{"id":133,"date":"2008-07-31T18:46:18","date_gmt":"2008-07-31T22:46:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.erwinhessle.com\/blog\/?p=133"},"modified":"2008-08-03T16:20:59","modified_gmt":"2008-08-03T20:20:59","slug":"they-do-ron-ron-ron","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.erwinhessle.com\/blog\/?p=133","title":{"rendered":"They do Ron, Ron, Ron"},"content":{"rendered":"

So, Ian Rons has temporary moderating duties over at LAShTAL.com<\/a> while the proprietor is on holiday, and true to form, within a day is back to the antics that made everyone glad to see the back of him in the first place. Now, it makes no difference to me where I get banned from, you understand, but Ian – still smarting from the last time he embarrassed himself trying to argue against me in the Go-Go-Godel<\/a> thread there and unsuccessfully trying to draw me into agreeing to define my terms in the only way that would enable him to have the argument that he wanted and could win rather than the argument he was actually having and could not – likes to present his case and then immediately ban people to prevent them from cutting down his weak straw-man arguments and foolish, distractionary nonsense. On a happier note, he can’t moderate this blog, so we’ll continue the discussion here, whether he likes it or not.<\/p>\n

The original post<\/a> of mine sparking this slow-witted troll to impudence dealt with elementary arithmetic, but both Ronnie and another poster managed – in their never-ending but ultimately futile bid to get the better of me in an argument – to turn it into a discussion of “Chokmah days”. The other poster remarked as follows, with regards to the idea that 73 day periods, or “Chokmah days”, denote more-or-less significant life events:<\/p>\n

\n

the only way to test this would be to observe the events of your own life with reference to the suggested pattern<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

to which I naturally replied:<\/p>\n

the fact that one may be able to identify significant events in one’s own life at 73 day intervals does nothing to demonstrate any actual significance in such an interval, so it’s no good pretending that observing the events of one’s own life with reference to the suggested pattern is going to “test” anything other than one’s own susceptibility to suggestion, regardless of what the “results” might be. If you really wanted to “test” such an idea, you’d have to do it with a sample significantly greater than one, and you’d have to use several other intervals as control groups.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

which provoked the following hasty and ill-conceived post from Ian:<\/p>\n

Just because you can’t think of a mechanism by which certain currents of events could<\/span> have a period of 73 days, doesn’t give you the right to be so condescending in your remarks. There are plenty of other periodic events in nature, such as larval periods of some animals that happen in prime numbers of years, the yearly cyle of the four seasons, etc. But you always take this attitude whenever you disagree with someone — it’s a poor show, and more than usually narcissistic for the internet.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Just as the original poster inexplicably managed to take a post explaining how 73 * 5 was equal to 365 to be critical of the whole idea of “Chokmah days” just so he could rehash the same old nonsense about “validation through experience” that he normally comes out with, so Ian Rons – still smarting from the last time he lost to me in an argument, much to his obvious bitterness and frustration – manages to confuse a statement about testing the idea that such periods could be significant for one which asserts that they certainly do not. It’s an all too common illustration of the lengths to which petty-minded know-nothings will go to make themselves feel knowledgable.<\/p>\n

Amazingly, even after having his error pointed out to him:<\/p>\n

Whether there are “plenty of other periodic events in nature” is beside the point; you can’t conclude that a larval period is a particular period of time by studying the development of a single larva, and you certainly can’t do that if you are that larva.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

this circus clown manages to pull a second<\/em> unique misinterpretation of the original quote out of his ass, this time coming up with some kind of claptrap about “experiential validity”:<\/p>\n

You assume that the combined experiences of more than one human are qualitatively different from those of one. There is, in fact, nothing inherently true about this assumption; rather, it would seem to be prima facie<\/span> true that personal experience is in fact the only experience for any of us. To utterly dismiss it is to dismiss everything as subjective in a big puff of smoke; but if everything is<\/span> subjective, then experiencing life in 73 day periods exists as one equally valid experience amongst an infinite variety. You cannot, finally, deny the value of the experience any more than you can the validity.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ian is just the latest in a long line of foolish and gullible occultists to confuse “subjective experience” with “truth”. It is as if one should argue that a task which took four hours to complete, but felt like it passed in an instant, actually did<\/em> pass in an instant, simply because that it how it was experienced, and that because “everything is subjective” there is no hope of ever distinguishing the two. Mr Rons likes to pass himself off as a knowledgable individual, recently using his newly found moderating abilities – once more in a thread to which it was impossible for others to respond, conveniently for him – to boast to an uninterested audience of how he criticised Richard Kaczynski on a point of statistics, as if this were difficult, but this kind of stupidity should demonstrate where the truth actually lies. In one fell swoop, Rons not only dismisses the entire scientific method – that same method which produced the computer he was using to write his post – because “personal experience is in fact the only experience for any of us”, and that “experiencing life in 73 day periods exists as one equally valid experience amongst an infinite variety”, but also completely flies in the face of the very same “subjective experience” that he’s attempting to place such stock in. So, next time someone is up on a murder charge, they can just claim “aha! but I didn’t experience the victim dying, so I didn’t do it!” and get off scott free with Ian’s blessing.<\/p>\n

It frankly boggles the mind to conceive of how even an unusually stupid dolt could think that any of this has any relevance to the concept of testing, or to his previous idea that things actually might align with regular periods, even if it weren’t for the patent and abject lunacy of the idea itself. It is as if one should contest the statement that “the net forces of gravity on earth will tend to pull objects towards its centre” with “not if you validly experience the opposite, they won’t”. This kind of utter piffle is always the last retreat for the impressionable occultist, abandoning all attempts at rationality and descending to “well I think I’m right, so I am, so there! My mom thinks my views are ‘valid’, I don’t care what you say you big old meanie.”<\/p>\n

What these “create your own personal reality” dimwits consistently fail to realise is that it is precisely our “subjective experience” that tells us that isolated, individual experiences often mislead, but that replicable, shared experiences are far more reliable predictors and far more reliable sources of explanatory power. To use the “one equally valid experience amongst an infinite variety” argument is to say that “subjective experience can lead to truth”, but only to those “truths” that we wish to accept which conveniently require such an argument. For all those “truths” which require “objective” knowledge, then subjective experiences won’t do. Delusionary and foolish occultists like this simply pick and choose which “rules” they want to follow whenever it suits them to do so, but when challenged on the point they’ll always side absolutely with the one that serves their current purpose. They can’t have it both ways, unless they want to be roundly and consistently laughed at. This kind of flaky oscillation is nothing other than a device for perpetuating fatuous beliefs which cannot stand up to scrutiny, and that includes the scrutiny of the “subjective experience” itself. This kind of absurd nonsense is the inevitable result of occultists clinging stubbornly to the belief that they have some kind of right to knowledge in a subject for which they simply do not possess the skills to deal, and a corresponding failure to perceive their own ignorance.<\/p>\n

Ian protests “no, I wasn’t being emotional” but it should be relatively clear to everyone what the actual case is. His final paragraph is particularly revealing:<\/p>\n

You’re welcome to express your views if you can succeed in refraining from the kind of argument you always seek to provoke<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In other words, “you’re welcome to express your views if you can succeed in refraining from the kind of argument that I’m destined to lose, because it upsets me and makes me cry when I lose arguments I’m woefully inequipped to engage in but emotionally incapable of staying away from.” And:<\/p>\n

I am here to tell you that you will be booted off immediately if you don’t pay attention to the criticisms of me and the other board members who find your style repugnant<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In other words, “myself and everyone else here find it repugnant when you force us to admit we’re wrong, it shatters our precious little delusions, and we want you to stop, and if you don’t I’m just going to stamp my little feet and make you go away, so pffffft you big old meanie”. Anybody who stoops to the “it doesn’t matter about being correct, my experience is valid and don’t you tell me that it isn’t you big poopyhead” gibberish might as well give up pretending that there’s anything other than emotion driving such an outburst, because only other dimwitted occultists are in any danger of falling for such tripe.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately for Mr Rons, making us go away is well outside of his powers, and if he doesn’t want to look petulant and stupid on his own temporary playground, then he can just as well look petulant and stupid here, instead; it makes no odds. It’s extremely unlikely that the foot-stamping juvenile will discover the courage to redeem himself by supporting his rather bizarre and hysterical position here where he can’t hide behind his own moderation, but being full of grace and kindness of spirit, we extend the invitation to him regardless, because we’re nice like that.<\/p>\n

Toodle-pip!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

So, Ian Rons has temporary moderating duties over at LAShTAL.com while the proprietor is on holiday, and true to form, within a day is back to the antics that made everyone glad to see the back of him in the first place. Now, it makes no difference to me where I get banned from, you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[121],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-133","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.erwinhessle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.erwinhessle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.erwinhessle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.erwinhessle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.erwinhessle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=133"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/www.erwinhessle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":144,"href":"https:\/\/www.erwinhessle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/133\/revisions\/144"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.erwinhessle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=133"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.erwinhessle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=133"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.erwinhessle.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=133"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}