I wrote:
If more people made a practice of speaking up against these outbursts, the
weight of humiliation for Hines and his like would eventually become
unbearable, and they would shut up or depart. He needs more than mere
attention, he needs to feel he has won a contest. The only way to make sure
he can't thrive in this perversion is to engage, and if necessary to
persevere.
Douglas Richardson replied:
We'll be sure to remember this, Peter, the next time you have one
of your own tempermental outbursts. In the meantime, you need to
apologize to Dr. David Kelley, FASG, for the abusive remarks you
made about him in your last outburst. Dr. Kelley is a fine individual,
who is undeserving of your contempt.
Ho hum....
Like Brandon and Hines you are wrongly assuming that temperament must
be involved, just because you feel a sting at the other end, whereas I
don't have to get riled at all to insult a deserving target: the
vehement tone of my responses to falsehood & inanity comes not from
momentary impulse, but as a result of deliberation.
You haven't offered ANY defense of Kelley, merely asserting that he is
a fine individual because he helped you. Does this mean that your
delusional infallibility rubbed off onto him?
I made several disparaging remarks about him, and no-one has yet tried
to refute the basis of these.
Kelley published a tissue of nonsense about one of the most celebrated
figures of the medieval peiod, leading countless readers of AR to
suppose that they could be descendants of Godfrey de Bouillon. Nothing
worse has been done in medieval genealogy for many decades, as far as
I'm aware, unless it is the cumulative horror of _Royalty for
Commoners_ (issued by your own publisher, although Hines still thinks
that GPC is a highly reputable firm). He made NO attempt to check the
sources or the vast literature that would have shown him in unequivocal
terms the impossibility (way beyond mere implausibility) of his case,
from every angle. Instead of this, garbed in the authority of his
professorship ("This text supplied by Prof. David H. Kelley"), he chose
to denigrate as "linguistically naive" those who had simply and
modestly got the matter right.
WHY does this not deserve contempt?
It's by no means the only time Kelley has made a great fool of himself:
try his ill-considered speculation about a royal ancestry for Earl
Godwine in 'The House of Aethelred', _Studies in Genealogy and Family
History in Tribute to Charles Evans..._ (Salt Lake City, 1989).
I'm certainly not going to apologise to someone who has repeatedly
committed such careless blunders, much less on the strength of your
fiat. By the way, your own collusion in this particular farrago of
incompetence - at least by silence over years about your alleged
endorsement of the "data" - has yet to be explained.
Hardly edifying for the newsgroup then to find you once again whining
about an apology suppposedly due to your esteemed colleague Tweedledum.
Peter Stewart