Rules of the blog: put up or shut up

There aren’t very many rules here. However, one of them is that if you are asked a direct question that is related to the subject at hand, then you must answer it. I do not permit the defensive and dishonest evasions that are so common in Internet discourse. If you refuse to either answer the question or admit that you cannot answer it, you will not be permitted to comment here and all of your subsequent comments will be deleted.

In general, if you are constitutionally incapable of admitting that you are wrong, then this is simply not the place for you. Go inflict yourself on one of the many thousands of other blogs that is more tolerant of mindless posturing. Everyone, including me, will inevitably be shown to be wrong at one point or another, and everyone is expected to be able to admit it when it happens. So, if you are one of those sad individuals who insists on clinging defensively to your mistakes no matter what, you may as well go away now, because I’m not going to permit anyone to subject the entire readership of this blog to stubborn self-delusions.

To give a recent example, an individual made a statement about how it was a fact that the members of a large group of people habitually made a very specific claim. I asked for ten examples, which should have been quite easy to provide if this was, in fact, the case. Others who have been asked for such things have readily come up with them; I am still reading through the evolutionary studies provided by a previous interlocutor. But in this case, rather than provide even a single specific example, the individual dissembled, retroactively modified the claim, and resolutely refused to provide anything except incompetent defenses of the general example he’d offered in his original post. This weaselly behavior is not acceptable here and will not be permitted.

In short, put up or you will be shut up.