Response to Young's December Defender

Back in March I wondered aloud where the hell a comment of mine had gone.  Turns out it was in my overstuffed drafts folder as a full post, dating from Christmastime and forgotten over the holidays.   Oops.

I do consider it an important post considering it includes a rough timeline of Brian Young's feud pitting SciFights against ST-v-SW.Net, a feud to which I am the late arrival.

  So, without further ado:

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Grr.  Comment alert fail again.

So someone left a long comment on the "Classic Hits" post five days ago and I just saw it.

And since it is a scattergun of a reply, I decided to escalate the response to a full post.  First, in fairness, the whole thing:

I looked at the photos even with color inversion and I see a long smudge in front of the backpack. I am sure you will call me blind but it looks like the arrow hit the unarmored area. What else accounts for teh smudge?

Even if it did stick into the scout trooper's armor, I really do not see the big deal. I love your posts an your attention to detail but I also do not see why you pick so many bones with Brain Young. I also have no clue why you compared this arrow thing to some old Michael Wong forum post. One is obvious, the other is open to interpretation. And even if the arrow fits the shoe that wears it so to speak frankly, so what? Young has made a lot of videos about who would win versus who. Even if Starfleet could dominate the skies, a galaxy-controlling government with fast FTL and better groundtroops than lame redshirts who have no armor ... there is a lot more at play than stupid gigatons vs. gigajoules. And in all fairness to Mister Young, you might notice he does not choose the Empire winning over anything that Wongites used to wank over. I know you are one of those people who tries to deny that hyperspace travel is millions the times of the speed of light, I do not really know why accept to try and limit SW. The shape of the galaxy does not conform to anything we know smaller than our own galaxy the Milky Way. And when it comes to Star Wars versus Star Trek, it is almost impossible to deny that hyperspace is faster than anything except Q and Borg (transwarp). Otherwise why would it take Janeway seventy or more years to cross not even the whole diameter of the galaxy?

I am certain you will have a perfect answer for every thing I just said but I must caution you against becoming another narrowminded Michael Wong type guy. He was no dummy in the beginnings but he got to a stage when he would not hear any differing opinions. Then he closed ranks and started being a real ass-hole to any one who disagreed with him. Do not be like him!

I find this comment quite annoying.  It features a number of counterfactual claims mixed with a large number of insidious bits.  The first paragraph basically says "I imaginatively disagree with the clear visual evidence, and now you will insult me for it."  Nice intro, that ... pretty much a self-fufilling prophecy.

Then there's the entire last paragraph, the suggestion that I "try to deny" or that I'm picking bones with Brian Young, et cetera.

Seriously, look at that last paragraph . . . "I know you're about to rip my little worldview to shreds now that I've audaciously tried to crap on many of your arguments, but if you do you're a [closed-minded, he meant] meanie!"

I've found over time that this is the combination which most pushes my buttons.   Honestly-argued error is one thing . . . dishonestly (or at least questionably)-argued correct conclusions are another.  Neither is perfect.  But questionably-argued error?  That's just obnoxious and rude.

So, let's dance:

I looked at the photos even with color inversion and I see a long smudge in front of the backpack. I am sure you will call me blind but it looks like the arrow hit the unarmored area. What else accounts for teh smudge?

Not blind, just imaginative.   One advantage of the exceptionally-long slo-mo part of the video I posted is that you can tell me in which frame or frames you think you see this smudge by referencing a second or series of seconds.

It might also behoove you to familiarize yourself with the scout trooper backpack.   I say this because Brian's favorite frame is one where the arrow and the backpack's short little 'tail fin' almost seem to line up for that one frame, which is highly misleading.

Even if it did stick into the scout trooper's armor, I really do not see the big deal. I love your posts an your attention to detail but I also do not see why you pick so many bones with Brain Young

The big deal is that inflationists try to claim that the plastoid armor is the end-all be-all, impenetrable by anything less than one of their also-inflated blasters.  That just isn't true.

As for Brian, who has been posting this stuff for a few years now, I couldn't have cared less until several months ago when he chose to pretend I had been some sort of aggressor toward him.  That was odd, but he then posted a little video where he dishonestly attacked me and the folks of StarfleetJedi then tried to shield himself from rebuttal by referencing his emotional instability regarding non-existent criticism.  He has happily defended bad behavior from his SDN allies while decrying imagined bad behavior on the part of SFJ, the latter imagined behavior being what he himself engages in.

Given his efforts to claim he is an unbiased evidence man contrasting so strongly with that behavior, I have since been viewing his older videos and noting that in many he was going after pages of mine without naming names, making numerous other sleight-of-hand bogus claims, and often making his little giggle whenever he was trying to get one over on folks.  Suffice it to say that with the exception of throwing mostly-irrelevant bones (e.g. his acceptance of warp strafing) he generally disregards evidence and is mostly bias.  And as I started making challenge at his home turf of ASVS.org (featuring a mod with a Holocaust joke in his sig ... I guess that is his idea of a nice crowd compared to SFJ) he responded with a video in which he dishonestly claimed I was supporting some other point of his.

Suffice it to say that he has positioned himself as the new voice of a virtually unchanged inflationism, trying to make it more palatable by being a bit less open with the jackassery, but no less biased and dishonest.  He wasn't on my radar but made a mistake and put himself there.  I could completely ignore him and do my own thing, leaving his falsehoods and attacks unchallenged, or I could respond.  Surely you know I am not the sort to do the former.

He has a few years of stuff to go through so, with my limited time, this won't go quickly, and I am still working on other projects.  But rest assured, I will respond.

I also have no clue why you compared this arrow thing to some old Michael Wong forum post.

Because two instances of blatantly ignoring visual evidence have something in common, especially when it is two old arguments that were slain long ago.

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So that was the December section.  I considered taking the rest piece-by-piece and dismantling and deconstructing his nonsense about super-duper-hyper-uberdrive, but frankly I feel it's all covered in the ST-v-SW.Net Archive/Victory edition, save for any TCW bits.