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Quote from THHuxley

it is true that many debunkers are guilty of over-generalisation and carelessness in their comments. And particularly hurtful is when they tar whole classes of people with the same brush.

But that is exactly what you do when talking so dismissively of Mary and Joshua.

Mary and Joshua are both, on the face, anonymous trolls, who attack the reputations of real people without having the courage to take responsibility for what they write. Now, I know who Mary is, that horse went out the barn door long ago, and I have what I'd call strong circumstantial evidence as to who Joshua Cude is, and, remarkably, that evidence has been disappearing. It is being deliberately taken down. The real person has never acknowledged being Joshua Cude, but too many coincidences fit together and the style match. But that actually matters little.

I've been interacting with both Mary and Joshua for a long time, so I have extensive experience. Mary is a classic pseudoskeptic, going after certain kinds of topics. He's intelligent, and sometimes quite informed, but the information is narrow, very selective. Again, a key factor: personal attacks on people and organizations considered to be promoting "bunk." These are not merely rational arguments, and they include plenty of ad hominem and circumstantial smears. They taunt and provoke. If they are debating with someone who has changed their position, they taunt the person with their old position. If anyone ever said anything possibly positive about Rossi, they will pull that up as proof that the person is an idiot.

They are not genuine skeptics. They do know and use genuine skeptical arguments, especially Cude, who is far more informed about physics and about CF history than Yugo. However, if these arguments are clearly refuted in a neutral forum, they disappear, and then repeat the same arguments elsewhere as if nothing had ever been said.

They generally add nothing to a genuine discussion of the issues. Cude, though, when he shows up. does bring up genuine issues, but mixes it all with huge dollops of contempt. Cude has an account here and last showed up July 16.

I have blocked Yugo here so I often don't read what Yugo writes. If, however, you believe that Yugo has raised a genuine issue -- and sometimes this happens -- by all means, quote it and add your comment. I am nowhere near thinking of blocking you! The opposite, I always read what you write with care.

What "class of people" do I "tar with the same brush" when commenting on Yugo and Cude? Those are, in a way, not real people, they are images, false fronts, but those they attack, so crudely and often viciously, are real.

I was looking for recent Cude posts elsewhere and came across this mess:
http://egooutpeters.blogspot.c…lenr-shorter-festive.html

In comments, my opinion: this is not Joshua Cude, but an impersonator, chiding Peter Gluck for censoring Mary Yugo posts, but the posts that were then allowed to remain are probably not Mary Yugo. Gluck could possibly handle this with power, but doesn't have the technical skills.

This is all highly offensive. I would urge both Yugo and Cude to either drop the topics or drop the anonymity and stand for what they believe, openly. I've been doing this on-line since the 1980s. And I did receive a bomb threat, but there is a lot more bark out there than bite. One friend was assassinated, but he was poking the worst of the worst, unfortunately, and unnecessarily. Tragic case.

Those who then use impersonation and deception to attack them are worse. We have that here, too, and it seems to have been tolerated.

Quote from Eric Walker

THHuxley wrote:
Joshua is rather different. Calling him a science apologist

I think that was a reference to this Wikipedia user.

Here is some more information. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…94/Previous_Account_Names
This user keeps changing his user name, and I saw many other devices he used to make it difficult to track him on Wikipedia. He was banned for a time, but was allowed to edit his user talk page. He made a large number of single-character edits, to drive the content with information about sanctions off normal page visibility. He was allowed to do many disruptive things that any ordinary user would have been banned for, because he was popular with the same faction behind my own ban. It is obvious that he changes name to avoid scrutiny, because all links to his old user name will fail.

He was highly disruptive, yet ... still edits and it takes support to change his names like that, so many times. I think that list isn't complete. To confirm that, though, the way he has set everything up, would be tedious. It was probably a condition of the name changes that he maintain that page. But most users are not allow to cover up their history like that. They are generally not allowed to conceal what is in history, though. So, as an example, take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Ken_Ham&diff=prev&oldid=723601053
This is a diff of an edit earlier this year. You can see the current user name at the top. But the signature at the bottom shows the user name as of that edit in June. When the username is changed, the new name shows up in page histories, but the old signatures remain. If one is looking at an article talk page, one will see the former name, usually, but it will not show a name used in current editing, and one might think this was a different user. But Joshua is the only user I know of using these long random character names. He used ScienceApologist, got himself topic-banned on anything fringe, openly defied the Arbitration Committee, and was site-banned for a time, used his real name for a while, was fully banned, then decided the heat was too much. Something like that. He really was offending a lot of people. His activities were blatantly in violation of Wikipedia policies, but ... he then managed to get himself unbanned. That's a whole story in itself, demonstrating how broken Wikipedia is. Looking at his recent edits, though, nothing leapt out at me. Maybe he is maturing. Can't be a grad student forever.

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Mary and Joshua are both, on the face, anonymous trolls, who attack the reputations of real people...

Really? Rossi is a convicted felon who created an environmental disaster, cheated the DOD out of approximately $9 million and tried to con Industrial Heat out of more than $10 million. He has no reputation unless you include a terrible one as a con man and a crook. So what lame excuse for a reputation is one attacking when they go after Rossi, exactly?

Hadjichristos deserves no reputation for reasons I already stated. I suppose he had one prior to Defkalion but he certainly has none now after all the lying he did.

As for Joshua Cude/Popeye/whoever... from his writing it is evident that he is very intelligent, has an outstanding physics education, and reasons rings around Abd any old time. He also follows LENR and knows the field thoroughly including most of the warts and moles. He calls out the flaws in LENR experiments much better than I do in general-- my "specialty" is ferreting out frauds and con men.

It is true that I am no expert on LENR and do not follow the field closely. That's why, for the most part, I comment on what is to me obvious lapses in methodology, particularly in calorimetry, which I have performed and do understand. I also remark on general science principles and I have an especially sensitive nose for the bulldokey that gets spread around with classical scams like Rossi and Defkalion attempted to perpetrate. It's a pleasure calling them out early and helping astute investors from losing money.

I am still not sure what, if anything, Abd knows reliably other than how to obfuscate with educated sounding and voluminous verbiage.

I don't use my real name because I have had my life threatened in the distant past for attacking nasty scams and wealthy scammers with underworld connections, apparently. The threat had elements of credibility too. Recently, I was actually stalked and threatened with violence by James Bowery (a Vortex regular) during a talk session on line in the course of the demo by Defkalion at ICCF when I was detailing and discussing Rossi's and Defkalion's lies. I wonder how Bowery looks back on that inane behavior now that I have been proven right that neither Rossi nor Defkalion ever had anything of value. Yes, I know Abd and believers disagree but then Abd is Abd and believers are ... well... believers.

Quote from zeus46

Poor Josh Schoeder had to change his real life name after Abd's previous efforts.

No. That all happened before I identified Cude as JPS, because Cude started up only after JPS was banned. That, in fact, is one of the pieces of evidence. It had absolutely nothing to do with me. Rather, JPS attacked many people -- real people under real names -- on many topics, and some did not take it kindly. This had almost nothing to do with cold fusion, which was a relatively minor activity of his on Wikipedia.

JPS was a graduate student in astronomy, working on his PhD, and was using his university access to sock on Wikipedia, as one of the issues. I think he started to experience real life blowback. I had nothing to do with this, at all.

He had declared himself as a "Point of View" pusher on Wikipedia. He called it "Scientific Point of View," which is an oxymoron. It was directly contrary to Wikipedia policy, which is itself problematic, but closer to an academic point of view, which will be rigorously neutral and not conclusory, generally. The so-called SPOV was popular among what Feynman would have called Cargo Cult. "Believers" in science. That is, generally, believers in the status quo. The status quo is usually right or at least partially right, so it seems relatively safe. And some non-scientists will practically worship "science," which will be, not science, but their own defective understandings.

On Wikipedia, I actually attempted to support JPS' positive contributions, and there were many. I worked with him on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/…%E2%80%93Phillips_process

He was suspicious that I was trying to somehow make this support cold fusion. No. I was actually a Wikipedian first and interested in cold fusion second.

JPS rewrote the Wikipedia article on Optics, and put it up on Wikisource, in his user space there. I don't know why he didn't use Wikiverisity, which would have welcomed that. He was site-banned at the time. I actively supported the process by which that contribution of a site-banned author was substituted for the existing article, because it was far better, and because that process showed how banned editors might still make contributions. Later, there was zero support for other similar initiatives. "Banned is banned" came to be the crowd chant. Procedures that I had developed and demonstrated showing how banned authors might still make positive contributions, and conflicts might be healed, were attacked, and JPS was part of that attack. Bad News.

Ah, don't get me started!

Abd:

Quote

Ah, don't get me started!

Getting you started seems entirely superfluous.