Alternative Ripperology: Questioning ...

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Thread Last Poster Posts Pages Last Post Archive through April 25, 2004 Jason Scott Mullins 25  1  4-25-04  2:45 pm Archive through April 26, 2004 Gary Alan Weatherhea 25  1  4-26-04  12:10 pm Archive through April 27, 2004 Natalie Severn 25  1  4-27-04  9:55 am Archive through April 28, 2004 Scott Nelson 25  1  4-28-04  10:18 am Archive through April 29, 2004 Glenn L Andersson 25  1  4-29-04  5:10 pm Archive through April 30, 2004 Natalie Severn 25  1  4-30-04  4:05 pm Archive through May 01, 2004 Jennifer D. Pegg 25  1  5-01-04  7:38 am Archive through May 01, 2004 Jeffrey Bloomfied 25  1  5-01-04  9:59 pm Archive through May 02, 2004 Jeff Hamm 25  1  5-02-04  11:17 pm Archive through May 03, 2004 Natalie Severn 25  1  5-03-04  4:15 pm Archive through May 04, 2004 D. Radka 25  1  5-04-04  1:45 pm Archive through May 05, 2004 Jeff Hamm 25  1  5-05-04  5:54 pm Archive through May 10, 2004 D. Radka 25  1  5-10-04  8:54 pm Archive through May 12, 2004 Alan Sharp 25  1  5-12-04  2:21 pm Archive through May 13, 2004 thomas schachner 25  1  5-13-04  12:11 pm Archive through May 14, 2004 D. Radka 25  1  5-14-04  9:32 pm Archive through May 17, 2004 hemustadoneit 25  1  5-17-04  5:19 pm Archive through May 28, 2004 Stephen P. Ryder 49  1  5-28-04  11:57 am Archive through June 05, 2004 D. Radka 50  1  6-05-04  9:16 pm Archive through June 14, 2004 Ally 50  1  6-14-04  8:08 am Archive through June 21, 2004 D. Radka 50  1  6-21-04  11:50 am Archive through July 04, 2004 D. Radka 50  1  7-04-04  8:29 pm Archive through July 20, 2004 Rosemary O'Ryan 50  1  7-20-04  7:49 pm Archive through July 31, 2004 R.J. Palmer 50  1  7-31-04  6:24 pm Archive through August 07, 2004 Jennifer D. Pegg 50  1  8-07-04  5:41 am Archive through August 11, 2004 Jason Scott Mullins 50  1  8-11-04  1:09 pm Archive through September 02, 2004 D. Radka 50  1  9-02-04  5:35 pm Archive through October 05, 2004 D. Radka 50  1  10-05-04  1:57 pm Archive through October 25, 2004 Lindsey Millar 50  1  10-25-04  8:29 pm Archive through November 22, 2004 Glenn L Andersson 50  1  11-22-04  8:15 am Archive through December 05, 2004 Richard Brian Nunwee 50  1  12-05-04  4:01 pm Archive through December 26, 2004 Glenn L Andersson 50  1  12-26-04  2:10 pm   Closed: New threads not accepted on this page

Author Message   Mephisto Unregistered guest Posted on Wednesday, December 29, 2004 - 2:04 pm:        Hello Everyone, Radka, I admire your stamina. I would have given up trying to explain the thesis a long time ago. I see that the same core of obtuse individuals continue to provide the thread with comic relief, and the same group of astute people continue to ask relevant questions and pose interesting arguments. In any event, I hope everyone enjoys what remains of the holiday season. Sincerely, Mephisto   D. Radka Unregistered guest Posted on Tuesday, December 28, 2004 - 6:35 pm:        Ms Comer asked Mr. Norder (Wednesday, December 22, 2004 - 10:05 am): “Dan, What did you find when you checked out those psycho guys?” Mr. Norder answered (Wednesday, December 22, 2004 - 12:32 pm): “Well, it's been covered extensively several months back (and thus buried deep in the bowels of A?R archive hell), but the upshot is that this hypothetical unnamed killer David talks about in his theory features some psychopathic traits and some paranoid schizophrenic traits, but mostly just mustache-twirling cartoon villain traits.” >>Mr. Norder has never posted anything with respect to an analytic description of the psychopathic personality type as discussed by psychiatrists. He cannot produce such a discussion, because he has performed little or no research on this subject, and is thoroughly ignorant of it. He has spent the last eight months making believe he has made this discussion by redirecting his readers’ attention to the archives, where no such discussion on his part appears. If he has ever posted a report out of the scientific literature analyzing my suspect on this web site as he alleges, then let him copy and paste it here now, giving his original posting reference. He is a hustler, a false showy poser, and an arrant, self-serving liar; he is now blowing off three people, Ms Comer, Mr. Nelson and myself, asking him to post his discussion. The above exchange with Ms Comer allows his readership to consider him, perhaps some of them for the first time, as he really is.   D. Radka Unregistered guest Posted on Tuesday, December 28, 2004 - 6:21 pm:        Ms Comer wrote: “Checkable Details for the AR theory: 1) “find out what Epistemological means” >>Epistemology is the philosophical study of the nature of knowledge. One example of a famous philosophical work concerning it is Plato’s “Theaetetus.” Many questions can be asked of this subject. Among them: What is knowledge? How do we know what we know? How can we discern when we think we know, but really don’t know? What kinds of knowledge are there, and how do they differ one from the other? What is the highest kind of knowledge? How can we establish the difference between knowledge and perception? Is perfect agreement between the perceiver and the object perceived a requirement for knowledge? Is this all that is entailed by knowledge? What is the origin of knowledge? Has its basic nature changed over the course of history? Is knowledge really an attribute or function of speech? A?R attempts to ask these questions with respect to Ripperology. What is the best way to study the Whitechapel murders? What are the criteria for knowledge in this field? In 1888, why did these things happen? Is there a single epistemological factor that can explain the whole of the empirical evidence? If so, what is it? How might all the disparate pieces and parts of knowledge we have about the case best be fitted together? With respect to all the ways of fitting the pieces together, how can we determine which way is best? A good place to start researching epistemology is the “Encyclopedia of Philosophy.” 2) “Review the works of psychologists Cleckley, Hare and Lykken to determine if the actions of JTR fit their definitions of a psychopath” >>Highly recommended! In fact, required in order to understand what the beep I’m talking about in A?R. But the only person who’s done anything in this regard so far is Roger Palmer. You need to get to be very good indeed concerning psychopathy in order to understand the case evidence. This is nothing you can accomplish in a weekend or two, you have to devote several months of your spare time to it. You need to personally develop in this field, suffering ups and downs and many revisions to your understanding, in order to qualify. You need to develop your own mind, your own resources and abilities, in order to be able to reject everyone else’s approach to the case evidence but your own. You will know the solution to the case only when you can rely on yourself. This is what I did, and the benefits are delightful. 3) “Review other psychologists writings in case the three listed above are not mainstream or would not be universally agreed with.” >>Haha! There is very little universal agreement in psychiatry. If you think you are going to find this to make your life easier, you are in for some surprises. Of many examples: The concept of the psychopath, albeit very useful in the disciplinary sense, has been sued into virtual nonexistence because of its reliance on criteria that can be seen as rather subjective or unscientific at certain points. It is one thing to say, for example, that someone has a rap sheet 20 pages long. This can be shown objectively. It is another to say that someone is shallow, or is incapable of understanding the meaning of love or irony. If you want to say the latter of someone, it is more difficult to support it in a court of law. So, the American Psychiatric Association has moved some of its chess pieces toward the former and away from the latter, folding the notion of the psychopath into the larger notion of Antisocial Personality Disorder for its official purposes. This is not to say that there is no referent group out there that corresponds just to psychopathy, however. Psychiatry is LOADED with sub-disciplines that appear to universally agree with one another, but then prove to do so only on the surface. We’re talking about the nature of the human soul. *** Cleckley, a humanistic psychiatrist, is to psychopathy what Moses is to the Jewish people. By personal contact with and exhaustive interviews of these people that led to his 15 expertly drawn case histories in “The Mask of Sanity,” he led the field out of the wilderness and asked the basic questions to establish an orderly beginning. Their names ought to be ensconced in hyperspace for all the Ripperologists on this web site; ONLY IF YOU KNOW THESE PEOPLE FIRST CAN YOU KNOW JACK THE RIPPER: Max, Roberta, Arnold, Tom, George, Pierre, Frank, Anna, Jack, Chester, Walter, Joe, Milt, Gregory and the nearly incredible, incomparable, unsurpassable Stanley. Hare took Cleckley as his starting point and developed a greater precision in attributing specific characteristics to these people, identifying specific brain wave differences between psychopaths and others. Cleckley’s work, as appended or corrected to some degree by Hare, constitutes identification of the key referent group. Lykken is an independent thinker not afraid to question the profession and develop alternatives. He is good at backtracking into possible causes of the psychopathic syndrome that serve to reinterpret Cleckley and Hare in certain ways, although he accepts the referent group they established. He is also a brain-wave sort of psychiatrist, even more so than Hare. “4)See if we can determine when various people moved into and out of the Kosminski, Cohen, Lubnowski residence using extant records. Check if any member of these three families other than Aaron ever had a run in with the police or was treated for some form of mental illness.” >>A lot of this work has already been done to the exhaustion of all known records, Scott Nelson being a key researcher. A psychopath may or may not have a history with the police or mental health authorities. Sometimes he doesn’t until some event in his life provides what he takes as a cause of action. *** Please note: Aaron never had a run-in with the police. He was not arrested. ”5) Check such biographical details of the three families as may be found to get any scrap of information about members. (Diaries, newspaper accounts, records in the local synagogue, old letters) >>One word: Scott. ”6)Who first proposed a reward according to government records. Who agitated vigorously for it?” >>The notion of a reward for the Whitechapel murderer originated in the little businesses of the district, among petit bourgeois types like shopkeepers. To them, the Ripper was bad for business. They set up the Mile End Vigilance Committee, elected George Lusk of their number to lead it, and established their own reward fund. Lusk then began agitation for the government to add greatly to that reward, and was helped along by the sensation that ensued with each successive murder. The reward made sense in a microeconomic sense, but not in the macroeconomic sense. The cost of the reward to the local shopkeepers was much less than the loss of business they experienced during the Terror, and if it would work, they’d make out. But once you start compromising the legal system by getting the government into it, there may be damage to the basic relationships that hold people together and in their places. Lusk was chasing an illusion. 7) “Check books on tailoring to see what the upside down V meant and other symbols” >>Good luck! Tailoring does not, or does not always have a firmly established symbols lexicon. The master tailor personally is often the prime organizational element of the trade. Tailors teach one another how to use symbols as they come up in the trade, and different masters may have different takes on what each symbol means. A group of people in a given locale might all use the same symbols, or they might not. It is not so simple a matter as you suggest, but there are universals, or near-universals in the field. An arrow is an arrow, and in the simplest sense it merely points at something. A broken line, especially when used in conjunction with an unbroken line, indicates discontinuity. “(“ could be perceived as half of “()”. As long as you understand what the boss wants you to do with a given garment, you know the language. ”8) Check to see if any of the members of the three families were involved in tailoring. (Did tailors have a union, organization or guild?)” >>Woolf Abrahams was a tailor, Morris Lubnowski a boot riveter. However, to accept even this as the official gospel is unwise. Lots of people moved into and out of different trades. There were various tailors, builders, horsy-type people, porters, etc. in Whitechapel, and you basically sometimes worked where you found the opportunity. If your uncle got a contract to produce 30 uniforms for the police department due next month, then you were a tailor for a while. Later you might be a carter. I don’t think you’re necessarily going to pick up any checkable details here. Scott knows what there is to know. ”9) See if Levy left any diaries, letters, etc. What stories have come down in his family?” >>This is like thinking that when you get to Birmingham you’re going to see a sign that says “This is Birmingham.” There may be a sign for you, there probably won’t be. More than likely, none of the people who knew the identity of the murderer ever said or wrote a word about it. They likely kept it a profound secret, afraid of the repercussions to them and their families. The covering up of psychopathic behaviors by the families of these people is often described in psychiatric literature. ”10) See if the three families have descendants alive today. Have any stories come down?” >>None that I am aware of. “10)Check to find out if the cry of "Lipski" in 1888 London meant, "be quiet or you will bring the Gentiles down on us" (A book on the Lipski murder?)” >>The cry “Lipski!” brings down social sanction on the Jewish people for the crimes of Israel Lipski, one of their number. Originally gentiles who wished to blame Jews and keep them in their place used it. But it is an expletive that sits out there, and is familiar to most everyone in the social system. It can have variations of meaning depending on who uses it, to whom it is addressed, under what circumstances, etc. The murderer uses it in the context of Berner Street to point out the possibility of this social sanction to be brought down on the witnesses Schwartz and the Pipe man. He is pointing to social sanctions to which they are or may be subject as Jewish witnesses. This corresponds directly to the notion of the sanctioned Jewish witnesses in Duke Street as depicted in the graffitus later that evening. “11)Research bilateral language disorder” >>Good idea. Also have a look at semantic aphasia. Both are the sort of thing that can happen in people whose brains don’t adequately partition to maximize “bandwidth.” ”12) Look at Kosminski's committal papers” >>Good idea. Compare the handwriting on the Lusk letter to that of anyone signing Aaron in. Perhaps a long shot, but if there is a match, let’s have a parade in Whitechapel! Thanks for an excellent, thoughtful post, Diana.   D. Radka Unregistered guest Posted on Wednesday, December 29, 2004 - 3:18 pm:        mvario wrote: 1. “{D. Radka wrote:} ">>Had a look at A?R in the Dissertations section? It identifies all the reasons behind the murders quite logically." {mvario responded:} I just did. Okay, that's sort of what I was trying to say only more succinctly...{D. Radka wrote:} "externalization of consciousness counterintuitive to the understanding of normal people, but typical of the syndrome of psychopathy" {mvario wrote:} I think the Ripper was a psychopath, but I think a lot of "normal people" are much more entralled with a grand tale of a killer with a motive that "makes sense" be it greed, jealousy, duty, or a grand conspiracy, even if it doesn't really fit all the facts (just jam that square peg in that round hole, it looks better). To a lot of people it "makes a better story".” >>This is a great post, one of the most laudable I’ve read on this web site. I can’t tell you how long and hard I’ve tried to get readers to apply reasoned perspective to the case evidence, and here a new poster comes along with the matter quite under his belt! It goes to show there are people who are ready for the sort of thing A?R is, and there are people who aren’t. I’ve spent the last eight months fielding questions from people who think I am the one who has “written a novel” or “crafted a story” that is “too good to be true” and therefore “doesn’t follow from the case evidence.” But mvario takes an opposite position. When he says… “…I think a lot of "normal people" are much more entralled with a grand tale of a killer with a motive that "makes sense" be it greed, jealousy, duty, or a grand conspiracy, even if it doesn't really fit all the facts (just jam that square peg in that round hole, it looks better). To a lot of people it "makes a better story".” …he couldn’t be more on target. Most of my critics simply transfer their own bad habits to me in their imagination, and then criticize me for them as their whipping boy. It isn’t THEY who want the Ripper to be conventionally understandable, it’s ME. Most people are locked by their habits into that world that makes sense to them, so when they are confronted with a situation that turbulates their settled water, that tiny little zone they project around them that “makes sense” to them, they immediately find someone to blame for what they perceive as a mess. (As Mr. Norder opines, ‘“Items that just don't make sense don't need to be checked because even if they turn out to be true they are still meaningless.” In other words, truth and meaning are what makes sense to Joe Average. Whatever doesn’t, don’t concern yourself with it. Keep your little bubble of conventional truths and meanings inflated.) When people say that A?R is a bizarre tale that doesn’t deduce from its premises, what they mean is they can’t find a recognizable story line in it to fit their preconceived notions. But folks, anyone who’d do what JtR did isn’t going to fit our normal view of motivations. In that he does things that none of us would ever think of doing, he’s going to be motivated in ways that we probably aren’t going to comfortably recognize or appreciate. You’ve got a career in Ripperology ahead of you if you want it, mvario. Thank you for your perspective.   Jennifer D. Pegg Assistant Commissioner Username: Jdpegg Post Number: 1546 Registered: 2-2003 Posted on Saturday, January 01, 2005 - 7:55 am:        JT Mephsito, hello to you!! Jenni ps the five word rule "I wanna really really really wanna zigazig ah"   D. Radka Unregistered guest Posted on Saturday, January 01, 2005 - 3:40 pm:        I’d like to make available, if I may, a listing of the principal fallacies of judgment for the benefit of readers. It will prove useful in evaluating arguments for and against A?R. Taken from “Introduction to Logic” by Irving M. Copi, sixth edition. (1) Argumentum ad Baculum (appeal to force) (2) Argumentum ad Hominem (abusive) (3) Argumentum ad Hominem (circumstantial) (4) Argumentum ad Ignorantiam (argument from ignorance) (5) Argumentum ad Misericordiam (appeal to pity) (6) Argumentum ad Populum (7) Argumentum ad Verecundiam (appeal to authority) (8) Accident (9) Converse Accident (hasty generalization) (10) False Cause (11) Petitio Principii (begging the question) (12) Complex Question (13) Ignoratio Elenchi (irrelevant conclusion) (14) Equivocation (15) Amphiboly (16) Accent (17) Composition (18) Division   Mephisto Unregistered guest Posted on Saturday, January 01, 2005 - 6:57 pm:        Well,back at ya Jen. Mephisto   Mephisto Unregistered guest Posted on Sunday, January 02, 2005 - 2:47 am:        Mr. Norder, On Wednesday, December 15, 2004, you wrote: "Frankly, I'm always too busy now to waste my time pointing out the mistakes you made, because I (and several other people) have already done so many times, while you just go on in denial as if nobody said anything". Actually Mr. Norder, Radka isn't in denial, because you haven't "pointed out" any mistakes he may, or may not have made. You've simply identified the theoretical concepts you don't agree with. You aren't qualified to offer anything more than a blue-collar opinion re: psychological issues. Moreover, your arguments are scattered and disconnected. Why don't you just focus on one issue, and argue the hell out of it. Provide us with some verifiable sources, and let us judge for ourselves whether or not you proved or "pointed out" anything of merit. I suggest that you start with the framework of the thesis, e.g.: How well does Radka present his arguments within the context of his central theme, i.e., the "epistemological center"? And your claim that Radka didn't originate the concept of Jack the Ripper as psychopath, is irrelevant to the matter at hand (Paraphrase, Norder: 2004). The fact remains that his thesis has been published at this website. If someone wishes to claim that Radka's thesis is based on his or her intellectual property, then I'm sure that he or she will do so. Thus far, no one has come forth to make that claim, and you haven't exactly knocked over any buildings trying to identify the originator of the idea, nor have you attempted to verify if the claims of the "several other people" you refer to are reliable. I think Larry Barbie's insight regarding secondary source verification explains my point: "For example I am certain that the signature of the Medical Attendant at Inquest is Jenkins; however, I know this from other sources, and not from reading this document. Here the signature is illegible. The significance of this is that what information I claim comes from the certificate, means just that. It can be verified by other researchers who read the certificate, and not have to consult other sources to confirm any of my statements or contentions" (Barbee: Dissertations: http://casebook.org/dissertations/dst-carrieb.html). At this point, all you've offered the readers is hearsay; show me da money Mr. Norder. Quote the paragraph, or paragraphs, including the author, date, and publication where the original idea was first described. If another Casebook reader has already made the same claim, and you didn't verify his or her accuracy, then you're just quoting hearsay. You also wrote: "Can you truthfully say that the only reason nobody (i.e., someone of note in this field) has commented on your theory in print is that they are being uncharacteristically silent on something that might be noteworthy but want to go research psychopaths first?" Well Mr. Norder, it looks like you've answered your own question here. You are describing how these folks became "someone of note in this field" in the first place. They have chosen to withhold their comments, until they have adequately researched the complexities of psychopathy. Wouldn't you agree that this method is preferable to making unsubstantiated claims, and doing the research during the discussion? You wrote: "Do you really hold out hope that someone of note in this field will out of the blue decide that your theory is worth taking notice of as something other than a joke?" (My italics) There are a number of problems with your thinking here Mr. Norder ({inter alia}): First off, you are extremely vague. What are the criteria that qualify one for notoriety in Ripperology? Who are these people of note you keep mentioning, and why would they rub shoulders with you? Are you implying that you are one of these people of note? Your statement assumes that your opinion is objective, or has some value beyond this website. I think the tone of your diatribe makes your bias abundantly clear. You seem to think that ridiculing Radka's work with anonymous sources passes for principled commentary. Sorry, but it doesn't. Noteworthy Ripperologist Stan Russo had this to say about unbiased criticism: "Maybe you're right. No wait a minute, you are most definately wrong and your biases against Cornwell and her ridiculous theory about Sickert cloud your judgment" (Russo: Wednesday, November 10, 2004 - 8:43 pm ../4922/13375.html"../4926/12250.html" target=_top>../4926/12250.html"ff0000">Mephisto   D. Radka Unregistered guest Posted on Saturday, January 01, 2005 - 10:07 pm:        ooo--EDITED VERSION Friends, I believe that “N. Statter” (posted on Thursday, December 23, 2004 - 6:38 pm) and “Mort Goldman” (posted on Tuesday, December 21, 2004 - 9:09 pm) are fictitious entities. These two new unregistered “posters” both have sonorous names, and both appear in the same queue. 1. “N. Statter” says: “This whole debate is so confusing. Does Radka really claim to have come up with the original idea that the Ripper was a psychopath? If so he is sadly wrong - it was suggested tens of years ago.” >>I have been very clear in giving the credit for the original idea that JtR may have been a psychopath to Cleckley, Hare and Lykken. My claim for myself is not that I originated the idea, but that I was first to use it as an epistemological center to solve the case based on its empirical evidence. In a nutshell, my logical position is that if it is possible to understand the entire case evidence by a single idea (psychopathy), then that idea is also the fundamental cause of the case evidence. This is why I call it the epistemological center. This is my essential contribution to the field of Ripperology. 2. “Mort Goldman” says: “Mr.Radka says Mr. Norder said...."You claim that no one of note in the field considers A?R as anything but a joke, when in fact they do not make this comment about it." However,Mr. Norder did not say that. He said...."Please, David. Do you really hold out hope that someone of note in this field will out of the blue decide that your theory is worth taking notice of as something other than a joke?” There is a significant difference in what Mr. Norder said and what Mr. Radka says he said.” >>No, there is NO DIFFERENCE WHATEVER. Mr. Norder clearly claims that significant Ripperologists consider A?R a joke, and clearly and typically he presents NO EVIDENCE to support this claim, just as I say above. If Paul Begg, Martin Fido, Donald Rumbelow, Phillip Sugden or another author of similar significance to the field has written that A?R is a joke, then refer to the writing here. 3. “I'd wager ALL the major researchers,authors,and aficinados of the Jack The Ripper murders, with the obvious exception of Mr. Andersson, have perused the content of Mr.Radka's ideas on these boards. Their absence...their total absence...after 1100 posts speaks volumes.” >>To my knowledge, correct me if I’m wrong, the only significant or halfway significant authors of the field that have EVER posted here are Begg, Fido, Evans (who has quit the place), and Harris (who is deceased.) Begg I’ve heard through the grapevine (not directly from him) apparently doesn’t like to post here because of the character of some of the posters, and Fido has done so only very sporadically over the years. Whittington-Egan, Sugden, Warren, Rumbelow and the rest of any significance have never appeared. So why should they now? You are attempting to attribute motivations to people with no evidence or other information concerning what their motivations may be.   D. Radka Unregistered guest Posted on Friday, December 31, 2004 - 11:29 pm:        1. “I am no criminologist and no psychologist, but experience makes me wary of "Agatha Christie"-type approaches to murder cases. I am sure that people DO plan their killings, but a plan of the apparent sophistication outlined by Mr Radka - involving a desire to be recognised in the home; throwing suspicion on another; seeking to have witnesses act in certain ways and manipulate official rewards (I take it I have understood what is proposed in the paper) is both anachronistic and unlikely to reflect the pre-occupations of an immigrant Jew in the London of 1888.” >>I believe you may misunderstand. I don’t have an Agatha Christie approach, but a philosophical, rationalistic one. I do not examine clues like Agatha, but instead the documented evidence and the ideas it represents. *** Clearly you misunderstand with respect to motivation. The psychopath did not develop any sophisticated plans in his murder series, but ricocheted from one typical project to the next, as he perceived opportunities. 2. “This is not to say that I reject Kosminski as a suspect (he would be among my suggestions for JtR) or that I disagree with some of what Mr Radka suggests (JH Levy is my candidate for the key witness).” >>I am clear that Aaron Kosminski had nothing to do with the murders. 3. “I also find new and interesting insights into the "tailor's language" inscribed into Eddowes' dead flesh. But NO, I do not find it credible that a C19th individual, from the background concerned, would develop a plan of this nature, put it into effect, seek to control each element (the explanation of the Double Event is unbelievable).” >>In what sense? Essentially, the psychopath is taking various antisocial actions toward his narcissistic interests on territory very familiar to him. What is so hard to believe about that? Before you say that I write anachronistically, i.e. that a nineteenth century person would do these things, remember that the extreme sensation generated by his previous actions had made him a twentieth century media event. We have a bit of the twentieth century taking place in the nineteenth here, just as with the Apollo moon landings of the 1960s we had a bit of the twenty-first century taking place in the twentieth. Under the right conditions, this kind of thing occasionally happens. 3. “There are REAL questions as to whether Stride was a Ripper victim at all, so to build a theory around a set number of victims is rather unwise. equally, to argue back that Stride MUST have been a victim of JtR because the theory demands it would be false logic. (I don't think Mr Radka does argue the latter, I simply cover both approaches here.)” >>False logic in what sense? My theory is consistent with respect to the empirical case evidence (Schwartz, the Duke Street sighting, the marks on Eddowes’ face, the graffitus, the Lusk letter, etc.) Nothing about the Stride case is inconsistent with the rest of the case evidence, if you accept my basic reasoning about the evidence taken as a whole. Serious doubt about Stride is entertained only if you want to consider the lack of mutilations or the cowboy-style attack as inconsistent with JtR’s modus operandi, but A?R has logical explanations for these things. Additionally, only Walter Dew of many detectives disagreed with considering Stride a Ripper victim. 4. “I also cannot give credence to the idea that the murderer decides to leave a message and then goes off to find chalk and scouts around for a convenient place to write his graffito. JtR (whoever he was) was cannier than that I think.” >>You’re really not paying attention, Mr. Hill. I clearly say that the graffitus was prompted by the Duke Street sighting--one Jew he knew walking with two others he didn’t—which could not have been predicted beforehand. This is why he needed to obtain chalk AFTER killing Eddowes. 5. “neither do I think Mr Radka's explanation of the word "Juwes" any more convincing than Knight's largely discredited masonic interpretation.” If you don’t like my explanation of the term Juwes, dump it. The meaning of the graffitus is the same either way. 6. “Sorry Mr Radka, I respect your efforts, but after careful consideration, I am unconvinced by an approach which relies upon "pure reason" to solve this crime. As others have said, simplicity should be the keyword and what you have offered is just too elaborate for me.” >>It the simplest technique I can imagine. If it is possible for me to understand the whole of the case evidence by a single idea (psychopathy), then that idea was the cause of the case evidence. This is the most elemental notion I can think of.   D. Radka Unregistered guest Posted on Wednesday, January 05, 2005 - 1:19 am:        ooo—EDITED VERSION Friends, This post is a new departure: it is designed to detect logical fallacies and false premises. (Please refer to: Irving M. Copi, “Introduction to Logic,” New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1982, beginning on page 98.) Mr. Norder wrote: 1. “Yeah, and odd how most of those people who got crucified for posting their theories were ones who decided to go into personal attacks instead of rational discussion and ended up getting banned (as David almost has been as several occasions). Lots of people present theories here, only the ones who refuse to debate the logic end up being ridiculed as badly as those people were.” >>False premise: “David almost has been {banned} on several occasions.” I have not been. I haven’t received any emails telling me a ban is under consideration with respect to me for several years, long before the Summary was published. Please supply evidence to justify your assertion. False premise: I do not “refuse to debate the logic” of my theory. I have been doing so on hundreds of well-considered posts since April 2004. Please supply specific evidence on what logical elements of my theory I have been asked to address but have not. Argumentum ad Populum: ~Posters who are ridiculed here have been banned here. Since David is ridiculed here, he should be (and almost has been) banned as well.~ This is an appeal to the crowd. It tries to get the reader to conclude that people should be banned because they are not liked, not because they commit an offense against the rules of the web site. Since David should be and is not liked, he should be banned. Fallacy of False Cause: ~Posters who have been ridiculed here THEREFORE have been banned here.~ In fact, posters who were banned broke the posting rules, the ridicule in the court of public opinion had nothing to do with their being banned. False premise: ~David makes personal attacks.~ I do not. If my posts contained personal attacks as defined by the rules of the owners of this web site, they would not have been advanced from the queue. Personal attacks are not permitted here. Fallacy of Composition: ~David is not liked here.~ A few posters apparently don’t like me, but that doesn’t mean that the posters of the web site taken as a whole don’t. Argumentum ad Hominem (abusive): ~The arguments of someone who is banned (or almost banned) are untrustworthy.~ In fact, an argument is untrustworthy only because its premises are false or its conclusions invalid. 2. “Actually, the problem here is that most of what David claims simply cannot be checked because of the way David rationalizes things. For example, the people who use the term "Juwes" as an abbreviation for a Christian youth group say it wasn't coined until the 1960s.” >>Fallacy of Composition: ~Mr. Benji Weibe, a member of a German Mennonite organization, told us that HIS PARTICULAR ORGANIZATION did not begin to use the term until the 1960s. This doesn’t mean the term had not been used previously in the German language taken as a whole, and that it necessarily was not in use in the 1880s there. Fallacy of Composition: One example of “how David rationalizes things” does not speak for the whole of the A?R theory. If a theory may have non-fatal mistakes in it, it still may be correct. 3. “David says that they are wrong, the killer obviously either knew of the term or just created it on the spot in his mind. You can't check what was in his hypothetical killer's head. The part that's checked already shows him wrong, and the rest of it so illogical that it shouldn't be considered.” >>False premise: {The A?R theory holds that} “The killer …just created {the term Juwes as a contraction for jugendwerk} on the spot in his mind.” I have no such position. The use of the term “Juwes” to refer to Christian youth groups or Sunday School pupils is well documented in Germany. False premise: ~The A?R theory attempts to pronounce upon what was in the killer’s head.~ It does not. It does not make a claim for what the killer was thinking. All it does is follow the empirical evidence in a manner faithful and logically consistent with an epistemological center. Fallacy of Converse Accident (hasty generalization): Mr. Norder generalizes hastily from an unusual, untypical case to other cases. Assuming “Juwes” is wrong, a generalization that the other logical elements of the A?R theory are therefore also wrong or “illogical” is invalid. Fallacy of Complex Question: “The part that's checked already shows him wrong, and the rest of it so illogical that it shouldn't be considered.” They key word is “already.” Mr. Norder assumes that a definite answer has ALREADY been given to a prior question that has not been properly asked, debated or critically verified; in fact Mr. Norder answers the prior question for us invalidly, not having proved that the term “Juwe” as a contraction of “jugendwerk” referring to Christian youth groups was not yet in use in the 1880s. As Copi says: “…when the…prior question is correctly answered, the second…one simply dissolves” (page 109.) 4. “Ditto for the facial mutilations being tailor's symbols. David started out claiming they were specific symbols with specific meanings, but then admitted he didn't find them in a book but invented them up himself in his own head and just assumes the killer did so as well to mean the exact same things.” >>Fallacy of Ignoratio Elenchi (irrelevant conclusion): ~The premise is established that the tailor’s symbols are presented as having specific meanings as such. These meanings would be verified if they were to be found in a tailor’s lexicon of symbols. They were not found in such a lexicon. Therefore they have no specific meaning, and what A?R claims they mean on Eddowes’ face is refuted as illogical.~ Mr. Norder here draws an irrelevant conclusion. Just because the symbols may not be tailor’s symbols does not mean they have no intelligible meaning on Eddowes’ face. Such meanings were determined from a context-sensitive analysis of the empirical case evidence; no lexicon of tailor’s symbols is required for this. >>False premise: I did not “invent {the meanings of the tailor’s symbols} up in my head.” I determined them logically from the context of the empirical case evidence, as the Summary clearly shows. I do not attempt to divine what was in the killer’s head, I follow the empirical case evidence instead. 5. “So we can check and recheck and it all comes down to some piece of fiction David came up with and claims the killer did as well yet nobody else ever came up with. (Of course then David avoids the obvious implications behind the concept that this hypothetical psychopath's mental process works the same as David's own brain does.)” >>False premise: ~A?R attempts to divine what the killer thought.~ A?R does not, it attempts to follow the evidence instead. False premise: ~A?R is a work of fiction.~ It is not; it logically follows the empirical case evidence, interpreting it according to a critically estimable logical center. No fiction is involved. 6. “The same goes for just about everything David has claimed. What he says about psychopaths contradicts what the leading experts say, so he comes up with his own checklist of what *he* considers to be psychopathic traits, even though he has no background in the field and people who do say he's nuts.” >>Fallacy of Converse Accident (hasty generalization): ”The same goes for just about everything David has claimed.” Hastily generalizes from a few unusual, untypical cases to the majority of the cases, without analyzing or even explaining them. False premise: “What {David} says about psychopaths contradicts what the leading experts say…” What I say about psychopaths fully agrees with Cleckley’s Clinical Profile, Hare’s Psychopathy Checklist-Revised and the American Psychiatric Institute’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, Fourth Edition, as I cite and extensively document in the September archive above. Mr. Norder has not acknowledged the existence of these posts of mine. Fallacy of Ignoratio Elenchi (irrelevant conclusion): “David comes up with his own checklist of what he considers to be psychopathic traits.” The unstated conclusion is that I did this for the purpose of inappropriately speaking on behalf of the psychiatric profession, illicitly forcing it to agree to my interpretation of psychopathy. This refers to my post of Monday, October 04, 2004 - 6:17 pm., in which I offer a reader’s study checklist of my own design. However, I did not use or cite this checklist of mine to predicate conformity of the A?R theory to the psychiatric field’s understanding of psychopaths. I directly annotated only the PCL-R and the DSM-IV for that, which are generally accepted instruments of the psychiatric profession and its principles. False premise: ~People with backgrounds {in psychology} say my interpretation of psychopathy is wrong.~ No, they don’t. No evidence has been presented to establish this charge. Please give citations we can verify, if you have any. 7. “The problem with your approach, Diana, is you are assuming that all theories are equally valid unless proven wrong. But you can't prove a negative, because there is always room for someone to try to rationalize evidence against his or her theory away with some highly unlikely but unprovable point. Just look at the soundly destroyed Royal Conspiracy, with a supposed Catholic marriage with no Catholics in it, a killer who was proven to be elsewhere, and other facts that are just plain wrong. Yet some people still cling desperately on, just as David is doing here.” >>False premise: ~Diana Comer is a person who assumes that all theories are equally valid unless proven wrong.~ Nothing about what Diana posted would indicate such a supposition on her part. All she did was list various items she wanted to check into with respect to determining the value of the A?R theory. Argumentum ad Ignorantiam (argument from ignorance): ~All theories are equally valid unless proven wrong.~ Validity and proof are operations of logic. All theories are subject to logical analysis, which can determine them to be true or false, valid or invalid. There is no presumption of validity or invalidity in the field of logic. There is such a provision in the law, however, where an accused is presumed innocent until proven guilty. This is possibly the source of Mr. Norder’s confusion. Argumentum ad Ignorantiam (argument from ignorance): “You can’t prove a negative.” You can’t disprove one, either. It works both ways. False premise: “There is always room for someone to try to rationalize evidence against his or her theory away with some highly unlikely but unprovable point.” There is in fact no room for this if the empirical data are brought together in a logical, rational way. The errors would be shown and the theory proved invalid. Mr. Norder is at his disordered and self-contradictory worst in this passage. PLEASE GIVE WHAT HE SAYS A GOOD READ. He directly states that: (1) It is ALWAYS possible for someone to slip highly unlikely arguments by the public if he is good at rationalizing them and they can’t be proven invalid, and (2) Stephen Knight tried to do this and was “soundly destroyed.” If (1) is correct, (2) cannot be. But (2) is correct, therefore (1) is proven to not validly lead to (2). But Mr. Norder says (1) does validly lead to (2). Therefore Mr. Norder here thinks in a tangled, topsy-turvy manner. 8. “What we should do instead is ask for people with theories to provide their own evidence, real solid evidence, instead of flimsy hypotheticals and bizarre notions.” >>False premise: What Mr. Norder describes and claims that A?R doesn’t do in fact is exactly what it uniquely does. It analyzes the real empirical evidence of the case from beginning to end. It causally explains it logically and rationally. A?R isn’t talking about an alleged marriage between two people unrelated to the case that never really happened, it’s talking about the graffitus, the Lusk letter, the Duke Street sighting, the Lord Mayor’s procession, etc., etc. No one has ever been able to effectively grapple with and make sense of all these things before me. 9. “Some authors try, then come to a point where no evidence remains to go any farther and admit that. Others, the vast majority I'd say, have convinced themselves and don't mind twisting things all over the place of even falsifying evidence (presenting imaginary tailor's symbols as if they were real, for instance, but the idea that the word "Juwes" is Masonic term is another famous one). These people try to make their cases up out of nothing and then attack people who dare to point out the parts that are wrong. These people should be dismissed as cranks -- as they have been these days in this field -- until such time as they come back with real evidence and a willingness to discuss things rationally.” >>Argumentum ad Hominem (abusive): ~Presenting imaginary tailor’s symbols as if they were real and “Juwes” as if it were a Masonic term {constitutes} falsifying evidence.~ It does not. It interprets the evidence, adequately or not. Falsifying evidence would involve knowingly making empirically inaccurate statements, such as claiming that JtR killed three women on the night of the double event instead of two, and concocting a phony third crime scene to justify the assertion. Mr. Norder abuses Mr. Knight and I by fallaciously accusing us of falsifying evidence. Someone who falsifies evidence would not be considered trustworthy. Fallacy of Equivocation: “Twisting things all over the place.” Use of this phrase is ambiguous. It sounds like a serious charge to the casual reader, but doesn’t mean anything, because it could mean almost anything. False premise: “These people...attack people who dare to point out the parts that are wrong.” If I made personal attacks on Mr. Norder, they’d not pass through the queue. Personal attacks are not allowed on this web site. I point out how much of what he writes is fallacious instead. Fallacy of False Cause: Applies to this piece taken as a whole. Because interpretation of “Juwes” as a Masonic term on Knight’s part and interpretation of the marks on Eddowes’ face as tailor’s symbols on Radka’s do not constitute “falsification of evidence,” these are not reasons, taken in themselves, to consider the respective authors untrustworthy “cranks.” 10. “{Addressing Mr. Nelson} You know, the funny thing is you were trying to be sarcastic, and yet it was the only sensible thing you've said on this thread. I think your major problem here is you have a suspect or family in mind and don't like people criticizing David's theory because he happens to share some of the same ideas.” >>Argumentum ad Hominem (circumstantial): A classic example of this fallacy. ~Because Scott’s circumstance is that “…{David} happens to share some of the ideas” of {Scott’s} theories, therefore what Scott says about the A?R theory cannot be trusted.~ The conclusion does not follow validly from the premise. 11. “The problem is that David's theory itself is illogical claptrap. One can throw out a ridiculous argument (as David's clearly is) without throwing out a suspect. For example, if I were to say that the sky is blue because it leeches the ink out of old newspapers, that argument is clearly nuts, and can be proven so (it was blue before newspapers were around, etc.). But that doesn't change the fact that the sky is blue.” >>Fallacy of Ignoratio Elenchi (irrelevant conclusion): As Copi says: “The fallacy of “ignoratio elenchi” is committed when an argument purporting to establish a particular conclusion is directed to proving a different conclusion” (page 110.) Mr. Norder’s argument above is: ~Because the A?R theory allegedly is “illogical claptrap,” its starting point, the epistemological center of psychopathy, and its conclusion, my suspect list of Woolf Abrahams, Morris Lubnowski or some other Kosminski familiar in contact with Aaron during the Terror, should not be credited to me as the case solution. Although these suspects may very possibly have done these murders, and although I was the first person to say they did and explain in detail why the murders happened, I am not the solver of the Whitechapel murders. Even if one of my suspects is someday empirically proven to have been JtR, I couldn’t claim the solution as mine.~ However, Mr. Norder’s argument is not relevant to the conclusion offered. I was the first to copyright the correct solution and an explanation of same, and publish them. Therefore the above unique solution belongs to me, and if it were to be empirically proven correct, I would be the solver of the Whitechapel murders on those counts. 12. “Of course we don't know who the Ripper was, but his real identity remains whether or not David makes up some bizarre egotistical fantasy he invented up. By all means, Scott, if you think he have a good theory, run with it, but you don't do yourself any service by linking yourself to someone who is the laughing stock of the field.” >>Argumentum ad Baculum (appeal to force): ~Because Mr. Norder’s opinions concerning A?R represent those of influential Ripperologists who have made Mr. Radka the “laughingstock” of the field, Mr. Nelson would receive the same treatment by accepting A?R publicly.~ But this consideration has nothing to do with the merit of the A?R theory. False premise: Influential Ripperologists have made Mr. Radka the laughingstock of the field. There is no evidence of this. Please give such citations we can verify, if you have them. Fallacy of Complex Question: Mr. Norder implies widespread previous acceptance that (1) A?R is a bizarre theory, and (2) I am egotistical. He then implies that if you accept (1) and (2), you accept that the theory is a fantasy. But even if A?R may seem bizarre to many people, that may arise from my explanations of the motivations of the murderer being paradoxical and outside the envelope of meaning habitually accepted by most people. And even if I am an egotistical man, that wouldn’t logically preclude me from arguing rationally. 13. “Of course what's even more problematic for David is that even if you accept his layman's understanding of psychopathy as 100% accurate, the points in his dissertation still don't come anywhere near close to following logically from the premise. A?R is more like a fever-induced bad dream than a coherent theory, which makes it simple for David to tack something on or leave something off when arguing about it, because there's no connection between any of the parts except for his imagination and ego.” >>False premise: “…even if you accept his layman's understanding of psychopathy as 100% accurate, the points in his dissertation still don't come anywhere near close to following logically from the premise.” Let’s get what Mr. Norder says straight: The premise is psychopathy, my views on psychopathy are 100% accurate, and the theory still doesn’t come close to following from the premise. This seems self-contradictory to me. I can clearly demonstrate that I show the murderer reacting in a purely psychopathic way throughout my explanations of his actions. If I know what I’m talking about in terms of psychopathy, then I’ve successfully got the whole of the evidence predicated on psychopathy. All of what I say about the murderer’s actions can be traced to my annotations of the PCL-R and the DSM-IV in the archives, which annotations are 100% correct according to Mr. Norder above. That doesn’t mean that this or that statement of mine concerning what the murderer did here or there is necessarily correct in or by itself. No particular explanation of the empirical evidence I make is necessarily correct in or by itself as a piece or a shard. The correctness of the A?R theory is a matter of the subsuming of ALL of what I say the murderer did, according to the empirical evidence and its chronology, under the center holistically.   John V. Omlor Chief Inspector Username: Omlor Post Number: 976 Registered: 2-2003 Posted on Friday, January 07, 2005 - 8:57 am:        Hey ! Copi was the book I used when I taught logic as a grad. student (an embarrassing number of years ago). And here it is on the Casebook being used by David to such a delightfully excessive degree as to provide me with a genuine morning chuckle. Sincere thanks, David. That was all very cute and brought back fond memories in this wounded old man. --John PS: Fallacy in this post of mine -- don't even bother looking, the whole post is irrelevant.   D. Radka Unregistered guest Posted on Friday, January 07, 2005 - 11:12 pm:        Ian wrote: 1. “…The "tiresome boaster" (spot on AIP) with the oh so high intellect, simply can't understand why we don't eat out of his hands and swallow his Summary and view of psychology hook-line-and-sinker.” >>No, no, Ian. I don’t fell that way at all. You are sucking up on a simplistic misunderstanding of my attitudes that you’ll find on another web site, a default of people who aren’t capable of gentlemanly dealings. I am not unhappy that people “don’t eat out of my hands.’ Just the opposite, I am unhappy they don’t think for themselves. What benefit would it give me if people “swallowed my Summary?” What benefit does it give any philosopher that people just accept what he writes? Doesn’t a philosopher want to stimulate thought and discussion instead? Doesn’t he want criticism? Isn’t he his own guinea pig? 2. “He's so up-close-and-personal with his Summary/theory that he seems to have lost all rational reasoning (viz. conspiracy theory based on a one liner you wrote, calling posters here his "readership", the intent to diss Howard in that post and drag up events from long past(I also saw it before it was pulled by Spry), comparing himself to Loenardo da Vinci, Nietzsche et al, previously he's compared himself to Plato and Hegel, claiming it's an important thread based on the volume of messages where quantity more than quality counts).” >>Well, I’m an innovator in Ripperology, just as Leonardo was in various other respects. I speak from being in a similar position, as was he. You vulgarize what I say when you imply that I’m putting myself on his level of intelligence and accomplishment, however. I’m not saying that at all. You miss the point. I’m an innovator. *** I hope Howard someday does to you what he did to me. Then maybe you’ll realize something. *** I do not claim this thread is important based on the number of messages it has. However, I do rather enjoy pointing out for the benefit if Mr. Brown and Mr. Norder, who stated repeatedly that it would terminate at about the 200 level, what the tally count is (now nearing 1,200.) They tried to cut my head off, but it’s still on. I think you would enjoy doing it too under the same circumstances. 3. “I think, if anything, he is not revered here as the solver of the case but... well... in all honesty pitied as the sad little man he seems to be.” >>And this view of me as a sad little man is based on—exactly what? Haven’t I stood up for what I believe in? Haven’t I made many patient explanations, giving of my time and energy? Don’t I have friends? What problem is it that you think I have, Ian? 3. “I understand he's spent 7 years on the summary and it must be a crushing blow that the "plebs" have the audacity to actually raise questions and criticise it.” >>I’m still looking for some worthy critics here. What the plebs say on a public posting forum, however, is a different matter than what the plebs say. 4. “No one but he is fighting his corner, he is alone, it's commendable that he is still fighting the fight, but nevertheless, it can't be doing him much good that he's so far convinced no-one and is just p*ssing against the wind.” >>Ian, I don’t care about convincing anybody. I don’t need anyone to fight in my corner. I just want to be able to do my work, advancing culture and knowledge. As long as I’m left to do that, I’m doing what I want to do. What the plebs say on a public posting forum is a different matter than what the plebs say. 5. “Even Mephisto avoided commenting on the Summary itself, he strictly limited himself to the methodology and the psyhcopathy aspects as far as I remember; it would have been interesting to watch him debate the actual conclusions reached in the Summary.” >>You think I’m worried about that? I’d be happy to debate him. He is a gentleman, a characteristic sorely missing among my plebian “critics.” 6. “David, laudable thought it may be to fight like a terrier in support of your theory, you surely must understand that your personal jibes and digs at posters reflects not only on you but on your summary also?” >>People have jibed and dug at me for eight months, Ian, you among them. Why do you think the shoe is only on my foot? Why do you think you deserve so much better from me than you’ve served me? 7. “Critics on the boards are rude, crude, stoopid, etc but everyone see your replies and what you say colours their opinion not only of you but of the Summary. It's sad to say but even I have a hard time separating the message from the messenger and I suspect I'm no different from the rest of the crowd.” >>I’m never a member of a crowd, Ian. I have no crowd sense. When I’m in Fenway Park watching the Red Sox along with 35,000 other people, I’m still just David Radka, no more no less. I don’t default my identity over to the mass at all. I don’t sympathize with the crowd. I’ve got no idea where they’re going and why. The only times I’m led by the crowd is when I can’t really see that it’s a crowd that’s leading me. Once I lost about $8,000 on a stock, and later I realized I’d been buying it based on what everyone else was doing at the time. But I don’t know or care about what you are doing in the crowd, Ian. 8. “You may not like it and I can't understand how a simple cause/effect like this isn't and wasn't apparent to you and why (even though some of the attacks against you/the Summary were vicious at times) you didn't take the moral high ground for the sake of your Summary.” >>The moral high ground is the thinker is left to do his thinking and make his contribution. He usually has to give the plebs a baloney story to get them to leave him alone in life. That is morality, as I understand it. Immorality is plebs getting rambunctious, worried about their little problems, and making it hard to hear yourself think. 9. “The Summary? It's a neat _story_ which covers _some_ of the case evidence, makes _HUGE_ logical jumps about marks on faces with no reasons _why_ anyone would ever think they were tailoring marks conveying a message to a butcher, _HUGE_ stretches of the imagination that the psychopath has THREE separate motives one after the other to help glue the story together, as you know I could go on, and you will deny it in your usual terrier like posting style, but, you should remember that a long, long, time ago there were probably some open minds on this thread and _you_ lost _your_ potential readership by _your_ outrageous, arrogant, boastful behaviour.” >>I owe my readers my best, but I’m not out to collect many readers. I don’t like composers who write a symphony to please the people. I like one strong in his or her own musical aesthetic, and if I want to follow that, I follow it. Ottorino Resphigi didn’t write “The Pines of Rome” for me, but that work lifts me out of myself. What it meant to him is not really what it means to me. You seem to think that because you are not pleased, I should do something. *** You are way too empirical to comprehend Jack the Ripper, Ian. Empiricism is like the tree trunk in Sumatra you’re holding onto when the tsunami hits. You don’t comprehend this, because you weren’t raised to. What’s wrong with writing to a butcher, using your imagination, having three motivations? Use your head, think for yourself, and don’t worry about what I won’t do for you. You’ll be better off. 10. “Do I await your answer? No. You won't convince me and you already "answered" those questions to _your_ satisfaction previously, unfortunately _I_ still have the questions.” >>Philosophers don’t care about convincing people so much. They care about—I don’t know—getting at something, maybe. 11. “The open minds moved on and only the dissenters are left. I am a dissenter and I raised a few issues I had, but, I don't raise issues any more since there's no point really, I, like the rest, are probably those who read out of plain curiousity to see just how low this thread can sink.” >>You sound like you have an antisocial tinge to you. But nobody pollutes me by what they write here.   Mephisto Unregistered guest Posted on Friday, January 07, 2005 - 5:12 pm:        Hi Jen, I have a question for you: Do you wanna really really really wanna zigazig ah, or is this just a stage you're going through?   R.J. Palmer Chief Inspector Username: Rjpalmer Post Number: 520 Registered: 2-2003 Posted on Saturday, January 08, 2005 - 11:41 am:        'Empiricism is like the tree trunk in Sumatra you’re holding onto when the tsunami hits.' And here I thought it was the Britsh Empiricists who viewed desolation with cool detachment, thus finding it suitable material for pretty analogies. But anyway....re-reading this thread, I sometimes wonder whether Messrs. Andersson ('gabage') and Norder ('a joke') are correct, or whether Radka will eventually be welcomed into the 'mainstream' flock of Anderson-based theorists. It hasn't escaped my attention that Paul Begg's new chapter on 'Kosminski' makes an argument nearly identical to Radka's: that the East End Jews saw little difference between the Met and the Tsarist police and thus would have shielded their own (ie., Jack the Ripper) out of fear of a general pogrom. Rational minds think alike, and possibly Dr. Robert felt this way, too...but it seems to me that a more reasonable or empirical man would have found the failure of the house-to-house search in the area north of Whitechapel Road suggestive of...well...you know... something else entirely.... I leave you with the following thought. Sims once wrote that the Ripper escaped detection by the merit of his madness; his actions were incomprenensible and thus unrecognizable to the logic of sane men.   John V. Omlor Chief Inspector Username: Omlor Post Number: 991 Registered: 2-2003 Posted on Saturday, January 08, 2005 - 11:54 am:        David Radka makes me smile again with, "Well, I’m an innovator in Ripperology, just as Leonardo was in various other respects. I speak from being in a similar position, as was he." Apart from the goofy grammar, this quote has me wondering, are we talking DiCaprio or DaVinci here? Amused as all get-out, --John   Mephisto Unregistered guest Posted on Sunday, January 09, 2005 - 1:39 pm:        Hello Everyone, Some time ago, a message was posted here that may give you a false impression about the way I've gone about things, and I think it's important that I straighten this out. On November 29, 2004, at 4:30 pm Ian wrote: "Even Mephisto avoided commenting on the Summary itself, he strictly limited himself to the methodology and the psyhcopathy aspects as far as I remember". You are correct Ian; I limited my commentary to those two issues, because I felt that discussing the conclusions of Radka's Summary before I understood his methodology and central theme would be going about the process ass backwards. Wouldn't you agree that it makes more sense to begin the analysis of a theory by first examining its structure and main idea, then after working your way through its premises, you are ready to reason with its general conclusion? From my point of view, anything short of this leaves you with nothing but a collection of related ideas and no context to give them cohesion. I think this is why Radka often badgers his critics to go back and reread his thesis or read-up on psychopathy. He's trying to encourage you to start at the start, and put his 44 arguments back into context. With a few notable exceptions, the majority of the posts on this thread are pointless because they lack a coherent process. Clearly, everyone is free to criticize the Summary in any fashion they wish, however, if their criticism sucks, its not Radka's fault. The archive is filled with the inane diatribes of frustrated readers who failed to convince Radka that his Summary contains factual errors. In my opinion, the critics were unable to sustain their arguments, because they didn't understand the Summary's structure. They didn't use any methodology to organize their thoughts; they read the thesis, and then took scenarios out of context expecting them to stand alone. The Summary is not written that way. It is a sequential composition of interdependent concepts, driven by a central theme, i.e., psychopathy. Most of Radka's critics failed to grasp this one simple point, consequently, what appears to be delusional behavior when isolated, becomes an exaggerated projection of personal identity when rationalized in context. I think it is unreasonable for anyone to demand that Radka acquiesce, and acknowledge inept analysis as legitimate criticism. You also wrote: "He's so up-close-and-personal with his Summary/theory that he seems to have lost all rational reasoning ". I hope I'm not misinterpreting this statement, but you seem to think that being well versed with the details of one's own theory is somehow detrimental to rational thought. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but aren't all authors conversant with their research data? You also seem to be under the impression that Radka's of depth of knowledge has somehow affected his ability to recognize when a critic's perception of his thesis is shallow or misguided. I take it that you are less than enthusiastic about his tone. Granted, Radka's replies may be acerbic at times, but can you blame him. He has little respect for the intelligence of most his critics, because they have a cursory understanding of his central theme, and no idea how it shaped his thesis; they protest that he's twisting the facts to fit his theory, when in fact, he used the historical record to form his theory; they take his arguments out of context, and then complain that his scenarios are inconsistent with their own knowledge base; they denigrate him personally because of past conflicts with him that they surely helped create, and then they have the balls to be annoyed because he treats them with as much contempt as they treat him. Ian, it sounds as if you have one set of social rules for Radka, and a different set for everyone else. If you truly believed that it was improper for Radka to refer to Mr. Brown's past behavior to defend his thesis, then why it is proper for you and others to criticize Radka's thesis based on his past behavior. How does your sense of fair play allow you to justify this double standard? And while you're thinking about it, try to imagine how interesting and constructive this thread would have been, without the rancor and churlish tirades. How much information and knowledge do you think 1200 posts could have generated, if they were composed using some small amount of critical methodology to organize their rationale? Recently, Diana began a METHODOLOGY thread in an attempt to address this problem. The focus of Diana's thread is verification or "checkability". In a January 2, 2005, 2:47 am message I posted to Mr. Norder, I quoted three published authors who regularly contribute to this website, to demonstrate this basic tenet of empirical research methodology. According to these sources, verification was essential to their research, because it corroborated their findings. It follows that verification is just as important to critical analysis, because without it, we have no way of knowing whether or not the criticism is valid. Radka fulfilled his burden of proof within the text of his thesis. If his critics take issue with his hypotheses, then they are burdened with the same obligation to prove their arguments. Comparative claims without supporting evidence don't cut it, and it is absurd and counterproductive to hold Radka's flexible inductive arguments to the rigid standards of deductive logic. Rational arguments, which use critical thinking to support their premises, will either succeed or fail based on the soundness of their reasoning. Using basic critical methodology, will reduce or eliminate errors of judgment, and generate discourse that is more productive. I think we should put the personality clashes and grudges aside, and try a fresh approach to analyzing Radka's thesis. What do you think? Sincerely, Mephisto   Scott Nelson Detective Sergeant Username: Snelson Post Number: 106 Registered: 2-2003 Posted on Sunday, January 09, 2005 - 4:51 pm:        Sad to say, it ain't gonna happen, Mephisto. Not when we have a qualified expert like Dan Norder around, who declares that David's Summary isn't worth wasting any more time on. And people believe him because its too difficult to think for themselves, and after all, he is the editor of Ripper Notes, so he has to be right.   Jennifer D. Pegg Assistant Commissioner Username: Jdpegg Post Number: 1629 Registered: 2-2003 Posted on Monday, January 10, 2005 - 3:16 am:        Hi, I'll tell you what i think, i think could this thread get anymore odd? Jenni "All You Need Is Positivity"   Mephisto Unregistered guest Posted on Sunday, January 09, 2005 - 11:50 pm:        Hello Mr. Nelson, Thank you for your insight. On January 9, 2005, at 4:51 pm you wrote: "Sad to say, it ain't gonna happen, Mephisto. Not when we have a qualified expert like Dan Norder around, who declares that David's Summary isn't worth wasting any more time on". I think Mr. Norder's bona fides have been thoroughly examined on this thread, and the level of his expertise was revealed for what it's worth. He says he is a busy man, and no longer has the time to defend his claims. Maybe we should count our blessings and move on. As far as I'm concerned, those people who wish to inform their opinions with empty rhetoric are welcome to do so, if that's all they can comprehend. I'm interested in learning from my peers, because they have something to bring to the table, the others, they're looking for an intellectual free lunch, and that doesn't appeal to me at all, there's no value in it. My take on the Summary isn't chiseled in granite; I remain open to suggestion, good, honest, reliable suggestion, without the blow hard demagoguery. For the record, I'm not out to convince anyone that my understanding of the Summary is correct, or that the process I used to reach my conclusions is infallible. What I am interested in doing is discussing the merits of Radka's thesis as such, with people who are able to reason with the premises of his arguments within the context of the Summary as a whole, i.e., the way it was written. One thing I'd like to explore is how some of the concepts, which have been suggested by other readers, hold together as an alternative "Summary". Another topic the readers might find interesting to discuss comes from a comment made by Glenn Anderson. The gist of his idea is that present day research into the Whitechapel Murders should be conducted like a police investigation. I'm assuming here that he means, as opposed to the current practice of historical research. What, if any, difference is there between the two methodologies, and how would it affect: 1. The research process 2. The value of the evidence in the historical record 3. The way the evidence is analyzed How does this methodology compare with Radka's approach? How does it compare with the approach of other authors? Wouldn't you agree that these discussions would be far more informative, constructive, and enjoyable than the ego-rants, and pointless, dim wit observations we've had to contend with thus far? Mr. Nelson, I invite you to begin a new era on this thread. Choose a topic, and let's talk about it. I'm sure that those people who have something of interest to contribute, will join us. Thank you for your time. Sincerely, Mephisto   R.J. Palmer Chief Inspector Username: Rjpalmer Post Number: 522 Registered: 2-2003 Posted on Monday, January 10, 2005 - 1:35 pm:        Mephisto: Consider the following comments by Mr. Radka (November 23rd, 1:36 p.m.), where he shares some interesting thoughts on Martin Fido’s theory: “Ripperology has basically tried to corroborate Anderson in two ways: (1) Trying to fit up Aaron for the murderer. But this fails, because he seems by all accounts a relatively harmless paranoid schizophrenic preoccupied with himself and unlikely to hatch a plot as violent and daring as the Whitechapel murders, and (2) Trying to fit up somebody else for the murderer, and this turns into David Cohen / Nathan Kaminsky. But while by the tiny few facts we have about him this fellow seems more the part, there is nothing tangible to connect him to the case evidence. (my emphasis). Do you have a sense where I’m going? Yes, this last sentence is what astounds me. Nothing tangible? This seems like an awfully strange comment coming from a man who prides himself on European Rationalism. Radka’s own method leaves us with nothing tangible; and that is precisely why the ‘hordes’ are up in arms against him. From what we can know with our senses five, Lubnowski might be a half-blind man who hobbles around Spitalfields on a wooden leg. Radka is inviting us to forget what we don’t know, and reason our way to him. Fine; but his criticism of Fido seems ample criticism of his own method. The hope is that what you call the "sequential composition of interdependent concepts" will somehow lead to something meaningful. But in an odd way, to me, it is this very logic that is the most troubling aspect of the method; few outside of Broadmoor are ever going to accept that the wording of the Lusk Letter is somehow “interconnected” confimation that Levy was the witness, no matter how closely it is reasoned that a psychopath would be interested in reward money. Why do I think that people find this ‘interdependence’ less than satisfying? Is it because they are second-class thinkers? Or is it because there’s always the nagging hunch that most of the events reported in 1888-89 really had nothing to do with the 'case evidence, but had more to do with mass hysteria? At least with Aaron Cohen one can see in the Colney Hatch records documentation of boils on his wrists; boils that are consistent with a staff infection caused by hemp rope--'interconnected' to the testimony of the Swanson Marginalia, some might argue. Lubnowski remains an airy figure. But I wonder if while trolling these boards you stumbled upon my quote back near the end of October: "Nothing falsifies history more than logic." --Francois Guizot. This is not a direct criticism of Radka’s theory, but only a general warning. Guizot is saying that objectifying human events and then manipulating and interpretting them through logic is a dangerous game. Success is possible, I reckon. In your estimation Radka plays the game better than most... but do you still get the sense that it’s but a game? The question that remains is the same question that Radka asks Fido. What is the relationship between the theory and reality? In the end, Radka wants something tangible. Odd. We are invitied to ride bare-back in the wild markets of the Bulls and Bears, but the whole time someone is secretly hording gold bullion. ~Peace.   D. Radka Unregistered guest Posted on Monday, January 10, 2005 - 9:38 pm:        ooo Mr. Palmer wrote: 1. “Mephisto: Consider the following comments by Mr. Radka (November 23rd, 1:36 p.m.), where he shares some interesting thoughts on Martin Fido’s theory: “Ripperology has basically tried to corroborate Anderson in two ways: (1) Trying to fit up Aaron for the murderer. But this fails, because he seems by all accounts a relatively harmless paranoid schizophrenic preoccupied with himself and unlikely to hatch a plot as violent and daring as the Whitechapel murders, and (2) Trying to fit up somebody else for the murderer, and this turns into David Cohen / Nathan Kaminsky. But while by the tiny few facts we have about him this fellow seems more the part, there is nothing tangible to connect him to the case evidence. (my emphasis). Do you have a sense where I’m going? Yes, this last sentence is what astounds me. Nothing tangible? This seems like an awfully strange comment coming from a man who prides himself on European Rationalism. Radka’s own method leaves us with nothing tangible; and that is precisely why the ‘hordes’ are up in arms against him. From what we can know with our senses five, Lubnowski might be a half-blind man who hobbles around Spitalfields on a wooden leg. Radka is inviting us to forget what we don’t know, and reason our way to him. Fine; but his criticism of Fido seems ample criticism of his own method.” >>In your writings, Mr. Palmer, again and again I feel the hoping against hope that I’m going to speak to and satisfy your British empirical requirements, and then the attendant hang-wringing despair when I don’t. Joining the Commonwealth isn’t in my plans. In my view, the way the British are taught to conceive of truth ultimately accords with some stylistic arrangement that somehow conforms to counting perceptions. If the perceptions keep coming up the same then we have to account for that in some way, so we hang ideas on that. In the end truth refers back to the primordial empirical event, perception. Thus, because I don’t give you an empirical perception of Lubnowski that you can hang your hat on, i.e., there is almost no data concerning him personally, then what I say about him simply can’t qualify as the truth. You and your fellow Brits seem to me to feel like I’ve run you all out to the end of the clothesline and then pegged the wheel, leaving you to dry. If I were anything like a gentleman I’d never do such a thing, and so you all stand aghast at me. Perhaps Begg, Fido, Rumbelow or other top people, if they’ve heard of this thread, feel the same. But if you can show me empirically that Lubnowski was a peg leg or blind then fine, I’ll affirm immediately that he wasn’t JtR, because JtR couldn’t have been a peg leg or a blind man to do what he did. If Lubnowski didn’t do it, then likely Woolf Abrahams did. And if he neither, then Isaacs Kosminski or some other Kosminski familiar. I say this because this is where the evidence, soundly viewed from the center, points the thinker. I don’t know what I’m going to do with those people, many of them very smart, who’ve got truth psychologically hard-wired into perceiving in this manner. I owe them something more than I’m giving them, that much is apparent. Empirically speaking, despite that Lubnowski remains imperceptible, I don’t think it’s such a terrible leap of faith to believe that SOMEONE in familiarity with Aaron could qualify as the psychopath who committed the murders. *** Let’s ask questions of British empiricism, and not make it our fetish. If Robert Stephenson hadn’t sat down in that photographer’s studio, he wouldn’t be our suspect Roslyn D’Onston today. For because we can perceive him, we think he well might have been JtR. That’s the key. We British empiricists dote on our perceptions. When we behold that photograph, it’s “I’m home! I’ve landed! Now I can believe!” *** Aren’t you forgetting numerous points contributing to the reasonableness of A?R’s suspect list, Mr. P? How about the fact that I’m talking about Aaron Kosminski’s brother-in-law, with whom he lived? How about the Hove identification? The Duke Street sighting? On the other hand, what has Nathan Kaminsky got to recommend him? 2. “The hope is that what you call the "sequential composition of interdependent concepts" will somehow lead to something meaningful. But in an odd way, to me, it is this very logic that is the most troubling aspect of the method; few outside of Broadmoor are ever going to accept that the wording of the Lusk Letter is somehow “interconnected” confimation that Levy was the witness, no matter how closely it is reasoned that a psychopath would be interested in reward money. Why do I think that people find this ‘interdependence’ less than satisfying? Is it because they are second-class thinkers? Or is it because there’s always the nagging hunch that most of the events reported in 1888-89 really had nothing to do with the 'case evidence, but had more to do with mass hysteria?” >>If that is what you want to believe, then throw A?R into the wastebasket. If the mass hysteria so corrupted everyone’s perceptions at the time that the police wrote down false information, Anderson went right out of his mind and Swanson followed him over the cliff like a lemming, then so be it; A?R is refuted. But what recommends such an extreme belief to us? Why put faith in a hunch, when reason is available? *** There is an aspect of mass self-deception to this case, however. It is the belief that the murderer operated on normal principles as we do, that he wasn’t very different from us as a psychopath is. But this is intelligible to us through the center. 3. At least with Aaron Cohen one can see in the Colney Hatch records documentation of boils on his wrists; boils that are consistent with a staff infection caused by hemp rope--'interconnected' to the testimony of the Swanson Marginalia, some might argue. Lubnowski remains an airy figure. But I wonder if while trolling these boards you stumbled upon my quote back near the end of October: "Nothing falsifies history more than logic." --Francois Guizot. This is not a direct criticism of Radka’s theory, but only a general warning. Guizot is saying that objectifying human events and then manipulating and interpretting them through logic is a dangerous game. Success is possible, I reckon. In your estimation Radka plays the game better than most... but do you still get the sense that it’s but a game? The question that remains is the same question that Radka asks Fido. What is the relationship between the theory and reality? In the end, Radka wants something tangible. Odd. We are invitied to ride bare-back in the wild markets of the Bulls and Bears, but the whole time someone is secretly hording gold bullion. ~Peace. >>I can’t blame you for thinking history’s been falsified concerning the Whitechapel murders, and worrying about the data we have to work with. The police did their best but were out to sea; the best witness of this is Anderson himself. Most books written about the case are massive falsifications despite that the respective authors have no idea they are, and tried to keep everything straight. I think I’ve found the source of this problem, however, and I’m determined to keep my eyes focused on it. It is the way JtR is viewed personally. Nobody in the field has ever known him, or been able to interpret his actions through the evidence. Few nonfictional persons have ever been so completely misunderstood, I think. You can’t speak about someone you don’t know, and we don’t know Jack, or so the empiricist says. But the evidence represents HIS logic, and we have to find a way to let that speak. *** Guizot I don’t think meant that logic itself falsifies history. Logic is a neutral tool. I rather think he meant that the intentions of historians using logic falsify history. So we have an early question of conscience in Ripperology: What are the Ripperologist’s intentions? They don’t put this question to themselves forthrightly enough, I don’t think, because they’re already a blur, off on the chase.   mephisto Unregistered guest Posted on Tuesday, January 11, 2005 - 7:20 pm:        hi jen, you wrote: I'll tell you what i think, i think could this thread get anymore odd? what exactly are you referring to?   Mephisto Unregistered guest Posted on Tuesday, January 11, 2005 - 7:11 pm:        Hi RJ, It is good to hear from you again. How have you been? I read through the November 23, 1:26 pm post where you found the quote, but I couldn't find a direct reference to Mr. Fido. However, I will respond assuming that you're referring to Mr. Fido vis-à-vis Radka's commentary re: Mr. Fido's suspect, David Cohen. You wrote: "Nothing tangible? This seems like an awfully strange comment coming from a man who prides himself on European Rationalism. Radka’s own method leaves us with nothing tangible; and that is precisely why the ‘hordes’ are up in arms against him". To begin with, I think we should consider what Radka meant by tangible in that instance. If he means something concrete or touchable, then he's all wet. But, if he's talking about some concept or scenario that can be treated as fact, real or knowable, then I think he makes a good argument, relative to the different approaches he and Mr. Fido used to understand the Whitechapel Murders. I think what Radka is saying in the first part of that quote, is that traditionally, Ripperologists like Mr. Fido, have used rigid empirical methodology to analyze the material in the historical record, and in his estimation, Mr. Fido believes he has found enough evidence to propose David Cohen as a plausible suspect. Radka disagrees. He claims: "Ripperology has basically tried to corroborate Anderson in two ways: (1) Trying to fit up Aaron for the murderer […] and (2) Trying to fit up somebody else for the murderer, and this turns into David Cohen / Nathan Kaminsky". With this statement, Radka suggests that strict adherence to empirical methodology has limited Ripperologists, like Fido, in their study of the historical record. Next, Radka questions the utility of Fido's methodology: "But while by the tiny few facts we have about him this fellow seems more the part, there is nothing tangible to connect him to the case evidence". Here, he's telling me that the paucity of information about David Cohen, offers little tangible or knowable empirical evidence to support Cohen as a viable suspect. By using the word tangible in this way, I feel he is implying that perhaps Fido's argument might have been better served, if he had used a rationalist approach. Taken as a whole, the quote reveals Radka's long held opinion that Rationalism can be a valuable analytical tool for investigating the Whitechapel Murders. Now if you think my interpretation has merit, then Radka's statement can hardly be construed as a criticism of his own methodology. You also wrote: "Why do I think that people find this ‘interdependence’ less than satisfying? It is because there’s always the nagging hunch that most of the events reported in 1888-89 really had nothing to do with the 'case evidence, but had more to do with mass hysteria?". I'm sure that the conflicting testimony, newspaper accounts, and official statements in the historical record, continue to cause skepticism among Radka's critics. In my opinion, Radka addresses these conflicts by explaining how he determined that some of the information in the historical record is related, and how he used his methodology to form those relationships into a coherent thesis. In item 1 of the Summary, he states: "a thorough examination of the evidence is undertaken in a questioning, responsively open and playful mode, by which it is determined whether or not it is so predicated". In my January 09, 1:39 pm post, I offered Ian, or perhaps burdened him, with my understanding of the structure of the thesis as, "a sequential composition of interdependent concepts, driven by a central theme, i.e., psychopathy". I did this, because I thought that he, and some of the other skeptics, might consider using it as an alternative framework to rationalize the reasons why Radka believes, a) these events are related to each other and to the 'case evidence', and b) why those relationships, have a high degree of credibility. I reasoned that if variables A, B, and C, are correlated by necessity, then they have a high probability of being real explanatory events, as opposed to the variables D, E, and F, which cannot be correlated, and therefore, aren't related to each other. Using the Null Hypothesis, there is a high probability that variables D, E, and F, a) can not explain events; b) may not be real events; c) are fabrications; d) are real, but isolated events, or e) none of the above. In any event, Radka doesn't claim that he can explain unrelated events, however, he does claim that he can, a) identify those events and conditions in the historical record that form a pattern, and b) explain why the pattern exists. I'm not sure what role mass hysteria plays in any of this, so I prefer to reserve judgment on that aspect until I have a better understanding of the events to which you're referring. RJ, I think Guizot's notion that 'Nothing falsifies history more than logic', is an exercise in comparing apples with oranges. Fatalist historian Guizot was a very conservative empirical determinist, who, without question, would have denounced Radka's combined empiricist/rationalist approach to historical analysis as unworkable. From this standpoint, perhaps it's more appropriate to consider the historical philosophy of Gustave Flaubert. Flaubert used rigorous research and detailed documentation to determine what can be known from the historical record. Flaubert, like Guizot, was also an empiricist, where they differed, is that Flaubert was not a dogmatic empirical ideologue. Like Radka, when all else failed, he often linked events by necessity, that is, he frequently rationalized their relationships using logical inference. However, Radka's Summary does contains a bit of Guizot's Fatalist philosophy, in that he tries to explain historical events, rather than narrate them. I think that "objectifying human events" is dangerous only because the authors that attempt to do so are overly rigid and deterministic in their approach. Flaubert believed that such undertakings produced a limited history that didn't, or couldn't, explain all the related events that remained unaccounted for around an explanation's periphery. What I admire about Radka's methodology, is that he said to hell with this limited history crap, and devised a hybrid philosophy to explain, what up until now, could not be explained in a single account, by a single theoretical approach. You concluded your post with two significant observations, which brings this post full circle: "The question that remains is the same question that Radka asks Fido. What is the relationship between the theory and reality? In the end, Radka wants something tangible". I believe that in the Summery, Radka provides us with "something tangible" to answer your question. His methodology makes it highly probable that the connections between his theory and reality are tangible, or knowable, because first, the structure of the Summery systematically correlates historical events by necessity, and second, the singularity of his "epistemological center" facilitates a plausible explanation that describes why those variables are related. In light of a question you previously raised on this subject, I thought that it might save some time if I explained why, in my opinion, the Summary's structure isn't a closed system based on circular logic: 1. It can be used to analyze new information, which may, or may not alter the results. 2. The analytical parameters aren't fixed. 3. It can be used to analyze any set of historical variables to identify possible correlations. Once again, it is a pleasure to discuss these matters with you RJ, and I look forward to your response. Sincerely, Mephisto   hemustadoneit Unregistered guest Posted on Tuesday, January 11, 2005 - 2:25 am:        Hi Mephisto, Yes, I know some of what I've written may be picked apart, viewed in isolation and seem as soewhat unreasonable criticism, _but_ as per the comment you picked out.... "He's so up-close-and-personal with his Summary/theory that he seems to have lost all rational reasoning ". That is said in the light of the baggage I carry from earlier posts and replies from David. Specifically if you read them, he dismisses other "edvidence" in the form of the other letters as an example as Not True (both in the summary and in a reply to my questioning that remark (to consider them, you stand outide A?R is what I recall was his response?). The fact that David takes no time and trouble to pick up that and _help_ us, his readership, understand why they are obviously not true then what hope is there of really justifying the methodology? We have only a summary not the thesis. Why has he discounted (or rather the theory) Alice, Fairy Fay, Cole etc etc? Did the process of building the summary originally include these as case evidence and then the methodology/logic lead to their dismissal as case evidence. Who knows? The summary does not give any clear guide to what THE case evidence is. David is playing his cards close to his chest on what the case evidence is, yet keeps repeating the mantra that the summary is built on the case evidence without really providing what was the _original_ case evidence he used. So yes, some of his replies _do_ in my estimation lack reasoning, he's assuming (I guess?) I've possibly seen the full thesis and can work out myself why he believes what he is saying. I don't personally believe the other (or any) communications were from JtR, but, that's not the issue here. If someone says they are using "the case evidence" and when the Saucy Jack postcard for example is raised the response is along the lines "not true, next item please", I see no rational reasoning? Do you? There are other examples, but, the single one above is my feeble attempt at justifying where I'm where I am coming from. Call it lack of communication rather than being up too close and personal if that is more generous but David brings the worst out of me sometimes ;-o The bottom line is how much can we appreciate and validate/verify from just a summary? Anyways, nice to see you back Mephisto. Cheerio, ian -- Keeping one eye open and the other one closed.   A. N. T. Ayar Unregistered guest Posted on Wednesday, January 12, 2005 - 4:22 am:        Murders committed by criminal psychopaths are the most difficult to trace on account of the obstacles met in trying to establish a motive. Moreover, if, as seems probable, the Ripper was simply a homicidal psychopath...then he was a deranged nonentity who has almost certainly left no other record of his existence.   R.J. Palmer Chief Inspector Username: Rjpalmer Post Number: 523 Registered: 2-2003 Posted on Friday, January 14, 2005 - 1:42 pm:        Mephisto. A tiresome explanation; I'll throw in a few bits about pig kidneys to make it more interesting, though I think Mr. Ryder might wish to eventually delete it. But first it’s necessary to set up a model. I’ll call it “RP’s Historical Hall of Mirrors.” (A) The Past. ‘Reality’; Life as it was. The real McCoy. The sights, smells of events now gone. The kitten in Dorset Street. Israel Schwartz’s trousers. Joe Barnett walking to the Orange Market. The temperature of the air on the night of Oct 11, 1888. All of this is ‘gone.’ We have no way directly ‘seeing’ it. (B) The Record. All traces of those things & events. I separate these into ‘remnants’ and ‘sources.’ a remant is something that existed in 1888 and still exists: Druitt’s bones in Dorset; certain buildings & pavements; letters in the PRO. Records, on the otherhand: all primary sources: the Home Office reports, election returns, city directories, the photograph of Annie Chapman found by Neil Sheldon, etc. The difference between the two is that a ‘source’ is somewhat less certain; it isn’t ‘the thing itself.’ Even a fossil is more of a ‘record’than a ‘remnant’; it’s not the bone, but the stone impression of a bone, and there might be some uncertainty as to how time or the elements effected it. (C) History. Strictly speaking, it's really only an interpretation of (B), the records. The historian can’t write directly about the past; there’s no way of going there. She attempts to ‘see’ or ‘understand’ the past through the records. Now & then, someone attempts to directly access the past. Tom Sleman throws a seance and tries to speak directly to Jack the Ripper; or Anne Koren, gets ‘impressions’ from the handwriting in a allegedly genuine document. For the most part, historians admit that they are at least one step removed from the past. (D) Historiography. (Bad word). The act of writing history; the historian himself (or herself). How he or she approaches the subject; the Cultural beliefs and market forces that might effect the interpretation, or what is published; the historian’s relationship to other historians, etc. (E) Universal Laws. Laws that are true (or allegedly true) throughout all time. These allow us to interpret the past, even without direct access. We can’t see the kitten in Dorset street, but we know how 21st Century kittens behave. (More in a moment) (F) Mythos. Man’s tendency to understand reality by creating systems of thought, science, and mythology. A few initial comments. There’s often no clear distinction between (B) the record, and (C) history. Swanson’s October report is used by historians as a primary source, but, really, it’s already a piece of historical writing in itself. Swanson was working from other sources; reports that no longer exist, an interview with Schwartz, what he overheard, etc. The historian using Swanson is really already twice removed from the past. History is choice. The historian consciously or unconscious chooses the sources used to interpret the past. This might be dull-witted or brilliant. This, of course, influences what is called the ‘historical record.’ A man sits down and writes a history of America, using various congressional records, the notebooks of Thomas Jefferson, etc. Now and then, another historian comes along and sees the entire history of the country in a new light, and uses an entirely different set of sources; Howard Zinn’s A Peoples History of America, for instance. He’s no longer interested in recording the thoughts of Columbus so much as the thoughts of those who were unfortunate enough to run into Columbus. A history of the world has been written from the view of lice and rats. It’s important to realize that the ‘sources’ were also, to some extent, a matter of choice, chance, and culture. A dumb example. At some point, a weed was growing in Mitre Square. A workman came along and chopped it out with a spade. That ‘happened’, it was part of the past, but we have no record of it, because it was not deemed worthy of recording. Someone thought Emily Marsh’s Irishman was worthy of record, and so it got put down in a newspaper. History is entirely dependent on what the contemporaries themselves deemed worthy to record. We also know of cases, unfortunately, where records have been deliberately destroyed, for various reasons, political and otherwise. And this doesn’t need to as trivial as a weed. ‘The record’ is only made up of what political or economic or cultural or technological mechanisms allowed to be recorded; or what these forces made the contemporaries feel was important to record. There’s also an element of chance. One of Herr Hitler’s bombs hits the city of London’s records office, and so we interpret the case largely through the Met’s eyes, and not the City of London’s. The ‘sources’ are not static; they are ever-expanding or changing. At the same time, what we deem ‘History’ also changes how we choose or view the ‘sources.’ Martin Fido might argue how a certain election or legislation affected how the Whitechapel Murders were reported in the press. I might argue that the Crimean war had some very real impact on the events of 1888. (It did, sort of). Begg might deem Sir Robert Anderson’s theological writings important because they help interpret his 1910 statements. The influence of Howard Zinn has effected what source material is now being put on the internet. Historiography and Mythos. Past historians influence the way subsequent historians view the case. Our tendency to mythologize also influences these views. Now & then, someone like Alex Chisholm or Judith Walkowitz will come along and give an entirely different interpretation to the same events. But it’s worth remembering, that in the case of the Whitechapel Murders, there was also a remarkable and instantaneous tendency to ‘fictionalize’ what was going on at that moment. The events happened; they were real, but the ‘myth’ affected what got recorded and how it was recorded, and, subsequently, how it is interpretted. The Historian. How Martin Fido (Oxford don) or Stewart Evans (ex-constable) or Judith Walkowitz (feminist, historian) view the case is going to be influenced by their own interests, personal history, aims, etc. Static or Universal Laws. A topic little discussed, but of great importance & contention. Few would argue against the Second Law of Themodynamics being universal. But many accept certian ‘Laws’ of psychology and human behavior. The debate between Andersson, Norder, and Radka, for instance. At the core this is an expression in a belief that what we know ‘now’ allows us to determine what happened then. These ‘laws’ allow us to correctly chose & interpret the ‘sources’., ie. the case evidence. Two examples. Some years ago, you might remember a clever physican named Dr. Thoms Ind, doing an experiment to see if the Victorians could tell the difference between a pig’s kidney and a human kidney. He got hold of a pig’s kidney or two and studied them, and concluded that they couldn’t. The thought then occured to him that a pig’s kidney wasn’t truly universal. Pig’s have been breeded heavily since1888, (plus the use of steroids, etc.) which might have fundamentally changed the size of pig’s kidney; so even here what we think as something fairly ‘static’ might not necessarily be so. It was once stated on these boards by a well-known theorist that one of the only ‘truths’ of the Whitechapel murders is that we are dealing with a sexual serial killer. This, one must see, would limit the ‘case evidence’, and would fundamentally change how history is interpretted. The theory of Wynne Baxter’s organ thief, for instance, would be set firmly on a back-burner or off the stove altogether. A second example needs to go no further than Messrs. Radka & Fido. Radka believes that Cleckley, Hare, etc. have discovered some universal truths about psychopathy: they allow him to correctly interpret the center of the ‘case evidence.’ Fido seems to accept the ‘disgorganized sexual killer’ model develeped by Ressler & others. Even on a fairly simplistic level, Radka & Fido are claiming to ‘see’ what happened in the past (A) through the mechanism of a ‘static’ or ‘universal’ psychological truth (E) that allows them to interpret the Records (B). (This is not a criticism, of course; to a huge extent it’s all we can do. I’m just pointing out that it’s useful to keep in mind what’s going on.) Notice how each method, each psychological 'diagnosis' effects the ‘case evidence.’ The authors’ respective views of Goulston Street will serve as a good example. One has a disorganize man mucking around with an excrement-smeared rag while fleeing in the general direction of the Temporary Shelter for Jews while the graffiti is merely a historical accident, an accident that can be explained by the social conditions of the East End. The other has an icy-cool psychopath calmy returning to the Wentworth Buildings in order to chalk up a warning to a witness that he later intends to browbeat and the rag is merely a ‘pointer’ the killer uses to demonstrate the legitimacy of the message. Note that Radka is attempting to know (A) the past, through the vehicle of (C) the ‘secondary sources’ and the mechanism of (E) universal truth. A key question or two is impending. More another day. A point you might consider though, is are ‘universal truths’ universal, or are they themselves determined by history, historiography, and ‘mythos'??. Or, in other words, are we really just mucking around with a bunch of 21st century pig kidneys and calling it reality?   Legion Inspector Username: Crix0r Post Number: 364 Registered: 11-2003 Posted on Friday, January 14, 2005 - 2:45 pm:        *Sigh* I believe the word you keep fumbling for David is "plebeian". I'm not normally a stickler for spelling, being a horrible speller myself. However, dictionary.com is your friend and since you can "preview" your post before you post it.... At any rate, wake me when you are ready to discuss this like a man. That means no tossing of insults to those who dare question you or your ideology, behave like an adult, etc. Until then... Legion "Our name is legion, for we are many"   Sir Robert Anderson Detective Sergeant Username: Sirrobert Post Number: 134 Registered: 2-2003 Posted on Friday, January 14, 2005 - 5:37 pm:        "though I think Mr. Ryder might wish to eventually delete it. " R.J. - you don't do yourself justice. Your post is one of the best I've read on the Casebook. I will draw special attention to a section that I think folks overlook in almost all their musings: "There’s also an element of chance. One of Herr Hitler’s bombs hits the city of London’s records office, and so we interpret the case largely through the Met’s eyes, and not the City of London’s." Amen. Sir Robert "I only thought I knew" SirRobertAnderson@gmail.com   Mephisto Unregistered guest Posted on Thursday, January 13, 2005 - 11:30 pm:        Hello Ian, Thank you for your thoughtful "welcome back". I appreciate it very much. As usual, your post raises a number of good points. I think I should preface my response, however, by saying that Radka hasn't asked me to act as his spokesman, nor have I appointed myself to that position. Also, it would be disrespectful of Radka's intelligence, for me to respond to you, or anyone else for that matter, as if I were his interpreter, i.e., red hair author say this bwanna. I think that I developed a modest understanding of the arguments Radka presented in the Summary, and the insight he used to reason his conclusions. This acuity gave me a sense of where his Radness is coming from as a thinker, and from this perspective, I feel comfortable commenting on the questions and situations you mentioned in your January 11, 2:25 am post. You wrote: "He [Radka] dismisses other "evidence" in the form of the other letters as an example as Not True (both in the summary and in a reply to my questioning that remark (to consider them, you stand outside A?R is what I recall was his response?)". Based on my understanding of the Summary, I believe that Radka dismissed the "Saucy Jack" letter, because he reasoned that it was incompatible with the pattern of behavior he perceived in the historical record. In my January 9, 1:39 pm post, I described the Summary's structure as: "A sequential composition of interdependent concepts, driven by a central theme, i.e., psychopathy". I'm confident that Radka developed the structure after reading through the historical record, in some form or another; he either saw a pattern of behavior, or identified a pattern of behavior based on some preconceived notion. Now I'm sure you're well aware that the Whitechapel Murders generated a massive body of information. But how does an investigator deal with such a vast amount of complex, and often conflicting data? It wouldn't be practical to assume that all of the information is relevant or factual, but this doesn't mean that you can indiscriminately dismiss information out of hand either. What it does mean, is that the investigator has to systematically analyze all of the information in the database, using either a deductive or an inductive theoretical approach. It follows that he had to have some criteria or control mechanism that he could rely on, to distinguish between related and unrelated pieces of information. In sum, what you're asking Radka to explain is: 1. What is it about the Lusk Letter that places it in the Summary? 2. What is it about the Saucy Jack post card that excludes it from the Summary? 3. What information from the historical record is used in the Summary? 4. How did you determine which pieces of information in the historical record were necessary to the Summary? Does the Summary provide us with the answers to these questions? Yes, I think it does. To begin with, the terms historical record and case evidence are interchangeable. Next, the scenario in section 21 contains the criteria that Radka used to qualify the Lusk letter. I'll explain the process in the context of the story-line, to give you a better feel for the underlying concepts that connect the letter with the Summary. The murderer, let's call him Murray, feels emasculated because his wife unilaterally decided to allow Nutso Kosminski, a mentally ill relative, to move into their home. This pushes Murray, no stranger to mental illness himself, over the edge, and he begins to viciously murder prostitutes, but the satisfaction from this activity is short lived, moreover, it hasn't changed his domestic situation. To accomplish that task, he dreams up a plan to move Nutso out of his small house and into the Big house, he'll just frame him for the murders he committed, and claim the reward money. Unfortunately, there are two major problems with this scheme: first, nobody is offering a reward; and second, he knows that if he turns in Nutso, his wife will teach him to sing soprano the hard way, if you get my drift. Nevertheless, Murray is determined to get rid of Nutso, and make a profit at the same time, so he decides to set up a couple of patsies to finger Nutso, and afterward, compel them to give him the reward money. The problem now becomes one of coercing someone to offer a reward for information leading to the arrest of the murderer, and Murray thinks that George Lusk, the president of the Mile End Vigilance Committee, is the ideal pigeon. Lusk has been using the newspapers to pressure Home Secretary Henry Matthews into posting a reward for the killer, but Matthews is reluctant, and has put Lusk on the back burner. Murray is beginning to feel omnipotent, i.e., he thinks he can elevate Lusk's power base by manipulating the level of public outcry, and thus, put him in a better position to move Matthews off the dime. So, he butchers Eddowes and sends Lusk a letter and half of her kidney. Now Murray could just as well have cut out the middle man, so to speak, and corresponded directly with Matthews, but than we'd have the "Matthews letter", with the Home Secretary receiving the half kidney. This explanation answers your questions by showing that: 1. The Lusk letter links the murderer to a pattern of behavior in the historical record. 2. The Saucy Jack postcard fails to advance the killer's need to boost Lusk's influence with the Home Secretary. 3. The Lusk letter is part of the historical record and is used in the Summary. 4. Individual pieces of information in the historical record have to demonstrate a characteristic(s) that can link it/them to the pattern. Item 4 also speaks to your question regarding Alice Cole, i.e., if the characteristics of her murder can't be linked to a general pattern in the historical record, or to the specific behavioral pattern described in the Summary, then her case isn't part of the Whitechapel Murders or the Summary. In sum, the information generated by the Whitechapel Murders, constitutes the historical record for that event; the terms historical record and case evidence are interchangeable; the case evidence that Radka alludes to, demonstrate characteristics that link them to each other, forming a distinct pattern; and finally, the pattern is an interdependent sequence of events and actions that are explained by a central theme, i.e., they are conditions of psychopathy. If you use my explanation as a qualifying mechanism, then I'm sure that you'll be able to discern for yourself which elements of the historical record are included in Radka's Summary. I sense that you have a genuine interest in understanding the Summary Ian, and I hope that from this point forward, Mr. Radka will treat with you on a friendlier basis. It has been a pleasure discussing these concepts with you, and I look forward to reading about your ideas on other issues. Sincerely, Mephisto   D. Radka Unregistered guest Posted on Wednesday, January 12, 2005 - 1:50 pm:        A. N. T. AYAR wrote: 1. "Murders committed by criminal psychopaths are the most difficult to trace on account of the obstacles met in trying to establish a motive." >>Good point. That is one reason why I strictly limit myself to following the empirical case evidence. To the greatest extent I can, I let what the murderer actually did determine my interpretation of his motivations. If you try to think about psychopaths and their motivations too generically, you often wind up inadvertantly cranking in normal human motivations, and then you lose your whole analytical platform. 2. "Moreover, if, as seems probable, the Ripper was simply a homicidal psychopath...then he was a deranged nonentity who has almost certainly left no other record of his existence." >>First, psychopaths are not deranged people. They are not psychotic and not insane. Second, it may be possible that some of the things he did left an indirect record of his existence. Possibly the private conspiracy that stoped him, or the records of Aaron's committals, the Anderson writings or the Swanson marginalia contain something accessible through interpretation. By the way your acronymn is interesting. You are apparently anti-something. I wonder what. David   D. Radka Unregistered guest Posted on Saturday, January 15, 2005 - 1:53 pm:        Friends, This board has a good dialogue going now between Mephisto and Mr. Palmer. Others (Mr. Nelson and Ian) have been invited, and I’d like to myself invite those on the sidelines who hadn’t contributed playfully enough before. As for me, I am present but I’m going to do more listening than speaking in the near future with respect to this dialogue, although I am preparing posts on unrelated matters. Both what I say and what I don’t are a part of my contributions to the dialogue now now. David   D. Radka Unregistered guest Posted on Monday, January 17, 2005 - 9:30 pm:        Mr. Palmer wrote: 1. “…I sometimes wonder whether Messrs. Andersson ('gabage') and Norder ('a joke') are correct, or whether Radka will eventually be welcomed into the 'mainstream' flock of Anderson-based theorists.” >>I wouldn’t think A?R an Anderson-based theory, such as would be considered the works of Mr. Begg, Mr. Fido and Mr. House. Anderson-based means you accept Anderson as a reasonable witness and commentator based on his biographical merits. Instead, I develop a means by which to logically oppose and objectively evaluate Anderson’s statements about the case, based on the empirical evidence. I am essentially an epistemologist; my theory is based on the epistemological center. *** For both positive and negative, I am about the last person in the world to be considered the member of a flock. I am so incapable of herding that I stand out just sitting in an employees’ cafeteria eating my lunch. I can’t eat lunch the way everyone else eats it. 2. “It hasn't escaped my attention that Paul Begg's new chapter on 'Kosminski' makes an argument nearly identical to Radka's: that the East End Jews saw little difference between the Met and the Tsarist police and thus would have shielded their own (ie., Jack the Ripper) out of fear of a general pogrom. Rational minds think alike, and possibly Dr. Robert felt this way, too...but it seems to me that a more reasonable or empirical man would have found the failure of the house-to-house search in the area north of Whitechapel Road suggestive of...well...you know... something else entirely....” >>As an obtuse man, I am unable to glean what you mean. Just what should have been suggested to Anderson by the failure of the house-to-house searches? Hmmmm---? I interpret the event as follows: Anderson staggers back to London from Paris and is summoned to Matthew’s office. If he hadn’t had his noodle stretched and twisted out of sight by his spymaster activities previous to his holiday, Matthews puts the holy screws to him now. “You are responsible for apprehension of the Whitechapel murderer,” he says to him. So Bob slinks back to his office and asks Swanson what he’s got. Swanson tells Anderson about the house-to-house searches that have recently been done while Anderson was in Paris. One of the points mentioned by DSS is the notion that Polish Jews would perhaps be unlikely to turn in one of their own to gentile justice. The two men get together on this idea, Anderson because he’s so in need to solve the case, Swanson in the puppy-dog sense because he wants to serve as best he can, and to get close to his new boss. No, I don’t imply a full-scale gay relationship between the two men. I merely suggest that they got a little bit closer than the usual supervisor-subordinate ratio of things at that time, due to special circumstances. Later, all this comes back to Bob when Levy points the finger.   Mephisto Unregistered guest Posted on Monday, January 17, 2005 - 10:33 am:        Hmmm. Anti AR. How clever. You wrote: "Moreover, if, as seems probable, the Ripper was simply a homicidal psychopath... then he was a deranged nonentity who has almost certainly left no other record of his existence". I think that the canons of modern anthropology and social psychology invalidate your claim that the murderer's psychopathy made him an unknowable "nonentity". I propose that by reasoning with what is known about the human condition, the Victorian Era, and the historical record, I can adduce enough detail about the murderer, to demonstrate that he was indeed a knowable human entity. Without question, the operation of the killer's survival instinct had a significant impact on the murders. For example, we can know with certainty that he acquired some measure of food, clothing, and shelter, which made it possible for him to survive long enough to murder an unresolved number of prostitutes. He was either independent, and could obtain these necessities on his own, or he was dependent, and in some manner, others provided them for him. In either event, he had to communicate with people, e.g., with words, gesturing or sounds, to sustain himself. Therefore, we can know with certainty that even if the murderer was a psychopath, he still was able to communicate with the people around him, and secure the basic necessities of life. We also can know with certainty that he understood the concepts of function and purpose, i.e., he had a working knowledge of sex, and he knew how to use a knife. We know that he was familiar with the prevailing social norms, because he didn't draw attention to himself. Conversely, if he did draw attention to himself, than your point is moot. It goes without saying that he understood the economics of prostitution, i.e., a man could have sex with a woman in exchange for cash. Let's consider the possibility that the Whitechapel murderer might have corresponded with certain individuals or institutions, and think about what this might mean in terms of his aptitude. If we knew with certainty that the murderer issued these correspondences, it means that to some extent, he could read and write. Alternatively, if he couldn't read and write, then he must have somehow communicated his ideas to someone who could. Now let's consider the fact that he wasn't found loitering about the murder sites; this means that either he was ambulatory and had the power of vision, or he was lead from each scene by his psychopathic guide dog. To summarize, we can know with certainty that: 1. The murderer's survival instinct facilitated the commission of the murders. 2. The murderer communicated with the people around him. 3. The murderer understood what things were for, and how they were used. 4. The murderer had a working knowledge of sex. 5. The murderer was familiar with the prevailing social norms. 6. The murderer was familiar with the ins and outs of prostitution (See #4). 7. The murderer had the power of vision. 8. The murderer was ambulatory. 9. The murderer escaped detection. Thus, what we now know with certainty is that the murderer communicated with the people around him to obtain the necessities of life. The alternative scenario is also true, i.e., if the murderer was unable to acquire the necessities of life on his own, but was able to communicate his needs to others, he was still interacting with the people around him. It follows that when he did these things, he was interacting with his community. If in either event the murderer is actively participating in community life, then your claim that he's a "nonentity" is unjustified. None of the above characteristics is indicative of psychopathy per se, and if you can't prove with certainty that psychopathy affected the murderer's survival instinct; his ability to communicate; or his power to reason with his socio-cultural environment, then your point is moot. Therefore, it does not follow that "a homicidal psychopath" would "almost certainly [leave] no other record of his existence". You also wrote: "Murders committed by criminal psychopaths are the most difficult to trace on account of the obstacles met in trying to establish a motive". This argument doesn't convince me that the inability to establish motive, makes it any more difficult to discover that a murder was committed by psychopath, than it is to discover that a murder was committed by a non psychopath. As far as I'm concerned, your arguments don't say anything worthwhile, because your concepts don't hang together, i.e., you don't tell me how psychopathy works to isolate the murderer from other people in his community, or how this pathology makes the details of his life unknowable. And you don't tell me where to find the information that inspired your ideas and support your claims. I'm interested in learning your perspective. Please supply more contextual information next time. Thanks for stopping by Anti AR. Mephisto   D. Radka Unregistered guest Posted on Monday, January 17, 2005 - 5:00 pm:        Ms Pegg wrote: 1. “Want the country in which you live to be used against what you say like it has some kind of relevance to what you say?” >>I am not a jingoist, using British culture against the British in a prejudiced manner. I don’t think, on the other hand, Ms Pegg knows much about the differences between British empiricism and continental rationalism, a topic that has been fairly debated for hundreds of years among educated people in Britain and Europe. There is a reason why, for example, people like Rousseau appeared in Europe during the Enlightenment, and not in Britain, and why Thomas Jefferson, reading him, wrote the Declaration of Independence to George III. You need to know something about intellectual history and philosophy to understand where A?R is coming from. I’m bending over backwards here to be nice to Ms Pegg. 2. “Want things you said in private emails years ago posting out of context on a public message board?” >>I have never posted one word of a private email to any web site. You offer no evidence to support your charge. 3. “Want to have lies made up about your personal life?” >>I have never lied about anyone’s personal life on any web site. You offer no evidence to support your charge. 4. “Want to be subjected to playground taunts?” >>You offer no evidence to support your charge. 5. “Want to be accused of committing criminal activities?” >>I have never accused anyone of committing criminal activities on any web site. A poster falsely portrayed me as accusing him of violating the RICO Act, whatever that is, and you are rephrasing his nonsense in the hope that people with half a memory of it will thereby think it a confirmed matter, pick up the cudgel, and write further against me. This sort of thing has happened to me many times on this thread. 6. “Want to be accused of syndicated gangstarism (whatever that means)?” >>It is established that there are people working together to use this web site to advance themselves Ripperlogically, sometimes at my expense. Here is an unrelated example. Once I was listening to a legitimate radio talk show. In other words, the host was supposedly not a mouthpiece for any corporation or product. The guest was an obscure investment newsletter writer who was making tall claims for his ability to make people rich, based for the most part on investing in very small companies that had previously had a large decrease in stock price. He would advise acquisition of big share blocks just the moment that volume in the share trading had increased. He essentially claimed he could time the next stock price increase in these tiny companies based on when insiders had started repurchasing the shares they had previously sold when the share price had been under pressure. After about thirty minutes of interview, the host received a phone call and took it on the air. The caller said he was a subscriber to the newsletter in question, and that everything the man was saying was true. He’d followed the man’s instructions to the letter, and had become wealthy. He waxed ever more complimentary to the man, called him a hero, and lavishly praised him. He stated that he was himself a sophisticated investor, and knew by experience that the newsletter writer truly had a genius system. The caller had called into the studio from Timbuktu all right, and neither the caller nor the guest were in cahoots with the host, but there seemed to me little doubt that the caller and the guest were in cahoots with one another. Anyone who reads here ought to keep aware that this sort of thing is also being done on these message boards as well. We have people here who work together in ostensibly offering fair, arm’s length praise to one another, but who actually calculate the whole conversation via email beforehand for their mutual enrichment. You have to learn how to listen carefully here, asking yourself questions concerning who says what and when. 7. “What to have your age used as proof of your IQ?” >>No one has ever done this on the A?R thread to my memory. One poster (not me) once said that another poster (also not me) hadn’t learned much in his short life, but that is a far cry from saying he had a low IQ. You mischaracterize what was posted and then surreptitiously attempt to attribute the post to me. Your charge against both the real poster and me is false. 8. “Want to be told that people with qualifications are better than others?” >>Well, aren’t they? I wouldn’t want to hire a manure salesman to be my dentist. Would you? 9. “Want your intelligence insulting, want to be called obtuesely inadequate (like it makes sense)?” >>If you were to take the time to review the criticisms made against A?R from Day One April 2004, you’d find ample evidence of obtuse inadequacy. You assume your reader will take your pitch straight from you, and won’t bother to do this. 10. “Want to be told that sometimes mentally ill people deserve to be hit?” >>This is an outright lie, calculated to bring down a calamitous social censure on me. What I said was that psychopaths—not mentally ill people, psychopaths—are in fact sometimes beaten—not deserved to be beaten but actually are beaten—because they won’t stop doing terrible things. This sort of thing happens. You get a father or a wife or a brother who’s been so put through the mill by a psychopathic family member charging up the credit cards or constantly being arrested that he or she desperately tries to get the antisocial person to behave by using physical force. In fact strong coercion—excluding physical violence—is recommended by psychiatrists as the only means by which to get a psychopath to stop misbehaving, if only for a while. You have to put a psychopath in a position where he knows he’s going to be INSTANTLY painfully compromised if he doesn’t follow moral rules, in order to have any influence on his behavior at all. It is no wonder, then, that sometimes they are in fact beaten. You portray me as advocating torture of the mentally ill, as took place in the Dark Ages. 11. “Want to be ignored for many months on end then have something you said months ago taken out of context and used against you when you can no longer remember saying it?” >>Hey Jenny if you said it, you said it. Don’t you know that you are responsible for what you say? Just read the archives of what YOU said in the context YOU said it. That’s what anybody here can do. 12. “Want to be accused of lying?” >>See my response to #11. 13. “Want to be told the author of A?R is comparable to Da Vinci/Plato/Hegel and that is why you cannot understand what he is saying?” >>You are parroting an unreliable source concerning my work, whom I feel posts here basically to get a few laughs by bashing someone who can’t hurt him back. I do not claim that I am of the caliber of the people above by any means; however, I am in fact an innovator as far as the Whitechapel murders are concerned, one of the best ones I think. And in THAT sense only, a comparison may be made. But so can many others be compared to them in that way. Bill Gates, Burt Rutan, Howard Hughes, Carson McCullers (remember her?) and many others come to mind for examples. 14. “Want to "gain something"?” >>I believe you are making play on words concerning posts written under the pseudonym “G. Longman” here. This chap used to complain about what he called my “gainsaying.” He just couldn’t understand how the epistemological center worked, and thought every time I explained anything concerning the case it was mere unsupportable gainsaying on my part. The nature of the Wentworth graffitus as a message to the three Jewish men was gainsaying, for example. So spoke an unreflective product of the British empirical educational system. I understand that I have to stand up to the long history of errors in the Ripperlogical field. 15. “Want to be told you supplied no evidence when you have supplied evidence several times that contradicted the view of A?R?” >>I’ll let Mephisto {Sunday, January 02, 2005 - 2:47 am} answer this one. “Actually Mr. Norder, Radka isn't in denial, because you haven't "pointed out" any mistakes he may, or may not have made. You've simply identified the theoretical concepts you don't agree with. You aren't qualified to offer anything more than a blue-collar opinion re: psychological issues. Moreover, your arguments are scattered and disconnected…At this point, all you've offered the readers is hearsay; show me da money Mr. Norder. Quote the paragraph, or paragraphs, including the author, date, and publication where the original idea was first described. If another Casebook reader has already made the same claim, and you didn't verify his or her accuracy, then you're just quoting hearsay…Professional journalists, and editors, don't complain that information is buried somewhere in an archive; they include the relevant information as a matter of course. You protest that you are to busy to reiterate your arguments, or the arguments of others, and are unable to do the proper research. Mr. Norder, if you had the time to make these allegations, then you had time to research the archives…” This has essentially been my expressed position as well since Day One, April 2004. 16. “Want to HAVE RANDOM words shouted "at you"?” >>I use capitalization because (1) I type in MS Word and paste into the web site, and the formatting for underlining and italics won’t transfer, and (2) I can’t figure out how to get the web site formatting to work in any event. I don’t mean to shout. 17. “Want to take the words of Robert Anderson as the gospel truth about everything?” >>I’ve been abundantly clear that one of the main reasons I wrote A?R was to make it unnecessary to take Anderson as the gospel truth! A?R provides an independent, critical alternative perspective on his claims, based on the empirical evidence street side. I think the objections raised by Sugden, for example, against simply believing in Anderson are justified. I don’t, however, consider Sugden’s conclusions about him—that he and Swanson came to inhabit a world of wishes and half-truths and thus exaggerated the value of the identification, gospel either. Hence A?R. You have my position exactly backwards. 18. “Never feel the need to apologise?” >>A few posters have tried to trick me into apologizing to them. “Boo hoo David, you hurt me, now say you’re sorry.” They are transparently attempting to fuse an apology intent into a manifest intent to get me to confirm their incorrect positions on A?R. 19. “…Not that i am trying to put you off Phil. I am just trying to get a bit of perspective introduced into this thread...” >>But you did. Mr. Hill picked right up on your “perspective” concerning me, and has posted a negative review of A?R based on an incorrect reading.   Jennifer D. Pegg Assistant Commissioner Username: Jdpegg Post Number: 1679 Registered: 2-2003 Posted on Thursday, January 20, 2005 - 12:32 pm:        David, i hope the irony of the situation isn't lost on you. i'll get back to you shortly! Jenni ps it's been a while since i made that post i refer you to #11! "What d'you think about that? Now you know how I feel"   Jennifer D. Pegg Assistant Commissioner Username: Jdpegg Post Number: 1680 Registered: 2-2003 Posted on Thursday, January 20, 2005 - 12:38 pm:        Just for my convinece a link to my post, my post of the 2 of december which i made those statements which were about things said on the thread by everyone not just david. ../4920/13901.html"#C6C6B5">   Jennifer D. Pegg Assistant Commissioner Username: Jdpegg Post Number: 1681 Registered: 2-2003 Posted on Thursday, January 20, 2005 - 1:12 pm:        Let's start now Me on the 2nd of December 04 "Want the country in which you live to be used against what you say like it has some kind of relevance to what you say? " David you seem to be denying doing this. Hang on let's look back at the thread for some Brit bashing highlights they include the following gems, David on the 21st June 04 "British philosophy is empirical in nature, and reflects the tenor of the British people as patient, adventurous, emotionally cold, pragmatic, detail-oriented, science-oriented, and empire-oriented" David on the 21st June "their empirical nature has left the British culturally programmed to eschew ideas as a legitimate driver" David on July 7th "Just as there is a difference in Americans between a man like Chomsky and a man like Cheney, there is a difference in Britons between a man like Byron and that fellow who got the idea to get the Chinese addicted to opium, so the Brits could clean up selling their poppies from their Indian plantations in their Chinese colony. This is one of the most emotionally cold things I can imagine. It happened. It was a British institution of longstanding." David on the 27th of July 04 "But when Brits are bad, they are bad in a different way. Brits it seems to me are bad out of cold, superior cynicism toward or detachment from the lot of the other. It has the bitter taste of betrayal. A kind of cutting off of feeling occurs—I don’t know exactly what triggers it;" David on August the 1st 04 "You Brits just can’t imagine what rationalism is, can you? All you need do is cross the channel and you’ll find millions of people living by it. No, I don’t magically transform a logical argument into empirical evidence. It remains a logical argument." David on the 1st August 04 "You [british people] need to develop a sense of what empirical evidence is good for, and what it isn’t. You Brits tend to think that the only good is empiricism, and if it doesn’t work, well, then we just need more empiricism. THERE is where the quantity counts more than quality, not in my theory." David on the 5th of August 04 "It is difficult to convince me that the British do not have some kind of emotional coldness in them at work, despite that they think Americans are merely unsophisticated. The upper lip is much too stiff, if that is what it is." David on August the 13th 04 "I have not used the term "emotional coldness" "to describe an entire history of a nation's many diverse people" anywhere at any time. It is a dishonorable lie to say that I have. My overall view of the British people is a complimentary one, and I view the differences between the British and American peoples as a positive thing," David on October the 18th 04 "The Briton starts sliding down the slippery glass mountain, so he instinctively grasps for his empiricism. So go the Brits, but not we good Europeans. Someday you will look up and see—I think—Scott Nelson standing at the top." David on the 28th October 04 "Right. To do so is the sense of traditional British empiricism, which has failed to solve the case for 116 years. If this is part of what you mean by sophistry, then I’m with you this far." David on the 14th of November 04 "This is a complex thought, however, and may seem hard to swallow at first to people who are used to British empiricism, the legal standard, and inadequate explanations of the evidence. And lastly, the original use of continental rationalism in place of British empiricism gives a new dimension to Ripperology." "What d'you think about that? Now you know how I feel"   Jennifer D. Pegg Assistant Commissioner Username: Jdpegg Post Number: 1682 Registered: 2-2003 Posted on Thursday, January 20, 2005 - 1:15 pm:        me on the 2nd of december “Want things you said in private emails years ago posting out of context on a public message board?” instinct tells me the post in question (about howard) was removed but i'll check on that. "What d'you think about that? Now you know how I feel"   Jennifer D. Pegg Assistant Commissioner Username: Jdpegg Post Number: 1683 Registered: 2-2003 Posted on Thursday, January 20, 2005 - 1:16 pm:        Me on the second of december “Want to have lies made up about your personal life?” instinct tells me the post in question (about howard) was removed but i'll check on that. "What d'you think about that? Now you know how I feel"   Jennifer D. Pegg Assistant Commissioner Username: Jdpegg Post Number: 1684 Registered: 2-2003 Posted on Thursday, January 20, 2005 - 3:33 pm:        me on the 2nd of december "Want to be subjected to playground taunts?" David on the 17th january "You offer no evidence to support your charge" will this do you? David on the 26th of April "Be adequate instead of hyperbolic for once" David on the 27th of April "... is a busybody, making no legitimate points about anything. He has an extremely immature habit of forcing himself on others, in this case me. That he has no backup whatever for what he says is not a part of the equation as far as he's concerned." David May 4th "... will say anything that will make him feel good for a few seconds, regardless of its truth value. He depends on a lack of thoughtfulness of people reading his posts to swell his ego. He is probably good at staring people down in conversation, a steady glare or being tall gets this done well enough." David on the 4th May "Once you try to raise the bar of Ripperology, it seems, every scurvy rat jumps out of the bilge to scurry under" David on the 10th of May "... is seen as something of a Great White Hope by little nowhere men, sitting in their nowhere land, making all their nowhere plans for nobody." David on the 13th May "thus she is projecting it on me here because she doesn't like the characteristic in herself" David on the 14th of May "several other of your ill-conceived backhanded jabs" David June 1st "The writer is attempting what is called a “swish pan,” in which he runs a load of baloney by you real fast and then puts a label on it, hoping the label gets attached in your mind. " David June 1st "The rest is a pile of arrogant **** on your part" Mephisto 8th June "The majority of your critics, however, are content to remain in the comfort and security of their subterranean vault, happily deluding themselves into believing that the shadows of the puppets and animal figures moving across the wall in front of them, is reality" David June 17th "My critic above affords himself the luxury of considering my position a subjective one only from his false perspective of disjointedness—once the evidence is considered holistically, the alleged subjectivity disappears. My eros leads me to make real connections; his position is essentially masturbation." David June 21st "You are full of prunes, Mr. Andersson" David June 20th "Please, Ian, get a life will you" David 21st june "Ian, Ian, you’re on the backside of the moon." Mephs 26th june "Pride normally makes one reluctant to publicly acknowledge their lack of understanding" David 4th July "Baloney, RJ. This time you’ve opened such a schism between truth and reality you’ve basically got two places--you standing on a little fragmented asteroid and normal people on a real planet" DR July 7 "We all know who’s “sitting back in pubs” very well, Mr. Wolf. And what you write is utter compost." DR July 14 "Notice how Mr. Souden in his angry personal tirade intentionally misspells my name three different ways—RAKDA, RADAKA, and RADKE. It is an act of disrespect, derision, and provocation, in which he gets himself off by altering or slurring my personal identity, if only in his own fantasies" DR 12th July "You know nothing, and have done nothing but try to bluff everyone reading these boards for the past 2 ½ months" Mephs 27 July "I'm not trying to nic your goat, but it does appear that dealing with you, is just about as rewarding as communicating with a mule, i.e., you both have a fondness for intractable open mindedness." DR 26 July "you sat so long in the mud you got yourself stuck deep in a rut when it dried up" DR July 29 "you are on a fantasy power trip the foolishness of which will someday become clear to you" DR 1st Aug "Rubbish. You have no idea of what you are talking about—you just wind your mouth up and let it fly—you offer no points from appropriate scientific literature to back yourself up." DR 15 Aug "a sheer baloney point placed into evidence, acceptable only to fools" DR 15 Aug "honestly, for your own good please grow a brain for the first time in your life" DR 2nd Sep "Get a life, Mr. Norder" DR 27 Sep "we’ve had to deal with the distortions of Mr. Norder and his confederates Mr. Mullins, Mr. Hamm, Ms Pegg and others." DR 27 Sep " Any infant can scream and scream for his bottle, but no infant has the problems Medea had, and she didn’t scream at all. Can’t you see this truth right before your eyes," DR Oct 17 "This little gem is so childish I couldn’t keep myself from laughing at it" bored now but will that do you? "What d'you think about that? Now you know how I feel"   Jennifer D. Pegg Assistant Commissioner Username: Jdpegg Post Number: 1685 Registered: 2-2003 Posted on Thursday, January 20, 2005 - 3:37 pm:        Me 2nd Dec "Want to be accused of committing criminal activities? Want to be accused of syndicated gangstarism (whatever that means)? " yes david both these things refer to the gangstarism charge. let it go. Its rubbish. Your post of the 23rd of september was wrong. Your post above "It is established that there are people working together to use this web site to advance themselves Ripperlogically, sometimes at my expense" no it isn't it is a blatant lie made up by yourself on the 23rd of september! "What d'you think about that? Now you know how I feel"   Jennifer D. Pegg Assistant Commissioner Username: Jdpegg Post Number: 1686 Registered: 2-2003 Posted on Thursday, January 20, 2005 - 3:42 pm:        Me 2nd Dec "What to have your age used as proof of your IQ? " Scott nelson Oct 14 "Well, in your 26 years of life, what could you possibly know? Why should anyone respect your observations/opinions? Are you an expert? You certainly try to write as one. Is it those two sociopaths in the family, or could it be three? Hey, Jason Scott, go back to fixing up your new house. Leave this thread as you promised to do so, long ago. Your observations are based on very limited exposure to the real world and hold little weight to this thread." Me 2nd Dec "Want to be told that people with qualifications are better than others?" DR above "Well, aren’t they" no actually, qualifications don't make a person. "What d'you think about that? Now you know how I feel"   Jennifer D. Pegg Assistant Commissioner Username: Jdpegg Post Number: 1687 Registered: 2-2003 Posted on Thursday, January 20, 2005 - 3:45 pm:        me 2nd Dec "Want your intelligence insulting, want to be called obtuesely inadequate (like it makes sense)?" You above "If you were to take the time to review the criticisms made against A?R from Day One April 2004, you’d find ample evidence of obtuse inadequacy. You assume your reader will take your pitch straight from you, and won’t bother to do this. " so you were ok to call me obtuesly inadequate on the 23rd on Sep, without explanation. its ok to insult people you see as less intelligent now is it? "What d'you think about that? Now you know how I feel"   Jennifer D. Pegg Assistant Commissioner Username: Jdpegg Post Number: 1688 Registered: 2-2003 Posted on Thursday, January 20, 2005 - 3:51 pm:        me 2nd dec "Want to be told that sometimes mentally ill people deserve to be hit?" You above " What I said was that psychopaths—not mentally ill people, psychopaths—are in fact sometimes beaten—not deserved to be beaten but actually are beaten—because they won’t stop doing terrible things. This sort of thing happens.[...] You have to put a psychopath in a position where he knows he’s going to be INSTANTLY painfully compromised if he doesn’t follow moral rules, in order to have any influence on his behavior at all. It is no wonder, then, that sometimes they are in fact beaten. You portray me as advocating torture of the mentally ill, as took place in the Dark Ages. " No I portray you as saying sometimes the mentally ill (which psychopaths are) desereve to be beaten which is what you said here ../4920/12447.html"#C6C6B5">   Jennifer D. Pegg Assistant Commissioner Username: Jdpegg Post Number: 1689 Registered: 2-2003 Posted on Thursday, January 20, 2005 - 3:54 pm:        Also, no i am refering to when you said i needed to "gain something" Phil's a big boy i'm sure he didn't take my word for anything. and I see you still don't feel the need to apology. i think i made my point! Jenni "What d'you think about that? Now you know how I feel"   Stephen P. Ryder Board Administrator Username: Admin Post Number: 3211 Registered: 10-1997 Posted on Thursday, January 20, 2005 - 4:05 pm:        This thread is closed until further notice. I don't have the time, energy or patience anymore to properly moderate this conversation, and its gotten completely out of hand. If you need to continue insulting each other, do it in Pub Talk, or better yet, take it to email. Stephen P. Ryder, Exec. Editor Casebook: Jack the Ripper