Wednesday, February 26, 2003

Gibbering jingoes

Well, CPO Starkey over at Sgt. Stryker's blog has posted a response of sorts to my earlier critique of his work, which to his ears apparently was a mere rant.

Perhaps that explains why there isn't much 'there' there. Indeed, the peculiar thing about this "response" is that it responds to only one of the five points I raised regarding the afactuality of the "history" he has presented so far. Moreover, while that single response was reasonably adequate in disputing a peripheral point I had raised, it in fact served to once again underscore the central point I was making, and which evidently continues to elude Sparkey: Namely, that the "Magic" cables no more justified the internment of the entire population of Japanese-Americans on the Coast than it would have justified rounding up all African-Americans or all Caucasians in the same areas.

Indeed, not only has Sparkey rather abjectly failed to respond to the remainder of the issues, he also has so far been unable to address the issue of the utterly false assertions he made at the Stryker blog, which were contested not only by myself but by Eric Muller at Is That Legal?. (Heaven forfend that he should once again try to assert that "race wasn't a major issue back then," considering the wealth of material that has been posted here already that would reveal that claim for the utter rubbish it is.)

Much of the rest of Sparkey's response is devoted to playing up an irrelevant mistake I made in my earlier posts and for which I did apologize. (I guess I must be the only one confused by Stryker's blog; for all I could tell, since there is zero information about the contributors to the blog, the names at the tops of the individual posts could have merely represented whatever voice was screaming to get out of Stryker's head that morning.) He also devotes considerable conjecture to my mental state as I write, most of which is pretty hilarious and unintentionally revealing, since anyone with a smattering of psychology can recognize projection when they see it. Ah well. I guess such straws are important to grasp when the rest of your argument is being blown away.

And can anyone explain to me exactly which link I contained in my posts that didn't take the reader to a relevant post? If it's a broken link, I'd be glad to fix it. However, my strong suspicion is that these remarks are more likely related to a reading-comprehension problem on Sparkey's part. (Lord knows I shouldn't look to Sparkey himself for any coherence on this point.)

As for the remainder: I normally prefer not to dignify juvenilia like this with a response, but for the disinterested readers out there who may be wondering about his imputations regarding my honesty, I'll only say this: Please review the links in this post. Please review Sparkey's posts as well. Then judge for yourself who is being intellectually honest here:

-- The person who is citing the direct words of the principals involved; the actual newspaper files from the period; the government records; and fully accredited (and properly published) academic studies of the relevant history.

-- Or, the person who not only is posting false information in this debate, but who is moreover pulling the vast majority of his material from an unaccredited, self-published pseudo-history text that belongs in the same genre as David Irving's work.

I rest my case.

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