From: jrk@information-systems.east-anglia.ac.uk (Richard Kennaway)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.guns
Subject: David Bowman considered as a sliding-block puzzle
Date: 12 Apr 92 15:16:38 GMT

You've probably all seen sliding-block puzzles.  In one of the simplest,
fifteen square blocks are held in a frame four blocks square.  There is a
block-sized hole.  By sliding the blocks around one tries to achieve some
particular pattern.  There are more complicated examples of the genre, but
they all share a fundamental property: no matter how you move the blocks
around, there is always a hole.

David Bowman's posts are like that.  Whenever you point to a hole in his
premises, he changes them to fill the hole, leaving a hole somewhere else. 
The hole moves around, but it's always there.  If you claim that a firearm
is sometimes useful for self-defence, he points to cases where it is
unnecessary.  If you point to cases where it is necessary, he counters by
claiming that "you always argue that non-violence never works".  I asked
him to post evidence that anyone here has made that claim, but he has
ignored the question (while responding to a more insubstantial post of
mine, so I can't be in his kill file).  I suggest that he believes that
non-violence always works, and he claimed that he does not.  I asked him
what action he advocates in the situations where non-violence will not
work, whose existence he had just agreed to, and he was silent.  The hole
moves around the board, but never vanishes.

Sometimes, it moves to some pretty bizarre places, such as when he claimed
that installing smoke detectors and a fire extinguisher in one's
inner-city home is evidence of irrational fear and/or inadequate fire
services.

It is this strange behaviour, of appearing to engage in constructive
debate, while doing no more than holding to his conclusions by shifting
his premises in response to each counter-argument, which persuades me that
"David Bowman" has no real existence, but is a fictional creation.  By
whom or for what reason I do not know.  A real person arguing for Bowman's
purported beliefs would display greater creativity than merely thinking up
a new set of premises every few days.  

Lest he (or his author) misunderstand this as an evasion, it is not simply
that our arguments have failed to convert him that persuades me against
his reality, but his method of hanging onto his position in the face of
these arguments.  On rereading a bunch of his posts all at once I feel an
absence of any real personality behind them.

Of course, the validity of an argument or the worth of an idea do not
depend on who or what makes them or for what purpose.  However, when
someone expounds and argues for what they actually believe, under their
own name, their personal engagement in the discourse is likely to lead to
a higher quality than when they create a purportedly real but fictional
character whose only purpose is to put forward a certain point of view and
hold to it regardless.  Indeed, it is a common error of bad fiction, to
give characters strong and loudly expressed opinions as a substitute for
personality.

If "David Bowman" comes up with something sensible to say, such as answers
to the unanswered questions I mentioned above, I will give them as much
attention as they appear to merit, regardless of whether I believe I am
talking to a real person or a fiction; but I fear that he will not.

--
Richard Kennaway     SYS, University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ, U.K.
Internet:  jrk@sys.uea.ac.uk               uucp:  ...mcsun!ukc!uea-sys!jrk
Newsgroups: talk.politics.guns