Double Nought Spy--
Of course you bash Massad Ayoob. That's what you do when you see his name. "Bash" is the appropriate word because it describes the intensity and commitment with which you pursue him. You do it often and with such passionate focus that I'm surprised to see you write that you haven't met Ayoob. My previous encounters with that particular kind of rage have led me to believe that it's generated by some real or imagined slight from its target. Perhaps you corresponded with him? Internet forums are an arena in which discontented people lacerate their personal demons in public view but rarely have I seen it done with such vitriolic attention to detail as you've focused on Massad Ayoob with such frequency over such a long time.
You've been doing it since at least the fall of 2003, when I joined this forum. In fact one of the first message threads that caught my eye when I joined was the thread you entitled "
Flight Equals Guilt - Ayoobian Nonsense" when you started it on November 6, 2003--nearly two full years ago. It's the same kind of message you posted to start this present thread. You've posted others like it in the interim, and you've leapt into other people's threads to bash Ayoob when anyone mentions his name.
There even are common characteristics to your Ayoob-bashing messages. Many contain the insulting coinage "Ayoobian" in their titles and your references to Ayoob, just as in this present thread. I don't know or care whether you invented that coinage but you use it often, apparently as a category for a kind of fallacy you seem to think Ayoob commits or represents. Massad Ayoob is a human being, not a thing, and it's distasteful to see someone "thing" another human being, especially one not here to defend himself. Perhaps it's vaguely understandable when done to a public figure who knew or should have known that elevated positions attract equally elevated hatreds. But Massad Ayoob doesn't occupy so grand a stage. Ayoob is a talented and accomplished man in his field who has earned his stature through hard work and achievement. He is simply a person who has made a place for himself on the relatively small stage reserved for people who are interested in the defensive use of firearms. Ayoob is a star on that stage--deservedly so--but I don't understand why anyone would expend so much energy as you do on such continuing attempts to tarnish such a star.
You cast all of these threads as if they are a detailed examination of issues that concern you in something Ayoob wrote. But that apparent objectivity is only the guise for bashing the man and his work. Your message is not about running with guns because you have something to say about that subject. Your message is about Massad Ayoob and the article he wrote on the subject. Even your response to me, at the end of your composite reply to your many critics in this thread, concludes with a juvenile dig at him and me: "I am still trying to work through the Socratic method in regard to the NH match Ayoob described at length. You may need to PM the lessons I am apparently missing from there." Personage, rest assured that I don't
need any direction from you at all. Neither, I think, does Massad Ayoob or those who read the article. I can evaluate it. So can everyone else.
The nature and extent of your folly is exemplified by the way you drag in-- usually without reason--Massad Ayoob's frequent service as an expert witness for the sole purpose of demeaning it. (You do it in responding to your critics here and you've done it elsewhere too.) Can't you see that your opinion just doesn't matter at all? An expert witness's credentials are presented and evaluated on each separate occasion for that occasion. Each judge decides whether to accept them on that occasion. What is significant is not your opinion but the opinions of the many attorneys that use and have used Ayoob as an expert witness and the many judges that have accepted him as an expert witness. What is decisively significant is that Massad Ayoob has been endorsed as
the expert in the judicious use of lethal force by the American Bar Association and the American Law Institute. They sponsor, produced, and distribute
the videotaped CLE course The Judicious Use of Lethal Force: What Prosecutors, Defenders, and Policy Makers Should Know for Continuing Legal Education credit. There are four faculty: one prominent prosecutor, one prominent defense attorney, one commissioner, and Massad Ayoob:
Massad Ayoob is the Director of the Lethal Force Institute in Concord, New Hampshire (
www.ayoob.com) and a world-renowned expert in the training of government and police agencies in self-defense and firearms. He has considerable experience as an expert witness for prosecution and defense teams on the defensive use of lethal force and has written extensively on the topic. A police captain and vice chair of the Forensic Evidence Committee of the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL), Mr. Ayoob is a member of the International Association of Law Enforcement Firearms Instructors.
You seem unaware of or intentionally ignore a basic reality. Ayoob doesn't exist only at his word processor grinding out articles for hire where nobody can evaluate his actual proficiency at what he professes. He is constantly in the arena being tested and submitting himself to scrutiny. None of his many supporters are mere sycophants. Every one of us is at least as rigorous as you.
I do know Massad Ayoob professionally but I'm far too old to accept uncritically anything he or anyone else says from the mountaintop. My life depends on my own judgments. I'm even old enough to know that it is folly to blindly reject knowledge because of envy, arrogance, or personality flaws. I learn a lot that is good to know from Massad Ayoob, in part because I never have to wonder if his advice is tainted by blind hatreds. I wish I could learn something useful from your messages but everything you say about anything touched by Ayoob is tainted by your obvious persistent animosity.
I have the sense that reasonable people are telling you now that they see through what you're doing and have lost patience with it. You will do as you please, of course, but maybe it would be worth taking them seriously instead of addressing them all as attackers to be repelled.
