"Put Your Name On The Petition Or Leave Me Alone"

JEFF SEILER:

Continuing with the faxed correspondence, but back to posting just Dave’s letters to me, with the occasional annotation. This one picks up where we left off last week. It is dated June 6, 2008:

Hi Jeff:

Please fax me Lenny's number and "when is a good time to call" and I’ll contact him directly. [Ed: This would have been about Lenny’s father’s experiences, which were previously mentioned.]

I've reconsidered answering the questions, since that involves at least potentially entertaining people who consider me to be a misogynist.

I correspond with Rick S. because he understands that this is about feminists making opposition to feminism into misogyny. I correspond with him because he’s the only person I know besides Sandeep who is able to stay on topic, so there is a certain level of intellectual interest in trying to find a way to stay on topic. No offence, but I don’t see that in you: like everyone else, you want to run around all over the map to "how much Jeff T. has done to help you", "who is higher up in the pecking order than Heidi MacDonald and/or Jeff Smith", "let’s rehash the roast book", "let’s slag Lenny for doing late what Jeff T., Heidi MacDonald and Jeff Smith won't do at all", "let's drag in completely irrelevant aside about James Owen". I'm not reaching out to Jeff T. I'm giving him the same offer I'm giving everyone else: Put your name on the petition or leave me alone.

[Ed: Okay, here’s where not holding onto (or misplacing) all of our correspondence leads to embarrassing gaps in my recollection. The quotes (or summations) to which Dave referred above escape me now, save for the ones about Jeff T. As regards the latter, I was just trying to patch up a rift between the two of them that still, to this day, has not been patched up. C’est la vie.]

Getting back to the subject: If police standards were as high and exacting as they used to be, how many policewomen do you think there would be? 3%? 40%? 90%?

In other words, how delusional are you choosing to be just to stay on the One Big Happy Family Side of the Fence? How delusional are you being in trying to make this about all of the pointless irrelevances listed above? Why are you doing that instead of discussing empirical reality?

Dave

[Ed: Okay, this is about the time that I began to realize that Dave was not just responding to particular points in my letters to him, but had begun using his letters to me to expand his plan for what he called “reading into the record”. It confused me, at first, but I decided just to go with it, and see what happened. So can you, if you stay tuned.]