When someone sends me spam, I figure the information sent to me is fair game. Remember the guy who sent me the email about noni juice? I blogged about it twice: (here and here).In the second post, I went through his email line by line and stated the logical fallacy. I made no personal attacks (except one, I'm only human after all). When I published the post, I removed his name. I wasn't trying to attack the spammer personally. I just thought it was an excellent exercise for us.
What I didn't do, is write back to the guy. As I said, it seemed like spam, and I didn't want to get into it with him. I figured I'd never hear from him again. I heard from him 5 times this evening. Oh, lucky me, I just got another one from him. That makes 6.
When he sent the first ones, he apparently hadn't seen the articles. In the first email of the evening he wrote:
"P.S. FYI The odds of you ever knowing, and/or ever meeting, anyone who is MORE truthful than I am is zero!"
To which I replied, "In my experience when someone starts out saying how [insert noble quality such as honesty, fidelity, etc. here] they usually prove to be either self-delusional or outright liars."
He didn't like that. He said later that my experience was limited. Which I have to say, he's right. My data pool is not immense. But it's a good rule of thumb in my experience. When someone tells me, "I'm so honest, I'm so faithful, I never lie, I'll always do this behavior" I will remember that. It's usually a huge red flag that they will fail in that exact respect sooner rather than later.
I'm not a psychologist but it seems to me that that there are two things going on. Either you're lying to yourself when you say such a thing, or you're lying to whoever you say it to. Or some combination thereof.
Anyway, I started to reply to this guy's email. I wanted to make it very clear that I didn't want his juice and I didn't want to argue with him. The way he talked about James Randi was another red flag I should have heeded.
He sent a long email of glowing reviews from other people. (I gather he is on a forum or something). This is anecdotal and irrelevant to me.
Another email was vague and I have no idea what it was about.
Then the kicker. Obviously he visited HDC. If you don't want to read strong language, skip this. It's exactly as he sent it in its entirety. Notice I do not do the courtesy of removing his name this time:
