Please Use The Index - plus The Long, Odd Silence of 'Wesley Crosland'

I'm sorry that I haven't been able to do much cut and thrust here lately.  I have been spending quite a lot of time attending the party conferences (not yet over) and nearly as much time reaching them via Britain's endlessly torn-up rail network with its 'engineering improvement work' that leaves the trains slower and more unreliable than before, its fragmentation and its padded timetables, which cause travellers to spend long minutes sitting at stations for no other reason that the rail operators aren't willing to risk being late, and being fined.

Once these are over I plan to return to responding in some detail to those comments which merit it (some just don't – and may I ask some contributors, who manage to comment perhaps five or six times a day, generally saying very little, and that incoherent and ill-spelled, to restrain themselves a bit, or I shall have to consider a daily maximum number of comments from anyone person to avoid it? Such things bore and repel other readers, and they bore and repel me too. The British Boring Board of Control has been in touch, and I do so prefer self-regulation).

I'll only take this opportunity to point out that 'Wesley Crosland' has still failed to reply to the personal letter I sent him on 1st August (about which he went public, jeering that the questions in it were childlike in their simplicity). The letter concerned his belief that everyone who doesn't accept the vague speculations of the evolutionists about the distant past as unchallengeable fact is obviously stupid and ignorant. Before anyone tries to bracket me as an 'ist' or a 'phobe' or a 'denier' or some other sort of outcast in our supposedly tolerant society, I should say that in the letter I merely asked him to justify and explain certain statements he had made, in his usual confident manner, on this subject. I myself, as I often have cause to say, have no idea of the truth of the matter, believing we have insufficient data on which to theorise.

In the subsequent two months, despite the allegedly childlike simplicity of these questions, Mr 'Crosland' has not found time to answer, though he has found plenty of time to sneer loftily and rather repetitively at evolution sceptics with extraordinary frequency. He has generally done this without any real pretext,  on threads where this subject has little or no relevance to the matter under discussion.

The childishly simple phrases 'All mouth and no trousers' or 'Big hat, no cattle' spring to my mind.

 

In the meantime, may I make a plea, especially to new readers who come here, as it were, in the midst of many long-running debates

This blog is unique, as far as I know, in having a full index of topics discussed, going back to its very beginning in February 2006.  Perhaps that is why people don't expect it to be there, and so don't use it as much as they might. I spent many laborious weeks compiling this, and the subjects are helpfully listed on the right hand side of the page. New readers wishing to know my view of the Tories, or my advice on voting or on UKIP, or on grammar schools, or the Iraq War (for example) may look them up here. I acknowledge that there are inevitable imperfections, but it is still a very useful archive.

In many cases they may also be able to look up reports I have sent from various countries around the world. Also available are the subsequent discussions I have had with readers. I am willing to answer questions about such things, but only after readers have searched the index.