[MD] Nest of Diapers

[Ant McWatt]

Dave Buchanan stated to Mark Maxwell November 17th:

>You are, in effect,
>calling Ant a liar. As with the last time you pretended not to understand
>the nature of your own actions, you have repeatedly implied that excluding
>any reference to the hoax from his site constitutes some kind of deception.
>"Why hide it?", you asked. Not only does that imply dishonesty on Ant's
>part, its also a really stupid question. The question is, why would he
>include a intentionally hurtful piece of crap on his site? It would be
>foolish and pointless to put it there. Your accusations are not unlike the
>hoax; intentionally hurtful nonsense.
>
>And your moral posturing only adds hypocrisy to the slime.

Ant McWatt comments:

I was happy to have a version of the "hoax paper" at robertpirsig.org (just 
a version without the weird bits) but I was asked not to include it by Horse 
and Ian Glendinning and, anyway, as a senior lecturer at Liverpool pointed 
out to me later on, Glenn Bradford disqualified his own paper from inclusion 
as a genuine contribution to the Conference by claiming it was a hoax.  
However, after about fifty minor amendments correcting the grammar and 
removing the star-f*cking by myself and its reader David Boyce (as the paper 
was supposedly written by an author with a condition similar to dyslexia), 
it's difficult (without being an eye specialist!) to see why the version of 
the paper read out at the Conference would be considered a hoax paper.  As 
Scott Roberts and Stephen Mills (the person who had the original idea for 
the Conference) also observed _afterwards_.  Talk about storm in a teacup.

>From what I gather with speaking to Mark, I guess the underlying trouble is 
that he is still concerned with impressing the establishment/status quo at 
Liverpool University's philosophology department which I'm far beyond caring 
about.  I therefore apologise if he was embarrassed in front of anyone at 
this department because of the lack of reference to the Philosophy Magazine 
(re: the MOQ Summary) at robertpirsig.org or moq.org.  However, as I’ve 
already noted to Mark, Pirsig and myself didn’t like Baggini’s overall 
attitude underlying his interview questions and encouraging the obsessive 
behaviour of people such as Glenn "Stalker" Bradford (for instance, he 
evidently monitors the changes on robertpirsig.org more closely than I do) 
is not the (Zen) way to go.  In the long run, similar to a kid with 
attention deficiency disorder, this kind of attention doesn’t help him or 
anyone else.

Best wishes,

Anthony



N.B. The MOQ Summary _is_ a damn good summary btw and is 99% gossip free.  
It is available at the following address:

www.robertpirsig.org/MOQSummary.htm


“Anthony McWatt comes closer than anyone to being a dharma successor of my 
own work on the Metaphysics of Quality. By ‘dharma’ is meant a duty that 
transcends one’s own personal self. It was this sense of dharma that made me 
write Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance over a period of four years 
when no one, including myself, thought it would ever be published. I think 
it’s this same sense that has caused Mr. McWatt to study for so many years 
to produce this clarification and expansion…”

Robert Pirsig, from his introduction to the “MOQ Textbook.”

April 2003

.

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