Brent Devereaux focuses on classics and military history, and he has some great stuff on his blog, including why Spartans suck and the myth of “hard times breed hard men” etc. He started off by showing that the “realism” of Game of Thrones, wasn’t.

Which is brilliant. Because giant wordwalls of complaining that ignore all the actual arguments I make and their evidence is the most efficient way to discredit yourself. I needn’t even reply.

That you also violated my comments policy by trying to pretend to be several other people praising you and insulting me childishly (yes, your IP address shows up on every comment on my back-end so I know they literally all came from your computer) is just gravy.

And when you read that policy you will notice sock-puppets are a banning offense. So your immorality (lying and bearing false witness) has won you an eternal ban from commenting on my site.

https://philosophicalmuser.blogspot.com/2026/01/beware-richard-carrier-dont-fall-for.html

No worries. It’s useful to cover it here since not everyone knows it’s covered there. So your question was welcome.

I discuss this in chapter six of Obsolete Paradigm.

But the short of it is:

First, they fail to distinguish heavily from merely mythologized figures, by “over counting” hits (they allow an absurdly broad definition of terms), an error I already warned against in the original study; correcting this error gets a very different result, as shown in OPH.

Second, their second paper relies on that faulty result and is therefore rendered moot, but it also ignores the original study’s warning that chronology cannot be relevant to frequency of mythologization or historicization, because it is modulated by when the cult or nation was believed to have begun, and not by anything to do with the historicity or not of the founder. So it’s simply the wrong reference class.

Doof management is more complex. Sometimes a doof is a useful foil for educating a broader audience. Sometimes they have something useful to say. Sometimes they improve in response to criticism. Sometimes they are entertaining. Sometimes disabusing them of their favorite fallacy rescues countless others from having to endure it. And so on.

So when someone gets blocked here depends on a number of factors. Especially since over-blocking becomes propaganda for them, as they can claim we are avoiding them or hiding what they are trying to report. The best way to forestall the effectiveness of that tactic is to give them a lot of rope before hanging them, so everyone sees what really happened, deterring future and prospective doofs.