Tell ya what, JD.

You go off and get up to speed on how Pascoe's claims about his family have unravelled and then we can have an honest engagement.

mhaze,

You're still trying to make agreement with your conclusion the price of "honest engagement", and that's the move I've been resisting from the start.

I don't need to "get up to speed" on Pascoe in order to point out a reasoning problem in your argument. I haven't denied that his ancestry claims are disputed, or that criticisms exist, or that you find the evidence decisive. What I've questioned is your insistence that this decisiveness is self-evident, that disagreement can only be explained by ignorance, and that declarations of lying follow automatically.

That's not a knowledge gap, it's a standards issue.

Notice how the ground keeps shifting. First, the claim was that the evidence is overwhelming. When asked to show how that evidence establishes deliberate deception, the response became "I've already looked into it". When that wasn't accepted, it became "go read old threads". Now it's "come back when you agree the matter is settled".

That isn't engagement; it's gatekeeping. It turns disagreement itself into proof that the other person hasn't done the work, which conveniently removes the need to explain how your conclusion is justified rather than merely believed.

An honest engagement doesn't require prior assent. It requires articulating why a conclusion follows from evidence in a way others can assess, and responding to challenges without recasting them as ignorance or bad faith. If the case is as clear as you say, it should survive that scrutiny without needing these preconditions.

So no, this isn't about me needing to catch up before discussion is allowed. It's about whether certainty is being asserted as a substitute for justification. If you want to explain how your conclusion about deliberate fabrication is established - rather than insisting it must be accepted before discussion can begin - I'm happy to engage.

If not, then we're not disagreeing about Pascoe. We're disagreeing about what counts as argument.