I NEVER have seen him defend any position he took. Just saying "My work speaks for itself".
That is a symptom of living too long in a walled garden. White surrounded himself with fanboys who took his every word as gospel. Under those circumstances it's not hard to acquire the mistaken belief that one merely has to say something and it thereby acquires the status of fact.
That's why I'm glad to be here. When I make a mistake, a half dozen people
on my side spring up and say, "No, Jay, I don't think that's right." Other days it's someone else's turn to be mistaken. This is how good work gets done. When each person feels individual pressure to be right, making a mistake has emotional-investment consequences. When there's a team mentality and a process (even informal) for reviewing propositions and correcting mistakes, the end result is more robust and requires less face-saving. Engineering practice, in its purest form, is a group of skilled people executing a process of proposal, review, and analysis. Individual mistakes and missteps occur along the way, but if a problem arises in the final product then the
process is what went wrong. It behooves the engineering team to discover how an error escaped the process designed to catch and correct it, not to point fingers at individuals.
There was James Fetzer, who I'm speculating, was being given post hints to continue the debate.
Fetzer is another character altogether. He made some hoax claims, and when I challenged him years ago to debate them he said he had no time to waste debating someone who didn't have a PhD. (I guess a lifetime spent building aircraft and spacecraft professionally doesn't qualify me to stand in his glorious presence and talk about his claims relating to space flight.) Fetzer's bluster is purely academic -- and literally so. His entire career has been teaching esoteric philosophy of science in a backwater college. He has no practical expertise in nearly anything that affects his claims, especially his hoax claims. Fetzer showed up to JREF (now ISF) a year or so ago. When I pressed him to assert whether or not he still believed in hoaxed Apollo missions, he evaded the question for weeks and then finally gave a perfunctory handwaving reference to a relatively obscure website author (one who basically just copied the Aulis authors) and told me that was all I needed to know about it.
He is clearly unwilling and unable to defend his Apollo hoax claims, but he still lists them on his own web site as something he apparently endorses.
