It simply doesn't matter if they're the same person or not.
It doesn't as long as we can extend the discussion beyond, "Why are you picking on this guy? I thought the book was really entertaining and nicely done." Having a sock puppet validate your work for the same reasons you think it's significant validates that criterion. Conveying the impression that's what many people want to talk about when you're the "many people" is fundamentally dishonest.
What matters is that the "content" of the book is ludicrous, inaccurate, and flat-out impossible.
Oh, but it's "entertaining." "Quite a good read."
We know
Jockndoris is Neil Burns, the author. After lying about it for a while, he came clean. I've been trying to have a discussion about the factual correctness of the work, but it appears its author (whether that's also Skeptic_UK or not) wants to adopt a warm-fuzzy love-fest approach. That's not what we do here.
No evidence has been presented for the book's claims that is independently verifiable.
But it's "entertaining." "A good read." Whether under the ultimately redeemed Jockndoris persona or ostensibly under his new fan persona, none of the advocates of this book are willing to discuss it as putative fact. The book itself says that if you don't believe in ghosts, keep passing it around until you find someone who does. The author has no intention of defending its veracity. He only wants positive feedback from people predisposed to believe it.
If he doesn't understand why I and others find that distasteful and immoral, then we have insufficient common ground.
If a person who isn't the author enjoys reading it, that person is clearly lacking in critical judgement.
But that person thinks it's "entertaining;" "a good read." And he doesn't understand why we insist on evaluating it according to criteria he doesn't feel matter. It's that utter disregard for truth, suspiciously shared by two recently active posters, that raise questions of identity. And the questions of identity drive questions of whether the present criticism is appropriate. Are those questions relevant? Only as far as the argument insists that we have to consider the two personas to be independent agents supporting each other.
If they slowly enjoyed it over the course of a weekend, they're not a very good reader, either.
Not weekend -- a
week. In my more literary moods I could devour a 400-page novel in three days. If it takes someone a week to read 60 folio pages, I have to doubt his reading comprehension. Or his sincerity; it may be that someone wants us to think this book is worth savoring page by page like that. It really isn't. I don't want hopelessly pixelated travelogue diagrams. I don't want paragraphs of text describing how some maid had folded his clothes. I don't want page after page of self-indulgent dreck. None of that is interesting or entertaining.
