GSG xmas present

[Henry Flower]

Pierre, what is your honest academic opinion - is the following an example of someone honestly attempting to answer the question:

Me: Did you ever sit back after finding these clues and ask yourself if there was any feasible way they would or could have been arrived at as coded clues ahead of time?

Pierre: Yes. I asked myself if the serial killer could gain anything by writing such a letter.

There are three surefire ways to determine when Pierre knows he has dropped a clanger, first he answers questions that he wasn't asked, second he mentions internal and external source criticism (it acts like a comfort blanket for him), and third he complains about being mocked or destroyed. Imagine if Hawking had acted like this when he lost his black-hole bet with Thorne!

[David Orsam]

The Gogmagog letter was very revealing because it demonstrated beyond any doubt that far from taking the approach of a scientist or historian, Pierre takes the approach of a cheap amateur treasure hunter looking for clues or hidden meanings in everything (and magically finding them).

In the case of Gogmagog, he read a letter in a newspaper referring to Lord Mayor’s Day but he didn’t understand it so naturally thought it was written by Jack the Ripper and contained hidden meanings which, when deciphered, would reveal information about the murder which took place on Lord Mayor’s Day.

We see the same thing in all of his threads. Pawn tickets in a mustard tin found at the scene of the crime must contain a hidden meaning – a message sent to the police by the killer - which only Pierre can work out. The lyrics to Sweet Violets in a newspaper were planted by the killer and contain a hidden meaning – a message to someone - which only Pierre can work out. The writing on the wall, when adjusted to read what Pierre wants it to read, contains a hidden message from the killer which only Pierre understands. The words spoken by Cross to PC Mizen contained a hidden meaning that Cross had seen Nichols being murdered by a police officer even though Cross never said anything like it and there was no way that Mizen could have understood it.

Pierre has not, of course, ignored the JTR letters and he’s lasered in on two which he likes. Both of them, of course, contain clues with hidden meanings for the police to solve. In one he is telling them he will be at work in the Minories (the hidden meaning being that dates are not dates but numbers of victims) even though there was no murder in the Minories and, in the other, a letter sent to the Great Yarmouth police, references to 'piers' mean 'pubs' and 'closing time' means the time of closing the roads.

When Pierre speaks of "sources" he simply means documents or oral testimony in which he has been able to extract hidden meanings. This is why he goes on and on about what his "sources" are telling him. It’s also why he never reveals the content of his "sources", as he did not in this thread.

Far from being a historian, Pierre is a lover of 'serial killer movies' as he told us in one unguarded moment in October 2015. I have no doubt that he likes the movie Zodiac and thought to himself that serial killers send hidden messages to the police so if he only he can find those sent by Jack the Ripper he could crack the case wide open.

As Henry Flower has shown, Pierre’s thinking is hopelessly misguided and reveals an unrealistic understanding of how a serial killer operates. He leaps to conclusions time and again without giving any real thought to whether those conclusions are sensible.

[Pierre]

[QUOTE=Henry Flower;404614]

it's not behaviour I would've expected from a scientist or a historian, and I expect there's a simple explanation for that.

More belittling from you Henry. You can´t help yourself.

So to be clear: you were content to believe that based on some inferences you drew from a letter, the killer knew in advance:

Here you speak in the past tense.

And you find it entirely within the realms of likelihood that he used the length of the Lord Mayor's procession as a pun on the name of their courtyard, and that same length in feet just happened to yield their room numbers, and a reference to the carriage that would travel in the procession was hiding an oblique reference to their names?

Here you suddenly speak in the present tense.

Let me ask you, did you ever think of asking a genuine scientist to calculate the odds on these staggering coincidences,

You can not perform odds calculations on this type of data. The mathematical concept of odds does not apply.

And again you try to belittle me:

did you ever think of asking a genuine scientist

I work with statistics.

or were you content to believe that such coincidences were more likely because of the killer's fine education?

It is the same for likelyhood. You can not use it on this type of material.

Because that's nonsense, isn't it Pierre?

Everything you write here is nonsense, isn´t it Henry?

[Henry Flower]

Dear Pierre, I find it slightly sad and also predictable that when you feel yourself slightly cornered you resort to complaining about people setting out to belittle or destroy you. You asked me to be polite and so I was. Rest assured, if I am setting out to mock you, you will be aware of the mockery. In this instance I was not. I was asking you whether you had merely looked for clues that would, after the event, support your theory, or whether you had also been remotely strict with yourself about whether these clues could feasibly and reasonably have been placed in advance. The fact that you became so personally defensive was quite revealing, it's not behaviour I would've expected from a scientist or a historian, and I expect there's a simple explanation for that.

So to be clear: you were content to believe that based on some inferences you drew from a letter, the killer knew in advance:

The names of his victims
Their home addresses
The date of their murders

And you find it entirely within the realms of likelihood that he used the length of the Lord Mayor's procession as a pun on the name of their courtyard, and that same length in feet just happened to yield their room numbers, and a reference to the carriage that would travel in the procession was hiding an oblique reference to their names?

Let me ask you, did you ever think of asking a genuine scientist to calculate the odds on these staggering coincidences, or were you content to believe that such coincidences were more likely because of the killer's fine education? Because that's nonsense, isn't it Pierre?

[Pierre]

QUOTE=David Orsam;404606

In Davidworld, the only existing thought is the thought of destrying Pierre. Therefore everything coming out from Davidworld is lies.

Remember that David has been believeing in his own little world for a long time now.

[David Orsam]

I reasoned that people knew the story about Queen Mary of Scots and Elizabeth. Mary was beheaded by the way.

One can only admire the convoluted thought process which arrived at this result.

Remember that a mention by Gogmagog of the Lord Mayor's coach was somehow a clue referencing Tennyson, due to Tennnyson mentioning the coach in a private and (as at 1888) unpublished letter, and one of Tennyson's plays was called 'Queen Mary' in which Princess Elizabeth also featured.

That's all bad and mad enough but the twist in the tale is that the Queen Mary who was the subject of Tennyson's play was not Mary, Queen of Scots but Queen Mary, the sister of Elizabeth (who was not executed).

So in PierreWorld, when Jack the Ripper posing as Gogmagog mentioned the Lord Mayor's coach, thus leading the readers of his letter in some remarkable way to his play 'Queen Mary', those readers still had to work out that it was a completely different Mary to whom he was referring and upon whose portrait he based the death pose of Mary Jane Kelly.

And at one time Pierre actually believed in this nonsense.

[Pierre]

QUOTE=Henry Flower;404516

So my question to you is this: at the time when you presented this letter and your theory to the boards, which of the following did you suppose was the killer’s first intent? – was it

to kill on the day of the parade?
to kill in rooms 13 and 20 Miller’s Court?
or
to kill Mary Kelly and Elizabeth Prater?

If you claim that his primary intent was to kill on the day of the Show then you must have reasoned that

Hi Henry,

You write "you must have reasoned" - and this is important. What I will decribe here is how I reasoned. So I reasoned that:

The intent was to acchive a murder discovery on Lord Mayor´s Day.

So I did reason that the killer wrote a message in a letter to the papers.

for the purposes of giving advance notice to the attentive he calculated the length of the procession,

The author was "told by the police" that there was going to be a procession, nearly a quarter of a mile long. So he mustn´t have calculated it.

searched for a street name that could stand as a written pun for that length,

The author of the Whitechapel murders didn´t need to search for street names since he obviously knew Whitechapel. I reasoned that the choice of Miller´s Court was made before the letter was planned.

converted the length into feet, split it in two to get two room numbers,

Since you have the lenght of 1320 and the rooms were close.

discovered the names of the residents of those rooms,

I reasoned that the author knew the names of some of the victims.

and made oblique reference to those names by paraphrasing a phrase from an unpublished letter by a writer who also wrote a play featuring those two very common names.

I reasoned that people knew the story about Queen Mary of Scots and Elizabeth. Mary was beheaded by the way.

If you propose that he selected the addresses first, then you must have reasoned that having selected two locations for murder, he found that by some miraculous coincidence the name of the courtyard could be very tenuously twisted to pun on the length of the procession taking place the day of the killings, and he then converted that length to feet and by an even more exponentially miraculous coincidence, the length in feet gave him the numbers of the rooms he had selected for his murders.

It was what people here love to call a "coincidence". I reasoned that the author knew how to use it.

If you propose that his first intent was to kill the two specific victims then you must have reasoned that he decided to make oblique reference to those names by paraphrasing a phrase from an unpublished letter by a writer who also wrote a play featuring those two very common names, and that the paraphrase just happened to refer to a carriage that would be taking part in the parade the day of the killing, and that the killer then studied the length of the parade and found by an incredible coincidence the distance in miles was nearly a pun on the name of the courtyard where the intended victims lived, and if you converted it to feet it actually gave you their room numbers!

I reasoned that he could not resist it. He did not need any specific advanced knowledge. He knew the lenght of the procession, he knew some street names.

You see, deducing hidden coded clues from a text after the event is the easy part. A child can do it.

Yes. What fools the police were he could reason. And so could I. You find it concearning modern serial killers communications too.

What is more demanding is doing what a genuine historian or scientist would’ve done, and that is working out whether those clues could feasibly have been arrived at and inserted intentionally before the event. And whichever way you look at it, there is no way the killer went through anything like the procedures outlined above.

No, he didn´t. Since the procedures outlined above are your own procedures.

The author of the Whitechapel murders was well educated, he knew society and history and could express himself. He lived in the 19th Century. All the advantages were his.

So I reasoned that he enjoyed himself sending a letter with the metaphorical "Gogmagog" - the protector of the city. The police was a protector of the city.

And whichever way you look at it, there is no way the killer went through anything like the procedures outlined above.

Of course he did not go through the procedures outlined above. They are your own procedures, constructed to ridicule and belittle me. But that was not the intention of the Whitechapel killer. It is your intention.

And if you say that it was none of the above, because in fact EACH of those elements was essential to the events of the day in his mind, then the impossibility of the coincidences in the letter is magnified exponentially.

Each of those elements were only essential to your mind, when you planned to ridicule and belittle me.

So I’m asking you Pierre, regardless of what you now think of the letter, at the time you presented that theory to the boards, did you apply any reasoning to the idea, or did you just hunt for hidden clues that could be made to retroactively fit events of Nov 9th?

I applied internal and external sources criticism. There are independent sources in the case and the letter was a test against them.

Did you ever sit back after finding these clues and ask yourself if there was any feasible way they would or could have been arrived at as coded clues ahead of time?

Yes. I asked myself if the serial killer could gain anything by writing such a letter.

It very much looks as though you did not.

To you, Henry. Naturally.

If you did, and yet failed to spot how absurd and how impossible a scenario you were formulating,

The absurd and impossible scenario that you formulated above. It is yours entirely. Not mine. And not the Whitechapel killer´s.

(And the rest of your post is just accusations and no questions).

Regards, Pierre

[Henry Flower]

Pierre: reasoning vs clue-hunting

Hi Pierre, I was reading your Christmas presents again, this year's and last year's, and it got me thinking about the difference between reasoning and merely looking for clues. It seems to me that looking for clues is what you mostly do. I have a question that would aid my understanding. It concerns last year’s present, the gogmagog letter. I know you eventually semi-disowned it and dismissed it as low-validity, but that’s not the point of my question, my question concerns reasoning and logical thought as opposed to clue-hunting, and I’d be grateful if you could answer it.

To recap, for the unfamiliar: you presented a letter in which, you claimed, it was quite possible that the killer had given the world advance notice of the names of his next victims, their addresses, and the date on which they would be murdered. This information was coded (though you erroneously described it as metaphorical) and consisted of the following:

The length of the Lord Mayor’s Show procession was given: nearly a quarter of a mile. You claimed this was a kind of pun on Miller’s Court, Mille Quart. Further, you deduced that a quarter of a mile in feet (1320) was a reference to the room numbers of Mary Kelly and Elizabeth Prater, 13 and 20. Additionally you claimed to have found a clue to their names in a reference to the gilded carriage, which was similar to wording found in a then-unpublished letter by Tennyson, one of whose plays featured characters named Mary and Elizabeth.

So my question to you is this: at the time when you presented this letter and your theory to the boards, which of the following did you suppose was the killer’s first intent? – was it

to kill on the day of the parade?
to kill in rooms 13 and 20 Miller’s Court?
or
to kill Mary Kelly and Elizabeth Prater?

If you claim that his primary intent was to kill on the day of the Show then you must have reasoned that for the purposes of giving advance notice to the attentive he calculated the length of the procession, searched for a street name that could stand as a written pun for that length, converted the length into feet, split it in two to get two room numbers, discovered the names of the residents of those rooms, and made oblique reference to those names by paraphrasing a phrase from an unpublished letter by a writer who also wrote a play featuring those two very common names.

If you propose that he selected the addresses first, then you must have reasoned that having selected two locations for murder, he found that by some miraculous coincidence the name of the courtyard could be very tenuously twisted to pun on the length of the procession taking place the day of the killings, and he then converted that length to feet and by an even more exponentially miraculous coincidence, the length in feet gave him the numbers of the rooms he had selected for his murders.

If you propose that his first intent was to kill the two specific victims then you must have reasoned that he decided to make oblique reference to those names by paraphrasing a phrase from an unpublished letter by a writer who also wrote a play featuring those two very common names, and that the paraphrase just happened to refer to a carriage that would be taking part in the parade the day of the killing, and that the killer then studied the length of the parade and found by an incredible coincidence the distance in miles was nearly a pun on the name of the courtyard where the intended victims lived, and if you converted it to feet it actually gave you their room numbers!

You see, deducing hidden coded clues from a text after the event is the easy part. A child can do it. What is more demanding is doing what a genuine historian or scientist would’ve done, and that is working out whether those clues could feasibly have been arrived at and inserted intentionally before the event. And whichever way you look at it, there is no way the killer went through anything like the procedures outlined above.

And if you say that it was none of the above, because in fact EACH of those elements was essential to the events of the day in his mind, then the impossibility of the coincidences in the letter is magnified exponentially.

So I’m asking you Pierre, regardless of what you now think of the letter, at the time you presented that theory to the boards, did you apply any reasoning to the idea, or did you just hunt for hidden clues that could be made to retroactively fit events of Nov 9th? Did you ever sit back after finding these clues and ask yourself if there was any feasible way they would or could have been arrived at as coded clues ahead of time?

It very much looks as though you did not. If you did, and yet failed to spot how absurd and how impossible a scenario you were formulating, you are clearly neither an historian nor a scientist of any great skill. It was amateurish ripperological sleuthing at its most embarrassing.

Did that debacle not give you pause at all, cause you to reconsider your methods or your approach? It revealed you to be quite the opposite of the rigorous and cautious professional historian you want us to think you are. It really was the death-knell for your entire theory. Not that the letter was essential, but that what we saw of your vaunted powers of analysis and reasoning was as comical as it was dismal.

[Henry Flower]

Sure. Ask them again in a normal and civilized way,i.e. without silly comments and belittling strategies, and I may try to answer them.

Why, are you special? You never belittle anyone, Mr "You're all doing research wrong because you are ignorant of the processes of real history, unlike me, a real historian, (who will ignore every request to share one iota of evidence that I am a historian)"? You've never used belittling strategies on any Lechmere thread?

You are one of the worst offenders when it comes to "belittling strategies" so get off your high horse you jerk. You've made a pathetic joke of yourself in this thread.

[Pierre]

Pierre. Could you please answer the two questions I put to you a few posts ago?

Sure. Ask them again in a normal and civilized way, i.e. without silly comments and belittling strategies, and I may try to answer them.

[Henry Flower]

Pierre. Could you please answer the two questions I put to you a few posts ago?

[Henry Flower]

The cold day in hell has already arrived, Henry:


By Henry Flower

10-27-2016, 05:16 AM

Thread: A major breakthrough

Post: 614

Wow. I'm speechless. You truly are the most humourles eejit I've ever seen on these boards.

[Pierre]

I haven't had cause to say this very often, David, but you are completely wrong there. It'll be a cold day in hell before I feel sorry for that pompous ass.

The cold day in hell has already arrived, Henry:

Poor Pierre sounds lonely.

By Henry Flower

10-27-2016, 05:16 AM

Thread: A major breakthrough

Post: 614

[David Orsam]

Hi Henry,

Yes, the little crapweasel will tell you.

To "prove it" you must be able to establish "it" as an historical fact. And to be able to do this, you must:

1. Have many independent reliable and valid sources.

2. Be able to construct valid and reliable causal explanations, motive explanations and functional explanations from these sources.

3. Establish a coherent explanatory history on these sources.

This isn't true by the way. You don't necessarily need "many" independent, reliable and valid sources. Just one could be enough if it is independent, reliable and valid.

The problem with Pierre is that he uses the word "source" to mean something that he can twist to fit in with his theory (such as the inquest testimony of Mizen or Lawende) rather than to mean actual evidence which objectively confirms the identity of Jack the Ripper. That is no doubt why he feels he needs "many" sources.

[David Orsam]

I haven't had cause to say this very often, David, but you are completely wrong there. It'll be a cold day in hell before I feel sorry for that pompous ass.

Fair enough.