Just archiving... nothing to reid here. Move along...


"Reid Goldsborough" wrote in message
...
On Sat, 08 Nov 2003 17:52:44 -0500, Reid Goldsborough
wrote:

What follows is a distillation of many people's opinions and
observations, including my own. Additions and corrections are
welcomed. This document is copyrighted -- please don't republish
elsewhere. HMTL version available he http://rg.ancients.info/guide.

This is in response to further nonsense from Phil DeMayo about this
subject, gleaned from a periodic Google Groups search.

Phil DeMayo isn't a lawyer but plays one on the Internet, combining
various unrelated statutes and nonbinding court cases and pronouncing
definitively, over and over, what's legal and what's not when there's
anything but judicial clarity about the subject of ownership of
counterfeits of collectible coins. He has said that Armen Vartian, the
most visible numismatic legal expert in the country, a lawyer who
writes a legal column for Coin World, has recently written a
particular column about the legalities of collecting counterfeit
coins, and has written a book about collectibles and the law, must not
have read the counterfeit statutes because his interpretation differs
from Phil's. Phil has said that you don't need to interpret laws, just
read them. From his reading of the laws, sans interpretation and
context, he has warned people repeatedly about the dire legal
consequence they face if they collect counterfeit coins, including
jail, fines, and car confiscated, when none of these consequences have
ever taken place. He is legalistic in the extreme, contending that all
laws and all rules should be followed to the letter, yet
hypocritically refusing to answer the simple question of whether he
himself has broken the law by driving faster than the speed limit, in
response only calling others hypocritical. He is moralistic in the
extreme, impugning the ethics of those who collect or study or write
about counterfeits yet whose ethics online leave a great deal to be
desired, not to mention his maturity, exemplified by among other
things his taking a picture of me from my Web site, defacing it, then
putting it on his Web site. He doesn't understand the difference
between jurisprudence and ethics, simplemindedly equating the two, and
between counterfeits and replicas, simplemindedly equating the two.
His sole or at least primary source of "research" is Google, and he
appears to believe whatever he finds, particularly if it comes from an
"official" source such as a government Web site. His purpose in
putting out information isn't to disseminate truth but to support his
own entrenched ideas, to promote his agenda. He has said flat-out that
he doesn't make mistakes and his online debating style reflects this
-- sheer stuck-in-the-mud, never-budge-an-inch intransigence. When it
becomes clear that he's wrong about a point, he has repeatedly blurted
out "Bite me!" rather than saying, level-headedly, "I hadn't
considered that," or "That's something I didn't know," or "I need to
check more into this," or "You may be right." His own criticisms of
others primarily reflect not important mistakes in fact but picayune
gnat-like needling, and he follows people around to various online
forums, an Internet stalker, offering only negative comments, or at
least does with me. He exemplifies, perhaps better than other
individual in this newsgroup, the unreliability of information on the
Internet and the sad "electronic shut-in" mentality of a small but
disproportionately loud segment of the Usenet population.

--

Email: (delete "remove this")

Coin Collecting: Consumer Protection Guide: http://rg.ancients.info/guide
Glomming: Coin Connoisseurship: http://rg.ancients.info/glom
Bogos: Counterfeit Coins: http://rg.ancients.info/bogos