Lady Luck tonight brings a comment to my blog from a “LadyLawyer.”

Now, as a law student myself, I’m always excited when lawyers visit my blog. One thing about lawyers is that after approximately four years of a grueling post-graduate education with an emphasis on analyzing and building logical arguments, you can have some truly terrific and inspiring debates that are often quite enlightening to both sides, so long as each party keeps an open mind.

Like this one, for instance…

In an August (the month; I’m not using it adjectivally) post on the question of whether Mel Gibson was an antisemitic jew-baiter, I noted that someone had sent me an article indicating Gibson was (antisemitic). I did a quick review of some materials about “the case” before posting my response to the question on my blog. The end result of my reading was that I felt there was no way to make a determination one way or another on “the evidence” in the articles I’d read.

One of the “sub-areas” of the discussion was about whether Jews were “attacking” the film. I noted that even “‘David’ Treiman,” a Jew writing in The Forward, said that some jewish organizations were questioning Gibson’s motives. For proof of this, he offered quotes that worried about “classical standard stereotypic images of blaming the Jewish people for the crucifixion of Christ.” I indicated that this did not appear to me to be assailing Gibson’s character. It appeared they were raising some questions about the presentation of the film. In fact, from some of my reading at that time, it appeared they had not seen the film and were asking questions rather than making accusations.

I ended the post by essentially indicating that the jury was out on two questions: 1) Whether the film was antisemitic and 2) whether Gibson was antisemitic. The implication is that on the strength of what I’d seen there was not enough evidence to support answers to either question.

And that’s how it was left. Someone brought a question to me; I traced a few interesting sub-points and arguments about them, but as to the larger questions I indicated it didn’t appear there were answers available—at least to me—at that point.

Personally, I’d practically forgotten the article. Then tonight I received a message indicating a new comment had been posted to it. And from a “LadyLawyer”! The excitement was palpable throughout my entire house! An actual attorney! Someone with all that intensive training in analysis, argument building—not to mention the breadth of knowledge she’d probably have, because lawyers encounter so many different things while practicing law!

And then, this:

The article in the Forward is by Daniel Treiman, not David. Click on the link and it is the first thing you see. If you cant get that right, how do we expect you to get any of your information right.

Posted by: LadyLawyer at September 17, 2003 08:30 PM

Well you can imagine my disappointment in myself. I nearly decided to drop out of law school after such a major mistake. HOW could I have been so stupid? There was nothing left to do. I had to own up to it. And so I did.

Well, dang. You got me. My entire argument just collapsed. Not one of the premises will hold up now. Nor can the argument possibly be sound. You have utterly defeated me.

I?ll probably have to stop writing altogether, because anything I?ve ever written before or ever will write is clearly now questionable. Now that you?ve convincingly shown that putting ?David? instead of ?Daniel? for the first name is indicative of a total lack of ability to get anything right, I?ll probably have to get a job flipping burgers.

But wait! You left the apostrophe out of ?can?t? in your post!

If you can?t spell right, how do we expect you to properly critique any of the things I say?

I?m saved! I can continue to build actual arguments full of premises, subpremises, subconclusions, conclusions and (dare I say it!) information! I can still write articles for my blog!

I just hope I don?t ever misspell anything, because I?d hate to have to shut down after all that good money I spent on domain names, servers, software and all that other stuff.

Posted by: Rick at September 17, 2003 09:48 PM

Anyone out there who occasionally enjoys reading this site can thank Lady Luck that LadyLawyer forgot that doggone apostrophe.