Some Detax Tactics Unmasked

On the morning of September 5, 2001, I saw the sun rise in the West.

How can this be, you say. Everybody knows that the sun rises in the east and sets in the west. He must be mistaken, or disoriented, or downright nuts, you say, to think that he saw the sun rise in the west. Well, I am none of the above. What I have done is to apply tactics used by Eldon Warman and his detax acolytes to justify their notions to a well-known fact of everyday life.

The first tactic is that if it's on the Web, it must be true. This is used by detaxers to uncritically present to us the most outrageous notions imaginable and expect them to be taken at face value, not because the web pages where these notions are presented contain accurate material, or are even rational, but because the detaxer presenting the material wishes it to be so. So I put my discovery on the Web, and in accordance with this tactic, by the very act of doing so I can now assert that it is true!

The second tactic is to apply the notion that using capitalization changes a word's meaning. This notion is frequently put forth by detaxers under the notion that when a government agency writes your name in all capital letters, it somehow converts you into a slave. (And some people think that the notion of seeing the sun rise in the West is looney!) To implement this tactic, I decided to say specifically that I had seen the sun rise in the West. Not in the west, in the West. I did this so that I could use a third tactic, a favorite of Eldon Warman himself.

If you have read about Eldon Warman's private definitions of "person", "resident", and "reside", you have seen that a bedrock principle of DetaxCanada is that if dictionary definitions do not result in the conclusions one desires, one simply makes up a private definition that fills the bill, then acts as though that private definition were legitimate. Well, as it turns out, Webster's dictionary does not contain a definition of West (capitalized) that refers to the direction of the sun, whether rising or setting; the definition that refers to the direction of the setting sun is the definition of west (lower case). So, by saying that I saw the sun rise in the West, I was then able to create my own private definition of West, it being the direction in which the sun rises. And having done so, in accordance with Eldon Warman's principles, I now get to use my private definition as though it were legitimate.

I'm using one more tactic taken from Eldon Warman's little bag of tricks: avoiding presenting a source. Note that I've never actually told you what dictionary I'm using. Sure, I said it's Webster's dictionary, but that's a generic term, and does not tell you which to of the many dictionaries that call themselves "Webster's" I am referring.

Thus do I "prove" that I saw the sun rise in the West, in the same manner as Eldon Warman "proves" the validity of DetaxCanada. All I had to do was to use a similar web of private definitions, concealment of sources, uncritical thinking, and plain old nonsense as he and his acolytes use, and hope nobody would notice.