Dennis Hackethal Is a Bully

Elliot Temple
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This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://curi.us/2605-dennis-hackethal-is-a-bully
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Half baked response, but I still want to be corrected:

From the post’s article:

He said he wouldn’t discuss and that he would consider it mistreatment of him if I or any of my associates wrote responses to his accusations on our own websites.

Wait, so he writes claims about you that could be damaging or hurt your reputation, but he also doesn’t want you or your associates(i guess im included) to respond to them? That seems very anti his Veritula philosophy.

I don’t think making claims about someone’s reputation and behavior is a good idea, cuz there could be a lot of mistakes being made about their psychology and what their actions were and what their intentions were. I think since he struggled with reading and understanding ET when Hackethal quit posting in FI that shows he’s not so good at understanding another’s intentions and motivations and knowing where they come from. He could be making very serious mistakes interpreting what you’re doing in general and what your intentions are and all.

End of half-baked response

From Hackethal’s blog in response to ET talking about Hackethal isn’t concerned genuinely about his reputation as an innovative philosopher:

I even give an explicit disclaimer at the top of the article saying “I don’t agree with everything [that person] says […]” (emphasis in the original!)

Just cuz one doesn’t agree with everything, it doesn’t mean that they can’t agree with 99.9% of what another is saying. There could be one thing they disagree about out of 100 or 1000. That’s me taking ‘I don’t agree with everything’ literally.

The disclaimer from Hackethal’s blog about his key takeaways from Kevin Samuel’s dating advice videos:

I don’t agree with everything he says, particularly his advocacy for the corporal punishment of children, but he has provided valuable advice about relationships to men and women alike. I’ve listened to and analyzed several dozens of his episodes, and discussed many as well. Here are my key takeaways from his show.

Sorry if this worded weirdly:

So since Samuels provided valuable advice about relationships and Hackethal analyzed those several dozens of episodes and cuz Hackethal talks about his key takeaways from those episodes, it all means that what Hackethal wrote about women and relationships are his key takeaways.

So who is being misleading or “dishonest”?

Yeah, he is being dishonest and misleading. Aren’t key takeaways or key insights what someone has learned from a piece of media? The key takeaways are what he’s learned and agrees with. Those reddit posts he made don’t help him either.

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Jesus Christ, those Reddit comments are disgusting.

Your husband is being a jerk about it but gaining 100lbs is unacceptable. Worse, you blame your kids for your weight gain. Please don’t do that.
Men and women are different. You can’t compare them directly. Your husband may have gained some weight himself but his job in the marriage is to bring home the bacon, not look good. One of your responsibilities as the wife, however, is to maintain a level of attraction. Letting yourself go to this degree is failing your husband.
If he brings home the bacon and starts being nicer, you have nothing to complain about. And you’ll be healthier and happier for taking responsibility and losing the weight.

This is not just a normal level of misogyny. This is definitely congruent with him being steeped in redpill content, and with being a fan of Kevin Samuels. Not just neutrally watching Kevin Samuels out of curiosity.

This comment is also disgusting and shows the same ideas:

You would have been better off making marriage a prerequisite for having children.

There is no requirement for him to marry you now. As Kevin Samuels would say, you’ve already given him the highest honor a woman can give a man – children. If your boyfriend wanted to marry you, he would have already done so.

Contrary to some of the other comments, I do not advise separating from him. Do NOT wreck your own home. It will cause severe distress for your children and they should come first. Being a single mom on the dating market sucks anyway and you will likely end up alone.

Expecting sex every day is unrealistic especially if you just had a child, but do consider the fact that men are more visual and often have greater sexual urges than women. It sounds like he’s fulfilling his obligations in your relationship and brings home the bacon. Ensure you remain attractive to him (shed the baby weight, hit the gym, dress pretty for him) and do sleep with him a few times a week.

Also the fixation on the phrase “bring home the bacon” is interesting. It’s kind of a goofy silly phrase which stands out when paired with disgusting, misogynistic, life-destroying advice.

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That’s how I read it. Eight months after ghosting my reply to his lawyers, Dennis Hackethal posted:

Like Temple, I’m issuing a no-contact request, to him and his associates. You are not to contact me, directly or through others, via any channels, anonymously or otherwise, about anything. In addition, you are banned from having and/or making accounts, and/or generating content on, my websites. Don’t look for loopholes – interpret this no-contact request in the widest way possible. For example, don’t communicate with me anonymously, thinking I won’t know it’s you. Don’t cause third parties to talk to me. Again, this is a general no-contact request about any topic. (Temple hasn’t initiated contact in a long time, but I’m being extra clear because I once sent him a no-contact request and he conveniently interpreted it as pertaining only to a specific issue, then contacted me again and even caused several others to dogpile me.) Proactively take steps to stay out of my life and not remind me of you. That includes stopping disparaging me.

I don’t want to remain in an adversarial relationship with Temple. But, since he has vowed to monitor my success indefinitely, continued defamation leaves me no choice but to keep responding until the defamation stops. He must now unilaterally comply with the terms from the proposed non-disparagement agreement for me to consider this issue resolved.

Clarifications:

He says “Like Temple” but his no contact request is quite different than mine.

I did not make that vow and also, regardless of what I once said I would do, I wasn’t doing it.

By “continued defamation” he seems to mean me leaving an old blog post up, unchanged, not me making new statements. (And I’d offered to edit the post and negotiate changes, but he ignored my offer and ghosted me…)

I think unilaterally complying with the twenty terms he demanded means that I can’t disparage him (I comply) but he can still disparage me (since it’s unilateral, not mutual). That’s an even worse offer than the original offer.

Any blog or forum post written by me or any of my associates on this topic might cause a third party (including one of my fans or one of Hackethal’s friends) to contact Hackethal or might remind Hackethal of me.

He also wants no disparagement: he wants me and my associates not to write anything negative about him. So part of his concept of no contact is that we don’t write our opinions about him anywhere.

He says “Don’t look for loopholes – interpret this no-contact request in the widest way possible.” so I don’t think I’m reading too much into his demands.

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Temple wrote of Hackethal:

Please don’t believe things just because he states them as facts and provides source links. His claims often contradict his sources.

and

Hackethal frequently uses source links to make his claims look true.

This reminded me of Hackethal’s claim that Temple is a hypocrite on the issue of plagiarism because Temple used the phrase “active-minded”.

Hackethal wrote (link omitted):

The part “active-minded” is an implicit reference to one of Rand’s ideas (which Temple makes explicit only much further down his article, contrary to his own stance on avoiding plagiarism). An active mind (as opposed to an open one) is one that critically evaluates ideas and holds firm convictions. Rand says objectivists should have an active mind.

But Hackethal’s own link to Temple’s alleged stance on avoiding plagiarism says:

When criticizing others, including me, Temple’s stance on plagiarism is: “Plagiarism is taking credit for ideas or writing that isn’t yours.” He says the name of the originator of an idea should be “in the main text” and “not just in the [end]note […].” He explains his stance further: “The appropriate action is to credit [the originator] by name in the main text every time one of [their] major ideas is introduced, at minimum.” He does not define “major”. “[I]ntentional malice is clear” to him when an originator is not credited “even once”.

Temple gives several quotes of Rand discussing the concept of an active mind “in the main text” of the article Hackethal is referencing. Temple not only names Rand as the source but specifically names “Ayn Rand’s Philosophical Detection, from Philosophy: Who Needs It.” Also, Temple is not “taking credit” for the idea. (Also, I personally wouldn’t regard it as one of Rand’s “major ideas” anyway.)

So Hackethal’s own example of Temple allegedly acting contrary to his own stance on plagiarism is just blatantly false.

I guess Hackethal is counting on his readers not bothering to check his claims and just assuming that what he says must be true because he provides links. As Temple says: “Hackethal frequently uses source links to make his claims look true.” and “His claims often contradict his sources.”

Also, even if Temple didn’t quote Rand on the issue of having an active mind, I think the context makes it clear anyway. Virtually any reader who’s enough of a Rand fan to be aware of the existence of Harry Binswanger would get the reference. (I think Temple is basically saying that Binswanger banned Temple even though Temple has qualities Rand championed (such as being “active-minded”). So it’s implicitly crediting Rand for identifying and championing that quality anyway. It’s also implicitly criticizing Binswanger for not appreciating a quality that Rand championed.)

Also, more broadly, Temple says that he’s a fan of Ayn Rand in the sidebar/header thingo of his curi blog. Even Temple’s X/Twitter bio says that he likes Ayn Rand. Temple also explicitly says that he/CF “builds on” and “takes inspiration from” Objectivism.

I guess Hackethal is trying to make it seem like Temple is being unreasonable about avoiding plagiarism and giving credit in order to obscure Hackethal’s own plagiarism of ET/CF. But if Hackethal were to act the way that Temple does in Hackethal’s own cherry-picked “active-minded” example, then Hackethal would have to—like Temple—credit and quote ET/CF “in the main text” of his articles, say he’s a fan of ET/CF in the sidebar/header of his blog (and even X/Twitter bio), acknowledge which ideas used for Veritula come from ET/CF and—even if Hackethal were to originate new ideas—acknowledge that he “builds on” and “takes inspiration from” ET/CF, etc., etc. None of which Hackethal does. To the contrary, Hackethal attacks and lies about Temple—presumably in an attempt to obscure the fact that Hackethal plagiarized ET/CF.

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Yeah. Thanks for finding and documenting an example. There are far too many for me to cover. There’s another one where he accuses me of plagiarizing BoI (by a straw man of my standards) in a BoI forum post that discussed BoI ideas without citing BoI (which I reposted on my blog with a clear label that it’s a BoI post).

Yeah, a lot of his examples have several layers of falseness. This can trick readers who find one layer and don’t realize it’s worse than that.

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Yes. The term isn’t standard. It’s only known by people who are familiar with Objectivism. For other people it just doesn’t make sense or they’ll (most likely) guess wrongly what it means. It’s totally different from explaining the concept of an active mind and not crediting it.

Elliot made a reference to a concept that only insiders know of. That’s not introducing the concept. To the insiders it has already been introduced, to the others the concept isn’t explained, it just stands for nothing.

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