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[Certain philosophers] have spent a prodigious effort to teach you to assume an unearned guilt. Once you assume it, you pronounce your mind incompetent to judge, you renounce morality, integrity and thought, and you condemn yourself to the gray fog of the approximate, the uncertain, the uninspiring, the flameless, through which most men drag their lives—which is the purpose of that trap.

The acceptance of unearned guilt is a major cause of philosophical passivity.

I’m not a lawyer. This article contains no legal advice.

It is the professional assessment of several lawyers I’ve consulted, including second and third opinions, that philosopher Elliot Temple (‘curi’) has been defaming me in various ways for years. While repeating any of Temple’s defamations would be painful, there’s a specific one I will analyze to expose Temple’s shamelessness in his attempts to destroy my reputation. I want to set the record straight and warn others about him. I’ll also analyze some (not all) notable, additional smear tactics he uses. Hopefully, this analysis helps others identify, and defend themselves against, such tactics in their own lives.

I’m obviously only one of many people who have had to deal with false accusations; with being defamed and one’s words being misquoted or selectively quoted. Sam Harris, for instance, who has been severely misrepresented by others, has written about carefully considering whether to dignify outrageous claims with a response at all; whether it’s worth bringing attention to such claims; whether one’s time wouldn’t be better spent doing something else.¹ Then there’s the problem that being open about these issues makes you vulnerable. I tried moving on for years but recently found out that Temple monitors my success to keep attacking my reputation, which forces me to respond. In addition, new evidence has come to light, showing that the defamation is even worse than I originally thought. Lastly, I refuse to accept an unearned guilt. So, as Harris writes about his own fight against defamation and smears: “I encourage readers to direct people to this page whenever these issues surface in blog posts and comment threads.”

I initially contacted Temple privately to rectify these issues. He refused. When I suggested mediation, he ignored the suggestion. When my lawyers offered him a mutual non-disparagement agreement, he declined. Their cease and desist has gone almost entirely unheeded.

Denial-of-service allegation

For context: Temple emailed me on 2020-03-31, accusing me of plagiarizing him in my first book. I disagree with his complaint. When I didn’t get back to him right away, he emailed me again only 8 hours later, stating he was monitoring my Twitter account for activity (“I see you tweeting a few minutes ago.”). When I indicated a willingness to cooperate and asked him what changes he’d like me to make, he instead berated me and sent a draft of a disparaging blog post about me, along with a threat to publish it if I didn’t meet his demands, and other threats. (That draft contained changes he wanted, but it isn’t what I asked for and he knows it – more on that below.) He then published his post on 2020-04-03. These threats made it more difficult for Temple to get what he wanted; along with the publication of his post, they also resulted in utter dread and paralysis for weeks, which might have been the intended effect.

One particular accusation from that post is especially egregious. Temple claims I attacked his website, or caused someone to do so, after he sent me the draft and before he published it. He says the attack was a so-called ‘denial of service’ (‘DoS’). It basically means overwhelming a website with traffic so it won’t load anymore – in this case, hiding the blog post. It’s a serious cybercrime and a type of vandalism – and, pace Kevin Mitnick, a type of computer hack. There’s also DDoS, a distributed denial of service, which is harder to guard against because the traffic comes from several sources. Not only did I not DoS Temple’s site or instruct anyone to do so – the defamation gets much, much worse.

Over the years, Temple has repeatedly claimed that his website got DoS’ed and that I’m at best “involved”, at worst the hacker myself. This is a notable part of a wider claim that I’ve participated in some “harassment campaign” against him. Below are all instances of the DoS claim that I could find (there may be even more). The first is from his blog post:

As a likely further response, this website was DOSed […] shortly after DH [Dennis Hackethal] saw a draft of this blog post, but before it was posted. Whoever did that is a criminal and the timing of the DOS seems unlikely to be a coincidence. The DOS was presumably done by DH or someone he told about his plagiarism.

Skipping some, he continues:

For security reasons, I won’t provide technical details.

Convenient. To be sure, I would have been in no position to verify whatever evidence he might have produced, nor could he possibly have provided evidence that I DoS’ed his site since I did not. It wouldn’t have made any sense for me to do it anyway – even if one were to take his site down, he would just repair it and publish the post later, only with additional fervor, or post it somewhere else with better defenses in the meantime.

Skipping some more:

If DH isn’t involved in this crime, he should provide the evidence he has about the crime, such as who he told about the plagiarism issue and thereby provided motive to. I’ve contacted DH about this.

I actually never received that. Temple’s correspondence up to that point had been so confrontational and coercive that I ended up blocking him; the last email I got was from 2020-04-01 8:30pm Pacific. I only found out about the alleged DoS when everyone else did: after Temple published his article. He continues:

If DH won’t help catch the criminal, all civilized people should shun him even more than they should for his plagiarism.

That’s not how that works. I wasn’t obligated to help him investigate crimes.

That same day, Temple also left a review of my book on Goodreads (replicated on his blog), where he writes, among other things, suddenly switching to a “DDOS” rather than just a DoS:

I initially contacted Dennis about the plagiarism privately, […]. Then my website went down due to a DDOS attack.

This phrasing is much ‘softer’ than on websites he controls. It still plants the idea in people’s heads, but he knows that, if he says it outright, the defamation is clearer and the people running Goodreads might remove his review or at least be more inclined to agree to requests to remove it. He knows what he’s doing is wrong. He left a similar (the same?) review on Amazon (they removed it without my asking) and also on Apple Books, as I recall (ditto).

Still that same day (2020-04-03), he followed up with a comment on his article (switching from a “DDOS” back to a “DOS”):

If anyone has information that may be relevant to the DOS crime, please contact me. Does anyone know if there was any discussion of the plagiarism at any of the Four Strands groups? Full copies of that would be appreciated but even confirming whether it happened would be helpful.

The Four Strands was the name of a private discussion forum I was a member of. Temple had previously tried to get access to the forum pretty obsessively, and even managed to get in, briefly. Then Temple violated our privacy by publishing some of our messages. The alleged DoS presented another excuse to get visibility into our private forum. Note also that the above quote gives the impression that he has no idea how anyone but me might have known about his blog post ahead of time – this will become important soon.

He continues, explaining the timing of the alleged attack:

FYI this blog post was put up around 11:15 AM, pacific time, on April 3, 2020. The DOS began at around 9:30 AM, around 45 hours after Dennis Hackethal received a draft version of this blog post.

A little over a month later, he repeats his claim:

[My website] is being DDOSed again using the same method as the DDOS that happened right before I put this post up.

If the DDOS brought down his website, how could he have put up the post in the first place? Also, Temple keeps switching between “DOS” and “DDOS”. Which is it? Continuing:

It's likely the same person: Dennis or one of his associates who Dennis is intentionally sheltering by withholding information (so Dennis is at least a DDOSing accomplice, today, by intentional choice).

Now he was saying I committed multiple DDoSes. More defamation. That isn’t “likely” and Temple knows it: probabilities don’t work that way. He repeatedly uses the word “likely” and related words in his defamatory assertions about me when he knows he shouldn’t. He himself has explained this manipulative tactic, so his use of it can’t be an accident: “People […] commonly use terms like ‘likely’ and ‘probably’ when they leave out explanations and don’t want their statement to look like a bald [sic] assertion.”

And again, that isn’t how any of the rest works, either. I wasn’t obligated to help investigate alleged crimes, or to talk to Temple at all and subject myself to more coercive correspondence with him, especially when he accused me and I had to assume he could use whatever I say against me, as he had on other occasions (see below). Now he was using my silence against me – there was no winning. He was essentially trying to coerce me to talk to him after he had made his previous correspondence overwhelmingly distressing, thus forcing me into impossible contradictions. Continuing:

The info Dennis is withholding is who he gave advance, pre-release information to about the plagiarism blog post, thus giving them motive. He also hasn't even denied being the DDOSer nor made any statement asking his fans or associates not to DDOS and disowning such actions.

More coercive attempts. I wasn’t obligated to do any of that. (I have since told him I wasn’t the DDoSer, but at the time of writing, he hasn’t updated his blog post accordingly even though it says he would.) He’s also moving goal posts: at first, he said I should tell him “who [I] told about the plagiarism issue” in general, now he’s switched it to the draft of his blog post specifically. We’ll soon see why.

Then he keeps repeating roughly the same claim over the next three (!) years:

Oh and the previous two DDoSes were very likely from the same person. The first of those was after I privately emailed Dennis a draft of my plagiarism article, but before I made it public. That indicates the DDoSer is Dennis or someone that Dennis told.

It doesn’t. Continuing:

Dennis refused to say who he told about my article, so he's at least some sort of DDoS accomplice/enabler.

Not how that works. Next, Temple tweets a diagram of the entire conspiracy (“harassment campaign”) he alleges. In it, he writes in a part he visually connects to my name:

DDOSED Elliot or got his friend to (most likely “Andy B”)

I’ll say more about Andy below – Temple basically claimed Andy was (is?) his cyberstalker and harasser. I never considered Andy my “friend”. Also, Temple implies that he isn’t certain (“most likely”) who this “friend” could be, but then why does he write “his friend”, which is more specific than just ‘a friend’? Who on earth is Temple thinking of here aside from Andy? Lastly, to get someone to do something means to instruct them, but I never did that. I don’t recall talking to Andy about this matter at all.

Still that same month, Temple continues:

[Hackethal is] involved in […] DDoSing

No I’m not. There’s no involvement.

I only blogged about Hackethal due to [among other things] his role in the DDoSing of this website.

I had no role in that.

The DDoS of my website started when I sent Dennis Hackethal a draft of the above blog post (at his request), but before I posted it. He is either the DDoSer or he's an accomplice who is hiding information about who the DDoSer is by refusing to share information about who he shared my draft with. DDoSing is a serious crime.

In order: it’s a lie to claim that I requested his blog post, as I explain below. Nor am I the alleged DDoSer or an accomplice. Nor do I recall sharing the draft with anyone, except my lawyer at the time, and even that was only after publication. There’s also:

[Dennis Hackethal] either DDoSed me or helped cover up who DDoSed me on his behalf.

First he claimed I was “withholding information”, now he’s saying I actively covered something up! I neither DDoSed Temple nor covered anything up nor instructed anyone to DDoS Temple on my “behalf”. (He doesn’t mention me by name in that quote, I added that in the brackets, but he does link to a video featuring me.)

The guy (Dennis Hackethal) […] is connected to the DDOSing […]

I had no connection.

Recall that Temple claims there was a 45-hour window between his sharing his draft with me and the alleged DoS. And he suggests that I gave someone “advance, pre-release information […] about the plagiarism blog post, thus giving them motive.” He also repeatedly claims he contacted me “privately”, in which case only I or people I told could have known about the plagiarism issue or the draft and thus given the alleged hacker motive, as Temple argues.²

It’s not true that he contacted me about the matter privately. First of all, his readers would never know that Temple himself reached out to several people with his plagiarism complaint about me, which resulted in dogpiling, a type of online harassment. This was before he published his article on 2020-04-03. Two of them were my associates, whom he contacted on 2020-03-31, and who, in turn, unwittingly reached out to me – as Temple could have predicted. The first forwarded Temple’s message; the second paraphrased Temple’s complaint. A third was an associate of Temple’s named ‘nikluk’ who emailed me on 2020-04-01 (cc Temple) asking me to comment on plagiarism. (Remember that name ‘nikluk’ – I refer to him again below. He would also later follow me into a Facebook group where I was marketing my book, then he brought up Temple’s accusations there.) None of them mentioned a draft – then again, in one of the quotes above, Temple merely asks “who [I] told about the plagiarism issue” (emphasis added), not even about the draft itself; he says just telling someone about the alleged plagiarism issue would have “provided motive”. So, applying that same standard to Temple, simply raising the issue with others would have been enough for him to give them motive, too. (Let me add preemptively that, if those two associates of mine did talk about this matter with others at the time, they would never have done so with malicious intent – they’re good people. I’m raising a mere hypothetical to show that Temple’s logic is flawed.) And in his Goodreads review, Temple manages to plant the idea in people’s heads without mentioning the draft – ie relying on the very method he accused me of using.

Further, Temple already had a history of publishing disparaging blog posts about people. He had, at that point, blogged about another member of the Four Strands for allegedly violating his trademark, and he had put several people, including me, on a nasty list of “evaders” for quitting his forum (he later renamed the list after some backlash). He had also previously announced that he was going to publish “a blog post related to [the Four Strands] community”, which he then did. Three people is plenty to spread the word, innocently and unwittingly, and, given his history of nasty blog posts, it wouldn’t have taken a mastermind to predict that Temple was going to blog about me next.

But it gets worse. It dawned on me last year that Temple must have communicated with nikluk somewhere. What if that was somewhere public? And what if Temple announces the draft there?

Temple’s long-term associate Justin Mallone has published the chat logs of Temple’s discussion group from that time. You can access them all and see for yourself here; note that, at the top, it says “Justin Mallone shared this folder.” This explanation states that the file I’m about to quote from was “updated constantly (every 5 minutes)”, meaning the chat log was effectively live. The explanation is from 2020-03-11 and links to the public Dropbox folder, meaning anyone could have read the chat log I’m about to quote.³

You can open file ‘fi-2 complete.txt’ here (it’s big, so it might take a moment to load). Starting at line 50,438, Temple writes (recall that ‘curi’ is Temple):

[01-Apr-20 02:14 PM] curi#0644
anyone want to discuss Dennis Hackethal's massive plagiarism of DD [David Deutsch] and I in his new book?

Then he encourages dogpiling:

[01-Apr-20 02:25 PM] curi#0644
would you guys msg him and ask him if he saw plagiarism allegation and has any response?

[01-Apr-20 02:26 PM] curi#0644
so he can't claim "oh i didn't see the emails from ET and hop never said anything to me"

“hop” refers to the second associate of mine that he reached out to. Continuing, he monitors my online activity:

[01-Apr-20 02:26 PM] curi#0644
he's been tweeting at on [sic] yest and today, and he's a very fast email checker in general

And, shockingly (bold emphasis added in this and the following quotes from the chat log):

[01-Apr-20 02:38 PM] curi#0644
tell [Hackethal’s associates] that [his] plagiarism is a good time to jump ship […]

[01-Apr-20 02:38 PM] curi#0644
and link to the blog post which will be going up soon

Timestamps are Eastern time, meaning the preceding one is 11:38am Pacific. He only emailed it to me at 12:25pm Pacific, meaning he announced his blog post to people in his public chat room before he even told me about it.

User ‘deroj’ (nikluk under a different name) acknowledges that Temple plans to publish his blog post about me:

[01-Apr-20 03:00 PM] deroj#6682
I can email Dennis Hackethal and ask about commenting re accusation of plagiarism. Is that what you meant? I haven't read his book nor do I know of him other than from the post on curi.us . So maybe I should await the blogpost to direct him to something?

Back to Temple, who again announces his blog post:

[01-Apr-20 03:34 PM] curi#0644
he's [Hackethal is] not aware of the scope of the problem or is pretending not to be

[01-Apr-20 03:35 PM] curi#0644
my 4500 word draft blog post will clarify that

Temple follows up with more dogpiling encouragement, and additional people acknowledge that he plans to release his blog post about me:

[01-Apr-20 04:15 PM] curi#0644
go ahead and contact him !

[01-Apr-20 04:16 PM] JustinCEO#3132
i don't really want to and don't think it would help, but i may make a video where i go through this epic blog post of yours and comment

Mallone (‘JustinCEO’) ended up doing just that. Another user acknowledges the draft:

[01-Apr-20 11:26 PM] Freeze#0215
is the blog post still slated to be published? i'm interested in reading it

And another user:

[02-Apr-20 12:16 AM] Deleted User#0000
That sucks. Sorry to hear about the plagiarism

Temple announces repeatedly, publicly, and within that same 45-hour window that he plans to publish his blog post about me. He even gives a timeframe and confirms which site he will post it to, thus informing the alleged DoS’er which site to target at what time:

[03-Apr-20 01:31 AM] deroj#6682
yes, I saw. Will you post the blogpost re Dennis on curi.us?

[03-Apr-20 01:31 AM] curi#0644
prob 2moro

(The timestamp is past midnight – he meant that same day, April 3rd, and he did end up publishing his post that day.)

Temple also shared my email replies and his draft responses with others in the chat room, proving that his correspondence with me was not private either, contrary to his claim from his Goodreads review and elsewhere. He even shared a draft email of his which I didn’t receive because I had already blocked him at the time. I only found out about it when I read through the logs. This means that, at the time the chat was occurring, anyone who read the chat saw more correspondence than I did.

Temple’s chat room was in the ‘sweet spot’ where it caused me the most damage: it was public enough that anyone could be the alleged hacker/DoS’er but obscure enough for me not to see the logs and defend myself against Temple’s allegations, and for readers of his blog post and his Goodreads review never to see the logs either, thus remaining misinformed. He could also rely on my not wanting to go digging for any of it because of the debilitating effects of his hostile correspondence on me. (I write more about the debilitating effects he has had not just on me but several others here.)

Last year, not knowing what I know now, I saw an opportunity to extend an olive branch and reached out to Temple to see if we could reconcile. I told him, desperately, that I wasn’t the DoS’er – but he never corrected me. He should have told me that he himself had given others “advance, pre-release information” about the draft and that the DoS’er could thus be anyone. Instead, he relied on my not having read his chat log and basically watched me squirm.

Shouldn’t he have been relieved that I wasn’t the DoS’er? I guess the reason he wasn’t relieved is that he already knew his assertion was arbitrary. And once he acknowledges that I didn’t do it, nor instructed anybody else to, that presents a problem for him: he has publicly claimed that I “maliciously encourag[ed] Andy (and anyone else) to harass” him (more on that below). But since I never did that, agreement that I didn’t would be an admission of defamation, so far as I as a layman of the law understand it.

Finding out that he had announced his draft to others changed things in a major way. I had been holding out hope that this was just some huge but genuine misunderstanding. Then there would have been an opportunity for resolution and reconciliation. The proper response to this alleged crime would have been to tell the police instead of weaponizing it against me.

Consider Temple’s claim that ‘Andy B’ was his harasser/cyberstalker. A cyberstalker surely would have infiltrated Temple’s chat rooms or at least read those public logs. Around that time, Temple also claimed that Andy B posed as someone named ‘TheRat’. I don’t know if that’s true, but let’s assume, just for the sake of argument, that it is. An associate of mine had told me months prior that TheRat had shown him “how to see” Temple’s Discord logs. We know that Andy, aka TheRat, being the DoS’er has occurred to Temple, since he writes in his previously quoted diagram that I “got [my] friend […] (most likely ‘Andy B’)” to DoS him.

In any case, the alleged attacker caused the DoS not to my benefit but at my expense. If they had conspired with me or acted on my behalf, they would have told me that Temple had publicly announced his blog post so that I could defend myself accordingly. Instead, I had to find this out myself by digging through chat logs filled with hate.

As I’ve said, I wasn’t obligated to help Temple investigate in any way, shape, or form. But again, whoever tipped off the alleged perp, it may as well have been Temple himself, in his own chatroom. That part was unwitting. But making it look like only I knew about the draft wasn’t.

The people in Temple’s chat room, who knew that Temple had publicly announced his blog post but didn’t say anything at the time, should say something now and disown his defamation. Otherwise, I will consider them complicit. They’ve had close to a five-year head start.

When my lawyers sent Temple a cease and desist for defamation last year, Temple claimed he had “made a vigorous effort to get the facts right” – that’s another lie, by glaring omission. (Lying in legal correspondence is a horrible idea.) I’m using Temple’s own definition of lying here, which says a lie is “a communication (or a belief, for lying to yourself) which you should know is false” – in other words, honesty is not just about not intentionally misleading people, but also about making a conscientious effort to be truthful. (In my opinion, it looks as though Temple may have borrowed this notion from physicist Richard Feynman without credit.) Temple further told my lawyers: “Even if my statements were somehow incorrect due to evidence that hasn't been provided to me, I haven't been negligent.” If he hadn’t been negligent, he would have proactively mentioned that he gave the public advance notice of his blog post. And he’s making a dishonest attempt to shift accountability for his defamation to me: he’s essentially claiming that, if he defamed me, it’s my own fault. That’s James Taggart straight out of Atlas Shrugged.⁴ It’s not my responsibility to provide evidence that prevents or corrects Temple’s defamation; I can’t prove a negative anyway. It’s his responsibility not to defame me in the first place. And, according to my lawyers, in a court of law, it would be on him to prove the veracity of his claim, which he couldn’t possibly do.

He wouldn’t use his own standard if someone else defamed him. As part of a long string of accusations against me, he once accused me of defaming him and expected me to provide evidence of the truth of my claim – rather than him providing evidence of its falsehood, as he now expects of me for his DoS defamation.

He also told my lawyers:

I don't see a factual statement that Hackethal is a criminal (or, as brought up in the proposed retraction text, that he hacked my website). Again, if you provide that, I'll remove it.

Here’s one instance. I quoted it above:

As a likely further response, this website was DOSed […] shortly after DH [Dennis Hackethal] saw a draft of this blog post, but before it was posted. Whoever did that is a criminal and the timing of the DOS seems unlikely to be a coincidence. The DOS was presumably done by DH or someone he told about his plagiarism.

Then there’s the previously quoted “[Hackethal] DDOSED Elliot […]”, “[The DDoSer is] likely the same person: Dennis or one of his associates […]”, “[The timing] indicates the DDoSer is Dennis […]”, and “He is either the DDoSer or he's an accomplice […]”. That’s not to mention his other factual claims that I’m “involved” in the alleged DoS and his description of it as a “DOS crime”, that (again) “[w]hoever did that is a criminal”, that “DDoSing is a serious crime”, and that he was “being criminally DOSed […].”

My lawyers showed him at least one of these quotes, but he still hasn’t removed them at the time of writing. I’m only aware that Temple has removed some pages containing more recent defamations, which is a welcome development, but he left older pages with some effectively identical claims up, so the removal was presumably just a matter of the statute of limitations (which he specifically raised with my lawyers) and not out of genuine concern or respect for my reputation. He does not seem to realize that, as my lawyers tell me, a judge can review the entire history of statements when deciding on a deterrent against further defamation. I don’t think his request for evidence was good-faith anyway: he knows how to use Google’s literal-string search. He might argue the definition of the word ‘hacking’ (though I see that he agrees that a denial of service is “a type of hacking”) and try other ways to word-lawyer his way out of it, but the words “presumably”, “likely”, and “indicates” don’t save Temple from liability – you can’t get around defamation that easily. And he doesn’t use those words everywhere anyway.

Temple also told my lawyers he had “published evidence” of the truth of his claims about me. Again, he could not since I didn’t DoS his site, but as I explained above, I’m not aware that he even tried – as quoted, he had previously and conveniently said he couldn’t, “[f]or security reasons”. So that’s another lie.

Last I checked, Temple hasn’t even updated the various places quoted above to reflect the new information I gave him last year. Never mind: he shouldn’t update them, he should remove them, post a retraction, and apologize thrice over.

This is the kind of defamation that can cost you your career. It’s a particularly sensitive issue for me since I’m a software engineer, as Temple knows. Similarly, he publicly revels in never letting his plagiarism complaint go; he plans to monitor my success into the indefinite future and boasts about how easy it would be to bring up his complaint to tear me back down if I ever get a significant following.

Over a year later, on 2021-05-19, he implicitly threatens to get me fired from my job at Apple:

Hackethal quit my community […] because, basically, he thinks I’m autistic. [B]ut I didn’t publicize his bigoted, ableist attitude. […] I know which woke, cancel-culture-friendly employer Hackethal works for but I never contacted them or named them because, even when extremely provoked, I act with restraint.

He says he doesn’t want to do that but clearly it’s occurred to him. And he posted this publicly so that the public, including me, would know. Also note that elsewhere, he disagrees with cancel culture: when people reported a tweet of his telling physicist David Deutsch and philosopher Sam Harris to “die in a fire”, Temple ridiculously complained about Twitter’s report feature as “enabl[ing] cancel culture […]”. Yet he hypocritically uses cancel culture to make veiled threats. When he wrote the above block quote, he already had a history of coming for my ability to earn a living; he had stated that people should “reconsider” “a business or personal relationship with” me and, as quoted above, that “all civilized people should shun” me. He has also made other veiled threats – for instance, he listed a bunch of public information about people, including me, and stated that he “left out private info about them that [he] ha[s].” That’s not to mention explicit threats such as his “warning” here. And contacting my employer would be similar to when Temple contacted the Royal Society, of which Deutsch is a fellow and which published a paper of Deutsch’s, so that they’d investigate Temple’s allegation that Deutsch had misquoted Alan Turing in that paper. I don’t need to point out that Temple’s behavior is extremely toxic.

I didn’t quit Temple’s community for the reason he states. As he knows from gaining unauthorized access to private emails of mine where I explained my reasoning, I left, essentially, because his forum is toxic and authoritarian and I didn’t think it was the right environment for me to pursue my interests and learn. And he doesn’t mention that he asked me to leave his group chat, which is where most of our interactions took place. Not mentioning that is misleading.

Is implicitly threatening to get me in trouble with my employer “act[ing] with restraint”? What about repeatedly defaming for years on end, or monitoring my success to spot opportunities to tear me down? If Temple considers all those things evidence of his restraint, what else has he considered doing that we don’t even know about? With what “restraint” is he going to react to this blog post?

TL;DR: Elliot Temple made it look like only I knew about a disparaging blog post that he planned to publish about me. He misled his readers to believe that I had motive, or gave someone else motive, to attack his website so that he couldn’t publish his post. In reality, he had not only caused three people to discuss the matter with me, but he had even announced the upcoming post to 100+ people in a public chatroom, meaning anyone could be the alleged DoS’er. I’m not aware that he mentions this crucial piece of information anywhere.

Sundry smears

Here are some more ways in which Temple has smeared me. This list isn’t meant to be exhaustive but aims to explain and expose some of his tactics. In the wider context of his claim that I’m involved in some conspiracy to harass him, he tries his hardest to make me look like a scumbag. If I really were such a scumbag, Temple would not need to twist my words; the evidence would speak for itself.

Twisting my words

Temple has a habit of interpreting what is said in a way maximally beneficial for his argument and maximally damning for his interlocutor. Consider what I wrote to Temple in response to his plagiarism complaint after I indicated my willingness to cooperate despite a prior no-contact request of mine:

[J]udging by the passage you’re at, it looks like you’re
still pretty early on in the book. As I’m sure you will find more
issues, I suggest you finish reading the book so I can review your
suggestions and make any applicable edits in one go.

The part “I’m sure you will find more issues” meant that that’s the kind of guy Temple is: the kind who would go looking for, and find things, he thought were plagiarism. Temple twisted that into me admitting to more plagiarism! He claimed, in reference to that sentence, that I “believed [my] book contained more plagiarism […]”. My lawyer at the time pointed this twisting of words out to me without my mentioning it first, which indicates that my meaning was clear.

In addition, Temple twisted the part about requesting all the suggestions at once into me asking for the disparaging blog post he then sent a draft of. That way, if I respond negatively, he can call me a liar. Which he promptly does by accusing me of “breaking [my] word about reviewing the problems [he had] sent [me] at [my] request […]” (emphasis added). (I did end up reading it even though he didn’t send what I had asked for.) He can then claim that my responses are “all on purpose” and place his plagiarism complaint in the wider context of his harassment complaint. My guess as to what really happened is: it took me a bit longer to reply than he would have liked (the next day); in the meantime, he falsely concluded I wasn’t going to reply at all, which is why his draft contained outdated information such as “Contacted about this matter, DH did not reply.” He shared that with me after I replied. In addition, he sent me the draft within 14 minutes of my responding, which is way too fast to write a draft of that length, so he must have already had it ready by that time. Clearly, he had gotten angry and decided to write his draft blog post on the mistaken assumption that I wasn’t going to reply. Again, he’s written lots of blog posts about people – this is what he does. So when I did reply, he didn’t want to have written his draft for nothing. After all, he had already announced it to the people in his chat room, so he twisted my words into me requesting my own punishment.

On that note, why would I both request his blog post and then DoS his site to prevent its publication? That makes no sense. And his harassment claim makes no sense in general: having left his toxic group and endured his distressing conduct since, I wanted to avoid Temple as much as possible. It would have made no sense for me to purposely anger him or draw his attention to me in any way.

An anonymous commenter on Temple’s plagiarism blog post about me picked up on a tweet of mine from around that time and, predictably, twisted my words. They must have been monitoring my Twitter account because they commented within hours of my tweet. Scott Hamilton, presumably (though falsely) alarmed at Temple’s blog post, had asked me whether I had stolen any of his (Hamilton’s) ideas for a discussion site (I hadn’t). Matt Guttman replied before I did with this GIF of a guy eating popcorn. I thought the GIF was a humorous way to indicate interest in my response and keep things light, so I first replied to Guttman with “Hehe”, then replied to Hamilton in a separate paragraph, tagging him to further indicate the separation, with an explanation he immediately accepted. But the anonymous commenter on Temple’s post does not mention any of these nuances and instead simply says, after quoting Hamilton’s question: “DH replied ‘Hehe’.” They made it look as though I thought stealing ideas was funny.

Here’s yet another example. After he had gained unauthorized access to the Four Strands group, Temple publicly quoted a private email of mine (without my permission), where I comment on his list of “evaders” of his group. His quote of me reads (brackets mine):

I am now a proud entry on [Temple’s] public list of apostates. :)

Temple interprets this, once again, in the worst way possible. He writes (link changed to the web archive, bold emphasis removed):

There is no list of apostates, merely a list of some people who chose to engage significantly in a public debate with [Temple’s forum] and then stopped responding without explaining or finishing. Here, Dennis expresses pride, and smiles, about being in conflict with other people, which further promotes hatred and fighting.

So, first of all, Temple admits that his list created conflict. Secondly, I don’t like being in conflict with others, nor have I ever “promote[d] hatred and fighting.” I used the word “proud” ironically, and I put a smiley because making a list of people who had quit his forum, let alone publicly shaming them as “evaders”, is ridiculous. I criticized Temple’s list because of my opposition to the conflict it had created. If I like conflict, why haven’t I escalated it and taken Temple to court? I could have done so immediately after he first accused me of DoS’ing his site at the latest, but I chose not to because I didn’t want to escalate the conflict. Temple’s ability to smear me, including his accusation that I like conflict, has ironically been based on my not escalating the conflict in the first place.

This is all part of his wider claim that, again, there’s a conspiracy to harass him and that I and others created an “atmosphere of hatred” toward him. As I’ve stated, I wanted to avoid Temple – it would not have made any sense for me to draw his attention to me. But he wants to make his accusations believable, so he twists my words.

Here’s one of the most egregious instances of twisting my words that I’ve seen so far. After several of his attempts to gain access to our Four Strands group, including his successful infiltration of our Discord server, Temple sent one of the owners and me, a manager/moderator, a distressing and vaguely threatening email pressuring us to take sides between him and an alleged “aggressor”: one of our group members, Andy. I had previously tried to ignore Temple’s attempts to communicate with me but that clearly wasn’t working. The owner of the Four Strands group had taken it upon themself to look into Temple’s claims about Andy (and later told me they had concluded that Temple was wrong). The owner and I discussed responsibilities and they agreed it was their responsibility, not mine, to respond to Temple. At first, they had asked me not to respond at all, but eventually we agreed that it would be good for Temple to know that I wasn’t the right person to contact in this matter.

At this point, my main priority was to get Temple off my back. Every email I got from him essentially caused a minor panic attack. Presumably for similar reasons, that owner didn’t want Temple to have clarity on who to contact, but I wanted Temple to know that I wasn’t an owner, and, by implication, that I wasn’t the right person to talk to about this matter and that an owner was looking into it. The owner followed up with Temple anonymously to address his concerns, and I wrote to Temple in full:

Elliot,

Please stop emailing me. I am not one of the group's owners, so this
is beyond my control.

Dennis

This is the no-contact request I mentioned earlier. Here’s how Temple spun it:

This was a malicious trick. Rather than do something anti-crime or anti-hatred, Dennis tried to fool the victim. I never said Dennis was an owner. He is, contrary to what he implied, a manager. And he does have some control over this matter (no one person has total control, but he’s one of the people involved in the decision making).

He cites my no-contact request again “as context” to lend credibility to his DoS defamation, claiming I have a “recent history of breaking laws, associating with criminal(s), and lying in defense of criminal(s)” (link changed to archive and bold emphasis removed).

These claims are absolutely outrageous. There are so many things wrong with them it’s hard to know where to even begin. I didn’t try to “fool the victim.” I didn’t try to fool him, nor did I even agree that he was a victim. I was still recovering from my former membership in his toxic group and hadn’t remotely begun to entertain any of his distressing emails. That I had no control referred to the fact that an owner was looking into Temple’s claims and that I was in no position to evaluate any of them. I was looking for anything I could say that might make Temple go away. In addition, the way he phrased his claims about my alleged “recent history” suggested, again, that I agreed with Temple that Andy was a criminal (singular, not plural) and that I was essentially aiding and abetting Andy. But I didn’t agree with Temple – I had formed no opinion on the matter. To this day, I am not aware that Temple ever produced the requisite court records proving that Andy was a criminal, or that Temple ever successfully pressed charges against Andy. Temple is in no position to judge whether anyone is a criminal – only a judge or jury can determine that.

Temple’s dishonesty (again, by his own definition) in this regard becomes clear when he conveniently interprets my no-contact request as pertaining only to the particular issue he had emailed about. He complains: “They [the Four Strands people] haven’t made no contact requests either; […].” (That’s another implicit attempt to shift accountability.) And, in a parenthetical: “Except Dennis asked me not to email him again about Andy, which I haven’t.” This is part of the pattern I mentioned: Temple interprets things in the worst possible light for his interlocutor and in the best possible light for his own argument. Honesty depends on conscientiousness, as Temple argues, and being honest/conscientious extends to no-contact requests: the recipient of a no-contact request should interpreted it in the widest, most careful way possible and back way off.

It’s also worth noting that Temple published a no-contact request of his own on 2021-04-23. He lists me at the very top of a list of several people, over a year after I asked him not to contact me! But he doesn’t mention that. His list makes it look like I had kept contacting him against his will, which fits his harassment narrative in the public eye. An honest, conscientious man would not have misled people like that; Temple should have mentioned on that same page that I had issued a no-contact request to him long before he issued his, and that I hadn’t contacted him in a long time. It was he who had repeatedly contacted me with complaints.

Misquote and out-of-context quotes

Several people in our Four Strands group had previously left Temple’s group – again, that’s how some of us had ended up on his list of “evaders”, which predictably caused us to dislike him. At one point, we were discussing how we could guard against attempts of infiltration. (Since he did end up infiltrating our group, we were clearly right to worry.) I suggested simply blocking him from our email list if he ever tried to sign up, or removing him from any future forum we might use. But, at the same time, I underestimated the risk and actually spoke out against doing that. I said:

Though I feel the pressure of agreeing with everyone about how much we all dislike Elliot, I have already done that now, and feel that I can say that I do not recommend doing any of that without giving him a chance to speak first. Though difficult to engage with, he's knowledgable, and should he ever want to interact with us, we should let him, and should let him continue to do so until there are any "offenses".

I was saying the pressure I felt was not good and advocating for Temple! After he gained access to this private message, he publicly quoted (again without permission) a deceptively small part and turned it into a misquote, which reads, in full:

I feel the pressure of agreeing with everyone about how much we all dislike Elliot

His readers would never know that there’s an important part missing at the end. There’s also a word missing in the beginning. To fix the misquote, Temple should use ellipses:

[…] I feel the pressure of agreeing with everyone about how much we all dislike Elliot […].

That would still be misleading in content but at least the ellipses would alert the reader that he had removed parts. As Marta Stanton writes,⁵ “the reader lowers his guard at the sight of quotation marks [or blockquotes] and believes that the exact language must have been used or the author could not have placed quotation marks around the words.” One has to be careful when quoting others.

Temples knows how important proper quoting is. I find it absolutely implausible that his misquote was an accident, not only given his other smear tactics, but also given his numerous articles accusing others of having misquoted people. Temple knows how to quote properly; he likens misquoting to deadnaming; he knows that “misquotes are usually changed in some way that benefits or favors the misquoter, not in random ways”, and that “[p]eople often misquote because they want to edit things in their favor […].” This is all part of his intellectual hypocrisy. And just to address the remote possibility that someone else had fed him a misquote (again, our group was private, after all): not only would it still be Temple’s responsibility to ensure the accuracy of the quote, but he does quote the same passage accurately weeks prior, on a different page, which allowed him to complain about another part of the quote. Readers of his misquote could easily miss that. Later, he misquoted me again here.⁶ Temple just arbitrarily jumps back and forth between accurate quoting and misquoting depending on how it suits him.

In addition, I’ve seen Temple twist the words of others in some of the quotes he leaked of private messages. The private nature of those messages makes it harder to correct the errors Temple introduces because the authors can’t provide a link to the original messages with full context. And they may not want to because they had a desire for privacy in the first place. This is one of several ways in which Temple turned their desire for privacy against them.

In his correspondence with my lawyers, Temple said he found it implausible that I was concerned with my reputation. As ‘proof’, he gave out-of-context quotes from an article where I paraphrase controversial things someone else has said. 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!). Temple conveniently didn’t mention either of these facts and presented quotes as if they were my views. That’s lazy and dishonest.

Misrepresenting associations

Temple has severely misrepresented my association with physicist David Deutsch. I understand there’s a preexisting conflict between Deutsch and Temple – I have no interest in getting involved. I mention this only because Temple already involved me, by not only alleging I was part of a conspiracy involving Deutsch, but also by writing outrageous things about my association with him.

By way of background: Deutsch once hired me, and collaborated with me, to translate his book The Beginning of Infinity (BoI). I give the below quotes pace Deutsch – I made the judgment call to publish this article without any prior coordination so as to 1) protect others from retaliation and 2) not feed into Temple’s conspiratorial claims, even if it means catching people off guard.

Shortly after Deutsch published both the translation and a video interview I did with him to promote it, Temple writes in one of his ‘harassment updates’ (I partially quoted it above re (D)DoS):

DD [David Deutsch] has been working behind the scenes with the second worst harasser for months or years. DD chose that person to translate BoI into German and DD made videos with him. Link. DD seems to be giving out a large, public reward for participation in the harassment campaign. Rather than distance himself from harassment, DD is professionally associating with a person who […] hired me for private lessons then plagiarized me, and either DDoSed me or helped cover up who DDoSed me on his behalf.

The phrasing “behind the scenes” creates an air of shadiness and casts doubt on a perfectly legitimate translation project that had nothing to do with Temple. (The phrasing is similar to when he publicly accused the Four Strands group of “operat[ing] in the shadows” simply because it was private and he couldn’t see its messages.) The translation project wasn’t a secret – I was discreet, as I always am when it comes to my clients, but some people knew. Temple simply didn’t know about it and I guess that, looking back, this bugged him.

The translation was my idea, not Deutsch’s. And he and I made videos (“public reward”) because a third party had suggested that this would be a good way to market the book. That wasn’t Deutsch’s idea, either.

(As an aside, the claim that I “hired [Temple] for private lessons then plagiarized” him creates the impression that I hired him for private lessons to plagiarize him; that I was scheming, for months, hired him in bad faith, etc. In reality, I didn’t even have the idea to write a book until after I cut ties with him.)

Over a year later, Temple continues his allegations:

The guy (Dennis Hackethal) who wrote a book plagiarizing me, […] and who is connected to the DDOSing ... is the same person DD chose as a business partner who translated BoI into German. (I don’t know the exact timeline but my guess is the business partnership hadn’t even started when the plagiarism book came out.)

Not that it’s any of Temple’s business, but it had. It was already underway when he claimed to have “lots of info” about my association with Deutsch – clearly not even enough to know about the translation, though. And Deutsch didn’t know about my book until after I published it. Yet Temple assumes the worst, as usual. He sees conspiracy everywhere. Completely divorced from reality. Skipping some, Temple continues, outrageously:

Did DD reward harassing me with the privilege of a business partnership? It looks like he may have, considering that Hackethal is a bad writer and thinker (his book is awful – despite plagiarizing me and DD so much he still screwed most of the ideas up).

No. Deutsch hired me because, as he told me at the time, I was the best man for the job. The translation is my pride and joy and deserves the glowing reviews it has received. But Temple views me as a competitor and doesn’t seem willing to consider that I’m good at what I do. He doesn’t speak German, so he’s not able to criticize the translation and has to find some other way to diminish it. He develops these unhinged conspiracy theories when he’s in no position to speak firsthand on my association with Deutsch.

Temple even misrepresents his own association with Deutsch. In his Goodreads review of my book from 2020, he writes: “This book contains extensive plagiarism of Elliot Temple (me) and David Deutsch (my colleague and mentor).” This reads as if Deutsch were still Temple’s mentor, as if Temple was just looking out for Deutsch. It even implies that Deutsch may have signed off on this review since a mentee might run something like that by his mentor. But from what I understand, Deutsch hadn’t been Temple’s mentor in almost a decade by that time. Temple told me in 2019 that he wasn’t in touch with Deutsch anymore; in his review, Temple is just fraudulently borrowing Deutsch’s authority as a physicist and fellow of the Royal Society. Deutsch not only had nothing to do with this review, but, as far as I know, he and Temple had had a falling out years prior (the verbal abuse Temple has since hurled at Deutsch is publicly documented). Temple also wrote as early as 2012, in a piece titled ‘I Changed My Mind About David Deutsch’, that he and Deutsch “no longer associate closely. Things changed.” Temple lies about things he himself has publicly documented, but readers of Temple’s Goodreads review won’t know that.

Nor was Temple ever Deutsch’s “colleague” in the sense Temple lets his readers believe. In an article from 2017, he again claims that Deutsch is his “colleague”; after linking to Deutsch’s book, Temple adds a parenthetical: “FYI this book is by my colleague, and I contributed to the writing process”. But from what I understand, he and Deutsch already weren’t on speaking terms in 2017. A colleague is “an associate or coworker […] often of similar rank or status”. Deutsch is a visiting professor of physics at the University of Oxford; he is widely considered the father of quantum computation and recognized, among many other achievements I’m not mentioning for brevity, for his work on the multiverse theory of quantum physics. He has been a fellow of the Royal Society since 2008 and received several prizes, including the Paul Dirac medal in 1998, honoring his achievements. Temple never worked at the same institution as Deutsch, as far as I know; Temple is neither a physicist nor does he have any achievements or status remotely comparable to Deutsch’s, so claiming a “colleague” relationship is quadruply fraudulent. Temple might argue that he is mentioned in Deutsch’s acknowledgment of “friends and colleagues” in BoI, but Temple is only one of several people mentioned there, including Paul Tappenden, who appears to be a quantum physicist at King’s College London, and computer scientist David Johnson-Davies, to both of whom the term “colleague” applies, as well as non-physicists such as Sarah Fitz-Claridge, to whom, as with Temple, it does not. In reality, Temple is just some blogger who believes he’s the “best living philosopher.”

In other words, Temple severely misrepresents his association with Deutsch – yet accuses me of doing the same. In addition, he can rely on Deutsch not wanting to get involved or correcting Temple’s claims because, as Temple alleges, Deutsch is afraid of him and effectively can’t deal with him (“When [Deutsch] tries to write, he thinks of me [Temple] and what criticism I might say, and he can’t deal with it.”). To avoid misleading people in his Goodreads review, Temple would have needed to write something like ‘… Deutsch, who used to be my mentor and whom I’ve since repeatedly verbally abused by telling him to “die in a fire”’ (“DIAF”).

In addition to my association with Deutsch, Temple misrepresents my association with Andy B. Temple not only claims that Andy has been harassing him, but, as I’ve said, that Andy did so at my and others’ behest (more on that below). In this context, Temple calls Andy my “star student” but provides no evidence of this claim – Temple conveniently forgets his own stance of presuming people wrong unless they provide quotes. Once again, he could not possibly provide such evidence since Andy was never my student, let alone my star student. But consider what it would mean if Andy had been my student: it would have made me Andy’s instructor, which plants the idea in people’s heads that I gave Andy instructions, which, in this context, is supposed to mean: instructions to harass Temple. And if Andy had been not just my student but my star student, he would have been especially receptive to such instructions. In reality, I never gave Andy any such instructions, neither express nor implied. I would never do that. But based on Temple’s misleading account, an impressionable reader might not put it past me.

In a nasty thread Temple has since deleted from his forum, titled ‘David Deutsch Megathread’, Temple suddenly sounds a lot less sure about the nature of my relationship with Andy. Temple writes: “They were (are?) friends or something.” If he’s unsure what my relationship with Andy was, he shouldn’t make confident pronouncements that Andy was my “star student”. In reality, Andy was just some guy who was a member of the Four Strands group and liked some of my writing, as I recall. Temple stresses the fact that Andy and I were both moderators of a Subreddit Andy had created, but if I remember correctly, I never had any sustained involvement. Also, at some point, Andy left the Subreddit. Why does Temple stress the Reddit thing? To make me look guilty by association. He and commenters on his blog hold merely tweeting with Andy, even getting retweeted by Andy, against people. In any case, I haven’t spoken to Andy in years and, last I checked, he had blocked me on Twitter for reasons I do not know. I have told Temple this, but at the time of writing, I cannot find any evidence that he has updated his numerous blog posts accordingly. If he were interested in finding and reporting the truth, he would have long done so.

More defamation

Related to Andy, Temple defames me again by claiming that “Dennis Hackethal [and others] are maliciously encouraging Andy (and anyone else) to harass me [Temple].” Do read the linked article, and the articles it links to in turn, critically, so that you come to your own conclusion and know I’m not hiding anything. Temple makes similar claims, eg that I “let” people in the Four Strands group “essentially argu[e] why [he] still deserve[s] harassment […].” I’m not aware that anyone ever argued that Temple deserves to be harassed (and I’ve just double checked the thread Temple refers to).

As I understand it – and I did get a second opinion from a lawyer about this – for Temple’s harassment claims to not be defamatory, Temple would need to produce a quote that says something like ‘go harass Temple’. Just because Temple does some close reading (“essentially”) and imputes that Andy may have misinterpreted certain statements as encouragement, on the other hand, does not rise to that standard. According to that lawyer, for the quoted claim (and really any allegation regarding an ‘harassment campaign’) to not be defamatory, people would have needed to come to an agreement and made a plan to take specific steps toward purposely harassing Temple. He could not possibly produce any corresponding evidence because I would never do anything like that – it would be appalling and reprehensible. On the contrary, one of the owners of our forum responded to the referenced thread at the time it was active (on 2020-01-23), concluding that “[i]t seems best to completely ignore” Temple. Temple quotes this part himself, apparently not realizing that ignoring someone is the opposite of harassment. And here’s another way in which Temple’s ‘harassment campaign’ claim cannot be true: if we had wanted to bother him, why didn’t we each use the legal leverage he had given us and sue him for defamation after he published his articles about us, as I understand we absolutely could have? Why didn’t I sue Temple immediately when he started defaming me, as my lawyer at the time said I could? Why did I instead decide not to escalate the situation – especially if, as Temple has falsely claimed, I like conflict?

In this context, consider once more the DoS defamation: Temple repeatedly accuses me, for years, and makes it a central part of his harassment-campaign narrative. Yet, as I’ve explained, he must have known that anybody could have been the alleged (D)DoS’er. So he also must have known that the alleged (D)DoS could not possibly be evidence of any participation in an harassment campaign on my part.

Judging by his correspondence with my lawyers and his actions since, maybe Temple doesn’t really understand what defamation is (along with details such as how it differs from disparagement and what the purpose of a non-disparagement agreement is). So maybe he’s just misinformed. He should be more careful with what he says about people.

Once again, I have to wonder how Temple would respond if the tables were turned. What if someone harassed me on my blog and referenced something Temple has said about me? Could one then interpret Temple’s defamations of me as implicitly encouraging and legitimizing harassment of me? I did receive threatening comments on my blog from someone who had read Temple’s complaints. Then they referenced Temple’s complaints a second time and left a review on Goodreads which piggybacked off of Temple’s implicitly defamatory review. They strongly disagreed with my writing in general but also took issue specifically with Temple’s complaints about me. They said they “would pay $500 for a chance to physically attack [my] face” and claimed I “have one of those faces that you want to just go to town on with a baseball bat.” They also told me I should unalive myself and promised to monitor my Twitter account. I do want to be absolutely clear that I do not think that person was Temple. Instead, I ask: how would Temple feel if I blamed him for that person’s comments? Would it be reasonable of me to do that? Would it be reasonable to pressure Temple to take sides in the matter? If he didn’t take sides, would it be reasonable to retaliate by writing nasty blog posts claiming he encouraged harassment of me?

Conclusion

Temple has been defaming me for years and misrepresented the facts. His tactics include lying, misrepresenting associations, twisting words, and misquoting. He has proven to be an unreliable source of information. Don’t trust a thing he says.