Google seems to penalize my blog so I have republished the exposé on a dedicated site: thegreatestphilosopher.wordpress.com

how come there aren't any pictures of temple online? like why doesn't he ever show himself. i wanna know what he looks like :P

I don’t know why there are no pictures of him online. He looks pretty unremarkable though. White guy, dark brown hair, brown eyes. I have pictures 📸 📸

dennis have you seen elliott's new posts about you? and can we see the pictures of him?

1. Yes. 2. Maybe.

In addition to posting new defamatory articles about me, he has also broken my no-contact request. As a result, I now consider his no-contact request null and void.

elliot is such a creep, clearly unhinged and dangerous person, you'd be doing the public a service by posting his pics

Hi Dennis, I sent you a long email shedding light on the real origin of some of the "coordinated harassment" Elliot has complained about. Trying to be vague here. But just wondering if you received it or if it went into spam or something because I no longer have access to that email.

Here are Elliot’s new posts about me:

• https://web.archive.org/web/20250328011724/https://curi.us/2578-dennis-hackethal-threatened-to-sue-me-now-hes-blogging-about-me
• https://web.archive.org/web/20250328011946/https://curi.us/2577-responses-to-dennis-hackethal-about-crime-and-threats
• https://web.archive.org/web/20250328020300/https://curi.us/2576-review-of-my-quotation-accuracy

I think they are full of dishonesty and errors – too many to respond to each individually.

One thing that stands out to me is that he doesn’t link to my exposé once. He doesn’t want his readers to see it. He’s hiding things and introducing severe bias. One should expect some bias in any adversarial communication, but to preemptively address that possibility, I frequently and openly link to his posts throughout the exposé so that my readers get a fuller picture and come to their own conclusion.

Elliot never mentions that things have changed in a major way since I reached out to him. For example, he never says that I have since found out that he lied about me when he falsely accused me of a federal crime by omitting exonerating evidence he had that I didn’t have. Nor does he mention that I have since found out that he plans to monitor my career into the indefinite future to bring up past complaints with my followers and tear me down anytime. Not mentioning either is misleading, dishonest, paints my exposé as an unreasonable response, and enables him to pretend not to understand why I wrote it. It also enables him to pretend that his “negotiating position” need not change.

Elliot’s new articles also confirm many points from my exposé. He says he hasn’t read it in full because it’s “very long” and “unpleasant” (the lack of self-awareness is astounding). Not having read it, he’s liable to prove my points in his response. He’s also escalating the conflict in ways that could be easily prevented if he just read my thoughts on how to resolve the entrenchment he has caused. (Those thoughts also preemptively explain the reasons I won’t talk to him, which he has known since, and even predicted, before he met me. He is pretending not to be aware of those reasons so he can, again, paint me as unreasonable.)

An example of Elliot proving my point is that I had already predicted that he would try to word-lawyer his way around defamation. (What I didn’t predict is that he’d turn it around on me by condescending to me and claiming I had poor reading comprehension and poor logic skills.) Here’s another example. He writes:

[Hackethal] also offered to give other people money to pursue legal complaints against me. If anyone has a complaint, please email me instead of escalating to lawyers before attempting conflict resolution.

But he provides lots of evidence of why talking to him directly would be a bad idea. For example, he quotes an email of mine from 2020 in which I showed myself cooperative in response to his plagiarism complaint. What does he do? He paints it as an admission of plagiarism. He also writes, in reference to my reaching out to him last year to see if we could reconcile:

[Hackethal] said that "irrespective of what has happened" he hoped "we can move on, get the acrimony behind us" – so I was surprised when, a month later, his lawyers contacted me.

In other words, I offered cooperation and peace, which he is now holding against me, implying I contradicted myself by hiring lawyers to deal with defamation. (Contrary to his claims, I did tell him to stop defaming me before I hired lawyers, which implies taking down defamatory statements, but he’s pretending not to understand that by complaining I had “never before said [I] wanted anything removed.” Even if that were true, it would be reminiscent of this tweet.)

Here’s another way in which Elliot has twisted my words. He writes that I suggest “that silence, neutrality and not taking sides would be acceptable responses” to violent threats. I never made such a suggestion. He references a specific section of my exposé, so this time he can’t claim ignorance – he must have read it. I said it was unreasonable of Elliot to expect people to take his side in his conflict with a guy named ‘Andy B’ after Elliot pressured them to, especially given the context of him having psychologically broken them. He’s implying that I would tacitly endorse violence. Nonsense.

It doesn’t really matter what you say, Elliot will find a way to twist it and use it against you. It’s as if he took Karl Popper’s insight that one cannot speak in such a way as to never be misunderstood, and then Elliot turned it into a universal weapon against his interlocutors.

My exposé has a whole section on how Elliot has twisted my words in the past. He has twisted other people’s words, too. So I strongly advise people against communicating with him directly. If mine and others’ experience is any indication, you will pay for it dearly. Basically, talking to Elliot is like talking to cops: you should never do it without a lawyer present, and anything you say can and will be used against you. My lawyers also explained to me at the time that you enjoy stronger legal protection when you let your lawyers speak for you because the opposing party cannot use your lawyers’ words against you in court as easily as they can use your own. The opposing party might still try, but at least you’re protected. (I’m not a lawyer; nothing I say is ever legal advice.)

In fact, Elliot does try to twist my lawyers’ words, too. He writes:

Another term [from the mutual non-disparagement agreement Hackethal’s lawyers proposed] demanded that I waive my legal rights regarding anything Hackethal's done in the past, including any illegal actions he's done that I don't know about.

Do you see the trick? They had sent him a standard, mutual non-disparagement agreement that would have applied to him as much as it would have applied to me. The purpose of that clause was to create a contractual basis for letting bygones be bygones. Yet he found a way to make it look as though I was hiding criminal activity so he couldn’t talk about it!

Also in the context of the mutual non-disparagement agreement, Elliot complains about “removing statements which aren't even alleged to be defamatory.” It’s called a mutual non-disparagement agreement, not a mutual non-defamation agreement. People don’t require mutual non-defamation agreements because they are already legally obligated not to defame each other.

Elliot also writes, in the context of a proposed retraction text:

Ironically, Dennis Hackethal demanded that I plagiarize the words "[...] Dennis is not a plagiarist [...]". I don't think he understands what plagiarism is.

The second sentence is ironic. First, there’s Elliot’s blatant hypocrisy in matters of plagiarism, which by itself is reason enough his readers shouldn’t listen to his stance on plagiarism (or any text he references in support of it) until he addresses that hypocrisy. Second, by his logic, Saturday Night Live couldn’t hire any joke writers; all manner of ghostwriting would be plagiarism. Once again, Elliot is finding reasons to be difficult.

Likewise in the context of his allegation of plagiarism, Elliot writes:

Hackethal hasn't tried to tell me refutations of my statements.

I wrote over 8,000 words on the topic of plagiarism alone but Elliot refuses to read them.

Two things especially stand out to me in Elliot’s new articles: his James Taggart-like compulsion to evade responsibility (again proving my point) and his dishonest attempts to look cooperative and reasonable at my expense. In my post on Elliot’s defamation tactics, I underestimated one specific tactic he uses. He writes: “Hackethal doesn't have an error correction policy like mine […]”. Basically what he’s saying is: ‘look, all you gotta do is prove that my claims about you are false and I will correct them.’ Sounds reasonable, right? The problem is, assertions such as his defamatory DOS claim are so difficult to prove false because they are arbitrary in the first place. (He once claimed that someone had hacked/DOS’ed his website to prevent the publication of an upcoming blog post of his about me. He had announced that blog post in a public chatroom, yet he falsely claimed he had announced it to me privately. That made it look as though only I or someone I told could have known about it. In reality, due to his public announcement, anyone could be the hacker, and so his accusation that it was me is arbitrary. He knows this, of course, yet he still expects me to prove it false before he will take his claims down. And I’ve written at length about what’s wrong with his claims, but then he won’t read that.)

By putting the onus on the other party to prove him false, rather than on himself not to lie and not to make arbitrary claims in the first place, the other party faces an uphill battle. They may even feel disarmed because they could fall for his lie that he is open to reason. They may feel as though their inability to persuade him is on them, but that’s not true. This trick allows Elliot to appear fully reasonable and rational on the surface to third parties while actually being exceptionally difficult to deal with. The trick is also related to his aversion to responsibility because, again, he puts the onus for error correction on his interlocutor. In the context of defamation, it’s also hypocritical because he doesn’t apply the same standard to himself when he accuses others of having defamed him.

Headings such as “Responses to Dennis Hackethal about Crime and Threats” and “I Didn't Call Dennis Hackethal a Criminal” plant the false idea that I am somehow connected to crime in readers’ minds, while simultaneously affording Elliot plausible deniability because he can claim he is not saying there is any connection. This is just another nasty trick.

There is one specific error I want Elliot to be aware of. He claims I reached out to him in bad faith last year because I “was already researching lawsuits a month before that conversation […]”. I wanted to find lawsuits stemming from misquotes so that I could market my tool Quote Checker as helping people avoid such lawsuits because Quote Checker helps them quote properly. My legal complaints against Elliot have to do with defamation, not misquotes, and the link he gives is clearly about misquotes, not defamation, so there’s no reason for him to draw this false connection. I reached out in good faith.

My lawyers have reviewed Elliot’s new articles and confirm they are defamatory per se (both as a whole and in specific parts, eg when he repeats allegation of plagiarism and implies I broke the law). I demand that Elliot take them down immediately. My lawyers also tell me that Elliot’s amateur analysis of defamation law is full of mistakes (proving my point once again, this time that he’s being irresponsible by not putting a disclaimer that he isn’t a lawyer and, once more, that he’s being hypocritical for applying a different standard to himself).

Elliot has yet to respond to his invasion of mine and others’ privacy, his defamatory lie about me (especially the part about omitting exonerating evidence), his hypocritical disregard for copyright, his abusive behavior, his ‘plagiarism’ (by his own standard), and much, much more (all of which he’s hiding by not linking to my exposé). (Wait for him to twist the part “has yet to respond” into me requesting more defamatory blog posts about me.)

By the way, Elliot is begging people for money now.

I did receive your email. Thank you for expressing your sympathy and sorry for not replying sooner – a lot of people have been reaching out and I forgot after all the craziness from the past few weeks. My bad.

You say you don’t have access to that email address anymore. If you send me a quick email from a new address along with some proof it’s you (eg by briefly echoing some of your previous claims), I’ll try to prioritize responding to you.

I don’t believe Elliot mentions in his new articles that I have long addressed his complaint about ‘plagiarism’. (Five years ago!) By not mentioning that, he misleads his readers yet again.