Trevor wrote:He wrote about the content as though it were real, and I doubt he would have missed the opportunity to deny its accuracy, if it were false.
In other words, it is a reasonable inference.
Incidentally, this seems a small point worth making:
I don't know for sure that the two quotations are authentic. With all of the thousands of posts that have gone back and forth on Skinny-L over the years, there's simply no way that I can remember all of them. I don't even always
read all of them.
But I
assume that they're authentic, because I have no reason not to do so. Despite my admittedly very low opinion of Scratch (and my confidence that his obsessive personal hostility toward me may stem from my having caught him, as I believe, in a rather brazen lie some years ago), I don't
believe that he actually
forges the evidence that he uses against me. He simply carefully selects, spins, tortures, abuses, and misrepresents it.
Assuming the authenticity of a document or a report unless one has solid reasons to question its authenticity is the reasonable thing to do, and is the default setting for normal civil conversation.