Any reasonable man would agree that Dawn has indeed undergone plastic surgery.

Of course, The Associate aka He Who Must Not be Named aka mindgame aka nw.t., having nothing better to do and delighting in pissing me off, decided to engage in pointless, postmodernist and solipsistic arguments to try to drag me into epistemological nihilism.

When I said any reasonable man would agree that she had undergone surgery, he claimed you needed the opinion of an expert on plastic surgery. Which is plainly ridiculous - if almost everyone cannot recognise her, and most think the pictures are of 2 different people; you do not need a doctor or even a paramedic to certify that someone whose head has been separated from his body and is currently 100 metres away is definitely dead. Exasperated, I pointed out that the only alternative was that she woke up one day and found that she had a new face, a possibility which he did not rule out.

And then he disputed my use of the term "reasonable man", claiming that the "reasonable man" in Germany in the 1940s would have agreed that Jews should be exterminated because they were scum. To say nothing of the assumption that most Germans in the 1940s were anti-Semitic, this line of logic would mean that reasonable men do not exist since no one is infallible, and that nothing can be said or proven since everything is, ultimately, an opinion. Oh, and courts of law would also collapse and we would revert to a state of pseudo-anarchy.

(In a murder trial, the defense attorney was cross-examining the coroner:

Attorney: Before you signed the death certificate, had you taken the pulse?
Coroner: No.

Attorney: Did you listen to the heart?
Coroner: No.

Attorney: Did you check for breathing?
Coroner: No.

Attorney: So, when you signed the death certificate, you weren't sure the man was dead, were you?
Coroner: Well, let me put it this way. The man's brain was sitting in a jar on my desk. But I guess it's possible he could be out there practising law somewhere.)

In the end I got so fed up I put down on him.

With his sort of logic, even the fact of the world's being round would be impossible to prove beyond reasonable doubt (let alone all doubt), since a reasonable man might disagree that we cannot prove that we are not brains floating in vats, and thus cannot know anything (except perhaps the fact of our existence). Hell, I'm not even sure that he exists, so I think I shouldn't talk to him for a week, especially since this is the umpteenth time he has wasted my time and raised my hackles with this bullshit.