I don't play the "show me your sources game." My experience is that is what know-nothings do instead of reading up on a subject themselves. If somebody has questions, they can google it themselves & tell me what they think. When I have responded to queries such as that, not a single solitary time has the questioner responded with a post based on the material in the citation. Maybe you would, but I have been doing this kind of thing too long to waste my time responding to that one.
Then surely - if, when challenged, you refuse to post your sources - you must realize that in that situation what you are not doing is to "quote original sources & give links to the complete texts & books that the poster can read on their own."
When someone has provided information and it makes sense with what I already understand, I have no reason to try and clarify the situation by checking sources. When someone has provided information and it does
not make sense with what I already understand, that is when I will generally post counterarguments (and check sources to ensure that my posts are as well sourced as possible).
If there is a situation where someone - such as yourself - has posted information that
conflicts with my understanding of the sources, I will then ask that person to source their own statements, so that I can check the source. It may be that the source alters my understanding; if however you refuse to source your statement, what we then have is that (from my point of view) I have on the one hand my existing understanding, derived from relevant research and sources, while on the other hand I have your
explicitly unsourced claim to which I can give little credence.
This only happens however when someone has provided information that does not fit with my existing understanding. When someone has provided information that
fits with my existing understanding, or does not conflict with it, I have no reason to do so.
Why would you even consider nit picking my Red Rover posting? If you have insights on the Rover & its very curious history, please post them.
That's sort of my point. There is nothing about your post about the Red Rover which conflicts with the information I already know, both general (Civil War period) and specific (about the ship specifically, I know very little).
It is when something is posted that conflicts with what I know that I seek to find further details.
To digress for a moment on a topic brought up in another thread,
a week or so ago you claimed:
As the British generals & admirals made clear at the time, no force that the British could have landed & supplied on the American coast would have had any chance of beating the Union army & navy. Had a British force of a few thousand managed to land at Charleston in 1864, for example, it would have confronted Sherman's veterans fully reequipped & spoiling for a fight.
This claim is one for which you have provided no source, and it is so general (there is no name given and there were a lot of British generals and admirals with a large corpus of work, much of it not digitized; this could be from Admiral Milne or General James Hope Grant or any of a hundred other names; there is no specific language which would allow for it to be searched for) that it is effectively impossible for me to find the source by myself - the best I can do is guess, and the closest guess I have is that you may have misunderstood the current rank of Garnet Wolseley (who was not yet a general and would not become one until the 1870s).
So I cannot ascribe much weight to it.
In the rest of the paragraph you also mention the British troops in question as being "parade ground soldiers who had never fired a shot in anger", which leads me to the impression that your reading on the topic of the British Army in the 1850s and 1860s is somewhat lacking as I can only interpret it to mean that you had not realized how the Crimean War in particular would affect the characterization of British troops as "never fired a shot in anger". This leads me to further lack confidence in the claim.
As against that I have my own knowledge and understanding of the capabilities of the US and Royal Navies at the time, plus the British Army and the expeditionary force it was capable of landing and supplying in the Crimean War.
My knowledge of the size of the battle line of the Royal Navy, and the capabilities of British and Union armoured vessels, suggest that the Royal Navy possessed significant to overwhelming military force; my knowledge of the force the British landed at Eupatoria (of ca. 30,000) and of the number of troops available in Britain (to whit, more than enough to provide a force of such a size) suggest that a British landing force would be significantly larger than your analysis has credited them with.
In the absence of a citation for your source, and with significant knowledge of my own from previous discussions and reading which contradict the argument in your post, I thus disagree with it (and outline why in my reply). I ask for a source because there are three possibilities:
1) The claim is garbled or does not result from actual contemporary sourcing.
In which case, no harm done, mistakes were made and you can apologize. It's fine to be mistaken so long as you're willing to admit it.
2) The original quote was made in a specific context, which means there is a problem with the interpretation.
Again, no harm done if the error in interpretation was honestly made. I've seen people
alter quotes, which is simply not on, but a problem in interpretation is a learning experience.
3) The original quote is correctly sourced, general enough to apply, and categorical.
In which case I would be tremendously surprised! But I'd have to admit that, yes, that would be what contemporary British generals/admirals did seem to mean, and I could then attempt to discern why.
My apologies for using an example from another thread; I wanted to use the best possible example.