Focus on UK Metal Detecting: Boothy and Mike

Here's a turn up for the books, the comments section of Heritage Action's latest post (see above) contains - as one might expect the attempts by metal detectorists to 'explain away' the issues raised by HA. In fact, not so much to refute the argument, but - as is their eternal wont - to deflect it to something else, claim they are being victimised, and then when that fails to engage in personal attack. We've seen that time and time again of course. I was struck by something else. There are (two ?) individuials writing, one calls himself "Mike", the other "Boothy". What is interesting about them is that unlike many of their fellows, they show signs of having derived some benefit from passing through the British education system. These ones are actually writing good English, even with proper punctuation. "Mike" (I bet it's not his real name) even knows that the planet Saturn has rings. The written style of "Boothy" (I bet his real surname is not Booth either) leaves a little more to be desired, and he exhorts Heritage Action's chairman to:

Keep up the good work Nigel, our hobby needs people like you to make us look moderate and reasoned against your background of extremism and pettiness [...] your take on matters is at times quiet (sic) bizarre [...] please carry on with your opining because it does provide amusement and importantly, does act as the backdrop of extremist and impractical and irrational thought against which moderation and common sense flourishes, and for that we thank and applaud you.

This is not the usual tekkie language. It would be very interesting if "Bothy" would show us where we can find these "moderate and reasoned" and rational discussions characterised by "moderation and common sense" among metal detectorists. Does "Boothy" (not a member of any metal detecting forum under that name that I can see) get great intellectual satisfaction from interacting with the thousands of UK metal detecting artefact hunters on those forums? Could he point us to a few of the threads where we can see articulate discussion by UK metal detectorists notable for the display of the characteristics he mentions? No, I thought not. Heritage Action sum up the discussion:

The point of this article was to say that the screening of Britain’s Secret Treasures Series 2 will result in a lot more unmitigated and unrecorded depletion of Britain’s archaeological record yet the only reaction has been from 3 metal detectorists doing what metal detectorists do – pretending the evidence doesn’t exist and indulging in irrelevant attempts to discredit me, not the point being made. [...] Long tangential attacks on us by artefact hunters using anonymous proxies are not only not relevant to the article but also a sure sign that our assertions about the programmes are well founded.