We do look things up. All the time.

You just refuse to accept them because they are part of the Great Liberal Conspiracy that haunts your every waking moment. We learned that in the global warming debates. Page after page of material you disagreed with, was either ignored or simply dismissed out of hand because it didn't fit in with your political and economic and ideological requirements and because the proponents were obviously delusional, usually because you labeled them agents of collectivism. Of course, even the slightest counterexample from your partisan sources was immediately seized, legitimized with references and presented as the only possible alternative. You cannot understand why your meticulously documented irrelevancies are about as convincing to your opponents as the reams of scholarly citations that support creationists, JFK assassination conspiracy buffs, and Holocaust denialists.

Read Karl Marx sometime. He did decades of research too, but even his supporters are often critical of it, not because he was fraudulent, but because he misinterpreted his data, or took it out of context, just like you do, and for the same reasons. Politics, Philosophy, Economics and History are social sciences. They are not physics. We can use scholarship and archaeology to establish when and where events took place, and we can gain insight into how they happened, but the "why" will always be a matter of personal interpretation.

No this is not a personal attack. Everyone is guilty of this form of self-delusion, myself included. The difference between us is that I know I do it, and I'm always trying to limit it (perhaps not always successfully or sincerely, but at least I'm aware of it). You refuse to see it in yourself, and that alone totally invalidates in our eyes every conclusion you arrive at, even those that might be correct.

You are so obsessed by your need to humiliate and discredit your opponents that you cannot see how obvious your motivation is emotional, not intellectual. You've been coming here every day for years with constant bitter assaults against your rivals, often several times a day! Doesn't that alone tell you something? And don't give us that crap about how you are only defending yourself. You initiate most of the brawls here, and you do it repeatedly, in the most arrogant and in-your-face way possible. You come here looking for trouble, and then blame those that resist your bullying as the reason you come here. And then you whine because people don't take you seriously. Can't you see how self-evident this pathology is to everyone but yourself?

Why is it so difficult for you to just step outside yourself and dispassionately evaluate your tactics (not your content, your tactics). If you could do that it would be instantly clear to you that your zealotry comes not from the head, but from the heart. Somewhere up the line someone lied to you, or hurt you, and you've been trying to punish him ever since. Well, it wasn't anyone here. We feel your pain, TB, but it's not our fault.

Basically, you're just Bowser with footnotes.