acting as ret’s official spokesperson, Herbert? Why? What’s your stake in this? Apparently you feel strongly enough to feel the need to a) also give gratuitous poor votes to the images on this observation and b) fib about ret supposedly no longer using the site (there was a “change to name” event attributed to him about a week ago) when asked why he can’t speak for himself if he’s so inclined.
And what’s with the changed story about this name? First the claim was that the western fly agarics were the same species as the European/Siberian, and the eastern ones were different. Now by claiming A. amerimuscaria should only be applied to western material and the eastern should be called A. muscaria var something, you’re essentially claiming precisely the reverse. That simply doesn’t make much sense.
Regardless, I’m tired of the constant taxonomic arguments. If the situation is unsettled, why not wait until someone somewhere has gotten more data? Arguing about it until then is obviously pointless, unless you have other motivations for doing so, such as ego. I have to wonder if this is just giving you a handy excuse to go around denigrating other users’ observations and IDs as a kind of marking-of-territory (on a site where there shouldn’t be any such behavior).
At the very least, if you are going to argue about IDs you should at least vote your own opinions and do so honestly rather than claim/pretend to be acting as somebody else’s mouthpiece when that somebody else has their own account on the site and is therefore perfectly capable of acting as their own, but has evidently chosen not to in this instance, thus effectively contradicting you by indicating that their opinion is “don’t care” rather than corresponding to your evidently-strong one.
