[Thunderdome]
This is Thunderdome, the unmoderated open thread on Pharyngula. Say what you want, how you want.
Status: UNMODERATED; Previous thread
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
This is Thunderdome, the unmoderated open thread on Pharyngula. Say what you want, how you want.
Status: UNMODERATED; Previous thread
Usernames are smart:
August 29th, 2012 at 8:46 pm
だらける
(not to be confused with ‘sloppy’)
Usernames are smart:
August 29th, 2012 at 8:49 pm
Bah – I don’t have the right keyboard, so I blew that one. Should be (phonetically) namakemono.
douglaslm:
August 29th, 2012 at 8:54 pm
Haiku’s are easy.
But sometimes they don’t make sense.
Refrigerator.
carpenterman:
August 29th, 2012 at 8:59 pm
douglaslm;
You stole that haiku from my brother-in-law’s tee-shirt.
Who said this: “There is no problem so great or so complicated that it cannot be run away from.”
Captaintripps:
August 29th, 2012 at 9:05 pm
Turtles have shells.
chigau (違う):
August 29th, 2012 at 9:05 pm
Usernames are smart
だらける
なまけもの
wow
ChasCPeterson:
August 29th, 2012 at 9:10 pm
Is it true that turtles “have shells”?
Like you “have” a ribcage and sternum, I guess.
Better to say that a turtle is, in part, a shell.
p.s. do you refer to the original Captain Trips?
julian:
August 29th, 2012 at 9:11 pm
Narwhals! Narwhals! swimming in the ocean, causing a commotion cuz they are so awesome!
Brett McCoy:
August 29th, 2012 at 9:13 pm
If I had a nickel every time a puppet told me what to do, I’d have two nickels.
John Morales:
August 29th, 2012 at 9:13 pm
julian, no linkee, no punch.
dianne:
August 29th, 2012 at 9:16 pm
From the department of “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me!”, the latest Catholic excuse for child abuse, The priests were seduced.
navigator:
August 29th, 2012 at 9:19 pm
Oh, this is random? Okey dokey…
“Vaccinate! Vaccinate!”
John Morales:
August 29th, 2012 at 9:20 pm
navigator, now why would one want to make people into cows? :)
Antiochus Epiphanes:
August 29th, 2012 at 9:23 pm
I thought a turtle was an inside-out fish.
Josh, Official SpokesGay:
August 29th, 2012 at 9:24 pm
Jesus fucking Christ Dianne. You all should really check out her link. Priest blaming the victims of sexual abuse, referring to Jerry Sandusky as “this poor guy,” and claiming no one knew child rape was so bad until recently.
Even better? The commenters:
Yes, there are some dissenters, but not nearly enough.
Faithful Catholics: you are moral monsters.
Anne C. Hanna:
August 29th, 2012 at 9:30 pm
Okay, I don’t know what just happened there, but there’s a world of difference between a developmentally disabled person and an anencephalic fetus or something like that, and I definitely had no intention of equating the two. I also don’t know *anything* about this kid that cm mentioned, so I am in no way intending to make any statements about the actual child. I am discussing hypotheticals only.
I don’t support deliberately subjecting beings of questionable sentience to pain if it can reasonably be avoided. To the degree that there’s anything there that can experience pain, or a reasonable suspicion that there might be, there’s a legitimate interest in avoiding pain. I even noted in my comments on abortion above that abortion should be humane. I do smush pest insects without remorse, but I try to kill them quickly and cleanly. So as far as I’m concerned, sexual “use” of a marginal human life in any form is repellent and right out. (Corpses are another story — a dead person cannot possibly be harmed by whatever is done to the body that used to be them. The people who are harmed by necrophilia are the loved ones of the dead person and other onlookers who are upset by it, but all possible harm to the dead person ceased the moment they became dead.)
I just don’t see a “life” for which there is no reason to believe that there’s anybody “in there” to experience it as one which is worth preserving in any way that’s comparable to the life of an actual person. I’ve been in this situation in my own family. Three separate grandparents (between my partner and myself) have ended up in situations where all evidence indicated that their brains were so badly damaged that there was no hope of any substantial “mind” ever being generated by those brains again. In each case the decision was made (by people other than me) to let what remained die rather than continuing to animate what were, for all practical purposes, breathing corpses.
I think these decisions were right. My only wish, in each situation, was that once we had accepted that there was most likely no person remaining whose life could be preserved, we could have just brought an end to everything quickly and painlessly, rather than essentially letting them starve/dehydrate to death. The body which used to be my grandfather was given “comfort fluids” as it was allowed to die, which meant that the process took a couple weeks. My partner’s grandmothers thankfully only took a few days each once the decision was made, but if there was anything of them left at that point, it’s hard for me to believe that it didn’t suffer that entire time, unnecessarily.
I don’t understand people who don’t make this choice. It seems to me grotesque to prize sentiment and life for life’s sake so much that one goes to great expense and personal sacrifice to prolong the shadow existence of something that will probably never have much positive experience of life, and which may in fact be suffering terribly in ways which no available ministrations can substantially relieve. I also don’t pretend that it’s my right to make this decision for others (whether it’s people deciding for their own loved ones, or adults who have left living wills), any more than it’s my right to decide their religious beliefs for them. All I ask is that they don’t insist that I share their sentimental responses myself.
ChasCPeterson:
August 29th, 2012 at 9:32 pm
No, it’s a
wait
navigator:
August 29th, 2012 at 9:39 pm
to John Morales
Well, if you look at the importance of cowpox in the development of the smallpox vaccine…I say again, Moo Moo! You go, cows!
julian:
August 29th, 2012 at 9:43 pm
I totally needed another reason to hate the Catholic Church.
John Morales:
August 29th, 2012 at 9:51 pm
navigator, heh.
(Actually, I was making an etymological and linguistic allusion)
–
Anne, this may be a poisoned chalice, but the more I read you the more I think you’re a better me.
chigau (違う):
August 29th, 2012 at 9:52 pm
waiting
Hurin, Midnight DJ on the Backwards Music Station:
August 29th, 2012 at 10:08 pm
Anne Hanna
QFT.
bcskeptic:
August 29th, 2012 at 10:11 pm
Ummm…molesting and raping children (well, anyone, but especially hideous when it is children) is never a grey area. It is always wrong! The dumb fucks who don’t realize this are despicable. All the more reason to work towards the annihilation of the Catholic Church.
On another note, sitting up here north of you I sure as hell hope the Rethuglicans don’t get into the presidency any time soon. It makes me nervous to think such wingnuts could be running a country that has so much military power. One only hopes that cooler, rational, liberal heads prevail.
Hurin, Midnight DJ on the Backwards Music Station:
August 29th, 2012 at 10:19 pm
John Morales
I get it that you were going off the context, but there is an adjoining wikipedia article which clarifies what is meant in that case:
I’m sure you are aware that very few people (if any) suffering from this sort of illness are going to be aware at a level comparable to those who are clinically brain dead, or fetuses in the first two trimesters (I would consider both of these cases “mindless”). Some of them may be sapient at the level of children, but obviously children can still be abused.
John Morales:
August 29th, 2012 at 10:27 pm
Hurin, I really don’t want to continue this, but yes.
Yes!
(Hell, I think of most vertebrates as people (in their own way), because they’re not mindless, and I treat my pets as family. I don’t have too many quibbles with Peter Singer, he’s probably as close to my own views as anyone)
Rich Stage:
August 29th, 2012 at 10:33 pm
My rhymes have found a new home,
grown in the purest of loam.
My verse is rehearsed,
perverse and accursed
as I enter PZ’s Thunderdome.
Anne C. Hanna:
August 29th, 2012 at 10:34 pm
John, I’ve got no idea what to make of that either.
———
Also, I do really hope I’m misreading Amphiox, because hir reference to NDEs sounds superficially like ze’s favoring the kind of dualism that I wouldn’t expect to see people supporting here. So what did I miss in that discussion that’s being referenced?
My impression to date was that the emerging understanding of NDEs is that they’re probably to some extent after-the-fact confabulations pieced together with scraps of information gathered before the brain went down and after it came back up, and do not represent substantial evidence that the mind keeps working even when brain activity is undetectable. As far as I know, there’s never been any real evidence that people who experience NDEs have information that could only have been obtained while their brain activity was stopped, but if somebody’s got something really good (meaning, well-documented at the time of the incident(s) using good data hygiene), please lay it on me.
But my worries about creeping dualism aside, is this mostly about the imperfection of our measurement tools implying that we should give life/sentience/sapience the benefit of the doubt? If so, I sort of agree with that, with the exception that there have to be some limits on how far we can be expected to go. There’s a point in resuscitation attempts where the doctors do eventually have to give up and admit that the person can’t be revived, and that point comes sooner if there’s a triage situation or something similar where you would lose lives that probably can be saved in futile pursuit of one that probably can’t. And of course in a world of finite resources, we’re always in a triage situation to some extent. So even when we’re talking about preserving sapient lives, there’s a point at which rationality has to lead us to conclude that the doubt is so small that we can’t waste any further resources on it.
The question then just comes down to line-drawing. I think that there’s a point where we can say that it’s not reasonable to expect anyone to work to preserve a life that seems, as far as our best efforts can determine, to have no mind attached to it. I also think that this should not be identical with the point at which we decide that that life has no further legitimate interest in being protected from unnecessary suffering. F’r'example, I don’t have any problem in principle with people choosing to kill and eat fish, which as far as we can tell have relatively marginal minds, but I *do* have an objection to making the fish suffer terribly in the process of being killed. Is this actually controversial here, or have we just been having communications glitches?
Ing: The World is Dying:
August 29th, 2012 at 10:36 pm
JM I want to know why you feel that I am to be forced to be part of a community I don’t wish to be and that I owe respect to people for building a community I do not respect.
Hurin, Midnight DJ on the Backwards Music Station:
August 29th, 2012 at 10:36 pm
John, fair enough. No more continuations from me.
Anne C. Hanna:
August 29th, 2012 at 10:37 pm
Since John’s brought him up, I should note that I too am somewhat influenced by Peter Singer. I don’t agree with him on everything, but he’s definitely shifted some things for me.
Anne C. Hanna:
August 29th, 2012 at 10:39 pm
Also, a propos of precisely nothing, I think “shitlord” is a hilarious word. Shitlord shitlord shitlord. This is why I don’t do so good at places like Dan’s. :D
Ing: The World is Dying:
August 29th, 2012 at 10:44 pm
Actually scratch it I’m just in a bad mood and don’t care what John thinks. It’s still moronic. I’m finding myself knee jerk judging people who claim the atheist label as ‘probably an asshole” now. :(
John Morales:
August 29th, 2012 at 10:53 pm
Ing, hey!
This business of having to belong is unnecessary; you are your own self.
(You can agree with certain propositions and hold certain viewpoints without being beholden to any particular label)
–
Anne, from long experience, I make Amphiox to be no less a rational empiricist (and therefore non-dualist) than you or I.
chigau (違う):
August 29th, 2012 at 11:49 pm
Rich Stage
Nice try but you are no Nassar Ben Houdja.
shripathikamath:
August 29th, 2012 at 11:53 pm
Anything I want?
OK, I will say that a reverse thunderdome beats a thunderdome.
Jadehawk:
August 30th, 2012 at 12:02 am
so hey. if i can convince a NZ university to let me get a graduate degree there, at the end of that I’ll have accumulated 210 points towards permanent immigration to NZ. and at 140, they let you in automatically.
geoffshorts:
August 30th, 2012 at 12:22 am
Hare Krishnas believe the moon is larger than the sun. I thought that was fairly random.
Amphiox:
August 30th, 2012 at 12:23 am
Oh no, never that!
You weren’t here back during the Shiloh/Scifi NDE wankery incursion (and you can thank whatever gods you don’t believe in for that!), but I was just making a reference to that.
chigau (違う):
August 30th, 2012 at 12:29 am
Jadehawk
try University of Otago
No one I’ve met seems to actually want to live there so there must be room.
Amphiox:
August 30th, 2012 at 12:32 am
That point is typically dictated by cardiovascular/respiratory function rather than brain function, simply because in the heat of such situations, we can’t measure brain function reliably, or quickly enough.
Resuscitation is mostly about restoring blood circulation and breathing/oxygenation (with supply to the brain being the foremost concern). If you fail that, whether the brain is still functioning or not at that particular moment is mute, because without a heartbeat, pulse, or breath, the brain can’t survive much longer anyways.
Questions surrounding brain function and tests for brain death is what happens after a successful resuscitation. Now that the patient’s heart is beating again, oxygen is flowing into the lungs (usually with mechanical aid, of course), and oxygenated blood is circulating through the body (to the brain) again, only now is there time to step back and figure out: did we save the brain? Is there still some working brain there?
If the answer is definitely “no”, then brain death is declared and all the other supports are withdrawn (unless the decision is made to support the body a little longer to allow for organ donation). If the question is “maybe no”, or “probably no”, THEN the question is whether to continue the support for the rest of the body in hopes of future recovery, or to stop.
And that is another one of those fuzzy border areas wherein things must be assessed on a case by case basis.
Orange Utan:
August 30th, 2012 at 12:39 am
My workplace. If you’ve got questions, feel free to ask.
Ing: The World is Dying:
August 30th, 2012 at 12:43 am
Oh fuck is Mabus back?
FFS aren’t you on parole?
Amphiox:
August 30th, 2012 at 12:44 am
I’ll also add that there is a very tiny, but non-zero, number of patients who, after resuscitation fails and is aborted, don’t die, but spontaneously recover – the heart starts beating again and breathing starts up again and so forth.
And a tiny, tiny, but non-zero, number of patients declared brain dead do not go on to die after discontinuation of life support, they recover spontaneously and wake up.
And a tiny, but non-zero, number of patients, not brain dead, but in whom the decision is made to withdraw aggressive life support (in Canada termed Compassionate Terminal Care, or Comfort Care, and in Palin-world famously labeled as “Death Panels”), do not progress to death, but spontaneously recover.
The decision to halt resuscitation, or aggressive life support, and so forth, is usually made on the criteria of practical futility. Not necessarily that the odds of this patient recovering are too low for us to continue, but that we, with our medical science and skill at this day and age, have nothing more we can do that will significantly improve the patient’s currently very low odds of survival, and since every medical intervention also inflicts a non-zero cost in time, effort, resources, risk, pain, and suffering, we stop, on the principle of primum non nocere.
Amblebury:
August 30th, 2012 at 12:46 am
AHEM! University of Otago is the first one I’d recommend. I just spent a week in the area, visiting daughter no. 1 who attends, studying Anth. Engl. and Gender, and writing for the university paper, Critic. Daughter no. 2 is heading there next year, starting a BSC in Geography. The academic record of the university is very strong in many areas. The library is terrific.
Dunedin is fecking cold. That’s the big minus. Apart from that, it’s hands-down the best, and most affordable university town in NZ. The surrounding area – we just spent some time in Wanaka – is breathtakingly beautiful.
Jadehawk, Let me know if there’s anything you need me to look into for you.
http://www.wanaka.nz.com/
And before anyone calls “Bias!” I’m an Aucklander, who spent many years living in Wellington, where I went to Victoria University. Which is also very good.
Ing: The World is Dying:
August 30th, 2012 at 12:46 am
The latest Hitchens thread is pretty much my new exhibit A for why I doubt A+ will do much good. If we’re going to look the other way for people on shit the problems from A are just going to follow you
Amblebury:
August 30th, 2012 at 12:48 am
Orange utan Where, if might ask?
Orange Utan:
August 30th, 2012 at 12:51 am
@ Amblebury
Not as bad as Fargo. I think I remember Jadehawk being up that way at some point.
Amblebury:
August 30th, 2012 at 12:53 am
Good point.
Orange Utan:
August 30th, 2012 at 12:54 am
I’m in a service division. I’m not an academic although as a staff member, I do get subsidies towards study which is nice.
chigau (違う):
August 30th, 2012 at 12:57 am
Let’s face it.
What passes for “cold” in NZ basically requires another sweater.
As opposed to burning your furniture.
(kidding)
Orange Utan:
August 30th, 2012 at 1:02 am
@chigau
Stoopid fuckin drinkin culture.
Orange Utan:
August 30th, 2012 at 1:03 am
I assume one of the monitors have notified PZ?
chigau (違う):
August 30th, 2012 at 1:08 am
I hope another monitor can send an alert, I’m current technology-challanged.
theophontes (坏蛋):
August 30th, 2012 at 1:09 am
@ Orange Utan
Message in Lounge. Shame – it is sad that his treatment has not worked. :(
theophontes (坏蛋):
August 30th, 2012 at 1:13 am
@ chigau
I have emailed PZ too…
Ing: The World is Dying:
August 30th, 2012 at 1:14 am
Goddamn it Canada, can’t you do anything right?
Wowbagger, Antipodean Dervish:
August 30th, 2012 at 1:17 am
Isn’t it that time of the evening in the midwest where most people would be asleep?
Orange Utan:
August 30th, 2012 at 1:19 am
@theophontes
Thanks.
No disagreement there.
theophontes (坏蛋):
August 30th, 2012 at 1:25 am
@ Orange Utan
To chigau.
…
This just popped up in my email by coincidence: Deviant Art.
John Morales:
August 30th, 2012 at 1:30 am
[meta]
xowarsxo = mabus = dennis markuze.
(Obvious is obvious)
–
Hey mate, you need your meds.
(And you’re breaching your parole!)
John Morales:
August 30th, 2012 at 1:33 am
[OT + meta]
Amphiox, you’ve made a parahomophonic error:
If you fail that, whether the brain is still functioning or not at that particular moment is mute
→
If you fail that, whether the brain is still functioning or not at that particular moment is moot
chigau (違う):
August 30th, 2012 at 1:35 am
theophontes
linking to Deviant Art from here always gets me scary warnings
Suido:
August 30th, 2012 at 1:39 am
@Jadehawk: Yes, that would be the fastest way to get citizenship in Australia.
:P
John Morales:
August 30th, 2012 at 1:40 am
Ing @46, you’re very close to counselling based on despair.
(Nay! There is always hope!)
theophontes (坏蛋):
August 30th, 2012 at 1:40 am
@ chigau (違う)
Huh? That is rather strange. I haven’t ever got them. (Perhaps because I log in automatically?)
Ing: The World is Dying:
August 30th, 2012 at 1:44 am
@JM
I have no idea what the hell you just said
chigau (違う):
August 30th, 2012 at 1:51 am
theophontes
If I try to go direct to satw.com, I get porn.
If I go through google, I get to satw, nice and clean.
Most of the links people post gets me warnings.
I don’t understand it.
but now I’m going to bed…
Ing: The World is Dying:
August 30th, 2012 at 1:52 am
@Chigau
Malware?
Anne C. Hanna:
August 30th, 2012 at 1:52 am
Amphiox, glad to hear you weren’t going dualistic about it.
In regard to the saving of lives issue, I know that’s not usually about brain function right in the heat of the moment. I meant it as an analogy to point out that we’re willing to give up even on sapient life at some point. I just wanted to illustrate that sometimes we have to make decisions about how many more resources and how much more suffering we want to put into the pursuit of how faint of a hope. When somebody has late-stage cancer that’s unlikely to be survivable, they don’t always choose to suffer through the most aggressive possible treatments just for a 1% increase in cure rates. We don’t cryogenically freeze most people who die. We don’t throw all of our society’s resources into immortality research to the exclusion of everything else. While it’s true that some people who are determined enough or wealthy enough make significant commitments to all of these things, most of us don’t.
Similarly, my family could have probably spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and months or years of anguish on maintaining the bodies of my grandfather and my partner’s grandmothers, in the hopes that there might still be someone in there who could someday be “woken up”, or that some new technology might come along to repair them. Some families might have made a different choice, but those who had the right to make the decision in our families’ cases concluded that the likelihood of salvaging anything of real value was too low to be worth what it would cost in our suffering and in the suffering of whatever scraps of the people we loved might still remain. Future technological advancements may shift this balance in ways that are hard to predict, but there’s still likely to be *some* kind of balance.
I completely agree that the exact location of the balance point has to be decided on a case-by-case basis, just like most other medical issues (which is why “if I wanted the government in my vagina I’d fuck a Senator” and etc.). For the most part I’ve got no real interest in second-guessing any specific decision where I’m not privy to all the facts. But there are always cases where it seems pretty clear that people are going overboard in putting their reverence for life at all costs above the actual well-being of the individual involved and their family. Some of the “pillow angel” cases are particularly disturbing.
I think it’s important to point these cases out as problematic, in the same way we would any other case of woo-based harm. I’m not going to try to get the government to dictate to those families the point at which they’re obligated to give up hope, and I understand that they have real emotions invested and deserve some sympathy because of that. It sucks when someone you love dies, or when a child you wanted turns out to be not just limited but essentially nonexistent as a person. And people don’t always react rationally in those situations. But, hell, some Catholics have real emotions invested in the sanctity of Communion wafers and have been led to such emotional investment by real and serious life traumas, and I don’t feel obligated to pretend that I think their behavior is rational or healthy either.
I just feel like we have to go by the evidence here. Evidence says that our minds are created entirely by our meat, and if the meat is broken badly enough, there’s no real reason to believe that there’s a mind there any more. Yes, the exact point at which it happens is vague and hard to determine, but if a particular bit of meat has definitely gone well past that point, I don’t really see the point of maintaining sentimental attachment to it.
Orange Utan:
August 30th, 2012 at 1:53 am
@chigau
http://satwcomic.com
John Morales:
August 30th, 2012 at 2:05 am
xowarsxo:
Yes Dennis Markuze – and a LIAR!
:)
(You are mentally ill)
John Morales:
August 30th, 2012 at 2:09 am
xowarsxo its post thus: .
Ayup! :)
Anne C. Hanna:
August 30th, 2012 at 2:10 am
I see I’m not the only one with an irresistible urge to try to reason with those who have, in one way or another, been rendered immune to reason.
John Morales:
August 30th, 2012 at 2:11 am
John Morales:
August 30th, 2012 at 2:18 am
[musical interlude]
Mother
Ing: The World is Dying:
August 30th, 2012 at 2:20 am
the idea that Mabus has a fan made me laugh and snort things up nose.
anubisprime:
August 30th, 2012 at 2:22 am
dianne @ 11
I was going to tear the article apart paragraph by toxic paragraph.
It is a whole world of fail and innuendo and is obviously primarily a short slimy, frayed and tatty threadbare rope to throw to the drowning clowns that comprise their victims.
Which according to the posters response to that article they gratefully cling to like dingleberries to anal hair.
But I have not got the cast iron stomach required, or the masochistic desire.
Sums up the official and unofficial RCC position, and is a blatant slip of protocol in their handling, they have never been so blatant before preferring only to allude to that weak and deranged sliver of apologetic bullshite, but then again they have never been quite so desperate and aware that they are well and truly busted beyond repair!
Now the damage control is focused firmly on the sycophantic brain dead legions that will buy absolutely anything with a jeebus stamp on it…from extremely piss poor apologetics to flagrant and boastful distortions of reality
It will be a test of the RC indoctrination techniques, they never needed to kick in quite so badly.
It appears these overtures are more akin to a DDT soaked house fly shaking itself to a quivering convulsive and panic laden imminent failure of vital organs.
Long overdue…I would rather use a rolled up newspaper to swat these parasites into oblivion…but they seem to not require that assistance they are doing mighty fine swatting themselves all by their ownsomes!
And they do not even realize it!
theophontes (坏蛋):
August 30th, 2012 at 2:34 am
@ Anna C. Hanna
Mabus/Mabuze is quite literally mentally ill. He was supposed to be receiving treatment, but appears this has not helped him.
Here an article in Global Montreal.
Setár, self-appointed Elf-Sheriff of the FreethoughtBlogs Star Chamber:
August 30th, 2012 at 3:33 am
Anne C. Hanna: Dennis Markuze, aka David Mabus, is known for more than just commenting here — he was filling PZ’s spam folder with a deluge of hate mail until a bit of pushing got the SPVM (the same SPVM that have been harassing student protesters for the past few months) to arrest him for criminal harassment. He was found to be mentally ill, and part of his sentence included treatment…but it also included not using social networking, which appears to have failed.
There are others, too, like a certain person named Kw*k.
Jadehawk:
August 30th, 2012 at 3:36 am
no thanks, I’m not suicidal ;-)
embertine:
August 30th, 2012 at 3:36 am
Hey all, as we’ve established the Mabus is not going to settle down by himself, isn’t there someone who is collating his breaches of parole in order to go back to the police? Can’t remember who it was…
The comment about being in his car might be of use.
Jadehawk:
August 30th, 2012 at 3:38 am
aww, that’s adorable. have I told y’all of that one time my eyelids were freezing shut on my walk to work?
theophontes (坏蛋):
August 30th, 2012 at 3:43 am
Oops:
MabuzeMarkuze.@ Setár
He has a suspended sentence in this regard. He could face jail time now that he is misbehaving on the internet again. (Link here.)
@ Markuze
Please stop. You need professional help, not a year and a half locked up in prison.
Orange Utan:
August 30th, 2012 at 3:53 am
@Jadehawk
No snakes in NZ. In fact, they’re illegal. Zoos aren’t even allowed them. Doesn’t stop the bloody aussies from trying to come in though.
No drop bears either.
Jadehawk:
August 30th, 2012 at 3:56 am
excellent.
theophontes (坏蛋):
August 30th, 2012 at 4:08 am
@ Orange Utan
*googles*
Terrifying!
Wowbagger, Antipodean Dervish:
August 30th, 2012 at 5:00 am
Orange Utan wrote:
Them’s fightin’ words! At least all our parrots can fly…
In other news, Greta has written an excellent post about the divisiveness (or not) of Atheism Plus.
KG:
August 30th, 2012 at 5:17 am
But presumably the kakapo flew to Aotearoa*, found a cosy tuatara burrow at a low, low rent, decided it never wanted to be anywhere else, and shrank its wings.
*I’m not using the most popular Maori name for the place (which if my source is correct, means “long white cloud”) because it’s ideologically sound (well, maybe just a bit), but because It’s just a much better name than “New Zealand”.
insipidmoniker:
August 30th, 2012 at 6:08 am
Jadehawk,
Just wanted to say that I enjoy your comments and I hope the NZ move turns out well. It makes me inexplicably sad that you are leaving the states. Can’t in any way blame you, though.
Jadehawk:
August 30th, 2012 at 6:50 am
I won’t be leaving quite that soon. end of 2013 at the earliest, if I do my MS here as well probably more like 2015. but it doesn’t hurt to plan ahead :-p
Rev. BigDumbChimp:
August 30th, 2012 at 7:18 am
I’m thinking these two things are not mutually exclusive.
dianne:
August 30th, 2012 at 7:29 am
Amphiox: Are there any documented examples of someone who was brain dead by all criteria (no spontaneous movement or respirations, no brain activity on EEG, no barbituates, warm, etc) and recovering even a little? I don’t know of any, but if there are, that suggests that there might be another piece of the puzzle that we’re not looking at. But I can’t help thinking that premature declaration when there was still function and/or the story is being told about someone who wasn’t brain dead but in PVS is more likely.
dianne:
August 30th, 2012 at 7:31 am
@91: In principle, no. In practice, the medical care, including psychiatric care, received in prison tends to be substandard.
KG:
August 30th, 2012 at 7:47 am
I’ve sent PZ an email about Markuze spewing here.
(First time I’ve used my temporary superpowers as a monitor!)
Rev. BigDumbChimp:
August 30th, 2012 at 7:59 am
I’d settle for locked up and getting treatment, doesn’t have to be prison.
SQB:
August 30th, 2012 at 8:04 am
Dianne, Josh,
That priest is full of bullshit! We know it was rape, because the kids didn’t get pregnant, right? (HT: Todd Akin)
Speaking of that asshole, Dutch politician Kees van der Staaij from the SGP — a party that denies passive suffrage to its members although they are having a rough time in the courts over it — basically confirmed Akin’s ideas in a debate (we’re having elections as well). A shitstorm followed and he felt the need to have bodyguards accompany him to a party meeting. Wrote a commenter:
MattP (with every passing comment, I want ever more to DIAF):
August 30th, 2012 at 8:58 am
Random derailment, but is anyone else getting “Atlas Shrugged II” ads?
Ogvorbis: broken:
August 30th, 2012 at 9:00 am
That’s probably better than super temperorary powers.
usingreason:
August 30th, 2012 at 10:00 am
Jesus is in my toast, I’m hungry, what do I do?
Amphiox:
August 30th, 2012 at 10:20 am
Premature and erroneous declaration is certainly a major possible consideration.
And in clinical practice, depending on jurisdiction, there are some variations in what criteria are necessary to make the declaration. For example, EEG is not used all the time, everywhere.
Amphiox:
August 30th, 2012 at 10:30 am
No disagreement here. A good illustrative analogy would be when we decide to call off rescue attempts/searches for survivors after a major disaster. (Or even a hiker lost in the woods).
This isn’t the best analogy though, since most of the time, it is the individual patient who makes that decision rather than a surrogate decision maker, and generally speaking, the choice isn’t maximum aggressive care versus no care, but a more nuanced decision pertaining to level of care and goals of care (ie if quantity of survival conflicts with quality of survival, what weight of import assigned to each).
Ogvorbis: broken:
August 30th, 2012 at 10:33 am
Ritual cannibalism. “This is my body you eat . . . .”
Jesus is just telling you, “EAT ME!”
TonyJ:
August 30th, 2012 at 2:51 pm
Hello all,
Excuse me for barging in, but my Mother just came out on Facebook today as a libertarian, and I don’t know what to say to her.
oolon:
August 30th, 2012 at 3:47 pm
Posted at the Slymepit just in case evil oolon decided to post nasty stuff there too… According to them I’m apparently going to be banned by PZ now as he totally bans *everyone* who posts over there at the evil pit. (Testing… Testing…?)
Anyway not sure why I bothered as thinking about it what could evil oolon say at the Slymepit that counts as nasty? Comments on how nice Rebecca is looking in her new tshirt? I’m thinking of growing a beard so I can look more like PeeZus?
Difficult to get your head around the bizarro world of the slymepit to manage that one.
Amblebury:
August 30th, 2012 at 3:57 pm
Try smothering it with Vegemite. It worked with a cracker.
dianne:
August 30th, 2012 at 5:33 pm
For example, EEG is not used all the time, everywhere.
Really? I thought that there were certain definite requirements without which brain death simply could not be declared and that an EEG showing no activity was one of them. It’s not really my area, so could easily be wrong.
Orange Utan:
August 30th, 2012 at 9:14 pm
@Wowbagger
*snort* Ours just try to fuck you.
Usernames are smart:
August 30th, 2012 at 9:20 pm
Nothing you can really say except tell her you love her.
Libertardian thinking is incapable of seeing the end game of “government bad, corporations good.” I mean, if the Financial Crisis of 2008 (aka about as unregulated as you can get before you go back to trading in coconuts) wasn’t enough to cure anyone of that idea, there isn’t hope.
Just sit back and enjoy the ride. And change the subject to Sports.
ckitching:
August 30th, 2012 at 9:31 pm
So, Gina Rhinehart, Executive Chairman of an Australian mining company and the richest woman in the world, wants the poor to stop whining, and thinks the only reason they’re poor is that they need to “Spend less time drinking or smoking and socializing, and more time working”. If they only did this then they could become rich the same way she did – by inheriting it from her father. Oh, and she wants minimum wage lowered. You know, so the poor can become richer quicker, or something. It certainly couldn’t be because of her extreme greed and avarice.
I don’t understand why these kinds of things don’t lead people to want to revolt.
joey:
August 30th, 2012 at 10:05 pm
Nightjar:
I don’t. My biggest beef is that sex ed isn’t comprehensive and detailed enough. Accurate and abundant statistics are a must for “comprehensive” sex ed. Ambiguous descriptions such as “highly effective” and “reduces the risk” and “to a lesser degree” without anchoring them using concrete data can only lead to false confidence.
———–
KG:
Yes, I don’t dispute those figures. I was focusing more on the condom failure rates on STD prevention as opposed to unplanned pregnancies, as was indicated in my example.
I believe in the dignity of the human person. That ALL human life (including infants) has intrinsic value, and that there exists things as inviolable human rights.
————
strange gods:
Correct.
————
Anne C. Hanna:
You mentioned that a very young infant isn’t probably sentient. If so, should infanticide be justified as long as the decision belongs to the parents’?
tkreacher:
August 30th, 2012 at 10:53 pm
My morality might have just shifted for the worse.
Catching a little of the RNC I see Mittens claiming Obama promised to stop the oceans from rising. The truth of the claim is irrelevant. Whether it was a spin or not, irrelevent.
It was the laughter that permeated the crowd after. It didn’t read to me as a “what a egomaniac” laugh. It seemed a “hahaha, ‘climate change’” laugh.
And at that moment, my disgust at these idiots laughing at a thing that may threaten humanity, the haughty nature of their incredible ignorance, the blindly self-assured condescension of their deadly ignorance… my disgust shifted from mere disgust into the thought that they deserve what’s coming to them.
These horrible, credulous, stupid, selfish god-soaked people are officially “others” to me now. The faceless, less than human kind of other.
Or more accurately – more completely, maybe – my esteem for humanity itself slipped from its already tenuous and somewhat misanthropic position. This now even less respected set “human” further divided into a minority subset of decent and a majority subset of utter shit.
That maybe I should just sit back and watch it burn, because fuck humanity.
Or maybe I’m just in a bad mood, and it’ll pass tomorrow.
Ing: The World is Dying:
August 30th, 2012 at 11:00 pm
@Threker
Here’s the worst part. They deserve it but they won’t be the ones affected.
Ing: The World is Dying:
August 30th, 2012 at 11:02 pm
also without even reading it just going to presume the response of “Joey you’re a lying idiot and need to grow the fuck up you spoiled little bratling” is appropriate.
consciousness razor:
August 30th, 2012 at 11:31 pm
I don’t know. They laugh and cheer and chant “USA! USA! USA!” at the most absurd and meaningless things. I don’t mean to say you don’t have most of them pegged. You do. But the way they responded to it is … hard to put into words. Thinking about it for too long is like staring into the abyss.
Climate change is at best an abstraction to them, even if it were real, though every right-thinking American knows it isn’t. They want stuff like jobs, low gas prices, never-ending war, and most of all “freedom.” You know: good old fashioned tangible stuff (plus freedom), not fancy big-picture ideas that never work. And they want them right now.
I know I’m being way too charitable with many of them, but that’s quite a bit less monstrous than “LOL global warming! fuck it!”
Suido:
August 31st, 2012 at 12:02 am
@Jadehawk et al:
http://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/world/flight-of-the-kiwi-20100521-w1uo.html
50,000 NZers to Australia last year, cue political outrage about 13,000 refugees swamping us from the north.
Sigh.
ckitching:
August 31st, 2012 at 12:06 am
These are the same kind of people who cheered and applauded the idea of letting uninsured people die because they can’t afford health care during the Sept 12, 2011 Republican debates. Assume the worst. Always assume the worst.
Amphiox:
August 31st, 2012 at 12:23 am
And the point was that so focusing in that manner was a transparently dishonest and invalid argument.
But, apparently, the right to bodily autonomy for pregnant women is NOT one of them.
Someone who actually believes this does NOT make the kinds of arguments in favor of abstinence only sex education that the gooey does, seeing as there really isn’t ANY form of sex education LESS comprehensive and LESS detailed.
What transparent dishonesty.
Amblebury:
August 31st, 2012 at 12:31 am
Suido Don’t get me started on the NZ exodus to Australia and other countries. This is what you get folks, when you inflict right-wing, libertarian thinking in an attempt to fix a nation that wasn’t broken.
And it compounds, because a large section of the populace who think and would vote differently no longer live in the country. I’ve lived out of it, off and on, for ten years or more.
Amphiox:
August 31st, 2012 at 12:32 am
http://www.aan.com/professionals/practice/guidelines/pda/Brain_death_adults.pdf
EEG is listed in section IV, under confirmatory laboratory tests, which are optional.
A key part of the consideration is given here:
Like all other medial diagnoses, brain death is actually a kind of scientific hypothesis – a hypothesis that you must then go ahead and test and confirm. And like with any scientific hypothesis, in order to be credible, you must have a plausible mechanism. ie, you have to have cause for the presentation of the symptoms of brain death, and that cause has to be one that is expected to be irreversible.
So, for example, if you found someone unconscious but with no indication of what was the cause of their unconsciousness, and can find no likely cause on further clinical investigations such as MRIs and CTs, such that you cannot render a diagnosis as to what has caused the neurologic deterioration, then even if they fulfill every other criteria for brain death, you CAN’T determine that it is likely to be irreversible and you CAN’T declare brain death. (You CAN decide to transition from aggressive to comfort care, but you can’t declare brain death).
dysomniak, darwinian socialist:
August 31st, 2012 at 12:36 am
Amphiox, I’m convinced. Where can I purchase an alarm system for my casket?
Amphiox:
August 31st, 2012 at 12:36 am
I just KNEW the gooey was going to come back with this infanticide schtick in response to Anna’s posts. That was one of the reasons I took issue with Anna’s categorizations early up-thread.
It’s not like it didn’t spend entire threads transparently trying to trap people into saying things in opposition to abortion that it could then twist around into making sound like support for infanticide.
dysomniak, darwinian socialist:
August 31st, 2012 at 12:38 am
Personally, as a pro-choice vegan I’d love to see aborted fetal tissue meat products on store shelves.
Amphiox:
August 31st, 2012 at 12:38 am
Such things actually do exist!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_coffin
Or at least, people have tried to make them.
Reliability, I do not think, was ever satisfactorily tested or demonstrated, though.
Amphiox:
August 31st, 2012 at 12:46 am
And as with any other scientific hypothesis, the more plausible the mechanism the greater the a priori likelihood of the hypothesis being correct, and lower the burden of proof and parsimony required to establish it.
So if you have CT evidence of a gruesome and massive traumatic intracranial hemorrhage, and a clinical history of a 150km/h highway speed motor vehicle accident with ejection and head first impact into concrete, or say an MRI showing a massive stroke destroying the entire brainstem, your mechanism is very consistent with irreversible brain injury and you need fewer additional confirmatory findings to support a diagnosis of brain death.
But if instead your MRI showed what appears to be an intact brainstem, or injuries that are not congruent with the severity of the clinical presentation of a deeply comatose patient, you don’t have a plausible mechanism for irreversible brain injury, and you might want more confirmatory evidence of irreversibility. And in these situations you might want to get an EEG, or a cerebral blood flow test, and other such laboratory tests, before committing to a diagnosis of brain death.
dysomniak, darwinian socialist:
August 31st, 2012 at 12:52 am
Oh, I’m aware of the history. I didn’t realize it had been worked on as recently as ’95. But perhaps cryogenics would be a wiser investment? You can’t really do both.
Amphiox:
August 31st, 2012 at 1:01 am
And note that the criteria are for adults only.
Young children are an entirely different and much more controversial ball of wax.
Because the capacity for plasticity in a still-developing central nervous system fundamentally alters the possibility of irreversibility in ways that we still do not fully understand.
It is, in fact, almost impossible to diagnose brain death in a newborn infant.
theophontes (坏蛋):
August 31st, 2012 at 1:49 am
Hong Kong is cool, or what?
Yikes. Supervolcano found under Hong Kong:
:)
theophontes (坏蛋):
August 31st, 2012 at 1:57 am
PS: Video Linky.
tkreacher:
August 31st, 2012 at 2:01 am
consciousness razor #114
In what is likely an actually valid golden mean, I’m probably being too critical and you, too charitable. heh
Maybe when I wake up tomorrow my misanthropic Overton will be shifted back closer to center.
Jadehawk:
August 31st, 2012 at 2:52 am
I just caught snippets of that speech, too (and jesus fuck did he look smug during that climate change line). The bit that I found personally interesting was the shit about “abandoning” commitments to Poland by dropping the missile defense thingy.
That is so fucking dumb. Poland didn’t want the fucking things there, but they were promised to be added to the visa-waiver countries if they let them. That was the promise the USA didn’t want to keep, and now Poles don’t want American missiles on their soil, because why would you wanna piss off the Russians for no fucking good reason?
Yeah, I know, super-minor point. But just what the fuck is it with Romney and Poland recently, anyway?
Jadehawk:
August 31st, 2012 at 2:55 am
more space for me :-p
besides, for NZ to catch up to the US (and especially this corner of it) would take longer than I’m likely to be alive. Though of course it would be better if the rest of the West didn’t see the clusterfuck that is the USA as something to aspire to. wtf is with that, anyway?
Jadehawk:
August 31st, 2012 at 3:43 am
and another thing about that speech… why the fuck was Romney talking about the Apollo missions? does he know those happened because of government?
In fact, I think Republicans who talk about how awesome life in the 60′s was, economically, should get the tax-rates from those days tattooed on their forehead
*grumble*
Nightjar:
August 31st, 2012 at 4:24 am
joey,
Oh, sure that’s your biggest beef, joey. That must be why you started this discussion by trying to defend abstinence-only lack-of-sex-education, which is by definition less comprehensive and detailed that any other kind of sex ed.
Again, just who here do you think has a problem with that? I mean, I agree that accurate and abundant statistics are a must for sex ed. Along with a solid understanding of the basics of statistical theory and probability theory, and the basics of disease transmission and control, both hopefully learned elsewhere in school. Otherwise they’re not really that useful.
But yeah, accurate information. All the information. That’s what teenagers subjected to abstinence-only lack-of-sex-education are not being given, and that’s why they are victims. Do you still disagree that they are victims, joey?
And ambiguous descriptions such as “only marginally effective” without anchoring them using concrete data can only lead to exaggerated fears and a dangerous “why bother then” attitude towards condoms. The latter being a big part of the reason why abstinence-only sex “ed” fails so spectacularly.
David Marjanović:
August 31st, 2012 at 5:00 am
joey: *mock* *mock*
Comrade Bush said: “Don’t forget Poland!”
And never again hath Poland been forgotten.
What? Who does that?
David Marjanović:
August 31st, 2012 at 5:14 am
…other than that crazy party in NZ. And maybe the two or three wackos in Austria who’ve been proposing a flat tax for decades, though the US doesn’t even have a completely flat tax…
Jadehawk:
August 31st, 2012 at 5:31 am
Canada and the UK, out of the top of my head.
KG:
August 31st, 2012 at 5:34 am
You prove once again what a dishonest little shit you are. You claimed that a condom which fails completely one time in ten would be more reliable than condoms now on sale. Now it is true that condom failure would not always lead to pregnancy, but for your 1-in-10 complete failure condom to give a pregnancy rate of 4 in 10,000, the chance of pregnancy from one act of unprotected PIV intercourse would need to be 4 in 1,000, or .004. I find a figure of 85% of women in a sexual relationship using no contraception will become pregnant within a year (I assume this means fertile women, if it doesn’t, the point is only strengthened). The same source gives an average “coital frequency” of 83 times per year. Now if the chance of not becoming pregnant from 83 acts of unprotected PIV intercourse is 15%, the chance per act is the 83rd root of .15, which turns out to be .977, so the chance of becoming pregnant per act is .023. Evidently, then, your 1-in-10 complete failure condom is much less reliable than condoms now on sale.
With regard to STDs, the effectiveness of condoms varies with the disease, but contrary to your lies, they do give some protection against all, and good protection against most, as has been shown by references already given. Moreover, protection for the individual wearing or insisting on their partner wearing a condom, is by no means the whole story: with any STD, the public health aim is to reduce the number of new cases an infected individual causes: if this figure can be brought below 1 and kept there, the disease will die out and more generally, the lower it is, the fewer new cases; even where the degree of protection is relatively low, as with HPV, it can contribute to the reduction in new cases. So, of course, can abstinence. But the evidence is quite clear that abstinence only sex education doesn’t work: young people have sex anyway, but are less likely to use condoms. You have been claiming to want fully informative sex education, but given your long record of lying – including the lies you have told specifically about condoms – no-one believes you; and no-one else has been arguing against such a thing.
“Inviolable” except, of course, when your imaginary friend violates them or tells others to do so*. Have you actually read the Bible, joey?
On a broader point, why did you spend so long lying about your beliefs, joey? You pretended over the course of several threads to be (your caricature of) pro-choice, including advocating a mother’s right to commit infanticide. You pretended during a long argument with me that all you cared about was your own happiness, which is of course completely incompatible with a belief in “inviolable human rights”, and that the only thing that would prevent you having your children tortured in return for a life of artificially induced bliss was that you couldn’t completely dismiss the remote possibility that there might be an afterlife in which you would be punished. While I consider Christianity to be both obviously false, and overwhelmingly pernicious in its effects, there are many Christians I can respect and admire. But not you, joey; most certainly, not you. All you’ve gained by this campaign of systematic lying is the universal and entirely justified contempt of everyone who has argued with you here. Are you satisfied with that outcome?
* Or of course when it’s the right of a woman to bodily autonomy.
David Marjanović:
August 31st, 2012 at 5:50 am
…Yeah. I don’t want to think about the Canadian conservatives too much. The UK ones are strongly constrained by public opinion.
David Marjanović:
August 31st, 2012 at 5:57 am
…Wow. That’s badass.
Heh. It makes me very easily explicably sad that you’re trying to go so far away from practically everyone else.
Antiochus Epiphanes:
August 31st, 2012 at 6:22 am
theophontes: we have one of those, too. Together, we are talking about an apocalyptic movie and it’s sequel. That’s without combining supervolcanos with other apocalyptic tropes.
Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls:
August 31st, 2012 at 6:29 am
*sees Joey posted*
Bwahahahahahahahahahaha
Nothing serious there folks, move along.
theophontes (坏蛋):
August 31st, 2012 at 7:59 am
@ Antiochus Epiphanes
I’ll come right out and say it: I have serious Caldera Envy.
(… and OK, I’ll need to pretend that ours is not stone cold dead. It kinda puts a spring in one’s step thinking one’ll get blown to high heaven at any moment.)
Badland:
August 31st, 2012 at 8:27 am
@ 127 theophontes (坏蛋)
Fortunately even by geological standards a volcano that last went bang 140 million years ago can comfortably be considered extinct.
Tokyo and Fujian-san? Those poor urbanites are fucked
Antiochus Epiphanes:
August 31st, 2012 at 8:29 am
Is your caldera really dead? Or *undead*?
Supervolcano: Following the apocalyptic explosion of the Yellowstone caldera, a dystopian society of children wages war on mutant bears and big horn sheep for survival and supremacy in the West. Ex-forest ranger Will Smith (Will Smith) rescues them with the help of wildlife scientist Consuela Garcia (Selma Hayek). Mourning the loss of his family to the depredations of significantly altered bears, Will Smith finds love unexpectedly in the hearts of dystopian children, and his nerdy yet attractive co-hero.
Supervolcano II: While the world suffers the economic devastation wrought by the Yellowstone Caldera, half-a-world-away, cocaine and sex-slavery merchants rise to power as part or the new world order that favors the ruthless* in the skyscrapers of Hong Kong. However, the Yellowstone caldera has awoken the sleeping giant beneath Hong Kong which erupts with unprecedented** devastation. Special agent Atonio George (Jason Statham)who has been leading the investigation into the corrupt municipal government must go head-to-head against the evil crime Lord Jason Wang (Donald Trump) to save his kidnapped daughter amidst the flames and rubble. He is assisted by the unlikely junk-skipper Wu (Jackie Chan), an ex martial arts expert with narcolepsy. Bone-breaking and hilarity ensue in this edge-of-your-seat thrillride.
*It’s fiction. You have to suspend some disbelief here.
**Somewhat precedented, I guess
anteprepro:
August 31st, 2012 at 9:04 am
Speaking of Republicans laughing about climate change, I just saw an ad for Self-Appointed Moderate Republican, Scott Brown. In it he BAAAAWED about how the fishing industry isn’t as successful nowadays and that he vows to destroy all regulations that the mean ol’ gubmint subjects those poor fishermen to. Because fishermen should be allowed to fish several species of fish to the point of extinction if it makes America some money!
Is there even one Republican politician out there who isn’t a stupid and horrible human being?
opposablethumbs:
August 31st, 2012 at 9:25 am
KG to joey:
QFT, and may I just add revulsion; Joey has consistently showed himself to be so repugnant as to make my flesh creep. The horror is of course that there are people like this not just displaying their utter lack of morality on the internet but wielding power over others.
anteprepro:
August 31st, 2012 at 10:17 am
Let me chime in to say: It’s not just the people arguing with joey who see how contemptible and dishonest he is. Though, in fairness, I was already holding joey in contempt for his first appearance here, where he was roughly just as dishonest and using roughly the same exact bullshit tactics and arguments as he is now. The fact that he is still pulling the same shit, X number of months later, and has only improved in the sense that he is willing to admit his agenda now, just makes it all the more clear that he deserves whatever mockery we can fling in his general direction. Even that may be more than he deserves.
theophontes (坏蛋):
August 31st, 2012 at 10:28 am
@ badlands
I’m a gonna pretend I didn’t read that. (The buzz is in the lability.)
@ AE
Hey, that sounds just like me! (I want MY cut.)
chigau (違う):
August 31st, 2012 at 10:35 am
theophontes
You do remember that the “Benign Dictator for Life” stuff was in jest?
Right?
theophontes (坏蛋):
August 31st, 2012 at 10:38 am
@ chigau
Rather humid here. We’ve just had some rain .
@ AE
Yellowstone Caldera on CNN right now. (Synchronicity? Its creepy.)
chigau (違う):
August 31st, 2012 at 10:50 am
theophontes
Bright sunshine here. I’m going to do some laundry.
Amphiox:
August 31st, 2012 at 10:58 am
Ah, but which part was the jest, the “benign”, the “dictator”, or the “life” part?
chigau (違う):
August 31st, 2012 at 11:03 am
Amphiox
It was the “for” part.
Amphiox:
August 31st, 2012 at 11:04 am
140 million years of plate tectonics should mean that the mantle plume hotspot that produced this supervolcano has moved elsewhere (or the rather the plate on top of it has moved elsewhere), so that even if the hotspot is still active, it’s not in the same place anymore.
But I’m not sure if we can actually be sure about that.
Amphiox:
August 31st, 2012 at 11:06 am
Lack of government regulations to fish as much as they wanted sure didn’t help the Canadian grand banks fishermen when they (in combination with international fishermen) fished the cod stocks to total depletion, and left them all without livelihoods.
theophontes (坏蛋):
August 31st, 2012 at 12:02 pm
I think we can all agree, apropos the above, that Politburo’s are like calderas.
anteprepro:
August 31st, 2012 at 12:22 pm
Nope, don’t matter. All we should care about is whether it is profitable on the scale of one to three years. Anything past that don’t matter at all, because that’s a long time away and I don’t care about something that doesn’t benefit ME either immediately or close to it. It’s all about the money, and it’s all about the money RIGHT NOW. Fuck the current environment, fuck future money, and especially fuck the future environment. None of those matter as much as short-term profits!
(Am I libertarian yet? Or will that only work if I’m shouting the above during a full moon?)
Antiochus Epiphanes:
August 31st, 2012 at 12:34 pm
anteprepro:
No, no, no. You’re doing it all wrong. You have to present your greed as a vehicle of principle. It isn’t just right to fish without concern for the future, it would be wrong not to.
I mean, you personally, do not like that all of these fish have to die, but freedom is at stake. The fish die or the terrorists win.
joey:
August 31st, 2012 at 12:34 pm
KG:
And I also explicitly stated in that post that I was focusing on STD prevention as opposed to pregnancy prevention. I said, “For the sake of argument, let’s completely ignore the possibility of an unwanted pregnancy (he/she has a perfect vasectomy or tubal ligation) and only focus on the possibility of contracting STDs.” Please take things in context.
I was playing devil’s advocate by arguing various positions/conclusions based on premises generally held by this community. Given these premises, I stand by the soundness of all the arguments that I’ve made, even though I personally don’t believe in many of the premises that form the basis of those arguments.
I always thought that I made it obvious (in the content of my posts and the manner in which I posted) that I was assuming the devil’s advocate role in many of the discussions (not all, if you remember one of our earlier discussions regarding seizing Catholic schools and the First Amendment). If it was not obvious to some, or even if it was obvious, I can understand how the manner in which I’ve been debating can be viewed as dishonest. Let me rephrase that…it was dishonest. For that, I apologize to you and the forum community. I will no longer debate in such a manner.
But given the understood premises (even though I personally don’t believe in them), I still stand by the validness of all the arguments that I’ve made. For example, my earlier arguments in defense of infanticide sound awfully close to what Anne C. Hanna has been arguing here, which are based on the premise that an infant has less value than an adult human due to its lack of sentience. My challenge has always been to dispute the arguments (if you can), or rethink the premises that form the arguments.
Ing: The World is Dying:
August 31st, 2012 at 12:44 pm
Joey shut the fuck up. You’re not helping you’re being a biggot fuck
People have excplained multiple time and u don’t care because you’re a selfish arrogant shit who tells others what they think.
——
Side note: I had an idea for a blog project to be a counterpart to A+. Where A+ is positive and active A- would be self reflective and be a constructive critic. Idea is to devote a blog by positive good atheists to look at the atheist culture and movement and offer strong critique. Not what arguements do or don’t work but on whether were being shits or being blind to privledged or acting just like dogmatic sheep. Thoughts?
anteprepro:
August 31st, 2012 at 12:52 pm
Well shit. No wonder why I can’t rouse the rabble.
And oh look, joey posted something! I’ll go celebrate by fetching the vomit trough and a basket full of rotten tomatoes for those who have finished using the former.
Sounds like a good idea to me. “Atheists Behaving Badly”? Or perhaps “Guys, don’t do that” if you wish to tempt fate.
Ing: The World is Dying:
August 31st, 2012 at 12:57 pm
I was leaning towards A- with ]uys don’t do that” being the tag line
Amphiox:
August 31st, 2012 at 1:17 pm
In other words, being deliberately dishonest and setting rhetorical traps using ridiculous hypotheticals with no application to real life situations.
We all knew that from the get-go, of course.
<blockquote
In other words, being deliberately dishonest and setting rhetorical traps using ridiculous hypotheticals with no application to real life situations.
We all knew that from the get-go, of course.
Ogvorbis: broken:
August 31st, 2012 at 1:29 pm
Fuck. Joey, you owe me a brand new, super-duty, high-impact, GOP-level irony meter. You just smoked mine.
Really? Please cite, with references, the one who stated that infanticide is acceptable. Or are you lying again? You know, bearing false witness and all that?
Take your rhetorical traps and shove them. Seriously. If you had a valid argument to make you should have made it. Even if I, or others, disagreed with you, if you had been able to support your position, it could have been a good argument. You have, however, through your lies, strawmanning, just-so stories and your rhetorical assholery made it impossible for anyone here to ever take anything you write as even remotely honest. If you told me that the sky was blue I would feel the uncontrollable need to check and make sure.
ronaldraygunz:
August 31st, 2012 at 1:32 pm
Here’s what I don’t get.
http://www.celebratecommunion.com/gluten-free-communion-wafers-130.html
You can buy gluten free communion wafers. Why do they need to be gluten free if they turn into the body of Christ? Wasn’t Jesus gluten free? Doesn’t that kind of ruin the whole faith in the transubstantiation thing if they have to be gluten free? I don’t get it. Someone needs to give me some direction here.
Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls:
August 31st, 2012 at 1:45 pm
Joey, the difference between “playing devil’s advocate” and trolling is zero. Ergo, you play the troll, you are considered a troll, and treated with the disdain trolls earn. And you have earned disdain, contempt, and ridicule.
If you said “this is what I believe, and this (link to evidence) is the evidence to back it up”, we can and do discuss issues as you are being honest. Why haven’t you tried the honest, non-trolling tact? It can’t be because we are expected to learn from you when you are trolling.
consciousness razor:
August 31st, 2012 at 2:05 pm
It’s your problem if you genuinely believe many of them are valid (if not sound). Wait a second. Are you right now being a meta-devil’s advocate making a concealed meta-arguendo claim about their soundness that we’re supposed to implicitly accept?
This also leads me to wonder why you won’t (or can’t) make a valid argument for positions you actually hold, based on facts as you actually understand and interpret them. It’s not just an issue of dishonesty, but that’s it’s generally not a valid way to arrive at conclusions. The alternative to whatever arguments people here give, whether they’re right or not, isn’t automatically your position. It’s almost never the case that there are only two sides, diametrically opposed to one another in every detail. That’s part of what makes you such a shitty devil’s advocate — that and the dishonesty, the sheer stupidity, and the utter lack of factual content.
consciousness razor:
August 31st, 2012 at 2:18 pm
And, of course, evasiveness short of outright dishonesty. It’s not hard to say “for the sake of argument” when that’s what you think, and that would clear up a lot. But you’re probably being evasive in another way. Isn’t all of this shit you argue about irrelevant, if the real issue you have with us is that we don’t believe in whichever brand of Christian god you think exists? Where are your arguments for that? You’re a Christian at an atheist blog, so should we assume that probably isn’t what your main beef with us is?
Antiochus Epiphanes:
August 31st, 2012 at 2:59 pm
*turning red and giggling*
When I was a child of ~11, a priest explained this to me while I was undergoing yearly altar-boy training. It was so hilariously bullshitty, that I remember it like it was yesterday. Let me see if I can recapitulate the idea…
*women wouldn’t likely do such a thing.
KG:
August 31st, 2012 at 3:15 pm
joey,
First, the context of the entire discussion is sex education for young people, so your “for the sake of argument” is an absurdity. Second, the point is that you made entirely unsupported claims about the ineffectiveness of condoms currently on sale, citing no sources. But we can get a reasonable estimate of how effective current condoms are in relation to your mythical works-perfectly-nine-times-in-ten-and-not-at-all-the-tenth by calculating what effect the latter would have in reducing pregnancy risks. Neither bacteria nor viruses can penetrate a normal condom, unless it’s faulty, any more than sperm can; the comparatively poor performance of condoms in relation to HPV arises because the infective agent can be passed via contact with areas that are not covered by a condom.
You’re a liar.
1) Playing devil’s advocate does not require lying about your own position. Indeed, that term is generally used only if a person agrees with others in the discussion, but wishes to present the position of someone who disagrees. In any case, an honest person, arguing in good faith, would have said “I’m a Christian, but I’m going to put forward what I take to be the logical consequences of the following premises, which I believe you hold.” You didn’t do that: you simply lied, and went on lying for long periods of time. Why should we believe your current assertions about the positions you hold – for example, your claim that you advocate comprehensive and accurate sex education? We know you lie about the positions you hold, and continue to do so for long periods of time. No assurance you give that you are presenting your honest view now has any value whatsoever.
2) Had you been an honest person and done as an honest person would, you would have identified the premises on which you based your position (I notice you have still not done so), and would undoubtedly have been told that these were not premises that are “generally held by this community”. In fact, in the abortion case you were repeatedly told, by many different people, that the premise on which the pro-choice position is based is the right of people (in this case, specifically women) to bodily autonomy, from which it quite evident that what follows is the right to end a pregnancy, and the death of the fetus, if it occurs, is a side-effect of exercising that right, while the right to kill an infant that is already born (or in the process of being born, so the pregnancy is being ended expeditiously) quite clearly does not follow. In the case of your argument for choosing an artificial ecstasy irrespective of the consequences for others, it was made abundantly clear that most atheists do not take psychopathic selfishness as a premise. In particular, I made it absolutely clear repeatedly that I value the happiness of others as an end in itself, and you simply refused to accept that this could possibly be so for anyone. Moreover, I made the point that if one did take complete selfishness as a premise, then even if one did have any doubt that this life is the only one we get (which I do not, nor I think do most of this community), such a doubt about whether there might be an afterlife to which one’s choices in this one made a difference could not rationally make any difference to those choices, since we have zero information about what difference those choices would make, whereupon you tried to insist that this was not the case. So, in both cases you were shown quite clearly that you were not arguing from premises generally held by this community, yet you continued to maintain them.
Incidentally, unless I missed it, you have not specified, as I asked, what “axioms” you proceed from. (You have said that you consider people to have “inviolable human rights”, but you have not said what these are, nor whether this is an “axiom”, or follows from something else.) Why have you not specified your axioms, joey? You have repeatedly tried to insist that others do so, so if you were arguing in good faith, you would be prepared to put yours on the table for examination and questioning.
tkreacher:
August 31st, 2012 at 3:23 pm
Antiochus,
That’s one of the most insidious tricks authoritarian leaders use. They’ve already got the authoritarian follower under their thrall by the simple virtue of the follower’s broken mode of thinking. They pour in “facts”, the facts are believed. The follower doesn’t look outside of the in group for information and, even if they did, don’t trust the information or don’t have the reasoning skill to parse the information.
But… just in case. Just in case you’ve got your hooks in a half-thinker. Someone on the low end of the high scale of credulous. Just in case they do start thinking. Poison the well.
“Doubting your faith can be a sign that your faith is STRONG. It is a sign that you take your faith seriously. It strengthens your faith. Here, let me quote some scripture at you to demonstrate this truth.”
“If God gave us evidence, our faith would be meaningless, and we would have no free will. If we didn’t have the choice to believe in Him we would not be free. Such is God’s love for us, that he would leave this world after sending his only begotten son to die for our sins, that we may have real freedom.”
“All of this so-called evidence for evolution is a test of our faith. That there is a wicked plot to cast doubt on Biblical truth is PROOF POSITIVE that the Bible is the truth. Why else would the disbelievers, at the hand of the devil, make such a massive attempt to deceive? What other motivation can they have? ”
It’s a safety net to catch those who might have a spark of critical thinking at their disposal. For those who trust their authorities on the face of it, but might have a stunted ability to connect thoughts when they are alone, in the dark of the night. Who might get uneasy at a blatant contradiction. Who might otherwise be lost from the fold.
Fucking insidious.
KG:
August 31st, 2012 at 3:39 pm
I did miss that you intended this as a specification of your “axioms”. But it’s entirely useless, joey, unless you tell us what that “dignity” and those “inviolable rights” are, and spell out what you think follows from them. What things violate the “dignity of the human person”? If there’s an “inviolable human right” to life, are you a complete pacifist, joey? Complete, in that you cannot kill another person even in self-defense, or in defense of others? If not, then the right is not “inviolable”. But if so, it’s at least doubtful if you can call it “inviolable”, because you would fail to defend it. Would it be right for the government to force one person to give up a kidney to save another’s life? If not, the right is not “inviolable”. See, joey, this is why I say demanding that people specify their moral axioms is so useless – and in your case, so dishonest: when we come to specific cases, such “axioms” frequently turn out not to provide a basis for a decision. Demanding them of others is just another of your rhetorical tricks, a way you think you can show how superior you are.
consciousness razor:
August 31st, 2012 at 3:46 pm
Sorry, I just noticed I made a big and confusing error. My first quote in #167 was supposed to start out looking like this:
I wasn’t saying I thought our (or my own) positions are invalid, and that if that were the case it would be joey’s problem. I was saying that if he thought those strawmen were valid, then that (in addition to strawmanning) is his problem, not ours. Because many of them clearly aren’t valid the way he’s presented them, which I won’t dwell on right now. But instead of doing any serious reasoning himself, he’s mostly distorting ours, accepting its “validity” at face value and ineptly using it against us to make cheap and irrelevant rhetorical points. Which is silly and rather boring.
Hurin, Midnight DJ on the Backwards Music Station:
August 31st, 2012 at 4:07 pm
Joey
Your infanticide question is moronic. Why would it be necessary for the baby to have the same value as its mother in order for it to be unethical to kill it?
Abortion is a special case, because a fetus depends on the body of another in order to develop and eventually get born.
After it is born it is a special case, because babies develop into full grown humans.
Even if a specific baby wasn’t going to develop sentience (we will say it is severely retarded due to some unspecified disorder) euthanizing it would still be unacceptable. Similarly, when and how animals can be killed is a matter of debate and regulation. I don’t support the wanton killing of house cats either, and in fact it would probably be against the law in most places under animal cruelty statutes.
cm's changeable moniker:
August 31st, 2012 at 4:42 pm
@Anne:
Oh, that was me asking questions tersely on the internet (and probably coming across as angry, which I wasn’t), and causing derailment and aggravation. Sorry. It will happen again, I’m sure.
For context, the child I’m talking about was born with something—the doctors don’t know what—which has left her with no motor function. I haven’t asked about EEGs (nor would I), but the fact that the doctors are still investigating seven years on suggests that it’s not a case of catastrophic brain failure. So she can’t move or communicate, but does seem to have pupillary response to members of family, affectionate hugs, etc. As to whether there’s a mind there, it’s distressingly hard to tell.
This is why the sentience/sapience distinction strikes me as problematic (see also Amphiox’s comment about sentiometers), and makes language like “isn’t sentient even at the level of a pet” sounds like nails on a blackboard to me.
However, I think we’re in (almost) complete agreement, except that that I’d quibble over language like:
… because people have used similar reasoning to go to some very dark places.
I guess I’d prefer to start from right-to-life and carve out exemptions (and, @joey: yes, one of them would be for abortion).
—
So, JM:
*rearranging*
Actually, I was trying to argue the exact opposite. :-/
opposablethumbs:
August 31st, 2012 at 5:39 pm
KG #170 and #172 –
we really, really need that squid button. I’d like to award you two tentacles and a beak (/highly inappropriate tauromachian reference (two ears and a tail))
KG:
August 31st, 2012 at 5:55 pm
opposablethumbs,
I’ll treasure them!
jflcroft:
August 31st, 2012 at 7:11 pm
I saw there was one post re: Seth Macfarlane on here – I honestly do not think an unmoderated forum like this is the best place to discuss what could potentially be an emotive and hurtful subject. What I will say is that I take the concern with the decision very seriously and that I have serious questions about it myself. We have certainly since that decision was made reconsidered our process for selecting candidates – for instance we recently vetoed a candidate because we felt they had similar problems to those Seth Macfarlane presented.
We are certainly not ignoring the criticism on this point – I personally take it very seriously indeed.
Antiochus Epiphanes:
August 31st, 2012 at 7:24 pm
Is Seth McFarlane the cartoon guy?
Disingenuous. I googled it. He is. I guess I’ll have to check out that cartoon and see what this is about.
consciousness razor:
August 31st, 2012 at 7:37 pm
Sure, you know, when I have emotions, I honestly think they should be moderated.
And if you had seriously considered even a fraction of the things that were wrong with choosing MacFarlane as Humanist of the Year, wouldn’t you already have the same (or very fucking similar) emotions? What’s fucking “potential” about this for you?
John Morales:
August 31st, 2012 at 7:42 pm
jflcroft:
Well, there’s nothing to stop you from moderating yourself, you know!
(Or is it your own hurt you’re worried about? :) )
Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls:
August 31st, 2012 at 7:51 pm
Gee, a HCH actually moderating themselves? I thought they got paid by the non-sequitor word to torment the atheist blogs….
John Morales:
August 31st, 2012 at 8:13 pm
Back in the day, James wrote:
Contrast with
Clearly, James is now admitting he believes it was a mistake and so does the organisation;, but what’s unsaid is even more interesting: there is to be no official public admission of that error nor revocation of this, um, prestigious award.
(Spinning like a whirling dervish!)
Amphiox:
August 31st, 2012 at 8:44 pm
There is a REASON it is called DEVIL’S advocate. Even theists long recognize that it is an evil and dishonest thing to do.
Isn’t it ironic that gooey the self-proclaimed “christian” admits to deliberately choosing to act in a manner directly analogous to defending the Prince of Lies.
SC (Salty Current), OM:
August 31st, 2012 at 8:47 pm
There’s such a thing as honestly being or playing devil’s advocate. It’s a useful exercise, but rarely happens on the internet. More frequent in this context is the belated claim of playing – in the sense of dishonestly faking – devil’s advocate. This is dishonest, disingenuous, and ill-intended (and of course in joey’s case laughably transparent).
I maintain the hope, though, that at least a few joeys will have a reverse-Genesius experience, gaining real enlightenment in the course of their fakery. It’s entirely possible, for all but the most ideologically blinkered.
consciousness razor:
August 31st, 2012 at 8:57 pm
Maybe you’re kidding, but I’m not clear about that at all.
jflcroft, what has changed since you made the comment quoted from July 6?
ChasCPeterson:
August 31st, 2012 at 8:59 pm
devil’s advocate
devil’s advocate
SC (Salty Current), OM:
August 31st, 2012 at 9:12 pm
devil’s advocate – ineffective assistance of counsel
ChasCPeterson:
August 31st, 2012 at 9:23 pm
Ha! I was there!
Greek Theater, Berkeley. That was the second of three days.
One of the most memorable weekends of my life.
Hurin, Midnight DJ on the Backwards Music Station:
August 31st, 2012 at 9:30 pm
Devils Advocate – Swedish style
Devil’s Advocate – Norwegian style
Devil’s Advocate – Tampa style (in honor of the Moran convention)
ChasCPeterson:
August 31st, 2012 at 9:30 pm
and yet now that I think of it I don’t actually remember it all that well.
was definitely there, though. There and then.
SC (Salty Current), OM:
August 31st, 2012 at 9:38 pm
*hopping along stones in the stream of consciousness*
Oh! I’ve just read the sample of Subversives: The FBI’s War on Student Radicals, and Reagan’s Rise to Power. Can’t afford it quite yet [please feel free to make a donation on my blog :)], but it’s next on my list. Is anyone else reading it?
SC (Salty Current), OM:
August 31st, 2012 at 9:49 pm
…Interesting comments.
cm's changeable moniker:
August 31st, 2012 at 9:52 pm
Where did all the good times go?
SC (Salty Current), OM:
August 31st, 2012 at 9:55 pm
There’s memorable and there’s memorable.
SC (Salty Current), OM:
August 31st, 2012 at 9:58 pm
Top comment:
cm's changeable moniker:
August 31st, 2012 at 10:02 pm
Doh. Borked the title. *sigh*
consciousness razor:
August 31st, 2012 at 10:05 pm
Devil’s advocate
theophontes (坏蛋):
August 31st, 2012 at 10:06 pm
@ Ing
Devil’s Advocate? ;)
SC (Salty Current), OM:
August 31st, 2012 at 10:24 pm
Holy…
cm's changeable moniker:
August 31st, 2012 at 10:26 pm
consciousness razor, dammit, you’ve awoken an old rivalry …
Lizst had a most fearsome adversary
consciousness razor:
August 31st, 2012 at 10:54 pm
Deep rifts!
theophontes (坏蛋):
August 31st, 2012 at 10:56 pm
☆☆☆ Lizst was the world’s first true ROCK STAR! ☆☆☆
consciousness razor:
August 31st, 2012 at 10:57 pm
I guess this is for me:
:) He didn’t take his time on it, either, that’s for sure.
consciousness razor:
August 31st, 2012 at 10:59 pm
This is not so, but I’d find it demeaning to be compared to a rock star anyway.
consciousness razor:
August 31st, 2012 at 11:04 pm
That looks much crankier than I meant it to be.
theophontes (坏蛋):
August 31st, 2012 at 11:07 pm
@ CR
Lisztomania (link):
If that is not the ultimate Rock ‘n Roll lifestyle then I am a mere tardigrade.
cm's changeable moniker:
August 31st, 2012 at 11:16 pm
Schumann?!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMD7oYMKsW0
Mah fayvorit.
consciousness razor:
August 31st, 2012 at 11:17 pm
I know his biography well enough, but I must insist rock is a (not very well-defined) musical style, not a lifestyle.
But you are a mere tardigrade. I could point to records in the Ministry of Truth demonstrating this, and they can’t be false.
Jeebus:
August 31st, 2012 at 11:27 pm
I was just blown away when I first heard the Rhenish Symphony, as conducted by Leonard Bernstein.
Hurin, Midnight DJ on the Backwards Music Station:
August 31st, 2012 at 11:53 pm
I got to see Philip Glass memorialize Allen Ginsberg with this when I was in high school. Blew my mind.
chigau (違う):
September 1st, 2012 at 12:45 am
What the … meh.
theophontes (坏蛋):
September 1st, 2012 at 1:18 am
@ CR
Then you have been doing it (The music is merely a means to an end.)
(If you have read the Minitrue archives correctly you would know that tardigrades do indeed lead » ¡ ROCK STAR ! « lifestyles.)
consciousness razor:
September 1st, 2012 at 1:51 am
“the public coveted and fetishized everyday items of his”
Is that a rock ‘n roll lifestyle or is it a weird cultish economic materialism, or is that just a difference of degree?
No, I haven’t been doing it at all. This is the thing. It’s as if all music is supposed to be defined in relation to rock, instead of the reverse. That’s what I meant by it being demeaning to what I do, not that I consider them (or their work) beneath me.
I won’t even touch how it’s as if history started when white people started playing it.
Not for me, but you still probably shouldn’t confuse the two.
dysomniak, darwinian socialist:
September 1st, 2012 at 2:56 am
As someone who held “punk rock” as a moral guideline for many years I must concur that rock and roll is a style of music, not a lifestyle.
Also, happy (slightly late) birthday to me. I am now the proud owner of a brand new crock pot (vegan recipes welcome,) slightly broken iphone (you can’t make calls with it – no too different from a fully functional model,) a Dewalt dril/driver (which works great but the battery packs won’t hold a charge,) and crisp new pairs of double-front carhartts and high-top chucks (all black, of course).
Antiochus Epiphanes:
September 1st, 2012 at 9:07 am
dysomaniak: Imma monochrome black chucks guy myself. It’s because I’m a ninja. And because I feel black on the inside. And because I am naturally flat-footed, and like, fuck arch support.
SubMor:
September 1st, 2012 at 12:44 pm
Ing@162:
I really like this idea. It should be so.
John Morales:
September 1st, 2012 at 10:32 pm
A- is a silly nomenclature (unlike A+); it should be A° (A-null).
consciousness razor:
September 1st, 2012 at 10:38 pm
Morales, that Richard fellow at Fincke’s blog is all yours. Free will!! I give up.
Ing: DOOM DOOM DOOM DOOM DOOM DEATH DOOM DOOM DOOOOOOOM THE END!:
September 1st, 2012 at 10:43 pm
@John Morales
I was going to do A Negative, but A-Null is a pun I don’t think I can pass up XD
Anne C. Hanna:
September 2nd, 2012 at 2:13 am
To answer stuff from like a hundred posts and two days ago without reading the intervening stuff that I don’t have time to skim right now because I’m traveling…
Amphiox,
I don’t see how this nonsense of joey’s raises any problems for what I’ve said at all. Like a fetus, an infant has interests. Unlike a fetus, an infant does not generally have to (potentially) contravene the overriding interests of any other individual (the mother) in order to have its interests satisfied. Instead, its care can be transferred to others who *do* want a child, or an essentially negligible amount of resources per individual can be drawn from society as a whole to provide a paid carer. Unless the infant has such severe birth defects that its life is expected to be so short and full of suffering that terminating its existence is probably in its *own* best interests, or unless it is born into a society with such severe resource deficiencies that abandoned children cannot be supported without doing severe damage to the society, then its interests become the overriding ones, and killing it cannot be justified.
Also, in re this:
The individual patient makes this decision when ze is in a position to do so, but if the patient were for some reason unable to make the decision for hirself (e.g. a legally incompetent adult human, a child, or a pet), then their legal caregiver has to make essentially the same decision on essentially the same grounds. In fact, when the decision is being made for someone who seems unlikely to be able to rationalize their suffering at some level, then as far as I can tell most people tend towards believing that the humane choice is the one that reduces suffering the most, rather than the one that prolongs life the most. So I’m not really convinced that this analogy is problematic in regard to the point I was trying to make with it.
———
To others, in re Dennis Markuze, yes, I know his history. It’s because of that history of hostile and pathologically irrational behavior that I would be extremely startled if atheists telling him that he’s mentally ill were to actually have any effect at this point. I mean, it’d be nice, on accounta how mental health treatment would almost certainly be hella better for him than prison, and I applaud the attempt. It’s just that, given my recent experience of telling an apparently perfectly neurotypical and supposedly completely allied person that I am not 100% behind every single thing he’s ever said on the subject of civility, I am not very optimistic about attempts to get Markuze to accept any flavor of sweet reason whatsoever. That’s all. :P
Anne C. Hanna:
September 2nd, 2012 at 3:46 am
*sigh* Reading further even though I should sleep now…
cm,
It sounds like the kid you’re describing is a case where it’s simply completely unclear what the status of the brain function is, in which case I don’t know why you’re perceiving hir as a reason to take offense at comments that were very carefully directed at situations where there’s a well-established and definitive absence of significant sapience/sentience. After all, locked-in syndrome is a real thing with adults, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t also things that happen with adults (e.g. massive hemorrhages) where the destruction of higher functions is probably reasonably unambiguous. So why would we expect that there won’t be cases with children where it’s reasonably unambiguous that a particular child’s brain is almost certainly never going to be able to produce a mind?
But the thing you’re talking about with this kid is not, “What do you do when it’s pretty clear that there’s nothing there?” (which was what *I* was talking about), it’s, “What do you do when you’ve either got no clue, or there’s at least some good reason to to be unsure?” In *that* case you look at the different possible outcomes and try to estimate their likelihoods and costs and benefits. Is it possible/likely that the patient will recover completely, or partially, or not at all? What do we know about the likelihood that they might be perfectly or partially mentally active or aware of their surroundings and yet unable to respond? In the different projected scenarios, how much will the patient be likely to be suffering, and how much emotional suffering and hardship will be imposed on their families and caregivers? What do we think that the person would do if ze was able to make this decision? And so forth. The right answer will depend incredibly sensitively on the specific circumstances, and there’s probably always going to be some guesswork, and even mistakes or injustices, at the edges. Perfection isn’t a reasonable expectation when we’re dealing in such murky realms. All we can do is our best.
In this particular case, the parents apparently either decided that the kid’s chances of some positive outcome were high enough or the potential for the kid’s and their suffering was low enough that going to a great deal of trouble and expense to sustain its existence was worth the costs. It sounds like a case where I would probably not have made the same decision, but absent a clear demonstration that what they’re doing is objectively the worst thing for the child, which probably isn’t possible, it’s one of those things that decency demands we leave to individual decisions. And regardless of whether any particular decider would choose to sustain an infant born with this problem or terminate life support, the question in this case would not be, “Do we continue to maintain the existence of this body given that it almost certainly cannot produce a mind of any sort?” (a question to which I would say, if it were relevant, “No, such a body has no value.”). Instead, the question would be, “Is it humane to possibly allow a human mind to develop in a body which is probably incapable of allowing that mind to ever even communicate to the world around it?” (a question to which I would say, “Very likely not, and since the person will probably never even be able to end hir existence if ze finds it unbearable, I’m not going to do this experiment.”)
It’s also not clear to me how what I’ve said leads to invocations of the Hitler zombie. Does it really automatically lead to pulling up the gas vans outside the local disability resource center if one says that there’s some level of brain malformation or damage at which essentially no mind to speak of can possibly be generated by that brain? And if so, how? Certainly, drawing a bright line isn’t going to be possible, and it will therefore generally be important to err on the side of caution, but there are still going to be a certain number of cases that are fairly clear-cut to anyone who is not a subscriber to a supernatural belief system. It’s not clear to me why it ought to be controversial to say that in those cases, such bodies are not persons and should not be valued as such, and that the perceived value at that point is more about the sentiments of the family members. As far as I can tell, the only reason to deny this is if one places an absurd and superstitious value on human-shaped things just because they’re human-shaped, and thereby unfairly devalues all other minds simply because they don’t happen to occupy human-shaped bodies. I just can’t support either of those things.
mikmik:
September 2nd, 2012 at 2:51 pm
Will ‘they’ quit calling it the God Particle? Jesus H. Christ, even Deepak Chumperawoo doesn’t like it, FFS:
Egads, what cruel and twisted universe have I woken up in? No TZT, Deepak not cashing in on a blatant opportunity, Mitt Fucking Romny, Esquire –
[ " Esquire
The friend of a hooker. Derived from the merging of the words escort (high class hooker) and squire (used as a term of endearment towards a friend)."I was mates with Judy for 3 months before I realized she was on the game, guess that makes me her esquire"] -
leading Obama in the polls????????????????????
strange gods before me ॐ:
September 2nd, 2012 at 4:27 pm
TonyJ,
It’s an open thread! You’re welcome to barge in. :)
I would start by asking her what are the important issues that libertarianism is correct about. If she lists only non-economic matters, it may be helpful to point out that progressives are pro-freedom on all these important issues, and her views may be better represented by progressive organizations like the ACLU. (Some people get the erroneous impression that libertarianism per se is just a devotion to civil libertarianism.)
Since progressivism shares all the civil libertarian and anti-war stances with libertarianism, the only differentiating issue is economics. If a person isn’t enamoured of extreme right wing economic policies, then they probably shouldn’t self-identify as a libertarian. You’re welcome to copy this essay outright or rewrite it. (The licensing on our wiki permits you to do this if you explicitly attribute the authors. Since I am the sole author of that particular essay, I’ll waive that requirement for you; you needn’t acknowledge the source in your discussion with your mother.)
Also it’s worth asking her how she plans to do politics differently because of being a libertarian. Is she going to vote Democrat? If so, then it’s probably not a big deal, maybe just one of those idiosyncracies of vocabulary — although she’ll have to get used to being initially opposed, for self-identifying as more dangerous than she really is, in any discussion with people who are familiar with typical right-wing libertarians.
We’ve had success here at Pharyngula with convincing at least two libertarians to abandon that ideology. (I’m almost sure there are others I remember vaguely, but I’m sure of two.) I was already an ex-libertarian myself when I arrived here, and I’d be happy to provide more useful links if you can give more detail on what’s salient to her about libertarianism.
Here are some collected bits from Chomsky that may be useful, depending on her answers to the above.
+++++
Usernames are smart,
When you use mental retardation as an insult,
like using permutations of dyke or gay or queer as insults, this is hurtful to innocent bystanders.
cm's changeable moniker:
September 2nd, 2012 at 4:59 pm
Nope. From my Concise OED:
esquire n. 1 (usually as abbreviation Esq) British a title appended to a man’s surname when no other form of address is used, especially as a form of address for letters. 2 archaic = SQUIRE.
[Middle English from Old French esquier from Latin scutarius shield-bearer from scutum shield]
HTH. ;-)
Amphiox:
September 2nd, 2012 at 5:17 pm
It isn’t so much that there are any problems with what you said, only that the manner in which you said it was vulnerable to joey’s particular style of dishonest misinterpretation.
In the case of terminal cancer it very rarely comes to this. Because cancer is a relatively slowly progressing disease, wherein the loss of mental competency occurs only quite late and near the very end of the disease process, if at all, the vast majority of cancer patients will have had time to consider their options with respect to end of life care and how aggressively they want themselves to be treated, and express those wishes to their likely surrogate decision-makers well in advance, while they are still fully capable of making such decisions, such that when the time comes that such decisions do need to be made on their behalf, those who are their alternative decision makers not infrequently already know what the patient had already decided that xe would have wanted.
It is because of this rareness of applicability that I indicated that this particular analogy isn’t the best one available for the point I thought you were trying to illustrate (which I do not dispute).
strange gods before me ॐ:
September 2nd, 2012 at 8:18 pm
joey,
Thanks. I’d like to know a bit more. What do you believe is probably true regarding Hell?
Eternal suffering? Annihilationism, with or without temporary suffering after death? Universal reconciliation, with or without temporary suffering after death? No Hell? Empty Hell? Separation from God, without suffering? Something else?
Who (if anyone) do you think goes to Hell, what happens there, and for how long?
cm's changeable moniker:
September 2nd, 2012 at 8:31 pm
*steps away from the dome*
(Or at least, the sulphurous bit of it that SG’s standing in.)
joey:
September 2nd, 2012 at 9:27 pm
Amphiox:
Do you think gendercide against female fetuses and infants is just some ridiculous hypothetical? Do you think forced abortions, justified using utilitarian arguments, don’t actually happen in real life? Do you think state-run eugenics and euthanasia (thanks for the link, cm) programs are only stuff of science fiction and have no basis in reality?
————–
consciousness razor:
You still haven’t gotten back to me on how you can square the existence of moral responsibility with the nonexistence of free will.
Of course. But the present position must be abandoned first before there is any hope of ever reaching my position. Baby steps.
————–
KG:
What’s wrong with focusing the attention on the STD failure rate of condoms as opposed to its unplanned pregnancy failure rate? There are dozens of other birth control methods that are just as effective (or more so) in pregnancy prevention, but condoms are the only real method to protect against sexually transmitted diseases during intercourse.
I cited a study that was performed 11 years ago. Are “current” condoms that much more different than they were a decade ago? I don’t know, maybe they are. I did a quick search and nothing came up that suggests so. But that particular NIH study that I cited seems to be the one source that is widely referenced when describing the effectiveness of condoms in preventing STDs, even in “current” websites.
You don’t have to believe any of my assertions about the positions I hold, nor do I really care. All I care about is the arguments that I’ve presented, not whether or not you believe what I claim to believe. Are my arguments valid or are they not valid? If they aren’t, then debate with me why you think they are not so. My own personal beliefs have no bearing on the validness of my arguments. They are simply irrelevant. If anything I thought that me explicitly offering my own personal beliefs from the start would only open the door to ad hominem fallacies, which is what I wanted to avoid. But I concede that in some threads I have not argued in good faith, and for that I have already apologized. And I apologize again for good measure.
But the death of the fetus does not necessarily have to follow when terminating the pregnancy, a valid point that has been repeatedly brought to my attention. I would then ask on those numerous occasions whether laws restricting the termination of a healthy fetus up to a certain point would be justifiable (say third trimester), even if there would be no restrictions on terminating the pregnancy at any time. All I get are crickets chirping, a variety of ad hominem attacks, and a quarantine to TZT.
And what I repeatedly told you in that thread is that I never took selfishness as a premise, nor was selfishness the conclusion. The premises in which I formed my argument are no afterlife and no objective value system (basically that physicalism is true), and the main conclusion is that your own perception is the only thing that matters. That it would be rational to choose a simulated life of ecstasy as opposed to “real” life. I also didn’t argue that every atheist would take the offer, but rather that taking the offer of a simulated life would simply be a rational decision. I still stand by the argument.
In another thread I argued that the feelings you have for friends and family are something more than biochemical reactions in the brian. But given physicalism, such feelings really are only biochemical reactions. So is it not rational, if it’s possible and you had a choice, to artificially alter your brain state to maximize your happiness for the rest of your life? And would it not be rational to convince your loved ones to the same?
Fair enough. I think the most succinct way is to provide an example…
A human infant has intrinsic value. He/she also has the right to live. It would be wrong to directly kill such an innocent human life. Even if both parents feel that it would be “better” for the family if the infant doesn’t exist (one less mouth to feed), it would still be wrong to kill it.
————-
Hurin:
Why? Why does your position differ from Anne’s (maybe I missed your explanation)?
————–
Anne C. Hanna
What does “having interests” mean? How does an fetus/infant “have interests”?
But none of this is required, is it? Again, why would it not be justifiable for parents to euthanize their infant child? This is what you said earlier…
“If the kid genuinely isn’t sentient even at the level of a pet, then, well, it’s the parents’ decision what the right thing is to do and what level of sentimental attachment they want to feel, but I don’t have a problem with saying that there’s nothing there that I personally consider terribly valuable in its own right.”
ChasCPeterson:
September 2nd, 2012 at 9:29 pm
ah.
yes, I detect a hint of…
brimstone.
chigau (違わない):
September 2nd, 2012 at 9:34 pm
I brought popcorn.
Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls:
September 2nd, 2012 at 9:36 pm
*hands out grog and swill to everybody but Joey*
Amphiox:
September 2nd, 2012 at 9:54 pm
Ah yes, gooey the pathetic liar is back, this time making a transparently pitiful attempt at misdirection.
It is accused, rightly, of using ridiculous hypotheticals, and how does it respond?
By MAKING UP NEW CLAIMS that are not hypotheticals, but ARE NOT THE RIDICULOUS HYPOTHETICALS THAT IT WAS RIGHTLY ACCUSED OF USING PREVIOUSLY.
A truly pathetic display of intellectual dishonesty.
But, as the gooey as brought them up, and as they are actually rather enlightening of what is going on in the gooey’s despicable mind, we might as well consider them now.
A violation of THE BODILY AUTONOMY OF FEMALES.
Another violation of A WOMAN’S RIGHT TO BODILY AUTONOMY.
The right to CHOOSE to have an abortion is the SAME as the right to CHOOSE NOT to have an abortion.
A forced abortion is EXACTLY THE SAME as denial of abortion.
Again, ANOTHER violation of individual autonomy.
All three, violations of BODILY AUTONOMY. All three, EXACTLY THE SAME as the gooey’s transparent desire to take away a woman’s right to choose an abortion. All three, EXACTLY THE SAME as the gooey’s transparent desire to control when young people have sex.
The people of desire for and commit gendercide, forced abortion, and state-run eugenics and euthanasia are the gooey’s IDEOLOGICAL BEDMATES, his fellow tyrant slavemasters.
That the gooey would even think to bring them up simply reveals the utter depths of hypocrisy to which it has sunk, and continues to sink.
Utterly pathetic.
consciousness razor:
September 2nd, 2012 at 11:07 pm
Don’t even try to shift the burden. You haven’t given any reason to believe free will exists, and you haven’t said how anyone can square responsibility with free will. Do you ever do any thinking for yourself, or do you just let others do it then ignore and distort everything they say?
If a rock is caused to fall downhill and that causes an avalanche, we say that rock is responsible for the avalanche. Even though something else (e.g., a gust of wind, a temperature change, etc.) must have caused the rock to move, we can’t leave the rock out of the picture, as it is a significant part of the explanation of the immediate causes of the avalanche. Likewise, if some person kicked the rock which caused the avalanche, they are responsible. (Or maybe two people kicked the rock together, with a third coercing them to do so with a gun. Obviously, one thing being responsible does not exclude other things from also being responsible, but that’s beside the point.)
Of course that is not all there is to it. In the case of humans (or similar), the question becomes whether there is some additional sense of “responsibility” which applies to humans (perhaps varying from person to person or in different situations) but not to something like a rock. There is. We can respond in ways (and to different kinds of stimuli) that a rock cannot, which is to say we have an ability to respond that rocks do not. We can perceive things, remember things, predict what will occur when we do things, decide which things we want to occur, and so on. Rocks can’t do that. And those are types of responses to stuff out there in the environment, which means they are caused by that stuff, none of which is magical. Those kinds of responses distinguish us from a rock by being what accounts for agency and specifically moral responsibility. However, the relevant point is that the very concept of responsibility, with or without the moral components, requires that you are responding in some way to something else. Or the term doesn’t mean anything at all.
(Like “free will” and “god” so often are, maybe it isn’t even supposed to mean anything. Maybe it’s only supposed to be a comfy-sounding word that’s really just a lot of nonsense, but that clearly wouldn’t be a valid option for something that actually exists.)
So you tell me: if we freely will something to happen, and that means nothing caused us to have that will, what would it even mean to say we have responsibility? What would we have responsibility of, or be responding to, or responsible for? Would it be the lack of things which caused us to act a certain way, or the inability to weigh different factors in our decisions, since those factors are assumed not to exist? How would that make any sense at all?
No, don’t treat me like a baby. I’m an adult who’s capable of abandoning positions by thinking for myself, but I’d rather not be manipulated by dishonest fuckweasels like yourself. But I’d need to know what the fuck your position is, assuming you even have one that can be articulated coherently. So you can shove your arrogant, evasive “baby steps” bullshit. This is quite obviously hard for you, not for us.
Amphiox:
September 2nd, 2012 at 11:59 pm
Only the most rigid of blinkered absolutist minds would even find this the slightest bit of a dilemma at all.
Ing: DOOM DOOM DOOM DOOM DOOM DEATH DOOM DOOM DOOOOOOOM THE END!:
September 3rd, 2012 at 12:12 am
When an engine fails do you punish it, fix it or do nothing because it lacks will and thus isn’t responsible?
Ing: DOOM DOOM DOOM DOOM DOOM DEATH DOOM DOOM DOOOOOOOM THE END!:
September 3rd, 2012 at 12:15 am
Now I’m a christian but I have to admit Joey I don’t see why you’re so hung up on the moral responsibility. The Atonement is all about moving the unbearable responsibility of sin away from people onto Christ, so it’s not a concept that’s consistent with Christianity anyway
Ing: DOOM DOOM DOOM DOOM DOOM DEATH DOOM DOOM DOOOOOOOM THE END!:
September 3rd, 2012 at 12:17 am
Oh and as a Christian I of course think the only logical solution is to go out and kill a child bellow the age of accountability, preferably an infant. This is a great idea because the child gets to go straight to heaven without being tempted by sin, and you can have enough time to repent before you get the death penalty and get to heaven yourself! it’s the only logical conclusion.
Hurin, Midnight DJ on the Backwards Music Station:
September 3rd, 2012 at 12:30 am
Joey
I don’t think it does, or at least not by very much. When I said
I didn’t specify anything abnormal or wrong about the baby, other than a severe lack of capacity to develop normal cognition. I assume the thing that Anne said, that you are telling me I disagree with, is that
(emphasis mine)
But I actually agree with that statement. Note the emphasis, and the fact that the baby from my hypothetical (which has no sentience or sapience but is otherwise healthy) doesn’t satisfy her conditions for killing the baby. If we take that baby and add some sort of birth defect which is not treatable and causes it horrible pain, then I actually agree with Anne that killing it is justified. I think living things should be spared unnecessary pain whenever possible. By the way, that is also the why for not killing the baby that lacks sentience but is otherwise healthy.
consciousness razor:
September 3rd, 2012 at 12:42 am
There’s at least one option you left out: prayer. It’s exactly like doing nothing, except that it’s also a complete waste of time.
cm's changeable moniker:
September 3rd, 2012 at 3:34 pm
In the UK, yes. Oh, yes.
strange gods before me ॐ:
September 3rd, 2012 at 4:46 pm
Them who are amused by my cataloguing of plagiarism will be amused again.
opposablethumbs:
September 3rd, 2012 at 4:52 pm
cm’s changeable moniker, I haven’t been to the youtube link but I presume you refer to the practice of giving them a stern warning and then – if they fail to mend their ways – a damn good thrashing?
cm's changeable moniker:
September 3rd, 2012 at 5:19 pm
opposablethumbs, yes. A “count to three” is also involved. :-)
—
joey vs. Amphiox:
It’s more subtle than that. There’s a toxic intersection between the one-child policy and Chinese preference for sons that has resulted in situations where you can have one child, but if it’s not a boy, you can try again.
From there, people choose sex-selective abortions to achieve the desired goal.
cm's changeable moniker:
September 3rd, 2012 at 5:39 pm
… for example (though I suspect you know this already):
China’s excess males, sex selective abortion, and one child policy
cm's changeable moniker:
September 3rd, 2012 at 6:45 pm
Nope. Disappointed. How hard is an href?
cm's changeable moniker:
September 3rd, 2012 at 8:16 pm
Well, I’ve been watching the Mighty Boosh.
So, some good has come out of today. :-)
Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls:
September 3rd, 2012 at 8:36 pm
Considering that it is above the reply square, not very hard. Unless one is a complete and utter idjit, who can’t even look up HTML tags. If they can’t, they have nothing cogent to say ever…
cm's changeable moniker:
September 3rd, 2012 at 9:10 pm
Then why didn’t Tis use it?
strange gods before me ॐ:
September 3rd, 2012 at 9:29 pm
It’s even easier than rewriting half the content. That’s the weird part.
+++++
Well, this has brought back memories.
This well-written comment from him. Lifted either directly from Iain MacSaorsa or via the collaborative An Anarchist FAQ.
And this makes me a little bit embarrassed that I said nothing at the time. But I thought it would derail the project. I dunno.
chigau (違わない):
September 3rd, 2012 at 10:16 pm
2009?
What’s up ॐ?
strange gods before me ॐ:
September 3rd, 2012 at 10:45 pm
I mentioned a couple weeks ago that the lifting from Bob Black’s The Libertarian as Conservative had stuck with me. Turns out it happened in the Why are Texans so unpatriotic? thread.
Some unholy jumble of guilt about never saying anything back then because it would derail, and aggravation now to see that it’s still going on, and more guilt about seeing comments like these.
Rev. BigDumbChimp:
September 3rd, 2012 at 10:54 pm
It Is really strange. Especially after being called out on it rather publicly.
consciousness razor:
September 3rd, 2012 at 11:13 pm
But now this comment from him, quoting part of KG’s response, has a nice little hint of irony in it:
So I guess it all evens out in the end.
strange gods before me ॐ:
September 4th, 2012 at 12:39 am
Astonishing denial of the obvious.
strange gods before me ॐ:
September 4th, 2012 at 2:07 am
Obvious now acknowledged, but I’m still being bad, just because I know the fall of every sparrow and I neglected to introduce myself as the Lord thy God, who brought thee out of the land of Egypt.
Harrumph. I’m going to go
lick toadsrain frogs.KG:
September 4th, 2012 at 3:23 am
That’s a pretty good summary of the compatibilist case!
KG:
September 4th, 2012 at 4:31 am
joey the shameless liar,
Because young people typically rely on them for both.
Here’s an update from 2004
So, since this is the first item that came up when I googled “nih study condoms”, you’re clearly lying again: you just used the study that gave results you liked. I also cited a more recent study that does show a level of protection against HPV.
I couldn’t give a shit about your apologies, since there is no reason to believe they are sincere. The point is, you are established as a habitual and persistent liar, so nothing you say can be taken at face value. Your arguments are, as I have shown, based on premises that are not, as you dishonestly claim, generally held in this community, so their validity or otherwise is of no interest.
You’re lying again: that point was most certainly met. It is a clear violation of bodily autonomy to force a woman to go through the dangerous procedure of giving birth if that is not the medically most advisable way of ending the pregnancy.
And it’s still complete, dishonest crap. Regarding your own perception as the only thing that matters is psychopathic selfishness, and it does not follow from physicalism – if it did, you would be able to show how, which you never even attempted – you simply repeated your assertion again and again. There is nothing irrational about caring about other people for themselves, and I made it quite clear repeatedly that I do care about other people for themselves.
Incidentally, some atheists do believe in an objective moral code. I don’t, but what is quite obvious is that “God’s will” does not provide one, since one can simply ask why one should obey God’s rules – other than out of self-interest.
No, physicalism does not imply that feelings “are only biochemical reactions”, and I do not know of any prominent physicalist who has said that they are. When someone talks about their feelings, you can draw inferences about what they are likely to do, other feelings they are likely to have, etc., without knowing anything about biochemical reactions: if feelings were only biochemical reactions, this would not be possible. What physicalism does say is that feelings, thoughts and other mental phenomena, are wholly instantiated in physical events*: that the latter are in principle sufficient to account for the existence of the former. If you are going to argue against physicalism, it is both dishonest and ineffective to argue against a strawman version of the position, which is what you constantly do with all the positions you oppose. Nor, if feelings were nothing but biochemical reactions, would it follow that exclusive concern with your own brain state would be a rational response: it could not possibly do so, since “rational” would then have no meaning.
In the first place, a single example is obviously insufficient: you don’t even answer the simple questions I put to you, so I’ll put them again. Does the “inviolable” right to life mean you cannot kill even in self-defense or defense of another? Does it mean that the government should force one person to give up a kidney to save another’s life? If your “axiom” is of any use, it should surely enable you to answer such simple questions. The fact that you fail to do so speaks volumes.
Now to your specific example. It isn’t, in fact, nearly specific enough. I am sure everyone here would agree that the parents would be wrong to kill such an infant in most circumstances – I certainly would. But suppose the infant is born in the middle of a famine. The mother is too malnourished to produce enough milk to keep it alive for long, and there are no other sources of milk available. I’m sure you feel able to sit in judgement over parents who, in those desperate circumstances, decide to kill the infant as quickly and painlessly as possible, but I don’t. Similarly, suppose the infant is born with a condition that ensures that it will have a short and painful life. Again, I’m sure you are smug and self-righteous enough to condemn them if they decide that a quick and painless death is better for the infant than the agony it would otherwise endure, but I’m not. In practice, such infants are often given only palliative care – their life is not deliberately shortened, but neither is it deliberately prolonged – but presumably to you this is a violation of their “inviolable right to life”.
*Not, I would argue, wholly in biochemical reactions, but that’s a side issue here.
Antiochus Epiphanes:
September 4th, 2012 at 6:44 am
*erk*
As much as the internetz has made it easier to plagiarise, it has also made it easier to detect plagiarism. This is my least favorite activity. I have really great software for evaluating documents, but my heart still sinks every time a paper comes up suspect*.
As pathetic as Tis’ excuse is, I find it to be the second most common one offered, after “I didn’t know plagiarism was wrong.” I find that some students are sincere when offering this excuse.
*and this happens all of the time, even though students know I have really great software.
dysomniak, darwinian socialist:
September 4th, 2012 at 9:40 am
Maybe ‘Tis should make use of such software himself. He could at least make his theft less transparent. Running the first 5000 characters of that comment through plagtracker.com’s free service reports 87% stolen content.
Amphiox:
September 4th, 2012 at 10:17 am
Notice how the gooey’s “example” does NOT, in fact, even come close to answering the question. It does not define what it means by “dignity” or “inviolable rights”. And indeed the last sentence is COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT TO THE QUESTION AT ALL.
Instead it deliberately sets up a false and outrageous dichotomy, artificially juxtaposing the gooey’s lack of actual response with something that few would argue against (especially that last part, whose deliberate inclusion for just this purpose is another example of the gooey’s utterly bankrupt intellectual dishonesty), in effect, “borrowing” (stealing, actually) legitimacy from something in reality only tangentially related.
And of course, the goal and effect of such a juxtaposition is to delegitimize any questioning of the gooey’s original premises and the silencing of dissent.
A classic strategy of tyrant slavemasters everywhere.
Utterly pathetic.
strange gods before me ॐ:
September 4th, 2012 at 1:14 pm
KG,
No, it is not, because nowhere does consciousness razor make the mistake of calling any of that “free will”.
It’s a pretty good summary of something else, which is not free will; as Peter van Inwagen says:
«Compatibilism is the thesis that determinism and the free-will thesis could both be true (And incompatibilism is the denial of compatibilism).
Whatever you do, do not use ‘‘compatibilism’’ as a name for the thesis that moral responsibility is compatible with determinism. This can only cause confusion. If you must have a name for this thesis, invent a new one: ‘‘MR-compatibilism’’ or some such.» [emphasis mine]
+++++
Antiochus Epiphanes,
I don’t see any response. Am I missing something, or did you perhaps mistake Flewellyn’s response for one from ‘Tis?
Amphiox:
September 4th, 2012 at 1:26 pm
Another good example of the gooey’s rhetorical dishonesty:
This arose directly from its first attempt at dishonest hypotheticals, for which it was summarily and easily destroyed.
And so it seemingly acknowledges this destruction, but juxtaposes this acknowledgment with this:
And in so doing, lend apparent credibility to it. But what the gooey deliberately DOES NOT acknowledge and leaves out, is that that second part is ALSO a blatantly dishonest hypothetical which as also addressed and also summarily destroyed in that prior thread, and that its tedious harping on this piece of dishonesty was one of things that got it exiled to the Thunderdome in the first place.
No, laws of this kind are not justifiable because they are unnecessary (the situations where such laws would apply occur so rarely in real life that separate legislation to address them are a waste of legislative resources and time, and when they do occur, they are already covered under broader existing laws anyways), ineffective (these situations are so rare and individually unique that they each need to be dealt with on a case by case basis, by the individuals most directly involved, and cannot be well addressed with broad, generalized legislation), and heavy-handed (by imposing broad, generalized restrictions on situations that need to be dealt with on a case by case basis, such legislation actually HURTS the ability for the individuals involved to make the most appropriate decisions).
This has NOTHING to do with the question of the fetus having or not having inherent worth, or how that worth compares with the inherent worth of the woman in the event of conflict between the two principles. There are LOTS of things that have inherent worth of various degrees for which it is NOT appropriate or justified to regulate through legislation.
consciousness razor:
September 4th, 2012 at 1:29 pm
Those are fightin’ words!
Antiochus Epiphanes:
September 4th, 2012 at 2:59 pm
sgbm (and bystanders): That’s exactly what I did. My apologies to ‘Tis. Misattribution is as bad as no attribution.
Antiochus Epiphanes:
September 4th, 2012 at 3:05 pm
Or worse, in this case.
KG:
September 4th, 2012 at 3:36 pm
SGBM,
Dennett is undoubtedly a compatibilist (at least, in any sense of the term I am familiar with), but consciousness razor’s comment could have been taken straight from Freedom Evolves. Van Inwagen believes that determinism is incompatible not only with free will, but with moral responsibility, so I’m mystified that you rely on his view of incompatibilism, since it clearly contradicts consciousness razor’s, and, as I understand it, your own.
ChasCPeterson:
September 4th, 2012 at 3:39 pm
gah.
Plagiarism is bullshit. I hate plagiarism. ‘Tis (ha) the season for that speech, too, in lecture and lab, and then plus the demonstration of the might and invincibility of TurnItIndotCom, and yet some will still try it and then I have to be the badguy plus do a bunch of paperwork.
bah.
strange gods before me ॐ:
September 4th, 2012 at 6:30 pm
I noticed. I was debating whether to poke at him for it, but, you know, not everything Dennett says is vacuous — and more importantly what consciousness razor said simply was not about free will.
I initially felt consciousness razor’s summary to verge on wordplay, but perhaps it only verges. Upon consideration, it appears to be an account of “moral responsibility” which could make sense even though “moral blameworthiness” and “moral praiseworthiness” are incoherent. I may borrow it for my temporally unidirectional hold-ourselves-morally-responsible-for-the-future notion.
I don’t. Van Inwagen holds libertarian free will to be true, while I hold hard indeterminism.
All I point to van Inwagen for are his correct points that free will is not identical to moral responsibility, and compatibilism refers to the compatibility of free will with determinism (or indeterminism with roughly “adequate determinism” — the world we appear to live in).
The usual sorting device here is not from van Inwagen, anyway, rather it’s Harry Frankfurt’s principle of alternate possibilities: “a person is morally responsible for what they have done only if they could have done otherwise.” If the PAP doesn’t hold in all cases, then there isn’t a 1 to 1 correspondence of free will to moral responsibility.
consciousness razor:
September 4th, 2012 at 7:52 pm
Well the part KG didn’t quote was about libertarian free will, but that’s not compatibilist free will, so I don’t get it either. If somehow my argument that LFW and R don’t mix is also an argument that CFW and D do, I’m stumped. They don’t look to me like they have any terms in common at all.
I’ll own that, up to a point. Part of this is an argument about words, how people use them and what they imply. If I have it wrong, someone else could do a bit of their own wordplay, saying just what it does mean and using it that way consistently. But if it’s just going to remain unanalyzed as some murky abstraction, we may never agree on it. No matter what, it’ll be awfully difficult making it consistent with an incoherent or vacuous term like “free will,” so I guess it doesn’t make a big difference either way.
Ms. Daisy Cutter, Vile Human Being:
September 4th, 2012 at 7:56 pm
Just a note.
If you seriously claim that “JAQ’ing off” shames people who masturbate, you are a fucking wanker, and you’re the type of person who has turned SJ into a fucking joke elsewhere on the internet.
Antiochus Epiphanes:
September 4th, 2012 at 8:11 pm
Ms. Daisy Cutter?
Is there a referent?
Ms. Daisy Cutter, Vile Human Being:
September 4th, 2012 at 8:22 pm
AE: I have no referent to which I can link. I was told about this voice to voice.
John Morales:
September 4th, 2012 at 8:28 pm
ॐ:
Neither is everything you say. ;)
(But I’d rather read him than you, nonetheless)
Antiochus Epiphanes:
September 4th, 2012 at 8:41 pm
I suppose voice to voice, no one says “Jay-Ay-Cueing Off”.
John Morales:
September 4th, 2012 at 8:52 pm
Antiochus, thus the difference between an acronym and an initialism.
Antiochus Epiphanes:
September 4th, 2012 at 9:41 pm
John: I know, I know. But I find it amusing to do some things wrong.
Antiochus Epiphanes:
September 4th, 2012 at 9:44 pm
Also, Ms. Daisy Cutter…I wasn’t trying to antagonize you. That’s how I say it to myself. I just think it’s funny.
Ms. Daisy Cutter, Vile Human Being:
September 4th, 2012 at 9:48 pm
Heh, AE, no worries, I didn’t take it as antagonistic. It was a reasonable question.
Stephen T:
September 4th, 2012 at 10:14 pm
Referent for JAQing off.
http://atheismplus.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=425&p=5111#p4966
John Morales:
September 5th, 2012 at 1:31 am
Here I sit, waiting for the snipers at the Lounge to venture forth for some chastisement.
mythbri:
September 5th, 2012 at 1:40 am
@John Morales
You are careful and precise in your comments. I’ve lurked at Pharyngula for a long time. You don’t say anything without fully intending it to be said. I don’t know why you chose to say that you were paraphrasing Jen when you said she couldn’t hack it, but I have no doubt that it was anything but deliberate. Poor timing and bad taste at best. Judgment and sneering at someone’s very real distress at worse. You can call it “truthful” if you want. I call it bullshit.
Way past my bedtime, so this is post and run.
chigau (違わない):
September 5th, 2012 at 1:41 am
John Morales from The Lounge #42
Trying to equate “I can’t take it anymore” and “can’t hack it” is not truthful.
Those who pointed this out are not “sniping”.
Your post would not exceed PZ’s “proportion” guidelines.
Your whole comment was thoroughly dishonest.
chigau (違わない):
September 5th, 2012 at 1:42 am
and good night
SallyStrange: Elite Femi-Fascist Genius:
September 5th, 2012 at 1:44 am
Ahem. John Morales: you are an insensitive, over-literal, pompous, self-admitted troll. (Remember when you said you sometimes post about things you don’t care much about, just to stir the pot? That’s trolling and it’s rude.)
I wouldn’t miss you if you left.
John Morales:
September 5th, 2012 at 2:00 am
mythbri:
:)
–
Try Googling
"can't hack it" meaningif you care to be disabused of that notion.Yeah, it would have; from the Rules: “If you find yourself taking up 20% or more of a thread”.
(Count my comments up to that point as a proportion of the total, if you disbelieve me)
If you deny the meaning of common idioms, I suppose so.
–
But honest and truthful; you cannot deny my claims, only decry my character — for which I forgive you.
I’d miss you, so there’s that asymmetry. ;)
(But then, I’m not into being unfair to others)
–
Oddly enough, the Rules for the Lounge also state “No personal attacks allowed at all.”
(‘Twas not I that breached that particular rule)
It’s OK, I can hack it)
Ing: DOOM DOOM DOOM DOOM DOOM DEATH DOOM DOOM DOOOOOOOM THE END!:
September 5th, 2012 at 2:01 am
@JM
Not worth the effort
Ing: DOOM DOOM DOOM DOOM DOOM DEATH DOOM DOOM DOOOOOOOM THE END!:
September 5th, 2012 at 2:02 am
FFS. I’m seconding the “would not miss”
John Morales:
September 5th, 2012 at 2:06 am
Ing:
There there, you’re not that useless; your self-esteem issues are irrelevant, here.
I’d miss you too.
(You have unique capabilities with regard to pop culture references)
strange gods before me ॐ:
September 5th, 2012 at 2:07 am
Setár has a complaint with a technological solution!
No problem! I will gladly write a bot for you.
Just ask it a question about economics (or poison ivy herbicides). It will pass your question to Google, plagiarize the first result, make an error like changing “contractionary” to “contradictory”, and return it to you signed by ‘Tis Himself.
For a couple extra bucks you can feel the whole authentic experience — the bot will preface its reply with “Here’s something I wrote on the subject a few years ago.”
John Morales:
September 5th, 2012 at 2:09 am
ॐ, what, no Markov chain?
SallyStrange: Elite Femi-Fascist Genius:
September 5th, 2012 at 2:17 am
What would it take to get you to go away, John Morales?
dysomniak, darwinian socialist:
September 5th, 2012 at 2:18 am
@JM Markov chains are more creative.
strange gods before me ॐ:
September 5th, 2012 at 2:21 am
Hmmmm. Only for the trial version of the software. The paid version should preserve most of the text’s meaning. Authentic ‘Tistext is usually a meaningful, serious answer to the question.
I really wonder about that switching of “contractionary”, though.
SallyStrange: Elite Femi-Fascist Genius:
September 5th, 2012 at 2:23 am
Also, John Morales, “can’t hack it” means that you SHOULD be able to handle it and there’s something wrong with you if you can’t. Really. That’s what it means, I don’t care what Google says.
There’s nothing wrong with Jen McCreight.
Therefore you are fucking wrong. You are wrong because you are over-literal and insensitive, not because you are insufficiently concerned with being truthful.
You are factually and morally wrong, because you are an asshole.
I really would be cheered up if I could post here and not see your posts anymore.
athyco:
September 5th, 2012 at 2:23 am
“Hack” has the definition of “chop” so that “can’t hack it” does fall into acceptable paraphrase with “can’t take it.” If the word was purely a synonym for “chop,” for hard labor, I guess you’re home free.
But it’s not. You must have heard of a hack writer, John. You must know about the virtually broken-down, mistreated horses drawing hackney coaches. The connotation of “can’t hack it” also draws from those references in scorn of substandard output and ability.
You don’t see that?
John Morales:
September 5th, 2012 at 2:24 am
SallyStrange, I was here well before you, I shall likely be here after you — but a cheque or money order for no less than $10,000 would likely achieve your aim, once it clears.
(Why do you dislike my honesty so?)
consciousness razor:
September 5th, 2012 at 2:28 am
Yes, google knows all and will disabuse us when it’s convenient for you. I’ll skip the rather sparse result from the first link (an ESL site) and go to the second, an online dictionary with a more complete entry:
So what the fuck is her assignment, exactly? And how is she handling it inadequately?
Oh, hold on. Do you think maybe that’s not what she meant? Congratulations: you’ve started learning how to read better than a fucking chatbot.
When someone less dense and shitheaded than you says something like “I can’t take it anymore,” they usually (and this can be inferred from context) mean something like they will not put up with it anymore. It’s a fucking figure of speech, as anyone who wasn’t such a ridiculously pretentious asshole would know. What they’d also know is that it is not her fucking job to “take” or “hack” bullshit from dense, shitheaded fuckwits (like you, for example), so she clearly was not talking about whether or not she’s adequate at fulfilling that job or any other. Thus, it’s completely fucking boneheaded (or dishonest) of you to claim otherwise.
SallyStrange: Elite Femi-Fascist Genius:
September 5th, 2012 at 2:28 am
I never said nor implied that it is your honesty that causes me to dislike you, therefore your claim of extreme honesty is falsified.
strange gods before me ॐ:
September 5th, 2012 at 2:29 am
hehe
Ah, a feature request. For added authenticity, I’ll have the ‘Tisbot check An Anarchist FAQ first before it queries Google generally.
SallyStrange: Elite Femi-Fascist Genius:
September 5th, 2012 at 2:29 am
You’ve got a good 30 years or so on me, so I doubt it.
John Morales:
September 5th, 2012 at 2:30 am
athyco, since you acquiesce to my contention in your first sentence, your adduction of polysemy thereafter seems rather strained if not futile.
(But hey! At least you care about semantics)
–
I note no-one disputes my actual claim (rather than its perceived phraseological connotations) that we do know the identity of the, but not that of the victimisers*.
–
* Oh noes! I paraphrased again; the actual term was “bullies”. :)
John Morales:
September 5th, 2012 at 2:32 am
[erratum]
“… of the victim”, above.
SallyStrange: Elite Femi-Fascist Genius:
September 5th, 2012 at 2:34 am
So, it would take $10,000 for you to go away? Seriously? There’s no amount of mean anyone could be to you to convince you to seek out other fora? Certainly there are venues on the internet where assholishness such as yours is not only tolerated but praised.
strange gods before me ॐ:
September 5th, 2012 at 2:35 am
Less. I asked him already. Like 15 or 20, unless you’re much younger than I think you are.
John Morales:
September 5th, 2012 at 2:40 am
SallyStrange:
:)
That’s the spirit!
John Morales:
September 5th, 2012 at 2:44 am
SallyStrange:
You imagine I’m here for praise?
LOL.
(I don’t think there’s even one regular that hasn’t called me an asshole or worse — maybe (maybe Nerd, but I can’t think of another possible candidate))
SallyStrange: Elite Femi-Fascist Genius:
September 5th, 2012 at 2:46 am
You’re a liar, John Morales. You just lied, got called on it, and ignored it.
Since you claim to value honesty, this ought to bother you.
John Morales:
September 5th, 2012 at 2:47 am
[meta]
For the record, I was born on 5 November 1960 in Madrid, Spain.
(Senility beckons?)
John Morales:
September 5th, 2012 at 2:48 am
SallyStrange:
Eh?
(Do elaborate)
SallyStrange: Elite Femi-Fascist Genius:
September 5th, 2012 at 2:49 am
And honestly, I don’t understand at all why you’re here, whether it’s for praise or something else. I got over wanting to hang out with groups of people who don’t like me in 8th grade. That’s age 13 or thereabouts.
You are an asshole, and I’m not, and I don’t really understand what motivates assholes. I don’t really care to, except that I really would like to know what, besides cash money, it would take to get you to inflict yourself on some other internet forum.
SallyStrange: Elite Femi-Fascist Genius:
September 5th, 2012 at 2:51 am
Okay.
So.
Apparently.
strange gods before me ॐ:
September 5th, 2012 at 2:52 am
woot! I remembered the year and city.
I think we would all have to disperse or stop being interesting. It doesn’t matter to him whether we like him. He likes us, or most of us.
SallyStrange: Elite Femi-Fascist Genius:
September 5th, 2012 at 2:53 am
Also “I can’t take it anymore” really does not mean the same thing as “I can’t hack it,” and your refusal to admit you are wrong about that betrays a lack of honesty.
strange gods before me ॐ:
September 5th, 2012 at 2:54 am
I should fix this, since I’m pretty sure it’s a bit wrong.
There.
John Morales:
September 5th, 2012 at 2:56 am
CR quotes (if poorly):
In this case, situation, not assignment.
(Selective reading is selective)
I did quote her words after my paraphrase was questioned, you know… and she wrote “can’t” rather than “won’t”.
(You imagine they mean the same thing?)
Your flame-thrower has successfully incinerated that straw dummy.
(You proud of that?)
SallyStrange: Elite Femi-Fascist Genius:
September 5th, 2012 at 2:58 am
Could you speculate on what the “much” comes from? Does it depend on the person or the situation?
SallyStrange: Elite Femi-Fascist Genius:
September 5th, 2012 at 2:59 am
So, you still can’t admit that “can’t take it anymore” and “can’t hack it” really are different phrases with different words and different meanings.
Pathetic.
consciousness razor:
September 5th, 2012 at 3:00 am
Her situation then, dipshit: give it. You failed to answer the questions.
(Failure is failure.)
SallyStrange: Elite Femi-Fascist Genius:
September 5th, 2012 at 3:01 am
I mean, this is obviously just John Morales’ ego talking.
Bad Vulcan!
John Morales:
September 5th, 2012 at 3:03 am
[meta]
ॐ, you know me better than SallyStrange.
(And your correction is meet)
–
SallyStrange @312, you imagine that’s a lie?
<snicker>
–
@318:
So, you contend that though she claims she “can’t take it”, she nonetheless “can hack it” for the same value of ‘it’?
(Listen to yourself!)
John Morales:
September 5th, 2012 at 3:07 am
cr: Definition from your own selected source: “situation or assignment”.
Your question: “”
(Why did you not write ‘situation’?)
Your new sig is duly noted.
strange gods before me ॐ:
September 5th, 2012 at 3:09 am
John, let me try to word this in a way you’ll care about.
Your phrasing reminds some people of an insult, and, relatedly, has the potential to make Jen feel even worse if she were to read it. I’m fairly sure you would prefer not to inadvertently make Jen feel worse. Considering that, it might be worthwhile — on the off chance that someone tells her about this discussion — for you to note that you did not intend any insult.
I’m not sure quite what you mean, but what I meant is that he generally likes to be liked, but it’s not so important to him that he’d leave if he were universally hated. So it doesn’t matter “much” — not enough to make a difference for your purposes.
SallyStrange: Elite Femi-Fascist Genius:
September 5th, 2012 at 3:11 am
I don’t imagine; I know why it is I don’t like you, and it’s not your alleged honesty.
Your dodging, snickering, and attempt to read my mind are noted.
–
I believe the value of “it” implied by both phrases are quite different. “I can’t take it” refers to an “it” which is a situation that is imposed, abusive in this case, not self-selected, and unnecessary. “I can’t hack it” refers to an “it” which is a necessary task or self-selected situation.
If the value for “it” were the same for both phrases, you would be right, but it’s not, so you’re wrong.
Take your own advice.
SallyStrange: Elite Femi-Fascist Genius:
September 5th, 2012 at 3:14 am
More dodging.
John Morales:
September 5th, 2012 at 3:15 am
CR:
You need me to find information for you?
Here: Goodbye for now
Pullquote:
(You want me to emphasise relevant bits?)
AshPlant:
September 5th, 2012 at 3:17 am
You know, John, I think you’ve probably garnered enough negative responses to make anyone not fanatically dedicated to being right all the time, no matter how trivially, semantically or technically, think again about their choice of words. Dismissing Jen as being unable to hack it is rude, and there’s very little gain for you in continuing to stick up for yourself against community criticism, other than a succession of the smug little nano-victories you seem to adore so much.
I ask this in all genuineness; are you aspergic or otherwise socially impaired? Because your behaviour here reminds me exactly of my aspergic brother, who will routinely blurt out bizarre phrases like “You’re being a fucking cunt*, AshPlant.” or “You’re a bitch*!” in response to utterly trivial things, like me disagreeing with him on game rules, or the mother asking if he’d like to take his jacket off in the house. He’ll then defend these outbursts with that damn catchphrase, ‘I’m not being rude, I’m just being honest.’ Well. Yes. Honest about your feelings, maybe, but, actually, still quite rude and not exactly defensible. Aside from anything else, there are times when strict uncompromised honesty simply isn’t called for, but that level of social awareness is not something I associate with Aspergers.
Now go forth and find another way of putting things that doesn’t imply you think Jen isn’t good enough.
SallyStrange: Elite Femi-Fascist Genius:
September 5th, 2012 at 3:18 am
Oh well. Thanks for taking the time to explain, anyway.
John Morales:
September 5th, 2012 at 3:26 am
SallyStrange, fine, have it your way.
She can hack it (the situation), though the stress is getting to her.
She can hack it (the situation), though she’s been miserable.
She can hack it (the situation), though she can’t focus or enjoy her hobbies or work.
She can hack it (the situation), though she spends her precious free time angry, on the verge of tears, or sobbing.
She can hack it (the situation), though the only solution she sees is to unplug.
She can hack it (the situation), though she feels she failed people for not being able to deal with all of this despite the support she’s been given.
(I stand corrected; she’s hacking it just fine)
</snark>
consciousness razor:
September 5th, 2012 at 3:31 am
He probably thinks he’s toying with us, proudly demonstrating his expert trolling skills.
Why would he think that’s a good idea right now? No fucking clue. He’s better than us, so maybe he’ll be kind enough to explain it one day, when people here still won’t give a fuck about him.
John Morales:
September 5th, 2012 at 3:34 am
AshPlant:
There is no such dismissal, there is but acknowledgement of her very own claim.
(What you characterise as nano-victories are but the repudiation of false claims; as for community criticism, this is trivial in context — I’ve had worse, and far-better founded at that)
I don’t think I have Asperger’s, and I can fit into any milieu — but yeah, I’m asocial by nature.
Whatever makes you imagine I think she ain’t good enough?
Again: my original contention (the which engendered all the opprobrium towards me) merely stated that we know who the victim is but not who the victimisers (“bullies” in the original) are. No more than that.
(FWIW: I think she’s coped with more than most people could, and for longer to boot; you may care to note what I wrote in the Lounge)
–
(This is the circle-jerk hive-mind echo-chamber in action!)
AshPlant:
September 5th, 2012 at 3:34 am
Why is apologising for your choice of words so difficult, John?
John Morales:
September 5th, 2012 at 3:38 am
CR, I see you now descend to the third person perspective.
(Got anything to say about the inclusive OR you yourself quoted?)
SallyStrange: Elite Femi-Fascist Genius:
September 5th, 2012 at 3:39 am
Dearie me, John Morales, clearly you don’t stand corrected! Why do you lie? Oh, right, silly me: the snark tag turns a paragraph of anger and bitterness into Honesty™. Just like Ashplant’s brother.
As I said before, and as others have said, and you’ve repeatedly ignored (I won’t speculate on your motives for ignoring, but it doesn’t make you look good): the phrase “hacking it” is mostly used to refer to a situation in which the assignment or situation is appropriate and self-chosen, and failure to “hack it” denotes general incompetence. Ordinary people are able to “hack it”; people who are failures cannot.
I realize Jen said that she feels like a failure but I disagree with her assessment. I don’t think any ordinary person can or should be expected to “hack” the gales of hostility and harassment she has encountered. Retreat in the face of such inhumane treatment is a normal, healthy response to the situation.
Do you think that Jen’s feeling is correct, that she not only feels like a failure–she is a failure?
If not then you’d best choose a different phrase than “she can’t hack it.”
If you do think she’s a failure, well, you’re an asshole, but we already knew that. And of course you’d also be wrong.
John Morales:
September 5th, 2012 at 3:43 am
AshPlant, I have no difficulty in apologising when it’s merited; you might care to try to convince me an apology is merited.
(Have you read my #329?)
–
Best I can do is say it would have been (in retrospect) better to quote her own words (“can’t cope”) rather than idiomatically paraphrase (“can’t hack it”).
Same semantics, different words.
(Ironically, tone arguments are supposedly not welcome here)
SallyStrange: Elite Femi-Fascist Genius:
September 5th, 2012 at 3:46 am
LOL! Why, your choice of words! Specifically, the phrase, “she can’t hack it,” which is applied in situations where the person who is failing to cope is expected to cope, and where ordinary people could cope, and where only failures and those who aren’t good enough can’t cope.
Words. Words are what make people think things about you. Yes indeedy.
In fact it did mean more than that. The fact that multiple people took “she can’t hack it” to specifically mean “she is not good enough” is enough to disprove your assertion. Come on, Humpty Dumpty. You’ve been around Pharyngula long enough to know what they say about intentions. And the meaning of words.
In that case, it makes absolutely no sense that you would cling so stubbornly to a phrase which specifically implies failing to cope with a situation that ordinary people would be able to cope with.
consciousness razor:
September 5th, 2012 at 3:49 am
Yes. When I’m talking to another person about a third, I refer to the third in the third person. If that’s a “descent,” then maybe I don’t want to go up.
opposablethumbs:
September 5th, 2012 at 3:52 am
JM, you have demonstrated time and again that you have an exceptional command of language. Therefore you appear self-deceiving (or disingenuous) at best and to be deliberately needling at worst when you say that you (still) cannot see any difference between “can’t take it any more” and “can’t hack it”. The literal meaning may be the same but the connotations are different; the implied opinion of the speaker towards the person who can’t take it/hack it is different.
strange gods before me ॐ:
September 5th, 2012 at 3:54 am
Well, I don’t really care about any apology, but — in case you didn’t notice my #323 — I do think it would be worthwhile to specify that you intended no insult.
opposablethumbs:
September 5th, 2012 at 3:56 am
Oh, SallyStrange said it much better in #336.
John Morales:
September 5th, 2012 at 3:57 am
SallyStrange:
<sigh>
Around and around we go.
Is is not by now obvious that when I wrote “can’t hack it” it was a paraphrase of “can’t take it”?
Had I merely quoted that, would everything have been fine and none of this discussion have taken place?
(You’re arguing about the terminology, not my original contention!)
A failure at what?
Obviously, she hasn’t failed either at inspiring people or being a successful blogger; equally obviously, she has failed at persevering with blogging* in the face of months’ worth of personal abuse and misrepresentation.
It is not I who thinks of people in such simplistic terms as ‘failures’ or ‘successes’ — never mind the actual logic of it (remember? “A failure at what?”).
–
* For now; she has left the door open and I’m personally hopeful she will resume in good time.
Setár, self-appointed Elf-Sheriff of the FreethoughtBlogs Star Chamber:
September 5th, 2012 at 4:00 am
Still not over the strengthsplaining, eh John? Tell me, should I still be standing up to bullies myself without demanding support to either correct or throw out the bully (because the bully is totally going to listen to me alone, right?) and get a more egalitarian social structure?
SallyStrange: Elite Femi-Fascist Genius:
September 5th, 2012 at 4:02 am
Generally, when people say things like, “I feel like a failure,” they mean “a failure at life,” or “a failure in general.” It’s never true but a lot of people have this feeling and it’s quite distressing.
You don’t know this–because you’re asocial, I surmise.
It would be wise to defer to people who aren’t asocial on matters such as these.
Just another small example of how your arrogance trips you up.
John Morales:
September 5th, 2012 at 4:04 am
ॐ, huh. Yeah, I missed your #323; I’ve been furiously multitasking (puppies don’t feed themselves!)*.
I can’t see the point, but FWIW of course I didn’t intend insult. My comment would have been identical in meaning if I’d just quoted her own words (“can’t take it”) instead — it was a pedantic note that we know who she is but not who all the bullies were, contra the claim I was addressing.
–
* Worth a thought, this business of replying thoughtfully to many comments aimed at one in near real-time; it’s what contentious outsiders and trolls experience.
SallyStrange: Elite Femi-Fascist Genius:
September 5th, 2012 at 4:07 am
It’s been obvious all along; what is mystifying is your inability to admit that the paraphrase was at best inaccurate and at worst insulting to Jen.
Yup! Is there something wrong with that? Different words mean different things. Different phrases mean different things. That is why they are different and not the same.
I do not care about your original intention. We are arguing about the meaning of words. Well, really we are arguing about how to not hurt people’s feelings when you aren’t intending to, which is, as I say, a subject on which you should defer to people who have better empathy and communication skills than you do.
SallyStrange: Elite Femi-Fascist Genius:
September 5th, 2012 at 4:09 am
Sorry, contention, not intention.
SallyStrange: Elite Femi-Fascist Genius:
September 5th, 2012 at 4:15 am
For fuck’s sake, no, it would not have been identical in meaning! It would have had a different meaning! We know this because you did not quote her–you used different words instead. And guess what? They had a different meaning. So different that several people took an insult from your words where none was intended.
SallyStrange: Elite Femi-Fascist Genius:
September 5th, 2012 at 4:17 am
And this is why I’m skeptical about John Morales’ claims of hyper-honesty.
John Morales:
September 5th, 2012 at 4:20 am
SallyStrange:
I’m hardly in a position to claim it wasn’t seen that way, but I maintain it was not inaccurate.
But, because of that, I’m more than happy to retract the original phrasing and just quote Jen, thus:
– begin amended quotation –
Improbable Joe:
– end amended quotation –
IOW: we know who the real victim is more so than “who the REAL bullies are”.
(And yes, it’s entirely possible that someone who can cope in the same circumstances is also a victim, for the nitpickers)
John Morales:
September 5th, 2012 at 4:31 am
[meta]
Well, that was invigorating!
:|
SallyStrange: Elite Femi-Fascist Genius:
September 5th, 2012 at 4:33 am
rorschach:
September 5th, 2012 at 4:38 am
Who the fuck are you? Greetings from the community.
John Morales:
September 5th, 2012 at 4:39 am
SallyStrange, go Google and find an example where “can’t hack it” means other than “can’t cope with it” or “can’t take it”.
Go on, try it! — because I’m pretty sure it is you who is misusing the idiom.
feedmybrain:
September 5th, 2012 at 4:42 am
So now JM has agreed with what was being said all along I have a question that I’ve been pondering.
Frankie Boyle (Scottish comedian) caused controversy with this joke.
It got complaints for insulting the less abled. My first thought was that it’s a joke at the expense of Saudi Arabia’s draconian laws and not the team but is there unacceptable backsplash?
feedmybrain:
September 5th, 2012 at 4:44 am
Oh, I was wrong. He hasn’t agreed at all. And round and round we go.
rorschach:
September 5th, 2012 at 4:49 am
Now, English is not my first language as you all know, but googling I find this reference to 60′s slang:
That seems to be synonymous with “can’t cope” or “can’t deal with it”.
Nick Gotts (formerly KG):
September 5th, 2012 at 4:51 am
John Morales,
Different phrases can have the same denotation, but very different connotations: “can’t hack it” has strong connotations of failure, incompetence andor insufficient determination which “can’t cope” and “can’t take it” lack.
SallyStrange: Elite Femi-Fascist Genius:
September 5th, 2012 at 4:56 am
Right, sure, me and everybody else here, which is just a wild coincidence, because Google is the ultimate authority on everything and supplants all our lived experiences…
John, no. Words and phrases don’t work that way. If Google agrees with you on the meaning of “hack it,” then I’ll be sure to keep that in mind the next time I’m talking to Google. In the meantime, I’d advise you, if you want to facilitate communication with people posting here, you stick with the commonly accepted meaning of the phrase as determined by the usage of the actual people conversing with each other right here and now.
However, since you’ve insisted and my curiosity is piqued…
Better luck next time, asshole!
strange gods before me ॐ:
September 5th, 2012 at 4:56 am
John, in my experience, which I suspect is similar to Sally’s — “can’t hack it” has, for some reason I’m unable to pinpoint, acquired a connotation of derogating weakness, while “can’t take it” has less so, and “can’t cope” least of all.
So while I couldn’t say confidently that you’re using the idiom wrongly, I think there may be polysemy here, such that Sally is not using it wrongly.
SallyStrange: Elite Femi-Fascist Genius:
September 5th, 2012 at 4:57 am
I tried html but I couldn’t hack it.
Strong connotations of failure!
SallyStrange: Elite Femi-Fascist Genius:
September 5th, 2012 at 5:01 am
Who needs experience when there’s GOOGLE?
strange gods before me ॐ:
September 5th, 2012 at 5:09 am
Some of this is gratuitous.
John Morales:
September 5th, 2012 at 5:12 am
SallyStrange, hm.
I wrote “can’t hack it“ (an idiom is an entire phrase, not just part of it), you looked up “hack”. Obviously, I used it as a verb and not a noun, so the noun meanings are inapplicable.
So, let’s look at your adduced links:
From your first link: “to perform one’s duties.”, which implies that “can’t hack it” is equivalent to “can’t perform one’s duties”.
Not quite what I meant, but pretty close — obviously, Jen’s blogging is only a duty in the sense she wishes to do it.
From your second link: (1) “to work on a computer programming or computer software problem.” — clearly a different sense and inapplicable to what I wrote.
(2) “to play with a Hacky Sack (footbag.)” — clearly a different sense and inapplicable to what I wrote (and what the heck is a footbag?).
(3) “to cough.” — clearly a different sense and inapplicable to what I wrote.
(4) “to explore the problem-solving capabilities of a computer and its software.” — clearly a different sense and inapplicable to what I wrote.
(5) “to withstand.” — precisely the sense of what I wrote and entirely applicable to what I wrote.
(6) “to use a particular computing technology.” — clearly a different sense and inapplicable to what I wrote.
–
In short, you’ve looked up a single word and used the noun meaning, rather than the intransitive verb which clearly applies, and when I look at your own link, it supports my contention.
(Try harder!)
John Morales:
September 5th, 2012 at 5:16 am
SallyStrange:
And “can’t take it” has no connotations of failure?
(heh)
Thing about Google is that it’s not a human with prejudices and ideologies; it’s a mindless non-curated bot that collates internet information and provides access to such.
(As close to an independent arbiter as you’re gonna find)
John Morales:
September 5th, 2012 at 5:18 am
ॐ, I grant that in the USA such connotations might apply, but at best you’re speaking of a matter of degree, not of kind — and that doesn’t reflect the accusations against me.
SallyStrange: Elite Femi-Fascist Genius:
September 5th, 2012 at 5:34 am
The accusations against you are to do with your stubbornness and your lack of empathy and your refusal to just accept that there are regional differences that you may be unaware of and your inability to recognize that your asocial tendencies blind you to things that seem obvious to other people and your arrogance and your inability to admit possible error and so on and so forth.
Really not a whole lot to do with the actual meaning of a particular phrase. It was just the launching point to comment on your overall pattern of behavior.
Nick Gotts (formerly KG):
September 5th, 2012 at 5:34 am
Let me admit I didn’t go back and read the context – the endlessly repetitive arguments about free will have long since bored me – it was an off-the-cuff comment; but if you’ve read Freedom Evolves (and if you haven’t, I once again recommend it), I think you will see what I mean.
That’s true on your interpretation of the term “free will”, but not mine, nor that of compatibilists in general, according to which we are morally responsible for (and can deserve praise or blame for), those and only those things we do freely (meaning, intentionally and without coercion or rationality-disabling pathologies). But in any case, “could have done otherwise” is itself in need of analysis. It’s not clear that it means what you take it to mean, so that in a deterministic world, no-one could ever have done otherwise than they did. Assume the world is deterministic. Now, take a case like Gavrilo Princip shooting Franz Ferdinand. Even in a deterministic world, “Gavrilo Princip could have refrained from shooting”, or (and this doesn’t involve decisions, so this isn’t just about free will) “Gavrilo Princip could have missed”, appear reasonable things to say, while “Gavrilo Princip could have turned Franz Ferdinand into an elephant” does not. They are all logical possibilities, and if the world is deterministic, none of them are physical possibilities – so what is the difference? Or do you claim that there isn’t one, and the intuition that there is, is simply wrong? Assuming he was sane, you would surely say Princip was morally responsible for the assassination (if I’m wrong here, I have misunderstood your position). But if there is a difference between the sentences I quote, why doesn’t it justify not only attribution of moral responsibility, but also liability to praise and blame, and a distinction between acts carried out freely and otherwise? If there isn’t a difference, then not only talk about moral responsibility and free will, but vast chunks of talk about causality become moot; it seems to make no sense to talk of any one event or condition causing another, since such talk relies on counterfactuals making sense: that if the specified cause had been absent, while other relevant things remained the same, the effect would not have happened. To return to my example, historians debate whether WWI would have happened without the Princip assassination – citing the high state of tension between the opposed alliances, the shifting balance of military power, the characters of the principle political actors, and so on. Are such debates simply empty noise?
Louis:
September 5th, 2012 at 5:35 am
John,
In my (naturally idiosyncratic and limited) experience, “can’t hack it” has stronger connotations of “capacity” rather than “willingness” than does “can’t take it any more” which is more open to modification on the basis of context as to the ratio of “capacity” to “willingness”.
More than that “can’t hack it” specifically refers to a more permanent or global assessment of “capacity”, e.g. I wouldn’t say of a top flight marathon runner like Paula Radcliffe if she broke her leg that she “couldn’t hack it” with regards to a (specific?) marathon. She clearly can hack it, and boy has she!
“I can’t take it any more”, especially in the context of Jen’s post and history falls more on the side of “willingness” rather than “capacity”. Sure there will be elements of “capacity”, one’s ability to be unaffected by vitriolic abuse for example, but that’s certainly no crime (not saying you think it is). And in the case of Jen, like Paula Radcliffe, I think she has more than amply demonstrated that she can hack it, and boy has she hacked it!
I think her post is strongly about “willingness”. She’s simply unwilling to exhaust herself by putting up with the abuse she’s receiving any more. The good work she does (advocating for X) has, for her, become too costly in terms of the abuse she gets for that work. That’s not an issue of “capacity”, that’s the rational consideration of a sensible person! Paula Radcliffe could complete a marathon on her fictional broken leg, as she’s completed so many before, but her time would be poor and the pain she would endure would not be worth the rewards of reaching the finish line. More than that, her running on that leg is likely to cause her more damage.
Psychological injury and disease is as real as anything physical, and I hate to say it, from an outsider’s perspective it seems a lot more painful. I’d rather break my leg than have clinical depression any day of the week. If the recent bout of abuse has helped to trigger an episode of Jen’s depression (and since the underlying causes of these diseases are ferociously complex and involve a variety of interlocking factors there’s no reason to suspect that this time for some reason it has managed to do so where it didn’t in the past) then Jen needs to take that as seriously as a broken leg for a marathon runner. Rest, recuperate, heal.
The “hack it” paraphrase to my mind too strongly implies that Jen’s decision, very rational decision IMO, to rest, recuperate and heal is to do with her lack of capacity as opposed to her current lack of willingness. That she has also mentioned that her capacity for tolerating abuse has been reduced (temporarily, because injuries heal to some degree) is coincidental to this, not causative in my view. The “can’t hack it” paraphrase is one that read to me as accidentally tilting that balance in favour of a judgement of capacity, not of current willingness.
But then I’m hardly going to take you to task for the use of idiom now am I? ;-)
Just thought that might help a bit.
Louis
Nick Gotts (formerly KG):
September 5th, 2012 at 5:43 am
No, in most cases it doesn’t. The sensible thing to do, John, even if you still think you’re right, would be to apologise and move on. But your ego won’t let you.
SallyStrange: Elite Femi-Fascist Genius:
September 5th, 2012 at 5:45 am
I recall you taking issue with CR when he used that definition. For fuck’s sake man, it’s an idiom, a piece of slang–usages will vary. Also, Jen’s “duty” certainly does not encompass being the target of sexist harassers, which is what is being talked about here.
The point is, when informed that some people see it this way instead of that way, you doubled down and refused to admit that there might be multiple meanings and if there were, well, yours was the most right and everyone else was wrong for seeing meanings that you didn’t put there on purpose and yadda fucking yadda.
Shit like that makes me wish you would go the FUCK away.
Later, Humpty Dumpty.
strange gods before me ॐ:
September 5th, 2012 at 6:06 am
Setár is going to look into this himself, because, you know, vendetta. (I guess my vendetta makes search engines unreliable.)
Okie doke, Setár. I’m happy to help you out. Here’s yet another case to look into.
From the Contrarianism so easily blurs into denialism thread, compare ‘Tis Himself’s comment #15 and Meagan Falvey’s review, Weakonomics.
See how ‘Tis writes the first sentence all by himself: “While Freakonomics was fun reading, there was one major problem with it.”
He begins in the middle of Meghan Falvey’s fourth paragraph; she’s already introduced Steven Levitt by this point, but ‘Tis hasn’t. So he adds some clarity.
‘Tis Himself: “Instead, economist Steven Levitt’s method was”
Meghan Falvey: “Instead, Levitt’s method is”
Himself: “then to reveal the core rationality that animated all players.”
Falvey: “then to shake these off to reveal the core rationality that alone animates all players.”
Himself: “were all based on the idea that human action was oriented”
Falvey: “are all based on the idea that human action is oriented”
And so on. Those are just from his first paragraph.
The change from present to past tense is because Falvey wrote this in 2005, when it was a contemporary book review of Freakonomics; but ‘Tis Himself plagiarized it in 2009 for the release of SuperFreakonomics.
Sad comments begin.
At least this time someone said something.
Not quite copied. So not a blockquote fail.
SC (Salty Current), OM:
September 5th, 2012 at 6:06 am
John, your comment was wrong in any case.
Improbable Joe was making the point that the ridiculous FTBullies crowd and not the bloggers here are the real bullies. We already knew this, of course, but this latest is just more evidence of their relentless harassment of bloggers here and others. He didn’t have to name individuals to make the point about who the real bullies are (and aren’t), though we could easily name several who’ve engaged in and supported the real bullying while endorsing the fake meme.
So, yes, really.
This is wrong. The real victims are all of those subjected to this harassment. People have different personal circumstances and different responses at different moments, but they’re all victims. Rebecca Watson and Greta Christina are still blogging, and that doesn’t make them any less victims. People who don’t discuss it publicly are equally victims. And so on.
(By the way, I think you needed a colon there rather than a semicolon.)
SallyStrange: Elite Femi-Fascist Genius:
September 5th, 2012 at 6:12 am
Morales was being sarcastic here; he was agreeing with Improbable Joe’s point about the irony of one of the alleged #FTBullies being bullied off the internet.
John Morales:
September 5th, 2012 at 6:16 am
SallyStrange,
Fair enough.
–
I entirely agree with this, and I did so before I wrote my contentious comment.
Yeah, it does.
–
KG,
Some will consider this a notpology, but for what it’s worth, I apologise for making people believe I was somehow disparaging Jen.
It was not my intention, and to her I apologise for any hurt I may have caused thereby and add that she stands high in my estimation.
(As for my ego, it’s pretty stout, it can hack it. ;))
–
SallyStrange:
The point is that I accept others see it otherwise, but nonetheless I am not wrong.
(I note you haven’t actually searched Google for the phrase so as to dispute my contention, and that your efforts thus far have backfired)
I would be perverse not to admit that there were connotations of which I was unaware, but I made it damn clear what I was claiming from very near the beginning of this disputation.
Some people might be affected by such personal animus to the degree that they would be hurt by it; but I’m not one of those.
What happened to “not a whole lot to do with the actual meaning of a particular phrase”? ;)
Look: you failed at your attempt to show me to be wrong; all I have to go by is the claims of multiple posters here about how they personally perceive my paraphrase, the which claims I cannot but accept.
(Again: care to show an actual usage of that idiom where it doesn’t mean what I claim it means?)
SC (Salty Current), OM:
September 5th, 2012 at 6:21 am
I don’t get it. (It’s far too early in the day for me to attempt fully coherent thinking, though, so that’s likely the problem.)
John Morales:
September 5th, 2012 at 6:29 am
SC:
We don’t know specifics, we know generalities — but I take your point.
(Will you take mine, that we only know some (and those mostly by ‘nyms)?)
Um, if it’s wrong that those who can’t hack it (and Jen was mentioned by name and clearly is one of those in the context of my reply) are victims, then it must be the case that they are not victims.
(Also, see this comment where I explicitly make that very point)
You are quite correct in this.
John Morales:
September 5th, 2012 at 6:33 am
[meta]
Good though it is to be able to dispute with people who are (at least) as capable as I rather than trolls, it’s kind of depressing that it’s over such matters as these.
(Need MOAR trolls!)
Louis:
September 5th, 2012 at 6:34 am
John,
Ah cool.
Not sure I knew about your agreement before hand, or even if I should have! ;-)
I’m happy to acknowledge my weaknesses on that front, my reading has not been universal of late, I may have skimmed something.
Louis
John Morales:
September 5th, 2012 at 6:43 am
Louis, you couldn’t have known, since I didn’t mention it explicitly before then.
–
It’s a bit of a shame people think the worst of me, but I guess I have to cop the reputation I have acquired, unpleasant and frustrating as it may be for me at times.
(C’est la vie)
SC (Salty Current), OM:
September 5th, 2012 at 6:47 am
Joe’s point was general, so the argument that we only know some individuals or the matter of whether we know them by ‘nyms aren’t really relevant. My “Yes, really” stands.
No. My point was that people’s method of coping with the bullying is not relevant to, much less decisive in determining, whether they’re real victims or not. If people are being bullied, they’re victims, however they respond to it. If your point wasn’t that the ones who “can’t hack it” are the real victims – implying that those who “can hack it” are not – then I don’t know what it was, or why you found this question of hacking it relevant to the dicussion at all.
I just saw it a minute ago, actually. It makes me even more confused as to your purpose in the can’t-hack-it comment.
strange gods before me ॐ:
September 5th, 2012 at 6:54 am
Nick, I’ll get back to you when this thread slows down. It’s actually too unpleasant for (even) me right now. But I am dismayed at questions I feel like you’re familiar enough to answer for me by now. “Are such debates simply empty noise?” — such debates may be part of a causal chain which leads to the prevention of another war. Same sort of reasoning as why I was trying to get John to clarify that he meant no insult, not because he’s blameworthy for his initial phrasing nor praiseworthy for apologizing, but because the situation is slightly better now that he’s said as much; I can step away from the computer with reasonable hope that this will be over soon.
rorschach:
September 5th, 2012 at 6:54 am
So, I get tweets:
Just imagine what his likes would do if they knew who I and my family were. They’re doing it now to silence Jen, and they will not stop. So what to do? To wait for legislation isn’t an option. I think the only solution is for decent people, including atheism dignitaries, to stand up and speak out against this.
strange gods before me ॐ:
September 5th, 2012 at 7:00 am
PS: can we still call you Knockgoats?
John Morales:
September 5th, 2012 at 7:03 am
SC,
Take the comment as a whole and evaluate it given the context of the one to which I was responding (the one I quoted), and it should be clear I’m stating that we know specifically who the victim is, but not specifically who the bullies are.
It should never have been a big deal — and I early in the piece admitted it was pedantry.
(There was no deep allusive meaning and no intended slight to Jen)
SC (Salty Current), OM:
September 5th, 2012 at 7:21 am
OK. I’ll just reiterate that we know other specific victims who’ve adopted different coping strategies more suited to them and their circumstances, and that Jen’s decision isn’t relevant to identifying her as a victim.
The reason I commented on it was that your remark seemed to me to play into the notion that bullying doesn’t count if you ignore it and that people somehow choose to be victims by “letting it get to” them. Those ideas serve to normalize bullying and to transfer responsibility and accountability from the bullies to their victims. I don’t think you meant to insult her or to support those ideas, but that’s how your post read to me initially.
And with that I’ll drop it from my end.
(P.S. – Yay, puppies!)
Setár, self-appointed Elf-Sheriff of the FreethoughtBlogs Star Chamber:
September 5th, 2012 at 7:32 am
SGBM, another thing before I go to bed: cut the condescension, too. You definitely don’t sound objective when you sound like a libertarian sitting atop their high AMAZINGLY TOTALLY ALWAYS PERFECTLY RATIONAL! horse.
Between hounding ‘Tis on the A+ forums and waving your case around there, dumping it on the table in front of me when I mentioned ‘Tis for what he is known for regarding that thread in the Lounge, and then being highly condescending here when I suggested that you, yes, you, SGBM, might be human and have a conflict of interests, you’re giving me every fucking reason to believe that you’re spinning this out of a cloth similar to that preferred by Ayn Rand.
And this is after I read your posts on the Atheism+ forum and was thoroughly shocked by them. I already told you that I acknowledge the merits of your argument, which is why I wanted to look into it myself in order to avoid the conflict of interests that exists between you and ‘Tis, but…no, you’re so AMAZINGLY RATIONAL! that you’re in the perfect position to just do this for me.
Give me a fucking break. I’m going to go to bed. Hopefully when I wake up you’ve dropped the superhuman crap and actually realized (even though I know you’re going to claim otherwise) that you’re subject to the same cognitive pitfalls as everyone else.
Setár, self-appointed Elf-Sheriff of the FreethoughtBlogs Star Chamber:
September 5th, 2012 at 7:34 am
Going to…go to bed…
…
And this is just the start of the day where I can’t buy beer. -sigh- ‘night.
strange gods before me ॐ:
September 5th, 2012 at 8:12 am
Setar,
Back at you. This comment from you was extremely condescending. I’m irritated by it. And your #386. You are not one to be lecturing others about condescension.
Where did I claim to be objective?
In this particular case my horse and I are being rational. I’m going to enjoy the ride.
Hounding! By pointing out that he plagiarized Stiglitz and Welker, I am hounding him! I am the bad guy! For “waving around” the fact that he plagiarized, right in the thread where he plagiarized.
(Tell me, Setar, does it bother you because you’re uncomfortable saying this stuff about an “ally”? My secret shame: that’s exactly why I kept my mouth shut for years.)
Hey, I like to have fun. Not my problem if you don’t.
Of course I have a conflict of interest. If I didn’t dislike him, I’d have taken his secret to my grave.
But yeah, I’m going to be condescending to you when you’ve been condescending to me and you can’t be bothered to Google.
Good god, man, listen to you. You’re a conspiracy theorist now. You’re having fever dreams.
How could I be making up nine cases of plagiarism?
(Apologies if I’m undercounting — I’m sure it’s at least nine I’ve documented so far.)
Great!
Great!
But you were condescending when you said that to me, so I’m irritated about that, and in turn I’m having a laugh at your expense.
I actually am in the perfect position to show you his plagiarizing Falvey, but that happens to be a memory thing, not a rationality thing.
No. You’ve been making false claims about me yet again. I don’t like it.
Sweet dreams.
I note again that I make no claim of being superhuman, I know that I make cognitive pitfalls, you are making false claims about me again because they serve a convenient and shallow narrative which does not account for my actual humanity, and if you had an ounce of introspection you’d be embarrassed at how condescending you are right now.
If you like, I’ll suggest you try being openly condescending as fuck, like me. It’s more fun than being a hypocrite.
Oh, and one more thing. Since I know that I’m not wrong about the plagiarism — this is kind of an open secret among the long-time regulars here, see, why don’t you start at #242 and scroll down; it’s just that you’re not in on the secret — since I know this isn’t a cognitive fuck-up on my part, you just look like a fool to me. It’s like if I you were to tell me that some kid in your old neighborhood was an asshole and I responded that I’ll have to look into it, see, I’m just not sure about your cognitive biases and of course you’ll have a conflict of interest if you didn’t get along with that person. So yeah, I’ve got to enjoy watching you make an ass of yourself — it’s the only tolerable way to cope with the absurdity of what you’re saying.
strange gods before me ॐ:
September 5th, 2012 at 8:19 am
… like if you were to tell me …
(strike that extra ‘I’)
Antiochus Epiphanes:
September 5th, 2012 at 8:32 am
sgbm: Maybe ‘Tis is Welker and Stiglitz. Ever think about that?
And seven other people. I mean can’t you give an ally the benefit of the doubt?
strange gods before me ॐ:
September 5th, 2012 at 8:37 am
Duuuuuuude
I seriously considered the possibility that he might be Bob Black though. In the very beginning. I am not joking.
SC (Salty Current), OM:
September 5th, 2012 at 8:45 am
Or the value of tone arguments, for that matter. Am I mistaken, or is this the person who talked about finding me and punching me in the face?
***
You know, that was my initial thought when I first read one of sg’s posts about this – that he was the person he was allegedly plagiarizing (when I thought it was only one). Just assumed there had to be some explanation like that.
ChasCPeterson:
September 5th, 2012 at 8:49 am
aw, man. Possibly the stupidest argument ever on Pharyngula and I missed it.
A couple of quick calls from the sideline then:
Morales gets full, uh, acknowledgement for being perfectly and precisely Morales throughout. There’s no reason to doubt his stated intent and accuse him of malice or assholishness, or even avoidable insensitivity, when his notoriously tin ear is sufficient explanation. [p.s. John: it's transitive]
sgbmOM has been the most rational participant.
Sally Strange did not fare well imo. It takes some brass to brandish the Humpty Dumpty quote after being the one person insisting that the particular connotations an idiomatic phrase has for her are the only correct ones, period, I don’t care what g**gle sez. Oo but then later pretending she was arguing for polysemy all along. Then there was the unfortunate noun/verb mix-up (though she wasn’t the first). And hey, internet logicians! True or false; this is a true argumentum ad hominem:
strange gods before me ॐ:
September 5th, 2012 at 8:49 am
You are not mistaken.
I know, right? That’s why I seriously thought he might be Bob Black, since that was the first one I noticed.
rorschach:
September 5th, 2012 at 8:55 am
Jebus. My throwaway blog post on Jen quitting has just overtaken the eternal number one post I ever did, on the female g-spot. It must be serious. Look, I care about this, but if the comments don’t clear up soon, I’ll just close them. Cheers.
Antiochus Epiphanes:
September 5th, 2012 at 8:59 am
My initial thought as well. However, it would have made sense to provide attribution if anonymity were important to him.
I realize that some of my disgust is with myself, for having been duped. I always admired the clarity with which ‘Tis wrote about economics. Le Sigh.
ChasCPeterson:
September 5th, 2012 at 9:09 am
‘Tis Himself is probably under a lot of stress right now. He has said that he was employed as the official economist for these guys.
strange gods before me ॐ:
September 5th, 2012 at 9:41 am
Alright, well, he may have said it here but let’s not talk about his employer in this particular thread, okay?
Web crawlers can do interesting things.
McC2lhu saw what you did there.:
September 5th, 2012 at 10:12 am
OpposableThumbs @162 in Jen’s C’yaLaterz thread:
One of those QFFT moments:
At least the shits were too busy circle-jerking over their seeming victory that they took until the 160′s to start tossing off in here. If only a mod were handy. A handy reminder that Jen was dealing with Major League Assholes. I can’t even grok the degree of cretinism and wankery…cretankery(!) a person has to have flowing in their vacuous skull to show up here at this time just to toss some more.
Louis:
September 5th, 2012 at 10:21 am
McC2lhu,
Comments like that are extremely divisive you know. How dare you and Opposablethumbs point out that hoggling haters have (temporarily?) robbed the atheist movement of a prominent and high achieving advocate simply because she’s a Woman Without Licence and With Bigger Ideas Than They Have. For shame, for shame!
;-)
Louis
anteprepro:
September 5th, 2012 at 10:25 am
Gotta confirm what sgbm said about ‘Tis. And I’m not quite sure that sgbm was the first one to make these charges (though sgbm was probably one of the first to notice): I believe I remember seeing the original charges made by some random trollish person a year or two ago on the old website. That troll seemed like he had an agenda, and it would have been easy to dismiss their charges. I almost did myself. Until I actually checked their links. And….yup. ‘Tis had comments that were virtually identical to material printed elsewhere. His initial defense was that he was the author to the wikipedia article he plagiarized. That excuse was less plausible for the later cases brought up, which he mostly just ignored. It’s amazing that ‘Tis has continued to plagiarize, even after being called out on it like that. Lesser people would realize that it damages their credibility, pays off very little, and would at least try to make a greater proportion of original comments in the future. Or at very least, cite sources properly. Fucking disheartening.
[Googles shit]
Yep. It was almost one year ago exactly. If you want to be depressed, read the responses onward from here. I actually read the evidence presented on sciblogs and it actually was convincing (sadly, those comments are now wiped). An example poured over to the same thread at FTB as well and was promptly ignored.
I guess we have blind spots too.
McC2lhu saw what you did there.:
September 5th, 2012 at 11:12 am
Louis:
I haz a shaym :(
Louis:
September 5th, 2012 at 11:34 am
Whether or not I like ‘Tis, whether or not I like his accusers, plagiarism is a bad thing. I have to confess this “open secret among the regulars” is news to this irregular regular, and not good news.
I’m not willing to hold ‘Tis’s feet to the fire to the same degree I would a colleague or student etc because this is “comments on a blog” not “real work”, but this is more than the odd missed citation and not good.
What conclusions should one draw? That ‘Tis’s arguments have been wrong? Hardly. That some of them weren’t “his”, sure! Someone on the internet perhaps isn’t who they said they were, big whoop! Someone on the internet is too lazy to write their own post, or too dishonest/lazy to represent quoted work accurately, or too busy to do much more than quote an article from memory poorly or copy/paste poorly? I can’t really be bothered to care that much. I don’t care if ‘Tis is a Harvard educated economist or a banana or both, he seems to know more about economics than I do (which to be frank isn’t hard) and what he has said interests me more than who has said it.
That doesn’t change the fact that passing off others’ work to this extent, even implicitly, as your own is a big no-no and bang out of line. Pretty damned dishonest and sour tasting. Not good, ‘Tis.
This from Javert, however, is also despicable. Although I imagine getting anyone to understand why there’s a world of difference between plagiarising an article or nine in internet comments (as opposed to some more formal context) is less unpleasant than the rather pathetic mentality this abject scum exposes here is a futile effort. Vengeance is thine, eh, Javert?
Abhorrent.
You are exactly the sort of hoggling netizen that makes the net unpleasant. What you are doing is malice, spite, and frankly I cannot imagine acting on that basis. You don’t even care about his arguments, you’re just lashing out at an “enemy” in the most primal and vile way. An “enemy” who isn’t even threatening you.
Anger? Sure! I fuck up that way all the time, but this is pure venom. I couldn’t give a fuck if Tis’ is an ally or not, this is simply the vitriolic pursuit of someone because you don’t like them. I actually feel creeped out by your behaviour, and indeed have for a while…
…a solution presents itself…
Welcome to my killfile, you are the first, and likely probably only denizen. I can cope with heat, some levels of dishonesty, anger, even dislike, but actual malice? I confess I had my suspicions but have long tried to give you the benefit of the doubt (despite appearances perhaps). That’s way over every line I’ve ever cared about. To me you are no different to the Hoggles of this world, whatever topics we may “ally” on.
Louis
P.S. Oh and to any fuckwit who decides to pull the oh-so-witty “why do you feel the need to tell us you’re killfiling someone?”, look in the fucking mirror. ‘Tis’s actions in plagiarising things are wrong, people are commenting about it, this is a good thing. If you are truly so fucking stupid as to mistake malice for righteousness….that’s your own affair, maybe Javert will get company, not that you care of course.
P.P.S. And yes, before StrawVulcan arises, good on Javert and others for exposing ‘Tis’s plagiarism. He done wrong as far as I can be bothered to tell based on their efforts.
This fact is orthogonal to Javert’s stated malice in motivating him to act. {Shudder} That’s just fucking abhorrent. Deliberate malice crosses the line. That’s bullying, that’s actually what I would call “active evil”.
Antiochus Epiphanes:
September 5th, 2012 at 12:55 pm
Malice? Malice???!!!!
Heaven forfend.
Louis: You could achieve the same level of irony with less wind. Combine as below.
anteprepro:
September 5th, 2012 at 1:08 pm
I’ve never seen a regular killfile a regular over so little. Especially whilst admitting that the killfiled regular is absolutely right . All sgbm did was admit bias. That is laudable. And it reflects poorly on us if we continue to ignore ‘Tis’s plagiarism, as we have been until sgbm dared to speak up. It reflects even more poorly on us if our reaction to that revelation is as defensive and dismissive as some of the reactions to sgbm have been.
I expect better of this place. I really do.
Hurin, Midnight DJ on the Backwards Music Station:
September 5th, 2012 at 1:23 pm
Louis
Except that his actions aren’t bullying by the usual definition, or out of line in anyway. I’m trying really hard to comprehend how someone can be engaging in “active evil” while limiting themselves to ethical courses of action.
If I continue debunking the arguments of a creationist or MRA on this site after I’ve come to personally dislike them (which often happens to me in the course of a discussion with the various trolls who come to this blog, btw) have I suddenly crossed a line between appropriate commenting, and “active evil”?
I understand what you are saying here, and I can agree that it would be better if SGBM had completely pure motives for outing ‘Tis, but I think your characterization of the event goes too far. I don’t think the existence of petty motivations is adequate for establishing something as “evil”.
Antiochus Epiphanes:
September 5th, 2012 at 1:24 pm
antepro: It is especially surprising in that Louis would never act on the basis of malice or spite. I guess his moral indignation knows no bounds, but in an even-handed, impartial way.
Illuminata, Genie in the Beer Bottle:
September 5th, 2012 at 1:27 pm
ANyone else seeing a seriously fucked up layout on this page?
dysomniak, darwinian socialist:
September 5th, 2012 at 1:27 pm
SGBM is HISTORIES GREATEST MONSTER!
Hurin, Midnight DJ on the Backwards Music Station:
September 5th, 2012 at 1:31 pm
I’m not seeing anything out of the ordinary.
dianne:
September 5th, 2012 at 1:36 pm
SGBM is HISTORIES GREATEST MONSTER!
I thought that was Rebecca Watson. So confusing.
dysomniak, darwinian socialist:
September 5th, 2012 at 1:48 pm
Have you ever seen them together?
consciousness razor:
September 5th, 2012 at 1:53 pm
It’s her fault that SGBM is “HISTORIES GREATEST MONSTER!” It’s also her fault that it should’ve been “HISTORY’S” and that now it’s too late to change that. It’s also her fault that anyone, anywhere, has ever blamed someone for something.
SC (Salty Current), OM:
September 5th, 2012 at 3:04 pm
So…
Jen McCreight stops posting because of a campaign of harassment while this arrogant lackwit continues to blog here.
I learn that a member of this community has been abusing its trust for several years, for what reason I have no idea.
I read otherwise intelligent and compassionate people talking about how when they listen to pigs they hear “Eat me!” (Pigs are smarter than dogs and very affectionate. They’re probably expressing their desire for a belly rub or their delight in playing or curiosity…or, more realistically in the world we live in, trying to convey their profound misery and sorrow. But it’s just so hilarious to joke about how all you hear is that they want to be killed and eaten.)
What an unhappy day on the internet.
SC (Salty Current), OM:
September 5th, 2012 at 3:06 pm
And a blockquote fail. Perfect.
So…
Jen McCreight stops posting because of a campaign of harassment while this arrogant lackwit continues to blog here.
I learn that a member of this community has been abusing its trust for several years, for what reason I have no idea.
I read otherwise intelligent and compassionate people talking about how when they listen to pigs they hear “Eat me!” (Pigs are smarter than dogs and very affectionate. They’re probably expressing their desire for a belly rub or their delight in playing or curiosity…or, more realistically in the world we live in, trying to convey their profound misery and sorrow. But it’s just so hilarious to joke about how all you hear is that they want to be killed and eaten.)
What an unhappy day on the internet.
David Marjanović:
September 5th, 2012 at 3:34 pm
Ooh. Plagiarism of epic proportions. I’ll have to read up on it.
They’ll be back.
Maybe they are already. The threads are gradually coming back in chronological order.
Aratina Cage:
September 5th, 2012 at 4:35 pm
On ‘Tis Himself, well Brownian and I noticed it years ago, too. And we weren’t silent. You can go back through all his comments here and on Scienceblogs and any that are long (you’ll see) are almost guaranteed to be plagiarized. I’ve been trying to steer him clear of it when I see it happen by leaving little comments reminding him to link to sources so people don’t think he wrote whatever it was he copypasta’d, but alas I guess he continues to do it. What’s strange is that I actually still like much of what the real ‘Tis has to say despite it.
Josh, Official SpokesGay:
September 5th, 2012 at 4:58 pm
Oh dear. Not good at all ‘Tis. This significantly changes my perspective about him.
Antiochus Epiphanes:
September 5th, 2012 at 5:15 pm
Oh my. I forgot about Ed Kagin. Lackwit, indeed. At least nobody can say that FtB discriminates against lazy writers and thinkers.
Brownian:
September 5th, 2012 at 5:35 pm
And “I think atheist culture is actually better than the norm”, says PZ.
Erista (aka Eris):
September 5th, 2012 at 5:59 pm
Test!
Erista (aka Eris):
September 5th, 2012 at 5:59 pm
God damn it.
chigau (違わない):
September 5th, 2012 at 6:17 pm
Toast?
cm's changeable moniker:
September 5th, 2012 at 6:17 pm
Oh Lord. When they get to about two years ago, remind me to cut off my Internet. ;-)
Illuminata, Genie in the Beer Bottle:
September 5th, 2012 at 6:32 pm
On TWO computers now – a seriously fucked up layout. Everything this is squished into the center, surrounded by black now.
but only sometimes, cuz when i refresh it sometimes reverts to normal. WTF
Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls:
September 5th, 2012 at 6:41 pm
No you weren’t. ‘Tis has admitted to writing about economics in the past, so he may have ghosted part of an econ book. IIRC, it left a bad taste in his mouth.
Illuminata, Genie in the Beer Bottle:
September 5th, 2012 at 6:42 pm
Interesting. The fucked up layout ALSO erases the embedded links in PZ’s posts…..
chigau (違わない):
September 5th, 2012 at 6:57 pm
Illuminata
Your computer is **possessed**
[scary organ music]
strange gods before me ॐ:
September 5th, 2012 at 7:15 pm
#398 is exactly the kind of comment that malicious hogglers are known for.
Hey, I can agree with that too. I didn’t speak up when I first noticed it because I was afraid my then-libertarian friend would stubbornly take the plagiarism as a reason for discounting the substance. Cowardice.
cm's changeable moniker:
September 5th, 2012 at 7:54 pm
Scary organ music.
It’s in A minor. Super-super-scary.
cm's changeable moniker:
September 5th, 2012 at 8:11 pm
(Although C minor is scarier.)
Anne C. Hanna:
September 5th, 2012 at 11:21 pm
Wow, it really is Uncomfortable Conversations Day here in the ‘Dome, innit? Necessary, maybe, but not at all pleasant post-travel catchup reading. I think I preferred getting all snarled up about the best way to argue with joey. :/
strange gods before me ॐ:
September 6th, 2012 at 12:24 am
More plagiarism.
This comment from ‘Tis Himself over at The Digital Cuttlefish blog, beginning at the “There’s an old story” line, is plagiarized from Larry Swedroe’s essay The Twenty Dollar Bill.
Again some changes, like “There is an” to “There’s an”, and “Economics professors Dwight Lee and James Verbrugge of the University of Georgia explain the power of the efficient markets theory in the following manner” to “Lee and Verbrugge explain the power of the EMH”.
Like he did with Iain MacSaorsa’s writing, he cites the same sources that Larry Swedroe cited, without noting that he’d lifted all of Swedroe’s own writing.
Cuttlefish thanks him, of course. And why not? It’s so well written.
Comments are still open over there, so I guess I’ll go over there later and let Cuttlefish know what’s up. I expect someone will scold me for not being a virtue ethicist, so in case anyone else would like to take the heat instead of me, I’ll wait a while.
consciousness razor:
September 6th, 2012 at 12:47 am
SGBM:
I commented on it, leaving a link to your comment here and to the article, but it’s awaiting moderation, probably because I’ve never commented there.
If they don’t, they could at least scold you for having the kind of character it would take to identify and discuss ethical theories.
strange gods before me ॐ:
September 6th, 2012 at 1:01 am
Thanks, CR.
*snerk*
Excuse me. I need to go metahoggle now.
consciousness razor:
September 6th, 2012 at 1:27 am
No need. Intellectual property rights being taken seriously are in my own interests. It’s fucking personal, even when I’m not the one getting shit on at the moment.
Alethea H. "Crocoduck" Dundee:
September 6th, 2012 at 3:10 am
FWIW, I agree with John Morales and I was very surprised by the pushback. There is no significant difference between the meaning of the terms “can’t hack it” and “can’t cope with it” and “can’t take it” in my vocabulary. It doesn’t have anything to so with a job, or a professional evaluation, or any of that kind of thing. Perhaps this is a case where words mean things, but not quite the same things to everyone. (I’m also wearing a jumper and eating a biscuit, and I keep a potplant in the bathroom.)
Beatrice:
September 6th, 2012 at 8:27 am
Timon for Tea at B&W is a piece of shit and I can’t stand him. I don’t want to get into an argument with him today because I’m not in a good mood and I’ll soon start swearing and cursing at him incoherently.
Grrrr. Can’t stand him
broboxley OT:
September 6th, 2012 at 10:08 am
#437 you are wearing a sweater eating a cracker and growing weed in the bathroom means its not getting enough light.
On Tis, the cut and scrape from the link at #433 appears as if the quoted material was the point, the copying without attribution was lazyness. In any case, Tis knows his stuff but absolutely needs to cite sources.
Years ago elsewhere I had a friend who would absolutely do the same thing. We would call him on it and request cites but he explained he was too busy, we all knew he was lifting the material and it wasnt until we told him that the group could be sued for using copyrighted material that he finally relented and made “fair use” of the material, properly cited and annotated
ChasCPeterson:
September 6th, 2012 at 10:17 am
no, the sweater is eating a cookie.
SC (Salty Current), OM:
September 6th, 2012 at 10:56 am
Perhaps it’s a regional thing?
He left teaching because he couldn’t __________ as a teacher.
He left teaching because he could no longer ___________ the low pay, bad working conditions, and racism of his colleagues.
In the first sentence, I think someone would use “hack it” or “cut it,” implying that the problem was primarily with him and his not being up to the task to begin with. To me, there’s a connotation of inadequacy or failure. In the second, I’d use “cope with,” “deal with,” “tolerate,” “take,” or the like, and the emphasis is on the social conditions constraining his options and shaping his decisions. If someone used the first group of phrases in the second example, as I would read it, they’d be normalizing the social conditions as an inherent part of the job of teaching – making it sound like everyone who wants to teach should have to tolerate them.
(A kind of tangentially related situation arose recently when two people suddenly dropped out of the competition on Project Runway. The responses were ridiculous. On the one hand, to other contestants were all emotional, crying that they’d “lost two people.” It’s a reality-TV design competition, FFS, not Guadalcanal. On the other hand, they were going on and on with this “Fashion’s not for sissies” narrative in which some people just can’t “hack it.” This was even after one of the two people had explicitly said that he’d found that experience wasn’t the right path for him and that he was going to find his own way forward….)
A big part of the problem is that in US (and especially my regional) culture, and others as well, there’s such a strong emphasis on individual competition and “success.” If people don’t finish grad school, for example, it’s so often treated as a failure on their part rather than the result of a recognition that it’s unsuited to them or they to it, a desire to pursue other opportunities, government policies that make it financially unworkable, bad advisors, institutions or departments that don’t provide adequate support, personal commitments, or many other reasons that aren’t about individual deficiencies of character or ability.
Because of this culture, when some of us hear people talking about others not being able to “hack it,” it seems to carry the baggage of – and feed into – that toxic and distorted hyper-individualistic, sink-or-swim, people-are-entirely-responsible-for-their-own-fates way of thinking. I don’t believe John meant it that way, both because I get the impression that the phrase doesn’t have those same connotations everywhere and because I know that he knows that McCreight’s an extremely capable blogger and opposes the harassment, but it struck me that way as well when I first read it.
In Jen’s case, of course, there’s no question about her abilities as a blogger. She’s great at it, she loves it, and people enjoy reading and are influenced by her work. And the situation is obviously not wholly specific to her but representative of a larger problem in the movement that needs to be addressed collectively. The failure is the community’s (and possibly FTB’s…? Is there some way she could be provided with tech support that would remove some of the moderation responsibilities so she wouldn’t have to confront it and better secure her site?). We need, somehow, to be clear in action that we’re not going to normalize these harassment campaigns or treat them as part of the job of blogging or speaking publicly in our community.
broboxley OT:
September 6th, 2012 at 10:57 am
I thought that a biscuit was an unsweetened cookie, so in american it would be a cracker. OBTW help yourself to a few commas as you noticed I have extra
AJ Milne:
September 6th, 2012 at 11:44 am
I’m just reposting this here (original at Jen’s announcement) ‘cos a) I typoed on the first version anyway and b) I really would like to repeat it and I guess I need a venue in which people will have some clue what it’s about and won’t shriek ‘Language!’ at me–response to another comment on the same thread:
—
Yeah. That.
And y’know, speaking of, what I think is the other really sad thing about this?
I was just looking back a bit at that boobquake coverage. That was good stuff, by and large. Nice moment of media prominence for an atheist blogger, nice demonstration of a sense of humour, and, in fact, actually a pretty coherent demonstration in its own attention-grabbing little way of demonstrating just how silly is one specific religious claim, at least…
… and on top of that, so far as I ever saw, the reaction of those being so (justly) ridiculed was, as I recall, pretty paltry. Oh, there was a bit of standard theological excuse-making, how, see, actually, the deity in question might pass on the earthquakes for now so that sinners might work their way deeper into hell (yay, loving god). But I went looking ’round, trying to find some nice death threats or rape threats or vilification campaigns or so on over this, and came up quite short. And, I note, critically, here: whatever those mullahs and their followers did or said in response, Jen McCreight was still blogging in the aftermath to that particular event.
Now, granted, the Iranian mullahs and Islamic states in general are pretty fucking nasty to women they actually have judicial control over, so don’t let anyone be imagining I’m letting them off the hook or nothin’.
But then, the reality is, methinks, women-hating assholes will work within the means they have, and the drooling fucknuggets of the web have at their disposal primarily the opportunity to post endless anonymous hate and threats and puerile bullshit about blow jobs in an effort to hound a vocal woman off of the net, so that’s what they do. Lucky for us, I guess, they don’t have actual village mobs at their disposal to stone women who might have unapproved sex to death in broad daylight; mostly, they have to stick to darker corners and psychological warfare via TCP/IP.
Anyway, still, it’s an observation and comparison I now feel compelled to make: Jen McCreight pointed out the stupidity of an Islamic mullah, and not a whole hell of a lot happened. Point out that the Islamists got some pretty shitty attitudes toward women, and hey, it’s a bit of press, some muttered excuses from those mullahs, and we go on our way.
And then Jen McCreight tries to point out some of the atheists and skeptics of the web got some pretty iffy attitudes toward women and equality, tries, hey, to ask that equality of the sexes in the west and in the movement and at the conferences in particular be made something more of a priority…
… and the abusive, nasty shit goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on until she has to take her leave.
So thank you, you clueless fucking losers, for making even the mullahs look relatively good, at least in this one little way. I can’t tell you how impressed I am by this dazzlingly edifying display. And I am hereby doing a nice slow clap for all y’all, right now. Well done, people. Well done.
Antiochus Epiphanes:
September 6th, 2012 at 11:59 am
AJ Milne: Word.
Josh, Official SpokesGay:
September 6th, 2012 at 12:40 pm
Note this. Note the casual dismissal of women’s and minority rights as “mild dissent.” Note the fact that this person cannot conceive of us as fully human. We’re merely over-emotional and “going apeshit.” From a commenter at Kagin’s blog:
Note the drawing of an equivalence between my civil rights and [what the author clearly sees as mere 'special interest' things].
Understand this. These people really, truly do not care. They do not see us as full people. Their empathy stops short. Do not underestimate how willing these people are to sell you out or leave you to the tender mercies of others who will hurt you worse. I don’t care if they call themselves rational, liberal, or atheist. They are dangerous and they are adversaries.
Josh, Official SpokesGay:
September 6th, 2012 at 12:51 pm
Oh, and ‘Tis? Are you reading this? What the hell are you doing? Do you understand that people here who’ve liked you are losing respect for you at a breakneck pace? You understand that your behavior is getting seen by lots of people, right?
Amphiox:
September 6th, 2012 at 12:51 pm
This is more than just doing a false equivalency. This is a deliberate and blatantly dishonest mischaracterization and misrepresentation of the original post.
This is creationist/godbot (ie texpip/gooey) level LYING.
Aratina Cage:
September 6th, 2012 at 1:11 pm
I don’t think so. That doesn’t explain why seemingly random words and phrases are skipped over or replaced with synonyms or similar sounding phrases in the “quoted” material. It also doesn’t explain why ‘Tis appeared happy to accept credit for writing the material. It also doesn’t explain why ‘Tis is not here in the Thunderdome right now apologizing and/or explaining himself. I never got one bit of thanks from him when I pointed out the correct source of the material he copied. Instead, he would just disappear from that thread for a long while. His being called out on this is way overdue, I’m sorry to say.
My theory is that ‘Tis was trying to create a completely fictional online persona (an economist, which he is probably not) and got caught up in it. He might not have been prepared for all the accolades some of his “writing” received here and felt too embarrassed to say that he was plagiarizing other people. And besides, for him to be honest about it would shatter his economist front.
Oh yeah, and I doubt his (Catholic) brother was real either. Probably just him trying out a new persona.
—
I’m glad that’s off my chest. I almost did a blog post on it a long time ago about how a Molly winner was pulling the wool over a lot of people’s eyes on Pharyngula, but it’s so much better to be able to air it here in the ‘dome.
Other than that, I like ‘Tis and hope he doesn’t think it means I hate him or his opinions or anything. I just don’t trust his facts and recollections as much as I would other peoples’ and am always sure to highlight large swaths of the text in his comments and paste them into Google Search to check if he is plagiarizing, which he often is when he talks about economics, and I hope he finally decides to come clean about it.
Hurin, Midnight DJ on the Backwards Music Station:
September 6th, 2012 at 1:24 pm
Is ‘Tis aware that this discussion is occurring? I don’t think he wanders into this thread that often under ordinary circumstances, so he might not have noticed that he has come under scrutiny.
Aratina Cage:
September 6th, 2012 at 1:28 pm
Hurin, read the next two sentences of mine.
Hurin, Midnight DJ on the Backwards Music Station:
September 6th, 2012 at 1:37 pm
Got it. Sorry for the silly question.
This thread contains mentions of a previous time when he has been publicly called out, and I wasn’t sure which episode those sentences were referencing.
Aratina Cage:
September 6th, 2012 at 1:50 pm
Sorry for being snippy, Hurin. Yes, ‘Tis’s not responding to my gentle nudging to not plagiarize is a habit of his. I can’t recall him ever responding to me about it (or Brownian), and I really do believe I scared him off by offering up the original sources on some of the threads where I caught him doing it.
I’d like to see that habit of his broken. I really would. I want him to be brave and show himself here today and acknowledge that he has been doing this and say whatever else he feels he needs to say about it. It is his silence about it that I can’t stand, and his continuation of what is generally considered to be an unethical practice.
Brownian:
September 6th, 2012 at 1:58 pm
Gah, between this business of ‘Tis, fuckheads like Kagin, and all of the issues of sexism and bigotry surrounding the atheosphere, I’m almost at a loss for words.
anteprepro:
September 6th, 2012 at 1:58 pm
Ick. Josh, that thread is awful. I thought that the “equality is really about bearing arms and animal liberation, right?” post you brought here was low. But that *wink* *wink* *nudge* *nudge* post that you correctly interpreted as “feminism is raping atheism!” was so fucking low that reading it made me sink through two stories. Fucking horrible.
vaiyt:
September 6th, 2012 at 3:06 pm
In short, the Gnu A* crowd can’t take it as well as they dish it out. It’s all well and good when they are the ones admonishing others for not being bold enough, but when some other people call them on THEIR unexamined privilege, assertiveness is A Bad Thing(tm)
Josh, Official SpokesGay:
September 6th, 2012 at 3:22 pm
Don’t insult Gnus! :))
Brownian:
September 6th, 2012 at 4:00 pm
That’s it. In a nutshell.
A vs. ~A is the only division they care to consider. It’s a fucking laugh riot when Hitchens humiliates some theologian in a debate, but when people note that Harris or Kagin are just as fucking unskilled and unaware of it on certain subjects as any creationist born they’re displaying an oh-so-terrible ‘us against them’ mentality.
A New Atheist seems to be someone who’s inordinately proud of the historically accurate scale-model trebuchet they built with which to launch stones from within their glass houses.
strange gods before me ॐ:
September 6th, 2012 at 4:16 pm
broboxley,
No, you aren’t looking closely. It isn’t a copy and paste job. Most of these instances are not.
When he plagiarized from f_rushingr he changed some words. When he plagiarized from Jason Welker he took out a lot of words and made the very weird error of changing “contractionary” to “contradictory”. Is that a sloppy attention to his spellchecker’s suggestions?
When he plagiarized from Joseph Stiglitz he rewrote roughly half the words. When he plagiarized from Bob Black he explicitly took credit for Black’s writing: “Some years ago I wrote about this very thing”. When he plagiarized from An Anarchist FAQ he added words to integrate their text right into his own second paragraph.
In reply to Cuttlefish, he explicitly takes credit for Larry Swedroe’s writing:
And he changes the text. Here’s a selection of changes. The first line in each is ‘Tis Himself’s rewrite, the second line is Swedroe’s original. You can see what he’s doing, taking out some unnecessary words, it’s like he’s trying to improve the text:
There’s an old story about an economist
There is an old story about a financial economist
walking down
who was walking down
The friend says
The friend stops and says
The economist coolly replies
The economist turns and coolly replies
The economist says
The economist turns and says
an investment in
an 'investment' in
would be a poor one.”
would be a poor one. I am also certainly not aware of lots of people, if any, getting rich mining beaches with metal detectors."
understand is an efficient market
understand is that an efficient market
it’s so unlikely to find one that it doesn’t pay
it is so unlikely to find one that it does not pay
… here I will skip a few because I’m getting bored. He ends by changing the (1) that Swedroe used for citation into a ¹.
That’s not laziness at all. That takes work. See #250 above: “It’s even easier than rewriting half the content. That’s the weird part.”
strange gods before me ॐ:
September 6th, 2012 at 4:23 pm
[An href is] even easier than rewriting half the content.
I mean, I know lazy. Sometimes I paste without using a blockquote or prettifying the URL. Just drop the plain ugly URL at the beginning of my comment, copypasta, and submit comment. The absolute minimum effort required for attribution, and it works great.
broboxley OT:
September 6th, 2012 at 4:23 pm
SGBM #458, I was being lazy reading it. That did take a lot of work. Doesn’t make much sense either. It is too easy to get caught unless you are pinching blackstone (shuffles off to check) FUCK!
Antiochus Epiphanes:
September 6th, 2012 at 4:59 pm
It is exactly that kind of attention to covering one’s tracks that I use to decide whether students understand that plagiarism = dishonesty.
ChasCPeterson:
September 6th, 2012 at 5:04 pm
yep.
And in other malfeasance news, Hauser is still guilty.
CJO:
September 6th, 2012 at 5:23 pm
It’s not weird at all, if you consider that the whole point of it was to be esteemed in the community as a person with knowledge of and insight into a particular field of study. An href would have been easier, yes, but counterproductive.
Josh, Official SpokesGay:
September 6th, 2012 at 5:28 pm
SGBM is right to highlight this and go to the work of pointing it out. Regardless of how any of us feel about the personalities or past conflicts or allegiances involved, this is a straight up case of someone lying. It’s not a few mistakes, it’s egregious. It’s “I don’t trust a thing you say” egregious.
This should disturb anyone here no matter whom they like or dislike.
Esteleth, Who Knows How to Use Google:
September 6th, 2012 at 6:01 pm
Sigh.
When I first saw the accusations, I thought this was a case of swiping someone’s words wholesale and claiming them.
But no.
This is worse. It would be easier to say, “as so-and-so said in their excellent book…” than rewrite as has been done.
UnknownEric:
September 6th, 2012 at 6:51 pm
Yeah, they want to talk, but they don’t want to listen. I think part of their attitude is due to the fact that they didn’t think of it (A+) first, therefore it’s Not A Valid Topic For Discussion(TM).
Markita Lynda—damn climate change!:
September 6th, 2012 at 7:24 pm
Well, that’s disturbing.
Antiochus Epiphanes:
September 6th, 2012 at 7:24 pm
Sounds like Hauser got off pretty easy. I wonder if he’ll work in academia again.
Hurin, Midnight DJ on the Backwards Music Station:
September 6th, 2012 at 9:05 pm
Aratina Cage
No hard feelings.
I agree. I’d like to be charitable to ‘Tis, because I’ve always found him informative. I actually think I could be charitable if this was a one or two occurrences of unintentional plagiarism, especially if there were an apology (not that I would even expect that to be noticed). This business of repeated plagiarism of long passages with some of the words changed is very concerning though. It looks blatantly deceitful.
carlie:
September 6th, 2012 at 9:22 pm
The “there’s an old story” thing I can easily say isn’t much of an issue, because the whole point of there being an old story is that it’s told the almost the same way every time, and is simple enough to remember. Some of those others really have me shaken, though, and I’d like to hear what ‘Tis has to say about it.
carlie:
September 6th, 2012 at 9:30 pm
(and I only mean “isn’t much of an issue” to me personally, because I’m one to often repeat stories as close to verbatim as I can get.)
consciousness razor:
September 6th, 2012 at 9:41 pm
You’re ignoring that even that case, what he plagiarized (and changed) wasn’t just the “old story” itself. And even if it were and you still wanted to repeat it verbatim (i.e., without changing things, which isn’t what happened), you could do that by linking to the source where you actually got the “verbatim” version of the story and save yourself a lot of trouble. But if that’s not what you’re doing and you want to dishonestly represent yourself as someone who can spin a good old yarn, then all of that is irrelevant.
carlie:
September 6th, 2012 at 9:43 pm
And I just checked it past what I read here, and realize it’s a lot more than the story itself. I am very sad and confused.
carlie:
September 6th, 2012 at 9:45 pm
sorry razor, cross-posted with what you wrote – I was reading it and typing while you were telling me to do the same.
Josh, Official SpokesGay:
September 6th, 2012 at 9:49 pm
Yeah, sorry. This is way beyond being charitable. ‘Tis needs to ‘splain. That’s it.
ibyea:
September 6th, 2012 at 9:55 pm
@setar
I am sorry to say this, but at this point, it doesn’t matter whether sgbm has a conflict of interest or not because the fact that Tis was plagiarizing was thoroughly demonstrated to be true.
Aratina Cage:
September 6th, 2012 at 9:59 pm
Add this to the list SGBM drew up in #458: http://freethoughtblogs.com/hallq/2012/03/02/not-so-different-part-2/#comment-2327
And that one is a twofer, a cross-posting with a year-long gap between each copy! (And plagiarized from Wikipedia no less.) And I see ‘Tis still hasn’t showed up here while I write this.
@Hurin
For me it is that I caught a friend (not a close friend, but a person I consider a friend nonetheless) doing it. Ugh. I had finally got to the point where my raging SIWOTI about it had subsided and I was quite happy to go about adding original sources to his economics comments whenever I saw them and nothing more, but there is little point in doing that now that it is a ‘dome issue.
Now back to Barack for me.
ibyea:
September 6th, 2012 at 10:00 pm
I like Tis, so it sucks that he is doing this. Is he a complete fake? I hate to think of him this way, but it is entirely possible. I wonder why he did all of this.
opposablethumbs:
September 7th, 2012 at 3:56 am
I also like ‘Tis (a great deal, in fact), and find his economic summaries/comments very informative. The thing is, “just” by being someone capable of remembering, finding, understanding and paraphrasing the information he posts he was actually providing a valuable service for people like me who find economics
impossibly impenetrablemakes their head explode.I wish he’d go on doing it and attribute everything that ought to be attributed; it’s still valuable information to many people that some of us wouldn’t have the first idea how to find let alone parse.
John Morales:
September 7th, 2012 at 6:04 am
[meta]
I well recall from when I was at school that substitute teachers were “fair game”.
(Perhaps I have grown up some, since then)
carlie:
September 7th, 2012 at 8:21 am
I second everything opposablethumbs said. He’s been around a long time and made a lot of really good expressions of support to a variety of people on a variety of topics; I sincerely hope this was just done out of a desire to impress.
And I also apologize to everyone who has pointed out this problem in the past but I never noticed it being said, particularly sg and Aratina.
broboxley OT:
September 7th, 2012 at 8:47 am
I am not an economist. I have spent most of my life studying it from a historical perspective. Tis must have some sort of background for he finds the type of material to copy that is consistent, so he knows the subject. He may be an odds setter at a sports book for all I know, he does have enough background to explain factors intelligently. That being said any posts would have to be read as his point of view, rather than his words.
SC (Salty Current), OM:
September 7th, 2012 at 11:30 am
Good news! Chris Hallquist is moving to Patheos.
strange gods before me ॐ:
September 7th, 2012 at 11:41 am
Strange trip.
So I looked up the older thread. Browsing through it, in addition to the plagiarized comment, I see this comment about Bob Avakian. It links to a piece which points out his homophobia.
As I’ve mentioned, I’m a fan of Mike Ely, a critic of Avakian, so this stuff is especially delicious to me, the way some people enjoy reading about Mel Gibson’s fuckups. I decide to Google homophobia+avakian.
On the first page of search results, this thread at Almost Diamonds. I see a comment from ‘Tis Himself:
In 2005, Ron Jacobs wrote:
Josh, Official SpokesGay:
September 7th, 2012 at 11:44 am
Ah, Patheos. The graveyard of misfit atheists.
Even better—he’s going to work for the Singularity Institute. For rillz.
strange gods before me ॐ:
September 7th, 2012 at 11:57 am
Make that twice he’s plagiarized Ron Jacobs.
Beatrice:
September 7th, 2012 at 12:08 pm
I could swear I’ve seen ‘Tis Himself in some thread on Pharyngula yesterday.
Shame he couldn’t be bothered to come here and explain what’s going on.
Dhorvath, OM:
September 7th, 2012 at 12:16 pm
It’s shame that has him not coming here to explain.
Beatrice:
September 7th, 2012 at 12:20 pm
In that case I don’t get the carefree commenting on other posts.
I’d probably crawl into a hole and avoid internet for the rest of my life. But then again, I wouldn’t be able to go through with something like this in the first place.
Antiochus Epiphanes:
September 7th, 2012 at 12:21 pm
I don’t think this is apparent. On subjects of which I am knowledgable, I find it far easier to compose a paragraph or two of my own than to hunt through the writings of others looking for an apt passage.
I don’t deny that much of what ‘Tis has posted here seems astute to me, but then again, I have no understanding whatsoever of economics.
If you don’t mind reiterating sgbm or aratina, what first led you to suspect plagiarism? Was it inconsistency in method, style, or just that you had read exactly what ‘Tis had cribbed?
Dhorvath, OM:
September 7th, 2012 at 12:27 pm
AE,
I find such work virtually impossible and prefer to compose as well. However, it has become apparent to me while on this site that other people are both far better at research and remembering relevant passages/authors than I.
anteprepro:
September 7th, 2012 at 12:29 pm
That is rather lulzworthy. I’m pretty sure people tried to argue sense into him about Less Wrong and the Singularity to no avail. So whatever.
As for Patheos: What is up with that place? Is it all Catholics and kid-glove atheists?
carlie:
September 7th, 2012 at 12:32 pm
I wish he would – I think the general sentiment is of perplexity, not of malice or mockery.
If I could regain the time I spend actively looking for writings of others I know exist and read once and need to find to quote in any way, I’d add a few years onto my lifespan. I’m too disorganized and memory-challenged to plagiarize.
Aratina Cage:
September 7th, 2012 at 12:36 pm
@Antiochus Epiphanes
I’m trying to find the thread where I first asked him about it with Brownian being the only other person who seems to have noticed. No luck so far.
I think what tipped me off was that I didn’t understand something he had written (not an economist here!) and highlighted a bunch of his words around a key (and obscure) term and searched for them on Google, and came up with a search result that was almost word for word the same.
So I went back and applied the same method to his other lengthier economics posts, and they were ALL plagiarized.
Forget Turn-It-In when people are copying off the Web (especially off of Wikipedia). Just use Google.
Aratina Cage:
September 7th, 2012 at 12:52 pm
Well, either that or ‘Tis Himself has been really busy publishing all over the place under numerous pseudonyms, many of which include fake biographies. :P
Antiochus Epiphanes:
September 7th, 2012 at 12:54 pm
Ahh. By accident. I’ve done that. I had a student once crib a wikipedia article* and then fail to remove a hyperlinked citation toward the end.
I usually set Turn-It-In up so that when students submit assignments, they are automatically scanned. I still have to use Google sometimes to find original sources. Before I had access to Turn-It-In, I’m sure some must have gotten by me, just because people do the strangest things.
I once had a student who turned in a really well-written paper with just one whole paragraph yoinked verbatim.
I had a graduate student who actually cited (later, and inappropriate to context) one of the papers that she had palgiarised heavily.
I had a student who cribbed about six pages of a paper, and changed nothing but the citations, but didn’t include any of the fabricated citations in the bibliography.
Heh. I almost forgot. I once had a student who bogarted a power-point presentation from the interwebs, and failed to remove an acknowledgments slide. Good times.
*Of all things.
Nick Gotts (formerly KG):
September 7th, 2012 at 1:01 pm
SGBM
My point was that your viewpoint calls into question the whole idea of causal chains (and is thus self-undermining), because reasoning about these involves regarding some counterfactuals (specifically, what one might call “reasonable” or “plausible” counterfactuals, such as “Princip could have refrained from shooting” or “Princip could have missed”) as true when interpreted in a way which makes “Princip could have turned Franz Ferdinand into an elephant”, false. If we take (what I take to be) your view, that in a deterministic* universe, all counterfactuals are false unless we take them to be referring to logical possibility (in which case all my three examples are true), then there is no way to pick out certain events as causally significant: every event (at least, every event within the past light cone of a given event) is of equal significance.
Certainly, old man Jenkins!
On the ‘Tis question, you’ve thoroughly justified your persistence. I’ve had arguments with ‘Tis that sometimes turned acrimonious, but I’d somehow missed, until quite recently, the plagiarism charges.
*It’s more straightforward to think about these things in a deterministic universe, but I think at least “straightforward” indeterminism doesn’t make much difference. In a deterministic universe, the laws of physics and the initial conditions determine all subsequent events. In an indeterministic one, we can regard the chance events as part of the boundary conditions. I think things may get more complicated with QM, because at least according to some interpretations, the past becomes indeterminate, so the initial or boundary conditions are not defined, and we have to think all the time in terms of the sum-over-histories.
AJ Milne:
September 7th, 2012 at 1:24 pm
I just have to say the former reporter in me is mostly just kinda impressed. I’m beginning to think I’m just not paranoid enough anymore or somethin’. However it came about, here’s a technical Oscar for you both to share.
And re ‘Tis coming to explain, I’d kinda like that to see that happen, too. I guess obviously. But I’m not even sure what my motivation is, exactly.
Curiosity, mostly, I think. And because the awful amateur psychologist in me now has all these stupid ideas about how this happened, all probably exactly wrong, and I’m trying to be properly sensitive enough and shut that guy the fuck up about it, and I’d really like to hear what ‘Tis has to say about this.
Oh, okay, and because I think most of you are pretty decent people in your various complicated ways, and I still put ‘Tis into that despite all of this. But then I’ve got roughly the resolution of a radio astronomer on this, I’m afraid. My general sensitivity to individual personalities is pretty bad on the net especially, honestly.
Seriously, ‘Tis, if you’re reading this: I’m not sure I even feel so much betrayed, personally. Don’t tend to follow anything closely enough that I could, and I’m not even very good at attaching single sets of words to specific imagined personalities anyway, and I don’t even recall whether I even read any of the cribbed bits in question… Probably not, on balance…
But I think people kinda do and kinda might be expected to. So please explain? It kinda looks to me like a lot of them might mostly forgive you all the fucking same, and if you can just somehow transition actually to citing things correctly, it does look to me like at least you get this stuff well enough that people appreciate your trying to put it together for them.
Seriously, I feel guilty when I steal a joke, even when I’m pretty sure the guy I heard it from stole it, too, so try anyway to hint where I heard it, whether or not I’m sure I remember. I’m not sure I can even relate, here. But it looks to me like you’re kinda liked here. So maybe it’s worth it: just own up and try to fix, y’know?
broboxley OT:
September 7th, 2012 at 1:26 pm
#490 Antiochus Epiphanes
well he knows enough to post a consistent viewpoint. As an example if I posed as a theologian and appeared to write passages of Pauline viewpoints one day then followed by Hadiths that were opposite in nature another day an amateur theologian would take notice.
CJO:
September 7th, 2012 at 1:34 pm
SC, forgive me if the reason for your antipathy is well-known, but why are you glad to see Hallquist headed elsewhere?
Not being leading or disingenuous; I honestly haven’t paid much attention to him. I posted a comment, on a post about ancient philosophy I think, and I’ve dropped by a couple of times to read posts about biblical interpretation and the like. Not that I was terribly impressed, but not that I thought he was terrible either.
He’s not one of the haters is he?
carlie:
September 7th, 2012 at 1:54 pm
I stumbled upon a good method of finding plagiarized answers to test questions once: instead of typing in the possible offending text, (which I had tried and somehow gotten nowhere) I finally just typed the entire question into Google. Bam. First result. Heh.
carlie:
September 7th, 2012 at 2:05 pm
Way back when the internet was shiny and new, the first thing I got involved with was a forum for women who were all due to give birth the same month. I’ve talked about that forum before here; it’s the one that underwent a hideous split after about a year and a half and dissolved in a spectacularly awful fashion. I don’t know if I mentioned that shortly before the split happened, we found out we had a faker. Someone had been impersonating a pregnant woman and then mother, with fake details of herself, the birth, the baby, etc. She just came on one day and posted that she had been participating all that time as part of a master’s thesis in sociology, studying this relatively new “forum” concept from the inside, and everything about her down to her name had been a lie. I can’t even describe how betrayed and creeped out we all felt (not to mention that I had no idea how she’d ever managed to get that “study” past an IRB).
So honestly, anything short of that level of sham as an explanation would be a lot better than what I’m braced for. But in the meantime I’ve got a terrible icky feeling that is too familiar.
Antiochus Epiphanes:
September 7th, 2012 at 2:08 pm
broboxley: Maybe. On the subject of economics, I’m not even an amateur*, so I’ll defer to the judgement of others.
*maybe “ignoramus” fits, here. I just think money is boring and have a difficult time learning things that are neither necessary or interesting for me.
SC (Salty Current), OM:
September 7th, 2012 at 2:21 pm
He posted agreeing with Thunderfoot during that fiasco and was happy to have at least that one thread – I think there were a couple – turn into a Slimepit outpost (plus Orac, acting like a fool). I did comment there arguing with his post, but I think he ignored me. He then did one of those amusingly sad “Welcome, new readers!” posts with links to his other material. I haven’t really paid attention to him otherwise, but I feared seeing some idiocy from him about Atheism+ in the sidebar here, so I’m glad that won’t happen and that he’s just no longer a presence here.
Antiochus Epiphanes:
September 7th, 2012 at 2:21 pm
I’ll weigh in as not needing an explanation. It’s a weird, shitty thing to do, but certainly no weirder or shittier than much of what takes place on the interwebs, and a hell of a lot more predictable and benign that what people do IRL. But YMMV. I don’t have much of a clue on anything that ‘Tis likes to write about (sailing, being in the navy, economics), so, like…fuck it. Whatevs.
carlie#501…my wife caught a student who had posted all of a take-home exam’s questions on yahoo answers (or whatever that yahoo service is called). The answers were so incoherent and non-responsive that she decided to just google the questions.
ChasCPeterson:
September 7th, 2012 at 2:24 pm
I can’t imagine an explanation that would make me feel any better about it. I’d rather not read one that makes me feel worse.
Improbable Joe:
September 7th, 2012 at 2:49 pm
Hallquist is leaving? Not even a bit sad to see him go. Hopefully he’s enough of a grown-up to forget we exist, but I’m totally expecting him to start bashing us pretty much immediately.
SC (Salty Current), OM:
September 7th, 2012 at 2:53 pm
Oh, it was actually this post I had in mind – Grothe, not Thunderfoot.
And if I remember correctly he’s also the one who got into a large argument about whether Plantinga (or was it William Lane Craig?) was really a believer, which in itself is of course fine, but from the bits I read he made some spectacularly bad arguments – for example, saying that the reason he knows he’s really a believer is that he knows him enough to judge based on experience and then very shortly after asserting that he’s also certain that the people involved in the Inquisition were all believers as well, I guess because being part of the Inquisition was evidence enough. Certainly not a reason to want him to leave (to put it mildly), but it annoyed me that anyone would make such a dumb claim.
Or am I confusing him with another blogger?
(If I am, I hope it’s not one I like. :))
Improbable Joe:
September 7th, 2012 at 3:12 pm
SC,
That sounds like it could also be Loftus before he left, or maybe even Fincke. Philosophers seem to stick together?
SC (Salty Current), OM:
September 7th, 2012 at 3:22 pm
Yes, thanks; I’m thinking it might have been Loftus….
Improbable Joe:
September 7th, 2012 at 3:36 pm
I know Loftus said that Craig was both a fine human being and a skilled philosopher, along the time that Craig was saying that Biblical genocide was a good thing, and making terrible arguments along the way. I’m not a philosopher, I’ve actually got some contempt for philosophy as a professional “discipline,” and it is due to the fact that people like Plantinga and Craig can be well-respected philosophers and other philosophers will shrug their shoulders and say “well, they are clever and have books published” and think that excuses piss-poor arguments and in the case of Craig seriously warped ethics.
consciousness razor:
September 7th, 2012 at 3:57 pm
If most of your exposure to it has been with religious topics, it’s easy to get a distorted picture of what it’s like in general. But whatever you really think of it, you’re probably getting a biased sample. If I had to guess, I’d say most probably don’t respect Plantinga or Craig, or would shrug and say that sort of thing. I doubt most of them have even heard of Craig.
Plantinga, they certainly have, but from what I’ve seen, they usually try to cordon off his theology (as utterly ridiculous) from the remaining scraps of the rest of his philosophy (as at least useful sometimes), which is fair enough. In his case, I’d bet being a professor rather than being published is what gives him the most leverage.
Improbable Joe:
September 7th, 2012 at 4:07 pm
consciousness razor,
More like… I’ve never really delved deeply into philosophy, but it feels sort of at best “not my bag” combined with “you needed a degree to come up with that?” and “yes, but how does that apply to the real world?” And then you add to it what I see from the “professionals” and it seems like gymnastics… I guess it is neat that you can do that, but let’s not pretend you’re really doing something, ok?
strange gods before me ॐ:
September 7th, 2012 at 4:18 pm
The latter, in my case. About 100 years ago (internet time), I read Bob Black’s* The Libertarian as Conservative when I was deconverting from right-wing libertarianism.
I noticed ‘Tis plagiarizing it — I think first in the Why are Texans so unpatriotic? thread — when the “more or-else orders … police … decade” line rang a bell for me. Then I started testing other his comments in Google and noticed the pattern.
*NB: Bob Black writes some antifeminist shit.
Is it this one? The “‘Tis Himself, was comment #15 a blockquote fail?” question was from Brownian, and you replied to mention Falvey.
Citation please.
consciousness razor:
September 7th, 2012 at 4:27 pm
Heh. Your feelings and vague impressions of it are pretty much irrelevant to what I was responding to, but okay. Let’s make sure you don’t pretend you’re “really” doing something when you do a bit philosophy either. That’s a deal?
Improbable Joe:
September 7th, 2012 at 4:30 pm
sgbf,
If I tell you that I don’t have a citation, will you mercilessly stalk me for the next year or three?
I’m not sure if there’s an archive of Loftus’s blog when he was posting here, but he defended Craig both personally and professionally and I’m paraphrasing but part of the professional defense was “I think he’s completely wrong, but he’s created some really clever arguments, so he’s a good philosopher”. I actually DID have a list of links/citations for my position, on a hard drive that is currently in a wicker box in the living room that I’m hoarding on the off-chance I’ll get bored and try to salvage something from.
Improbable Joe:
September 7th, 2012 at 4:33 pm
consciousness razor,
Only as soon as I start writing 50,000 word essays defending a point that can be stated in a paragraph. Deal?
Aratina Cage:
September 7th, 2012 at 4:39 pm
@SGBM:
Yep! :) That’s the one, and no wonder I couldn’t find it since the comments on that thread have not yet been restored at National Geographic. It’s been almost three years I see. Notice how ‘Tis doesn’t return to that thread after our comments, his last comment being #131 and Brownian’s question being #136 and mine #139, all within an hour and a half of his comment. He ran from that thread just like he is running from the Thunderdome now and from the Lounge and the other threads where he is questioned about this habit of his.
—
No explanation is fine with me, but at least let’s have an acknowledgement, ‘Tis.
strange gods before me ॐ:
September 7th, 2012 at 4:47 pm
Is this a bad joke, or have you really bought into a bullshit narrative about me? I don’t stalk anyone.
So, Loftus maybe. Not highly regarded around here anyway. And not “philosophers” generally.
You want to cite that either? You’re blowing smoke, man. It’s not to your credit.
consciousness razor:
September 7th, 2012 at 4:49 pm
That’s just Loftus. That’s not “other philosophers,” many philosophers, most philosophers, all philosophers, or philosophy as a professional discipline.
That sounds like doing a lot, rather than not “really doing something.”
Improbable Joe:
September 7th, 2012 at 4:51 pm
Why are people so defensive about philosophers? If your answer is to make mention that whenever someone is thinking, they are doing philosophy, or you can point to someone applying philosophy isn a real-world way to the benefit of real human beings, I don’t know what to say because that’s not what I’m talking about.
strange gods before me ॐ:
September 7th, 2012 at 4:55 pm
Wrong question.
Someone is wrong on the internet, and that someone is you.
Right question: Why are people so bothered by false and idiotic claims?
Well shit, Joe, you might have said from the beginning “I don’t like bad philosophers” instead of the silliness you’ve been saying.
Brownian:
September 7th, 2012 at 4:56 pm
I’m glad someone found it. I’d completely forgotten that thread (and looking back on it, I can’t remember how I’d figured out that it was lifted, but I can hazard a guess that I’d simply cut ‘n’ pasted a sentence or two into Google to find more information and found a lot more than I’d bargained for.)
This whole thing, including ‘Tis refusal to deal with it, is really frustrating.
Aratina Cage:
September 7th, 2012 at 4:56 pm
Also, I hadn’t seen this before:
That is unfortunately a common reaction to speaking up about plagiarism. I think it works similarly to the use of the word “racist” et al. The person uttering it is the True Problem™, not the person doing the thing that the word describes.
Improbable Joe:
September 7th, 2012 at 4:56 pm
If it takes me three weeks to do something that needed three minutes, that really doing a whole shit-ton of padding, which is a really fancy way of doing three weeks minus three minutes of nothing.
Improbable Joe:
September 7th, 2012 at 4:58 pm
sgbm,
How do you tell a good philosopher from a bad one?
Brownian:
September 7th, 2012 at 4:58 pm
Hmm. How did I fail to follow your link from yesterday’s comment, SG?
In case it’s not obvious, my question “‘Tis Himself, was comment #15 a blockquote fail?” was me giving ‘Tis every possible benefit of the doubt, which I obviously can no longer do.
strange gods before me ॐ:
September 7th, 2012 at 4:59 pm
I read them and see if they’re wrong.
Brownian:
September 7th, 2012 at 5:01 pm
Aside from obvious bruises, blemishes, or bad smells, good philosophers will give a bright, high ‘tink’ when you rap them with your knuckles. If they give a ‘thunk’, they’re probably still edible (stew them well), but if the sound is more of dull ‘thud’, into the compost they go.
Improbable Joe:
September 7th, 2012 at 5:02 pm
a) Are you a professional philosopher?
b) How do you judge “wrong”?
c) If they are wrong enough to be classified as a bad philosopher, how did they get to be a philosopher at all? Or at least one of enough prominence that a layperson would run across their work?
Aratina Cage:
September 7th, 2012 at 5:03 pm
Huh. I thought you could tell apart the good philosophers from the bad by how Bright they were.
strange gods before me ॐ:
September 7th, 2012 at 5:07 pm
No.
Jesus Christ. What kind of question is this? I use logic and empiricism, of course. The same way any sensible person judges whether any statement is probably true or false.
That’s going to depend on the individual in question, obviously.
ChasCPeterson:
September 7th, 2012 at 5:07 pm
Various criteria apply. For example, the ones who write 50,000-word essays to say something Joe-on-the-internet could say in a paragraph? Bad ones.
No, actually, straw ones.
Improbable Joe:
September 7th, 2012 at 5:08 pm
Well, I see that Loftus, Fincke, and Hallquist were all invited to FtB and lots of people have had issues with both their conclusions and the reasoning they’ve used to reach those conclusions, on top of folks like Craig and Plantinga being taken seriously. So, it seems like it is actually sort of tough to pick a winner?
Improbable Joe:
September 7th, 2012 at 5:11 pm
You’re getting pissed off like I’m asking a stupid question, but I’m not. It isn’t a stupid question because I’m pretty fucking sure that professional philosophers are ALSO convinced that they are also using logic and empiricism. Do you not see the problem?
Brownian:
September 7th, 2012 at 5:12 pm
Who isn’t?
Improbable Joe:
September 7th, 2012 at 5:14 pm
Brownian,
That’s sort of my whole point. Everyone is sure that they are using logic and reason. Philosophers are supposed to be actually trained to do it. There seems to be a number of philosophers who have careers at it who also seem to often fail miserably at it. I think that’s an issue.
strange gods before me ॐ:
September 7th, 2012 at 5:16 pm
I’m not. This is just Thunderdome. I’m getting exasperated because you’re saying stupid shit, and here in this thread I’m allowed to say it’s stupid shit. All of Pharyngula was this way, once upon a time…
Yeah, you are.
No, because you haven’t stated the problem you think you’ve stated.
Some people are right and some people are wrong. Or rather, some people are more right and some people are more wrong. These is facts. If some people who are wrong don’t know that they’re wrong, that has no bearing on the fact that other people are right.
consciousness razor:
September 7th, 2012 at 5:18 pm
Because I think some of it’s valuable, and because some people have some grudge against this bizarre parody of philosophy that only exists in their minds. Don’t conflate theology with philosophy. It simply makes no fucking sense to do that. You can blame religions and apologists for distorting things if you like, but there’s no need for the collateral damage.
And then there’s this other idea that if you’re not doing science, you’re wasting your time. You better believe a lot of fucking people are going to being defensive about that shit, not just philosophers when that sort of “criticism” gets leveled at them, even if it’s just due to sloppy thinking and isn’t meant that way.
Improbable Joe:
September 7th, 2012 at 5:19 pm
ChasCPeterson,
I don’t know how much of a straw philosopher that is, when Dan Fincke at one point seemed to be promising a series of essays potentially totalling 20-30 thousand words+ to justify his moderation policy, or the fact that WLC has written an entire book justifying a really simple and really lousy argument for the existence of his genocidal god.
Improbable Joe:
September 7th, 2012 at 5:20 pm
Brownian:
September 7th, 2012 at 5:20 pm
So are many other academics. What does that say about them?
Brownian:
September 7th, 2012 at 5:22 pm
How do you tell which biologists* are valuable vs. others?
*Insert any field whatsoever into here.
Improbable Joe:
September 7th, 2012 at 5:26 pm
Brownian,
That’s a great point. Let’s look at economics. There are various schools of economics, and they call for contradictory actions to create the same outcomes. Some of those ideas have been shown to be empirically wrong and yet those ideas have not be universally rejected and are apparently still taught as though they are a valid option. And yes, that also means that there are schools of economics that are empirically justified.
But, if there are wrong ideas that are still accepted, and any moderately-informed person can tell the difference between good and bad ideas, what does that say about the discipline as a whole? Doesn’t it say something?
consciousness razor:
September 7th, 2012 at 5:28 pm
Professional musicians are supposed to actually be good at music.
Celine Dion is a professional musician.
Therefore, professional musicians are no better than non-musicians at being good at music.
Yeah, uh, so everybody: How about those professional musicians? What the hell is wrong with them, am I right?
consciousness razor:
September 7th, 2012 at 5:31 pm
I should’ve said “non-professionals” rather than “non-musicians” but fuck it. We all know what a True™ musician is. Know what I mean? *wink-wink nudge-nudge*
ChasCPeterson:
September 7th, 2012 at 5:32 pm
In grad school I played in a band with a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy, great piano player. I took a few courses in college (Plato-to-Descartes, Spinoza-to-Kant, Existentialism, something called Philosophy of the Counterculture) and knew it wasn’t my bag, but I tried to pick my piano-playing friend’s brain whenever I got the chance; he was a cool guy and our wives became friends. We talked about all kinds of mind-numbing bullshit. Anyway, one thing he said I remember was “One way to think of philosophy is as working at the intersection betwen reality and language.”
I still think that’s interesting.
Brownian:
September 7th, 2012 at 5:33 pm
But, if there are wrong ideas that are still accepted, and any moderately-informed person can tell the difference between good and bad ideas, what does that say about the discipline as a whole? Doesn’t it say something?
Yes, it says that some fields of study are more subjective than others.
My first degree is in anthropology. Unfortunately, some units of study don’t fit into petri dishes.
Improbable Joe:
September 7th, 2012 at 5:33 pm
Can you insert ANY field in there? Because I can tell when a plumber is doing the job correctly if my plumbing works and I don’t get overcharged for the labor and parts. I can tell if a mechanic is doing their job correctly. There are ways to track the performance of doctors and biologists and physicists, although those are probably beyond the realm of the average layperson in a lot of cases.
Brownian:
September 7th, 2012 at 5:34 pm
That’s not a bad description, Chas.
LicoriceAllsort:
September 7th, 2012 at 5:35 pm
Apologies for barging in, but I wanted to put this petition on the Horde’s radar. TW for references to sexual abuse.
Terry’s execution date is set for Oct 3, 2012. Please consider signing the petition and passing it along to others.
Brownian:
September 7th, 2012 at 5:36 pm
There are multiple solutions to most problems. How can you tell if you’ve been overcharged for labour and parts?
I know something about medicine, particularly oncology. Are you sure of this?
LicoriceAllsort:
September 7th, 2012 at 5:37 pm
…and I’m a dork. Petition for clemency for Terrance Williams.
Improbable Joe:
September 7th, 2012 at 5:38 pm
consciousness razor, you’re misinterpreting my point. I blame myself for not presenting a formal paper to you on the subject… :)
No, seriously I do accept that I have been less than clear. Your analogy with music would work better if you replaced “professional musician” with “professional music instructor.” And while musical taste is subjective, there’s actually a way to judge if a musician is playing a piece of music as written, or if they are screwing it up.
If you want to say that philosophy is an art rather than a discipline, or even as much art as discipline, I can accept that.
strange gods before me ॐ:
September 7th, 2012 at 5:42 pm
To justify, not to state. He could have stated it outright very succinctly. It was quite a bit more work to attempt to justify all his arguments for why it should be such. If you think that’s trivial, go restate all his arguments as briefly as you can — not your arguments for a moderation policy you’d prefer, but his arguments for his own policy — keeping in mind that many of his arguments were in response to specific counterarguments from earlier threads.
Theology again. Doesn’t help your case much.
Consider biology. By your reasoning, the fact that both David Sloan Wilson and PZ Myers are professional biologists is a problem for the discipline of biology as a whole, because they can’t both be right.
+++++
Are you aware of any good philosophers, Joe?
consciousness razor:
September 7th, 2012 at 5:43 pm
Yeah, that’s not too shabby. It deals in concepts. A lot of people make the mistake of thinking the words and concepts we make up just naturally or automatically “carve up nature at its joints,” but they don’t. So people have to pick them apart and put them back together in different ways, just to see what works as a concept and what doesn’t. That’s the kind of work it’s doing a lot of the time, but I don’t feel like writing 50,000 words on it right now, since many others already have.
Improbable Joe:
September 7th, 2012 at 5:46 pm
I don’t know if I can answer that question in the context of this conversation. I am aware of philosophers that I agree with, and people who are “doing philosophy” that I agree with.
consciousness razor:
September 7th, 2012 at 5:46 pm
No. It’s an art in the way science is, but that’s not what I wanted to say about it. I don’t understand the distinction between “an art” and “a discipline” that you’re making.
strange gods before me ॐ:
September 7th, 2012 at 5:48 pm
And why do you agree with them?
Improbable Joe:
September 7th, 2012 at 5:49 pm
… and on that note, I’m going to bow out for the evening. Catch you folks again tomorrow if you like?
Ichthyic:
September 7th, 2012 at 5:49 pm
By your reasoning, the fact that both David Sloan Wilson and PZ Myers are professional biologists
Sloan Wilson is not a biologist any more.
he pretends to be one, but really all he does is recycle bad assumptions into mathematical models.
Ichthyic:
September 7th, 2012 at 5:51 pm
…I do understand your point. Just had to toss that out there, given I’ve met the man and listened directly to his latest spiel about group selection and the evolution of religion.
he’s gone down the rabbit hole of self-confirmation bias.
Ichthyic:
September 7th, 2012 at 5:53 pm
I don’t know if I can answer that question in the context of this conversation. I am aware of philosophers that I agree with, and people who are “doing philosophy” that I agree with.
now that’s interesting.
Joe decides if a philosopher is good based on whether they agree with them or not?
Brownian:
September 7th, 2012 at 5:56 pm
So have I, but I’m still really good at giving the impression that I’m open to the possibility that I could be wr—
Sorry, my fingers slipped.
I’m open to the possibility that I could be wro—w-r-o—
Uh, there’s something up with this keyboard.
Let me try something else.
I’m open to the possibility that I could be incorre—incorrrrrrr—myknowledgecouldbeincomplete.
Improbable Joe:
September 7th, 2012 at 5:57 pm
… last post for the night on this subject. Can everyone limit themselves to one last short post at most, so that I can reasonably answer your criticisms tomorrow? I don’t mind the discussion, and I’m pretty sure I’m chianging my mind on at least some of my position, but if you dogpile while I’m doing other things I’m going to be overwhelmed.
Brownian:
September 7th, 2012 at 5:58 pm
No, my interpretation is that he’s saying that he can tell whether or not he agrees with a philosopher, but that he’s not capable of telling whether or not that particular philosopher is any good.
Brownian:
September 7th, 2012 at 5:59 pm
Joe, don’t worry about me. I’m happy to lurk this one, so don’t feel you have to respond to my comments. I think others are far more capable of discussing this issue than I.
Have a good night.
hotshoe:
September 7th, 2012 at 6:18 pm
Exactly.
broboxley OT:
September 7th, 2012 at 6:30 pm
#26 improbable Joe
the one who doesnt fall into your normative of the narrative is the bad philosopher
SGBM will call you on stuff and ask for citations if you posit a point but only if it seems like your point needs to be addressed.
Anne C. Hanna:
September 7th, 2012 at 7:08 pm
Hmph. Philosophy. I have conflicted feelings about the discipline, because while a lot of the potential subject matter seems interesting and important, and while some people who are philosophers write some very interesting things, there’s also a hell of a lot of rubbish, including a fair percentage of the stuff by the “big names”. Descartes beginning from “I think, therefore I am,” and proceeding to “prove” the omni* triune deity of the Catholic Church is one that particularly annoyed me when I first read his stuff many years ago. By the end I found myself wondering why anyone took him seriously ever at all, and he’s by no means the only one I’ve had this kind of experience with.
One big problem I’ve seen in a lot of the philosophy I’ve encountered is the use of very vague and subjective words (often Randomly Capitalized, like capitalization makes them somehow more important or fundamental) which make it easy to equivocate and bamboozle the reader. Religious philosophers seem to be some of the worst abusers of this — I’m thinking particularly of stuff like making a big ol’ mucky wallow out of the idea of “perfection” in order to “prove” the necessary existence of a particular deity-concept. Many modern secular philosophers seem to have learned to be more careful about this kind of thing, but I still see it cropping up occasionally, and a lot of older works are almost unreadable because of it.
Another problem I’ve encountered is incessant citation of Big Name So-And-So’s position on a particular issue, as if the fact that So-And-So the Great said something means that that thing is established as true for all time and no one is ever permitted to question it. Being in the physical sciences, I understand the importance of giving proper credit to the originator of a particular idea, and of summarizing evidence for brevity, but it’s rare when I read physical science literature that I get the impression that somebody’s trying to impress me into silence with the Name of their source. There are definitely philosophers who are citing more in a physical science way, just saying, “So-And-So is generally considered to be the originator of the argument that ,” but there’s also a fair bit of stuff that’s more along the lines of, “So-And-So proved , so I’m going to build everything else on this basis without even giving much of a pointer to a justification [and if one is so bold as to seek out the justification one will discover that it's complete nonsense],” especially once religion starts coming into it. I’d like to think that philosophy has mostly come out of the era of the arguments from authority and antiquity, but it in my experience there’s still a certain amount of backsliding.
The third thing that bugs me about a lot of philosophy is that so much of it seems to be so backward-looking. Philosophers from hundreds of years ago are still cited as important authorities, and it’s considered a key part of education in philosophy to read their actual original works, no matter how obscurantist their language or how lousy their argumentation. It’s not clear to me why it’s important to read all this old crap to have a good grounding in philosophy. I didn’t have to read the original works of Galileo to learn how to use his ideas, and, in fact, if I were to try to do physics in the style of Galileo, cite his works extensively in scientific publications, and declare myself a “Galilean”, I’d be laughed out of science. Galileo was an interesting dude, to be sure, and I respect what he accomplished, but studying his works directly is considered to be in the realm of history of science, not science (no disrespect intended to history of science — it’s also neat and valuable, it’s just not the same as science).
So why are (for example) Nietzsche’s rather unreadable (IMO) works still essential texts in a philosophy education rather than being replaced by something more updated and streamlined? Why are all these old d00ds still being cited on a regular basis, rather than gathering dust in a back room like Galileo is? I can’t help wondering if these things hold on not so much because they’re still relevant to the field in and of themselves, but more because philosophers are inculcated with a ridiculously strong strain of respect for ivory-tower-polishing, rather than being taught that the point of doing philosophy is to make new contributions to our understanding of the world and to the development of humane and practical ethical systems.
So, I dunno. My experience of philosophy has been that I’m drawn to a lot of the subject matter, but repulsed by a lot of the actual written works that I’ve encountered. I do know that there’s good stuff out there, and I’ve even read some of it, so I always try to go into any given reading with a positive attitude, but I’ve been disappointed with readings in philosophy far more often than with readings in the sciences. So it’s easy to conclude that it’s mostly a waste of time to try to sort the wheat from the chaff.
Anne C. Hanna:
September 7th, 2012 at 7:13 pm
Whoops, forgot to escape my angle braces. Those sentences in my second paragraph should read:
“So-And-So is generally considered to be the originator of the argument that <explanation and brief justification of argument>,”
and:
“So-And-So proved <bald statement>, so I’m going to build everything else on this basis without even giving much of a pointer to a justification [and if one is so bold as to seek out the justification one will discover that it's complete nonsense],”
broboxley OT:
September 7th, 2012 at 7:42 pm
#71 Anne C. Hanna
I think you are confusing applied logic vs research and development logic
Anne C. Hanna:
September 7th, 2012 at 7:47 pm
broboxley,
I am really not sure what you’re trying to get at with this. Please elaborate.
broboxley OT:
September 7th, 2012 at 7:59 pm
Philosophy of the religious sort is applied logic. The constraint field is pre-built for you much like applied research. All logic must proceed from this precondition of containment.
Research and Development logic is free form with no containment other than empirical building blocks. Like an research and development project where you are given a very vague endpoint and a large budget. You are told to build something spacey and the next thing you know you have found a use for nano buckey balls and tooth enamel repair but it only works in a vacuum.
“I think therefore I am” was interesting. Almost as interesting as “I think therefore you only exist in my mind as an extension of myself”
Anne C. Hanna:
September 7th, 2012 at 8:01 pm
broboxley, I understand your point even less now than I did after your first comment. Are you talking about motivated reasoning, or something else?
broboxley OT:
September 7th, 2012 at 8:11 pm
what field are you in Anne? Maybe I could use similes that you are more familiar with
Religious Philosophers are constrained by their faith. Because of that constraint their logic is reasoned very well within that particular framework. If you don’t accept their religious “circular reasoning bucket” their arguments wont have a lot of resonance fr you.
Non religious philosophers (and I dont really consider Nietzsche a philosopher) Also have constraints of their current localized culture. The common theme as SGBM has mentioned earlier is that their logic must be empirical. Not necessarily right but cohesive.
broboxley OT:
September 7th, 2012 at 8:15 pm
Sorry Ann, should have clicked on your Nym
So there is “applied research” and R&D
religious philosophers are like folks working on applied research projects
non religious philosophers are like the R&D researchers as opposed to applied researchers
consciousness razor:
September 7th, 2012 at 8:17 pm
broboxley QFT? What is happening here? Is the world ending? I need to reevaluate my life.
Apologists trying to prove the existence of a god are irrelevant, so I’ll ignore it.* What makes you think this is at least somewhat accurate?
Could you give an example? Are they trying to prove something exists? Or trying to develop a consistent framework by researching (hence “R&D”) what the implications would be if something were true, without committing to it or using it in some kind of ontological argument?
*In fact a lot of modern religious apologists don’t accept ontological arguments either, whether they count as representative of “philosophers” or not.
Hurin, Midnight DJ on the Backwards Music Station:
September 7th, 2012 at 8:24 pm
Why?
Anne C. Hanna:
September 7th, 2012 at 8:25 pm
broboxley, I think I see what you’re saying now, but what *I* was trying to say is that their reasoning is *not* in fact logical, because it relies on a lot of hidden assumptions which often shift without notice.
In the particular case of the “perfection” argument, the term “perfection” is generally not well defined, and there is often substantial equivocation amongst multiple different definitions of perfection, depending on which happens to be convenient at any particular point in the argument. This is just an example, but I’ve seen similar nonsense all over the place in certain types of philosophy.
So my complaint is not just that these arguments don’t have resonance for me, it’s that they’re shit arguments which seem be more about motivated reasoning (trying to prove the thing the arguer already believes) than about building a sound logical framework from empirically-warranted and clearly defined premises.
I don’t see any justification for cordoning off a particular area of argumentation as a special clarity-, consistency-, and empirical-warrant-free zone where people ought to be allowed to witter on endlessly about the logical necessity of ill-defined “perfections” without being called on it just because that’s how that area of argumentation works. It strikes me as little better than the separate magisteria crap that religious folks try to use to protect their nonsense from effective scrutiny.
broboxley OT:
September 7th, 2012 at 8:36 pm
#79 Hurin
to me Nietzsche was an articulate observer of his time and place. His works, which I have only read english translations of, are interesting as descriptors. His theory of “question authority” wasn’t really new or that interesting. Thats just me. I prefer Lenny Bruce and Allan King
broboxley OT:
September 7th, 2012 at 8:38 pm
Ah, Anna I see
But how can one have a good argument about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin without stipulating that both angels and pins exist? (BTW if you didnt know the answer its 144)
Anne C. Hanna:
September 7th, 2012 at 8:54 pm
consciousness razor,
I admit, my days of spending significant amounts of time trying to read philosophy are largely over, primarily because I got impatient with the amount of laughable nonsense cloaked in layers of abstruse verbiage that I was encountering from supposedly great philosophers. It just stopped seeming worthwhile to wade through that to find the good bits. What little philosophy I’ve read recently has been related to religion/atheism discussions, which is why the “perfection” example is prominent in my thoughts, but I don’t have a huge list of other examples ready to hand. Seeing as how I don’t really have a vendetta against philosophy, just a sorta mild dissatisfaction with it, I’ve got no motivation to keep such a list.
That said, I’m not sure why anything I’ve said would lead one to the conclusion that I’m critiquing philosophers simply for examining hypotheticals. I would’ve thought that my choice of examples would’ve made it clear that that’s not the case.
Furthermore, I am in no way contending that all (or even most — I haven’t taken a survey) philosophy is crap. I’ve seen some good stuff, and I’m not trying to run it down. All I’m saying is that there are good reasons that a lot of people are kind of iffy about philosophy in general. I suspect that most of them are probably related to holdovers from its theological past, and are probably slowly decreasing, but I still think it’s worth taking explicit notice of them, in order to get rid of them faster, and in order to address the negative perceptions that people have about the discipline.
Anne C. Hanna:
September 7th, 2012 at 8:57 pm
broboxley,
I’ve been trained to see the solution/proof as more interesting than the answer, so I’m going to have to insist that you show your work. :P
broboxley OT:
September 7th, 2012 at 9:31 pm
#84 Anne short version
with the stipulation of both angels and pins you have the following
pin, dimensions dont matter as angels are magical
what is an angel? In the literature you have beings that are godlike without being a supreme being. References from persian, hebrew, assyrian, hindi and tibetan sources gain a hierarchy of angels. One stops at 144 because that number is symmetrical. Lesser numbers seem trivial and larger exponents of 12 let in lesser demons such as the base animistic demons. Now some backward country wannabees insist that the numerical exponential should be 7 not 12 but we let those folks mutter in the lubavitch corner :-)
To me philosophical discussions between atheists and the religious should never happen. Any discussion should be on pure legal terminology as one side will not accept the others stipulations.
So where is your book, what does it say, why are you not living up to what your book states if its all true. That at least gets you to there is no “true christian” part of the argument
consciousness razor:
September 7th, 2012 at 9:34 pm
Okay. I’ve never seen a modern philosopher use an ontological argument, except for some fraction of theologians. It just doesn’t happen.
They make mistakes like everyone else, but most of them really aren’t so prone to fallacious arguments and total absurdities like people seem to be saying. And they don’t tend to make a load of assumptions without analyzing them. Instead, some do tediously spend thousands of words trying to rip them apart to see if there’s anything of value, rather than state in a paragraph what they believe while expecting everyone to simply accept it without discussion. That may not be interesting or useful to you, at least in some cases, but I don’t know why anyone would be against it generally.
ChasCPeterson:
September 7th, 2012 at 9:36 pm
ah, the intersection of engineering and juggaloism. I can’t think of a better committee for judging philosophy.
What say ye of…Berkeley?????
Engineer?
Juggalo?
how about…Sartre?????
Juggalo?
Engineer?
consciousness razor:
September 7th, 2012 at 9:43 pm
Those are two of the greatest juggaloists of all time, Chas. Everyone knows that.
Antiochus Epiphanes:
September 7th, 2012 at 9:43 pm
Some of my favorite philosophical work has implications in the way that evidence is used to update beliefs, especially when the field of explanation is well defined (phylogenetic trees) but vast. In short there are very few disagreements about the actual mathematical operations but much more about what the results mean in terms of validating hypotheses. The decision about which kinds of operations one wishes to employ rest on not only the tractability of the operations, but philosophical reasons about which methods anwer the questions in a way that allows a straightforward interpretation of which hypotheses ought to engender belief.
The differences are so deep, that after 30 years, there are still rifts in the scientific community about which operations to use, even though computation of competing methods is not very controversial.
For an early overview of how this all unfolded, David Hull’s Science as a Process is a fairly captivating read*.
ChasP: I like the description that you gave– intersection of reality and language.
*although, some of the facts presented have been disputed by the subjects of the work
Antiochus Epiphanes:
September 7th, 2012 at 9:50 pm
Chas, cr: hee hee.
Anne C. Hanna:
September 7th, 2012 at 10:00 pm
consciousness razor,
I’m willing to accept that modern philosophers have gotten a lot better about the kind of stuff I’m objecting to. But why is it that all these old d00ds who *did* do it still seem to be in the ranks of the greats, and still seem to be considered essential reading? Is this all just a matter of popular perception, and True Philosophers don’t really give much respect to all that old nonsense any more, or are the old d00ds seen as being for some reason so valuable that it’s worth overlooking their flaws? Are they just kept around because when one needs to argue against a particular view it’s useful to have some name to attach it to as shorthand? And if so, why aren’t these old crappy things more widely understood to have been discredited, like phlogiston was in physics? Is *that* the popular perception failure? What am I missing here?
consciousness razor:
September 7th, 2012 at 10:15 pm
Because history is worth understanding? Because they sometimes had things to say that are still relevant? Because we can learn from mistakes just like we can learn from successes?
Again: give some examples.
I do sort of like Carrier’s idea of setting up a website of “established” philosophy, when something’s been covered exhaustively and a pretty reliable conclusion (or two or three) has been reached. But I bet that would still be fairly limited, relative to of all the topics that have come up over thousands of years.
John Morales:
September 7th, 2012 at 10:24 pm
Anne, science is philosophy, but with with a particular domain, epistemology and methodology; similarly logic, jurisprudence, political theory and any number of other disciplines are types of philosophy.
(Once was natural philosophy)
Because otherwise people would keep rediscovering those ideas and arguments and they’d have to be nutted-out all over again.
(Euthyphro dilemma, anyone?)
Not just the above, but also because most such are not amenable to empirical falsification, unlike science.
broboxley OT:
September 7th, 2012 at 10:31 pm
Chas #87 excellent both juggaloeists
now Maimonides?
Pythagoras?
Violent Jay? (gave you an easy one)
Pablo Escobar, criminal or philosopher or both?
Stallworth, engineer philosopher or jugaloeist?
Black Elk, philosopher or jugaloeist?
Antiochus Epiphanes:
September 7th, 2012 at 10:32 pm
Without philosophy, statistics is just naked operation.
Yeah. I said it. I’m a little drunk, but, shit.
broboxley OT:
September 7th, 2012 at 10:36 pm
#91 Anne,
quick question, is string theory philosophy or engineering?
from the evidence it can be both but is disputed by those who do not regard the underlying constraints (like the non religious refuse the constraints of the religious)
ibyea:
September 7th, 2012 at 10:50 pm
@broboxley
I would call it speculative applied math. It is trying to be physics, but there is no way in hell that it can be falsified, since if one form of string theory goes wrong, someone comes up with new excuses.
consciousness razor:
September 7th, 2012 at 10:55 pm
Theoretical physics, but I’m okay with calling that philosophy.
Not engineering, unless I’m missing something. Do string theorists have to make or design their own chalk?
ibyea:
September 7th, 2012 at 11:01 pm
Well, what conscousness razor said is more accurate. It is theoretical physics. I just hate calling it physics. That’s just me, though.
Anne C. Hanna:
September 7th, 2012 at 11:54 pm
broboxley, right now string theory is math. If anybody ever figures out how to test it, maybe it will then become science. Or maybe it will be discarded like phlogiston. If it *is* discarded, I can guarantee you that in a hundred years physics students won’t spend much time learning details about the names and theories of the proponents of string theory, or reading their original works. It won’t be completely forgotten, any more than phlogiston has been, but it’ll be a footnote, and the string theorists’ books will probably be out of print, accessible only in obscure rare book collections.
The thing that bugs me about philosophy is that a lot of its crappy old stuff doesn’t seem to be in a similar condition. I’m not saying that it oughta be thrown into a fire, or that it’s not of historical interest or nuthin’, but why haven’t folks like Aristotle and Aquinas faded into well-deserved obscurity the way the phlogistonists mostly have? Why is so much of this stuff still treated as significant cultural touchstones?
Even when you look at bad scientific ideas that *haven’t* faded out of the popular culture yet, like creationism, an education in the sciences doesn’t generally involve any kind of pretense that such things are of anything more than historical interest, and one doesn’t typically spend much time delving into their intricacies, reading the original works, or exploring the details of the arguments. Hell, even in the case of the *good* ideas, we don’t usually spend a lot of time studying the originators’ works, because the original conceptions and presentations of the ideas generally weren’t as good as what was developed and refined by later generations of researchers. We remember the originators’ names, but when we use their ideas we refer to textbook distillations, not primary sources.
Somehow science mostly doesn’t have to refight all its old battles over and over and over (modulo the occasional crank), despite the fact that those old ideas aren’t given a serious amount of attention in science education. There’s a general recognition that that stuff is old and dead and generally a waste of time that could be better spent studying stuff that *hasn’t* been shown to be crap.
I get that philosophy isn’t entirely subject to empirical validation, and that this can cause complications, but by that logic, math should have the same problems, and it doesn’t. This is because math actually *does* define its terms clearly and unambiguously, state all of its axioms, and proceed from there without any messing around. So when you prove something in math, it’s proven, straight-up, with very little room for sensible argument, but philosophy doesn’t seem to be able to offer this. In fact, I’d argue that the problem in philosophy is precisely that, unlike math, it *does* have links to the real world. It attempts to pronounce about what humans are, what we value, what we *should* value, how we should actualize those values, and so forth. In this realm it’s hard to define the terms and axioms precisely, or to determine their logical implications. Moreover, while philosophy has real-world implications which *should* be testable to some extent, nobody seems to be able to agree about what constitutes a valid test, or what the test results mean. This in turn means that it’s easy for sneaky, equivocating crap (or inadvertently equivocating crap) to pass unnoticed, because there’s no definitive way of rejecting it. A non-negligible amount of that sneaky, equivocating crap seems to be in the canon of greats, and it’s not clear to me why there isn’t a more concerted effort to clean it out.
Anne C. Hanna:
September 8th, 2012 at 12:07 am
Addendum: John, I’m not sure that I’m satisfied with defining philosophy (for the purposes of this conversation) in a way that’s so broad that just about every field of human intellectual endeavor could potentially be considered philosophy. It kind of seems like yet another equivocation issue. The original gripe here was pretty clearly about philosophy as practiced by the people who call themselves philosophers and inhabit philosophy departments, so it seems to me that dragging in the physics department and the political science department and so forth will just confuse things.
consciousness razor:
September 8th, 2012 at 12:53 am
Aristotle practically invented formal logic. Is that still significant? Is it like phlogiston? Some people (philosophers or not) still like some things about his ethics, maybe without even knowing it. That’s about it, I think. Other than that: obscurity. What makes you think otherwise? Have you been pestered by many staunch Aristotelians lately? Since you don’t want it thrown in the fire, what exactly do you expect modern philosophers to do about it that they haven’t in fact been doing?
Same with Aquinas, really. I don’t know many philosophers who’d bother to spend any time poring over Thomistic theology. Philosophers tend to be atheists, so what would be the point?
consciousness razor:
September 8th, 2012 at 1:03 am
Where to begin? The world is confusing. Philosophers in philosophy departments do address political and physical theories, among many other things. I don’t what else to say. It’s definitely not all about ancient religions.
John Morales:
September 8th, 2012 at 1:57 am
Anne:
Really?
(You quibble about categories and scope of the universe of discourse whilst decrying philosophy as a discipline — I am duly amused)
theophontes (坏蛋):
September 8th, 2012 at 2:11 am
@ John / Hanna
(Well, we called that one “Eeyore’s Theorem”. Who came up with the nickname originally is lost in the mists (and beer-fog) of time. Substitute “philosophy” at your own peril.)
{relurks}
John Morales:
September 8th, 2012 at 2:37 am
Pretty good that, theophontes. :)
McC2lhu saw what you did there.:
September 8th, 2012 at 3:31 am
There’s a rumour going around, because I just started it, that the MRAs and other asstivists in the genre have become quite disgruntled and want a place just to be able to say whatever the fuck dumb shit comes to their feeble minds, especially rape jokes, victim blaming, use of gendered epithets and masturbation of privilege; so they are starting their own website dedicated to the cause: Ableism+
At Ableism+ one can blather on contentedly for hours about how Rebecca Watson IS the c-word, the apparent victory over the BlagHag despite her imminent return and other fun pastimes that border on the obsessive and paranoid, if not completely transgressing it, stomping on it until a dust cloud rises and screaming misogynist slurs until the noise bylaw officers have to intervene…uhm, where was I? Oh yeah, and one will not hear a single discouraging comment from the FtBullies, only the calming reassurances and echoing sentiments of your fellow DudeBros or those hotties that are really working it in that sexy attire they’re wearing today.
Join the
bowelmovement at Ableism+.org.#BitchesAintShit #Women’sOpinions?LOL #WeBeUnctuousSmirkingAssholes #TellItMahBruthuh! #HowDareTheyQuestionMyWhiteDudedness #Ableism+FTWBITCHES!
strange gods before me ॐ:
September 8th, 2012 at 6:39 am
Huh.
‘Tis Himself has changed his usual boat avatar to this dude. (Copied here.)
Who is that dude? Is this a cryptic message, or is that just his favorite country singer?
John Morales:
September 8th, 2012 at 7:06 am
ॐ, Google images identifies it as Alferd Packer.
MikeG:
September 8th, 2012 at 8:04 am
Heh. CU Boulder still has the Alferd Packer Grill. (insert joke about the annual long pig roast)
McC2lhu saw what you did there.:
September 8th, 2012 at 8:26 am
MikeG:
You won’t have to worry about anyone cannibalizing those jokes. ;)
carlie:
September 8th, 2012 at 8:41 am
So he has been reading along, then. ‘Tis, nobody’s trying to put you on trial and condemn you here. You’ve built up a pretty extensive history, and regardless of whether you were cribbing from others, I assume that everything about your personality and your reactions etc. were the “real” you. It’s just that most of us do see plagiarism as a big thing, and some of us would like to know whether you did it on purpose and for you to start citing your sources from now on.
McC2lhu saw what you did there.:
September 8th, 2012 at 9:17 am
I’m stuck in moderation at Alethian so I’m going to x-post this here in case I get lost in the shuffle.
broboxley OT:
September 8th, 2012 at 9:33 am
Kagin is an ass, I simply commented that insisting on raping someone isnt the same as declaring that you dont like the flavor of their ice cream and the fucker wouldnt publish that
ruteekatreya:
September 8th, 2012 at 9:37 am
I’m not sure about the appropriate place to vent this, but it’s unmoderated and my girlfriend’s asleep so what the hell.
What the everliving hell is wrong with people? How can anyone pretend that there’s not a moral imperative to leave the Catholic Church at this point? THat people aren’t being assholes by staying and supporting it? There is no ‘greater good’ to be done by trying to really change it. Like the democrats, they have considerable leeway because they have absolute (and justified) faith that people won’t leave more or less no matter what they do. Unlike the democrats, there’s no utilitarian reason to stay, and there’s considerably less accountability or serious change from within in the intervening periods.
It pisses me the hell off that people will treat emotional attachments to the church as a moral justification for staying. Don’t get me wrong; people are people. I understand that some will stay for this, even if they are totally ethical in every other respect. But that doesn’t make it the correct or right choice. People are fucking suffering because of the Catholic Church. Quit fucking helping them do it.
And of course, I had to watch feminists be the ones to ignore the catholic church’s massive bullshit campaigns.
Rev. BigDumbChimp:
September 8th, 2012 at 9:46 am
Is this some sort of cannibalism / plagiarism leap?
anteprepro:
September 8th, 2012 at 9:58 am
The religious are notoriously good at pretending and notoriously bad at understanding moral imperatives that aren’t fed to them by their churches. The consistent denial of the obvious by Catholics (or appealing to “b-b-b-but, I’ve always gone to church, whimper whine”) in order to justify their continued support of their church is just the latest galling example of that.
chigau (違わない):
September 8th, 2012 at 10:10 am
The effect Catholic Church teaching had on me was to make me think that the Catholic Church was the only way to get to heaven.
It mattered not in the slightest if I approved of anything or anypriest as long as I followed The Rules.
It was dead easy and required no thought.
But then I stopped Believing™ as a young teenager so I have no idea how adults manage.
broboxley OT:
September 8th, 2012 at 10:14 am
ruteekatreya my wife is a catholic, she identifies as such and will die under that brand. She goes at christmas and maybe at easter. Wont take communion because she hates confessing to anything to anybody. We almost didnt get married (Im not catholic but offered to marry her there) because she refused confession. It took an entire villiage to cajole her into the hut. When I asked her how it went she said “shaddup” but if you ask her what her religion is she will answer, catholic.
consciousness razor:
September 8th, 2012 at 3:42 pm
Pretty much my whole family is Catholic. I’ve talked with my parents about it before. They can’t stand all the rapes, cover-ups, other scandals, or even some of their church’s dogma. Some of it’s hit them locally, with priests and others they’ve known for years, so it’s really gotten to them and they’ve complained pretty openly about it to me. Along with having a constant influx of new, increasingly-uninspiring priests shuffled around in their diocese, the liturgy changed recently too. They’re fairly devout and stubborn and ignorant (I repeat myself?), so that kind of thing matters a lot to them.
None of it’s the same church to them, and there’s really nothing about the church and how they interact with it that they wouldn’t have a good reason to complain about. And because they’re devout and stubborn and ignorant, that episcopalian church over there (or whatever) is scary and foreign. Nice, friendly, normal people do go there, of course, but inside it’s apparently a big black box. Who knows what could happen if they went there instead? Several years ago, they settled into a different Catholic parish in the same diocese because they were so frustrated with the other, but if they did more than that, I don’t know…. Zeus might strike them down or something.
And somehow it’s like they don’t even have a decision to make. They’re old. They’re surrounded by other Catholics they’ve known their entire lives. It’s their identity and their family and their community. It’s just who they are, in so many ways. It’d be like asking them to become someone else. How could they do that? It seems like they just can’t think of it as which institution they’re “staying” with or “supporting.” Like I said, a lot of this shit is very local for them too. It’s hard to treat it like some distant thing halfway across the country, but they can still distance themselves just enough.
“It’s those other people right over there. Who me? No, I’m just me, and I’m Catholic, always have been. Nothing I can do about that.”
I just don’t know what you can say to a person like that.
Improbable Joe:
September 8th, 2012 at 4:34 pm
Anne C. Hanna seems to have said a lot of what I have been feeling, and much better than I would have done. Sweet, I can be lazy!
Noooo!!!! Like other folks correctlty interpreted, I am saying I don’t know if they are good or not. I’m not sure what the criteria should be. As stated earlier in the conversation, we can say we are judging by “logic and empiricism” but that’s sort of moving the question one step back and hitting the same problem. It is a rare day where one person just up and admits that they are making shit up based on a whim and just pretending that they have good reasons to hold that view.
consciousness razor:
September 8th, 2012 at 4:45 pm
Since it fails on all points, I guess it’s a good thing you didn’t bother making it even worse.
Anne C. Hanna:
September 8th, 2012 at 5:13 pm
Good evening, ‘Dome.
———
John and cr,
I’m not decrying philosophy as a discipline. I’m saying that there seem to be some aspects of the way the subject is handled that are unsatisfactory, in the same way as I might critique the widespread problems with statistics in certain areas of modern medical research without decrying the entire practice of medicine, or even the idea of doing research in those particular areas.
I’m also not claiming that professional philosophers don’t or shouldn’t address questions that are somehow the property of other departments, or that work in other departments doesn’t/shouldn’t ever encompass a certain amount of material that could reasonably be described as philosophy. I’m not generally terribly interested in disciplinary boundaries. I study and discuss stuff that interests me without getting hung up on where it oughta fall in the course catalog, and I’m sure as hell not gonna impose restrictions on others’ investigations that I wouldn’t accept for myself. I just don’t think it’s very helpful for the purposes of the current discussion to equate the academic discipline which calls itself philosophy with all philosophical discussions engaged in by everyone everywhere, or to defend against complaints about the quality of some philosophical argumentation by pointing out that philosophers also argue (sometimes poorly, sometimes well) about things other than the number of angels which can dance on the head of a pin.
In fact, I actually just ran into an example of crap philosophy today which was in fact about something from the sciences:
https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2012/09/07/another-philosopher-proclaims-a-nonexistent-crisis-in-evolutionary-biology/
As far as I can tell, this Dupré guy isn’t religious in any way, but that doesn’t stop him from making a hash of things in his buzzword-laden quest to overturn “traditional reductionist views of science”.
Anne C. Hanna:
September 8th, 2012 at 5:16 pm
Also, cr, I’m interested that you say that I failed on all points when you didn’t even *address* most of the points we made in my original comment. We’ve been going back and forth about one or two sentences, with, I think, a certain amount of misunderstanding of what I said in those sentences, and the rest of it seems to have fallen down the memory hole.
Anne C. Hanna:
September 8th, 2012 at 5:31 pm
Urk. Royal we. Nice job me.
broboxley OT:
September 8th, 2012 at 7:07 pm
Anne #124 under chaos theory a butterfly fart in the amazon can cause a tornado in nebraska.
What does it matter to study from the tornado to the butterfly or the butterfly to the tornado?
cm's changeable moniker:
September 8th, 2012 at 7:45 pm
http://plato.stanford.edu/
Probably, although it might well be less wrong than all the random shit people have made up over thousands of years. ;-)
John Morales:
September 8th, 2012 at 8:04 pm
Anne, Coyne is well-known for his attitude to philosophy; PZ is more nuanced.
(Have you read this piece by Dan Fincke?)
John Morales:
September 8th, 2012 at 8:10 pm
broboxley, I’m not convinced you comprehend the concept behind the butterfly effect.
consciousness razor:
September 8th, 2012 at 8:30 pm
You gave no examples of your impression of philosophy having any basis in reality. I asked several times and got nothing. If you just make a bunch of assertions, I’d say those points failed, and I’d say I wouldn’t need to address them until they get substantiated. So of the points that you’ve actually backed up, assuming there are any, which haven’t I addressed?
Now, you finally gave an example: a philosopher of science interpreting facts differently than Coyne, maybe even getting some facts wrong? How terrible! Scientists make the same fucking kind of mistakes every day.
So even if he’s totally off base here, what’s the point? What is the problem for philosophy or philosophers generally that you’re alluding to in this case?
Is it being wrong? Is it the use of buzzwords? Is it wanting to overturn traditional reductionist views? What?
As an aside: he’s doing philosophy of science, but you said you wanted to leave those sorts of things out to avoid confusion. Your complaints were at least supposed to be about “pure” philosophy (whatever that would be, if anything), but I don’t see how this could be an example of that. I personally wouldn’t hold that point against it as being representative of philosophy, so this is pretty much irrelevant, but I’m still confused by what you were saying before.
Sophia, Michelin-starred General of the First Mediterranean Iron Chef Batallion:
September 8th, 2012 at 9:56 pm
Hm. Anyone help me flesh out a few mental puddles I’ve trodden in whilst reading the comments over at Alethea’s rather smashing Neo-Molly post?
I’m one of those irritating people who always gives the benefit of the doubt, so I was reading BG’s posts and getting a bit bemused by the backlash, until I was smacked in the face by the connection to the OP. (Yeah, I’m a bit slow sometimes.)
I’m feeling a bit horrible though, I know that the situations with the stupid hypotheticals are irrelevant, but I can’t quite wrap my head around the fact that you con’t justify having a hypothetical moral judgment reaction to those hypothetical situations. Personally, I -would- feel negatively towards any mythical being who had a late-term abortion, but that reactions remains as hypothetical as the original scenario.
That’s the point, isn’t it? That this anti-choice argument is simply pulling a scenario out of a giant hypothetical arse, causing people to feel negative emotions about it and conflating the reality of those emotions with the ‘reality’ of the scenario?
So… it’s not really the judgmental reaction itself that’s the problem, it’s the fact that you’re applying that to a very real and dangerous situation to which it is entirely irrelevant?
Didn’t want to derail the convo over there!
Sophia, Michelin-starred General of the First Mediterranean Iron Chef Batallion:
September 8th, 2012 at 9:59 pm
ARGH. To “mythical being who had a late-term abortion”, add “for reasons of simply vanity or lack of care.”
consciousness razor:
September 8th, 2012 at 10:17 pm
No, it’s really both. It’s not your body, so it’s not your judgment. It doesn’t matter if you don’t believe it’ll actually happen. You’re still saying someone else’s bodily autonomy is worth squat compared to your judgment. And that’s not a “hypothetical judgment,” as if you’re not really saying what you just said. It’s right there in the comment you just made, and it’s not going anywhere, unless you want to take it back.
It wouldn’t be derailing. That is the conversation. You are just wrong about it.
Sophia, Michelin-starred General of the First Mediterranean Iron Chef Batallion:
September 8th, 2012 at 10:23 pm
I don’t follow – I’m human, I’m fallible, I make stupid and irrelevant judgments of other people with no justification. I’m a product of being socialised to feel that certain things are ‘wrong’ when in fact I have no right to make those judgments.
I would probably make such a hypothetical judgment, initially, and it would be wrong to do so. Denying that it’d go through my head, however, is simply dishonest.
That’s kind of what I was trying to clumsily drop into my thought processes. I assume it’s not worked. Back to the brain-tank I go.
Sophia, Michelin-starred General of the First Mediterranean Iron Chef Batallion:
September 8th, 2012 at 10:43 pm
Trying to clarify slightly; If, as humans, we are prone to making unjustified knee-jerk judgments when initially confronted with an issue with which we are not entirely familiar and comfortable, is it not reasonable to conclude that the judgmental reaction itself is not the crux of the problem?
The crux, as I see it now, would be our treatment of that initial reaction. If we actively oppose that initial reaction, dismiss it for the reason it is not our business, then we’ve made a rational decision to respect this (imaginary) person’s autonomy.
Yes, it’s nitpicky. I just see a big connection here as to why the fundy anti-choice arguments can be so irritatingly persuasive to so many people. It’s taking our human tendency to react emotionally to hideously overblown hypotheticals to… well, do just that. To create an emotionally charged gut response in people hearing the issue, so the person will associate those negative emotions with any mention of the -real- issue. It’s dishonest and insidious, but frustratingly effective.
strange gods before me ॐ:
September 8th, 2012 at 10:52 pm
You don’t have to deny it — because nobody’s asking.
And if they are asking, you’re not obligated to answer.
People can feel what they feel about others’ abortions. Whatever. They should keep their negative feelings to themselves, though, since those feelings are wrong, unjustified, and socially destructive when aired.
consciousness razor:
September 8th, 2012 at 11:10 pm
Okay, I guess I misunderstood. No one is saying that you have to. There’s not much anyone can do about that, if it’s clear you understand and accept why it’s wrong.
Sure. But the whole point of the absurd exercise is to justify why it would be wrong in these extremely contrived hypothetical scenarios (and that society can do something about it, and thus that it could and should be illegal). So you’d have to demonstrate that doing it is harmful and that outlawing it isn’t treating women like chattel, not just demonstrate that you have an icky feeling about it.
Sophia, Michelin-starred General of the First Mediterranean Iron Chef Batallion:
September 8th, 2012 at 11:11 pm
Yes. That’s very true.
I agree entirely – if someone thinks their initial judgment of a person’s actions is right and should trump that person’s own opinions/feelings/rights then they are entirely wrong to do that.
Yeah, this seemed much more important to me before. We’re human – we do/think immensely stupid things. That’s normal. Saying said stupid things out loud as though they should be given any traction is the problem, and my musing on subtleties is nitpicky and not helping.
Glad I posted here. heh.
Sophia, Michelin-starred General of the First Mediterranean Iron Chef Batallion:
September 8th, 2012 at 11:13 pm
Yeah. I just understand much more clearly now why that argument is so infuriatingly appealing, yet so utterly wrong.
strange gods before me ॐ:
September 8th, 2012 at 11:37 pm
Glad to be of help.
And yes, I think that’s what’s going on. Although there are different ways of compensating for the emotion, so it doesn’t always work as they might intend.
Specifically, since the issue can involve thoughts of death and corpses, there are probably mortality salience effects — which will probably cause highly committed pro-choicers to become even more strongly committed to their position and disdainful of anti-choicers. I.e. for us, any negative emotion can become associated with the opposition instead of abortion per se.
Sophia, Michelin-starred General of the First Mediterranean Iron Chef Batallion:
September 8th, 2012 at 11:44 pm
Full agreement. Issues as emotionally charged as these do tend to create intense polarity. For those being confronted with any polar extreme, the initial response (unless they agree entirely with the argument presented) is likely to be opposition.
In fact, the anti-atheism+ debate seems to be doing this very thing. See a polar extreme, don’t agree entirely therefore MUST OPPOSE. In other words, haven’t thought it through to the logical conclusion, you’re proposing something I haven’t yet overcome my ingrained prejudices about, therefore you’re a FUNDAMENTALIST DOGMATIC GODWIN INDUCING blah blah blah repeat ad nauseam.
I can see where the “you’re alienating moderates and fence-sitters!” people come from, but I can also see why they’re blowing the wrong trumpet.
strange gods before me ॐ:
September 9th, 2012 at 12:07 am
Maybe. Mortality salience probably is a special case, though.
I’m actually not sure why it’s viewed as suspect to have strongly held views. It’s “uncool” to care about things, as I learned very early, but I’m not sure quite what’s going on there — is it that strong emotions are for queers, women and children? Is it that strongly held views which are divergent of the norm indicate a person as an out-group member, thus to be distrusted?
It happens even here. I espouse several views that are seen as extreme by a significant subset of the commentariat. I understand and have no fundamental problem with it when my views are denounced as incorrect. Occasionally, though, I am simply denounced as an extremist, as though this in itself is wrong. It’s the golden mean fallacy, of course, but I’m unsure what causes it.
strange gods before me ॐ:
September 9th, 2012 at 12:09 am
… denounced as [supposedly] incorrect. …
of course ;)
John Morales:
September 9th, 2012 at 12:27 am
Sophia,
I wouldn’t ask Improbable Joe that one, since it’s a philosophical question and therefore useless to contemplate.
Sophia, Michelin-starred General of the First Mediterranean Iron Chef Batallion:
September 9th, 2012 at 12:41 am
You know, I think you’re on to something there.
Being suspicious of strongly held views… why?
I suspect for some people it’s the label of skeptic combined with personal experience (IE privilege). Strange how it all spirals back to those same concepts, eh? Hyperskepticism.
Accusations of irrationality (just like the fundamentalists/creationists), hysteria (use of that word, for a start!), overreacting, having definitions wrong…
Privilege. Complete and Total Arse of a thing.
Also, patriarchy, which is simply applied privilege.
Men (IE the default, normal) are not emotional and are therefore rational. Women (deviating from the male norm) are emotional and therefore not rational. Being unemotional, men (and by extension, normal people) do not react emotionally to insults, harmful behaviours or other negative stimuli.
Under this model, reacting emotionally to any topic is considered abnormal, hysterical, womanly (weak) and should be pulled back into line so as to appear more normal (emotionless, indomitable).
Of course, espousing this kind of view is Feminist Propaganda, and despite the demonstrable applicatibility of the model, since it comes from a perspective that claims women are oppressed (of course they’re not – claiming oppression is a hysterical, womanly, weak, abnormal, non-manly thing!), it’s thrown out.
the irony is STAGGERING.
Sophia, Michelin-starred General of the First Mediterranean Iron Chef Batallion:
September 9th, 2012 at 12:45 am
John:
That depends entirely on your definition of philosophy.
I’m not getting suckered into that argument, my knowledge levels qua philosophy, definitions and the applications of, are below 101 levels.
SGBM:
Additionally, that Terror Management Theory link is very… explanatory. And applicable. And frustrating.
chigau (違わない):
September 9th, 2012 at 12:51 am
Sophia
A very wise choice.
John Morales:
September 9th, 2012 at 1:11 am
Sophia,
1. Yeah, that part seems to sum it up pretty well, and was the model under which I grew up.
(I got better)
2. You discount the (time-honoured) exceptions: certain insults do not just allow, but indeed require strong emotional reactions — but these must be manly (therefore aggressive) emotions.
(I’m sure you can think of examples)
3. Due to the above exceptions, this constitutes too simplistic a generalisation.
–
Heh. That was only ostensibly addressed to you, with the spurious excuse that I was quoting you.
Also, note that my knowledge levels qua feminism, definitions and the applications of, are probably below 101 levels — but that’s never stopped me from weighing in regarding specific contentions on that issue. :)
Sophia, Michelin-starred General of the First Mediterranean Iron Chef Batallion:
September 9th, 2012 at 1:23 am
John:
I mostly agree with your points, though I would add that “emotional” under my model is a word that has connotations of femininity, weakness, etc. Certain emotions are mostly exempt from this – “masculine” emotions of anger or aggression are owned by men.
Use of “masculine” emotions by women is considered abnormal and punishable. In fact, when a man shows anger or aggression he is generally praised, when a woman does so whe is usually met with the same emotion as punishment (put in her place).
It gets fuzzy in the “masculine emotions” stakes, men don’t often get told they’re “too emotional” if they express anger, women often do. A man expressing sorrow, empathy, love or other “womanly” emotions will often be called a sissy, a girl, be told to put their big girl panties on and so forth.
Another note is that even anger, agression and annoyance can sometimes be viewed as negative and feminine when they’re not about the right, manly, things as shown with the use of the expression “you’ve got sand in your vagina”, being that your anger is like a woman’s anger at a woman’s problems and you are not justified in feeling it – it is beneath you as a man.
It’s all very interesting. And depressing.
strange gods before me ॐ:
September 9th, 2012 at 1:33 am
And must be accompanied by violence or the threat of violence, explicitly stated or expressed by posture or approach.
Aggressive emotion without at least the threat of violence is construed as emasculating: impotent.
I think my response to John can account for an inclusion of all emotionality per se — the threat of violence is a compensatory device which legitimizes an emotion which would otherwise be construed as evidence of weakness.
Sophia, Michelin-starred General of the First Mediterranean Iron Chef Batallion:
September 9th, 2012 at 1:35 am
Masculine/Potent anger as opposed to Feminine/Impotent anger.
Violence is manly, superiority is manly, superiority through violence is normal.
All kinda mooshes together, doesn’t it? Funny how things make sense when they’re true :P
strange gods before me ॐ:
September 9th, 2012 at 1:51 am
I should mention also the meaning maintenance model, which has a competing explanation of mortality salience effects. In this model, death is but one of many threats to meaning.
The controversy does not seem to be very important for the purposes of anyone who isn’t a researcher publishing on either topic. The effects are what they are, regardless of whether they occur because mortality salience is a threat to meaning or belongs in a unique category.
Sophia, Michelin-starred General of the First Mediterranean Iron Chef Batallion:
September 9th, 2012 at 2:04 am
Yes… frankly I can’t really see too much difference aside from the fact that death is the only completely inevitable thing we have to deal with, and therefore there’s rather more motivation to find a way to deal with it. In other words, it’s a subset. an important one, but still a subset. Same theory, one important application.
John Morales:
September 9th, 2012 at 2:17 am
Sophia, aging past one’s prime and its concomitant decrepitude is also inevitable, but it ain’t death.
John Morales:
September 9th, 2012 at 2:19 am
[addendum]
Hm… I was wrong — it is evitable, but only at the cost of dying young.
(I retract my objection)
Walton:
September 9th, 2012 at 3:07 am
Philosophy is important. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t often done badly, of course. But we all rely on philosophical assumptions in our daily lives, whether we know it or not.
For instance, what is morality? How do we know what is morally right or morally wrong? On what do we base our moral convictions? Is there such a thing as an objectively “right” view of morality? These are philosophical (specifically, meta-ethical) questions; and all of us, if we espouse views about morality and ethics (which we all do), need to have answers to these questions. If we assert that X is morally right or that Y is morally wrong, we need to be able to explain why. We can’t avoid that. And once we answer those questions, we are, by definition, doing philosophy.
John Morales:
September 9th, 2012 at 3:19 am
Hey, Walton.
(Nice to see you around!)
McC2lhu saw what you did there.:
September 9th, 2012 at 4:06 am
I wanted to say something along the same general lines as Walton, but he said it infinitely more eloquently than I ever could. So, thanks for that and saving me from embarrassment.
theophontes (坏蛋):
September 9th, 2012 at 4:19 am
{theophontes waves at Teh Walton}
Too terrifying to post anywhere else but on Thunderdome:
A short propaganda interlude paid for by the Ministry of Truth: All you wanted to know about tardigrades but were too afraid to ask (understandably).
Where are your gods now?
…
The Butterfly Effect: Benabar – L’effet Papillon
Ms. Daisy Cutter, Vile Human Being:
September 9th, 2012 at 7:57 am
Azkyroth:
Oh, for chrissakes. Nobody wants to see some random person’s tonsils. Coughing sprays germs into the air. Bumping into things can knock them over or displace them. And there’s nothing particularly wrong with excusing oneself for clumsiness — speaking as someone without much coordination.
But, yeah, people should stop being polite because it irritates you and makes you worry that people will expect greater politeness out of you.
Everything’s about Azkyroth, isn’t it? God, you’re a petulant, solipsistic asshole.
broboxley OT:
September 9th, 2012 at 8:21 am
John,
either that or you have trouble with the top down, bottom up investigatory method
ChasCPeterson:
September 9th, 2012 at 8:58 am
Some nice tardigrade shots in there.
The citizen-naturalist protagonist, however, while certainly dressed for the part, knows nothing about evolution.
Tardigrades did not come from outer space. We know this.
We do know where tardigrades fit in the tree of life, and we do know their closest living relatives. [They are part of a clade called Panarthropoda, which also includes arthropods and onychophorans.]
PZ Myers:
September 9th, 2012 at 4:41 pm
That was a terrible video, full of misinformation. “We don’t even know what species tardigrades are related to…” — bullshit.
“We might even have come from a different galaxy.” More bullshit.
“It would have taken hundreds of years for another species to travel from another galaxy.”
I give up.
Rodney Nelson:
September 9th, 2012 at 4:49 pm
The nearest galaxy to the Milky Way is the Canis Major Dwarf Galaxy, approximately 25,000 light years from the Solar System and 40,000 light years from the Milky Way’s galactic center. So light from Canis Major, traveling at 300,000 kilometers per second, takes 25,000 years to reach Earth. Animate beings would be traveling far slower than light.
nms:
September 9th, 2012 at 5:44 pm
Maybe tardigrades have hyperspace technology.
PZ Myers:
September 9th, 2012 at 5:52 pm
NEW THREAD.