Commutation of sentence


There I was, heaving a bow saw against the shrubbery, sweat running into my eyes, red-faced, and maybe looking a little over-stressed, and my wife gives me one of her looks and tells me that maybe I ought to call it a day, she was about to drive off to the dump with a load of brush and was a little bit afraid that she’d find me slumped into an unconscious heap when she got back.

Now you know, this is an affront to my manhood. I quickly marshaled many fierce replies, but I was slowed in delivering them because I was panting so hard. Otherwise, I was ready to tell her…

“At least I will have died like a man, with my tool in my hand!”

Or maybe the classic,

“We all gotta go some time.”

But then it sunk in that if I said anything like that, I would sound like Gary Johnson.

My gob, what an idiot. Aren’t you New Mexicans a little embarrassed about having elected this guy?

So I surrendered meekly and have gone into the house. I guess being sensible and cautious is one way to avoid surrendering to our fate.

Oh! And as I walked into the house, I got handed some bulky certified mail. Richard Carrier is suing 7 entities, and I’m two of them. He’s demanding $1,050,000 in compensation and another $1,050,000 in punitive damages. So there’s another fate I won’t be surrendering to.

Comments

  1. slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem)) says

    yeah, climate is getting warmer, man-made yada-yada-yada. so we should build more coal power plants. yes we should
    yuk yuk yuk not even wrong.
    long term view does not mean Billions of year timeframe.
    what a dimwit.

  2. unclefrogy says

    I could not get 2 minutes into what he was saying. I take it he does not live near a sea port any where in the world. It will be really expensive to relocate all of the sea ports in the world to higher ground. I have no idea how to even estimate what it will cost, probably considerably more than switching to alternative energy sources could cost.

    I have learned that when I start to throb and sweat profusely from exertion I am getting old and am not in the condition I was when I was in my 20’s and 30’s. It means it is time to take a break and maybe not try to accomplish too much all at once. And remember I am getting “payed” by the hour not by the piece .
    uncle frogy

  3. Kreator says

    He’s demanding $1,050,000 in compensation and another $1,050,000 in punitive damages.

    Well, serves you right. I reckon that the nothing that you and your pals did to him must have been quite devastating to his bottom line.

  4. Silver Fox says

    “At least I will have died like a man, with my tool in my hand!”

    You have no idea how lucky you are that you didn’t say that! Your wife probably would have died laughing.

  5. raven says

    Gary Johnson is truly an idiot.
    “Since the sun will go red giant in 2 billion years, we don’t have to worry about global warming in the next century.”
    It’s basically, we are all going to die someday so why worry about anything?

    We are all going to die someday. So why bother even getting up in the morning?
    For a lot of reasons. We don’t own the earth. We just take care of it for the next generations, some of whom are our friends and children.

  6. Paul Cowan says

    He’s suing? Wow, any plans to setup some kind of GoFundMe or for legal costs? It’s a model that worked well for Steven Novella I understand.

    I’ll contribute!

  7. says

    He’s demanding $1,050,000 in compensation and another $1,050,000 in punitive damages.

    What a schmuck. Whatever else it was, proving deductively that Jesus didn’t exist was mostly harmless. Now he’s graduated from abusing history to abusing the legal system–where a lot more damage can be done.

  8. says

    Yeah, we’ll probably have to set up something. It involves several specific individuals, the FtB network (which, according to the suit, I totally control), the Orbit network, and Skepticon, Inc, though, so we’re probably going to have to coordinate something.

    It’s just so ludicrous, though. He feels justified demanding a million dollars in lost compensation from FtB? I had no idea we paid so well!

  9. EigenSprocketUK says

    Dr. Evil: “One million dollars!”
    Dr Evil’s lawyer: “Don’t forget my fee?”
    Dr. Evil: “One million and fifty thousand dollars!”

  10. raven says

    He’s demanding $1,050,000 in compensation and another $1,050,000 in punitive damages.

    No big deal.

    1. I’ve been threatened with lawsuits so many times, I’ve lost count. All that happened was two guys ended up in federal court, charged with felonies.

    2. I’ll echo some of the above.
    Set up some sort of defense fund. I’ve contributed to many. We’ve never lost one yet.

    I’m in for a few bucks. And a few more if it is needed.
    I really, really don’t like bullies!!!

    PS The truth is an absolute defense.
    PPS Carrier is an idiot. Most of us had forgotten all about him and his problems. He just reminded us again. Really, he should sue himself for being an idiot.
    Hmmm, I just called him an idiot. Twice. Maybe he will sue me. I can hope anyway.

  11. Azkyroth, B*Cos[F(u)]==Y says

    He’s demanding $1,050,000 in compensation and another $1,050,000 in punitive damages.

    Well, that goes a long way towards clearing him of the charge of being unethical.

  12. Nerd of Redhead, Dances OM Trolls says

    Ah, the usual. He is free to express himself, anytime, anyplace, and in any situation, including criticizing you. You aren’t free to criticize him at all. Somebody who doesn’t truly understand free speech due to ego problems, like Trump.

  13. whheydt says

    How is Johnson any different from any other Republican ex-governor? Just because he’s running as a Libertarian doesn’t cover up the basic insanity of the modern Republican party, to which he used to belong. (I’ll make an exception for Jon Huntsman. In 2008, he was pretty reasonable. so far as one found out anything about his opinions.)

  14. gijoel says

    Rabbit in the headlights stupid. SNL should do a skit on him, every time I see him he looks like he has no idea what he’s doing, and was some how talked into running due to a bet.

    Is Richard suing for defamation, or is he going the full thunderf00t? Either way I don’t like his chances.

  15. raven says

    PZ et al./FTB’s should try to get this declared a SLAPP suit. Which it is.
    Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation.
    Losers of SLAPP suits pay your attorney fees and court costs.

    Minnesota is an anti-SLAPP state.

    This will BTW, end up in federal court. Not all the accused live in the same state as Richard Carrier.

  16. themadtapper says

    PPS Carrier is an idiot. Most of us had forgotten all about him and his problems. He just reminded us again. Really, he should sue himself for being an idiot.

    Pretty much this. The “compensation”, I’m willing to bet, is not for supposed lost revenue from FTB, but lost revenue because he thinks the reputation hit will affect his book sales. Thing is, if he’d just left peaceably and just gone somewhere else, and just kept doing his thing, he’d have been better off. Yeah, he’d get talked bad about in some circles, but he’s had plenty of defenders and I’d imagine most people who find his books for scholarly reasons won’t have been digging into his past before deciding on whether or not to buy. By filing a ridiculous (and ultimately doomed) lawsuit and making a complete spectacle of himself, he’s just reminding everyone of the very thing he’s worried people will think of when they hear his name. He really is his own worst enemy here.

  17. raven says

    he’s just reminding everyone of the very thing he’s worried people will think of when they hear his name.

    1. He has forgotten the First Rule of Holes.
    When you find yourself in a hole, the first thing to do is…stop digging!!!.
    This is really dumb.

    2. He has turned something nebulous and minor into some major issue that is going to last for years. The federal courts are backlogged due to the GOP not letting any judge appointments through.

    3. My knowledge of this whole situation is cursory. But from what I’ve seen, he is dead wrong and going to lose badly. He really doesn’t have a case at all.

    4. I’m guessing based on how flimsy his case is, that he is simply trying to bully people. A lot of the time, they hope the accused get scared and refuse to show up. This actually works a lot of the time and they get a default judgement easily. They’ll keep the case going until the first day of court.

    It wouldn’t work on me. I’ve been in federal court before on high stakes IP cases. I was nervous until after the first day. It’s no big deal.
    The Plaintiff’s pulled a bunch of pathetic tricks to try to intimidate me. It didn’t work but it did make me mad.

  18. raven says

    California Federal Court Update: Backlog Of Cases Reaches Crisis …
    www. ibtimes. com/ california-federal-court-update-backlo…
    International Business Times
    Nov 12, 2015 – Only six judges handle thousands of cases in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of California.

    1. The federal courts are seriously backlogged.
    This article called it a crisis, a year ago.

    2. I don’t know exactly how this translates into when a civil case filed now, gets heard.

    3. I’m guessing the wait time will be a few years.

    No point in waiting up on this one. Most likely, nothing is going to happen for years.

  19. Silentbob says

    @ 22 Gregory in Seattle

    He’s said so himself.

    I do not want FreethoughtBlogs or its mission to be compromised by having to devote resources to defending me or vetting claims or choosing sides.
    [… ]
    I have therefore decided it’s best for me to move my blog content to my own domain where I can operate independently and take all the heat myself, now and in future. Accordingly I have moved my blog here to my own website.

    (Source: richardcarrier.info/archives/586)

  20. Andrew G. says

    Wow, is he representing himself or did he somehow find a lawyer who has somehow missed the last 20 years of US legal history?

    The magic word in this context is “47 USC 230(c)(1)”, and anyone who knows anything at all about Internet law knows about this one. (It has even been relevant specifically to the skeptic movement: Stephen Barrett of Quackwatch lost a case because of it, see Barrett v. Rosenthal.)

    Carrier in a comment on his own blog made it clear that he believes that a blog network is subject to the same rules regarding liability as a print newspaper; this hasn’t been the case since 1996, and there’s a long list of legal precedents about it.

  21. =8)-DX says

    RIP my respect for Carrier as a human being (arrogant, entitled prat is how this makes him look) As far as I can see he’s pissed at people discussing women complaining about his flirting/inappropriate sex-talk, he’s enraged anyone can call it harassment/a mistake. Which seeing as he’s trying to be open and above-board poly is something he should take as an expected risk. If he cared about his reputation, he’d admit, apologise and try to do better (even if causing harm was never his intent – misunderstandings are miscommunications, intentional or not).

    But his scholarly work remains interesting and worthwhile.

  22. marinerachel says

    What a fucking child.

    Johnson is just a boob. Glad his chances of a presidency are less than zero.

  23. says

    he thinks the reputation hit will affect his book sales.

    That’s bestseller territory. Carrier’s in no danger of losing that kind of money from his books.

  24. says

    But his scholarly work remains interesting and worthwhile.

    Just one note because it was something that annoyed me: I read Proving History: Bayes’s Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus when it came out. It was interesting. But – I didn’t become aware until after I’d purchased it that it was essentially the first part of an argument about Jesus that he would continue in another (and more expensive) book. That should have been made plain in the book’s description itself; better yet, it should have been one book. Proving History had far too much about Bayes’ Theorem in general and far too little about its application to the existence of Jesus. I haven’t read, and won’t read, On the Historicity of Jesus because I was and remain thoroughly ticked off by the bait and switch, which has no place in scholarly publishing.

  25. Rob Grigjanis says

    SC @29: I’ve read a few reviews of that book by mathematicians, and they all seem to be rather critical of his use of Bayes’ Theorem, even ones who are sympathetic to his views;

    I can’t help but think that Carrier is using Bayes’s Theorem in much the same way that apologists such as William Lane Craig use it: to give their arguments a veneer of scientific rigour that they hope cannot be challenged by their generally more math-phobic peers.

  26. themadtapper says

    That’s bestseller territory. Carrier’s in no danger of losing that kind of money from his books.

    To be sure. But that’s the whole point of the suit anyway, to start with a ridiculous sum and hope to bully the other parties into settling for less. His argument will be that he is losing or will lose book revenue, but his goal is probably to NOT have to defend that in court. When he does have to though, he’s going to like how it ends.

  27. Beatrice, an amateur cynic looking for a happy thought says

    themadtapper

    To be sure. But that’s the whole point of the suit anyway, to start with a ridiculous sum and hope to bully the other parties into settling for less.

    Just another way US let’s-settle-that-in-court culture is maddening. There is not sense of justice or respect for the legal system in that, it’s just using the legal system to bully and harass people.

  28. Golgafrinchan Captain says

    It seems to me that Carrier’s approach may be an attempt at a Streisand-Trump PR move.

  29. anthrosciguy says

    I clicked on the Johnson video but then decided I really didn’t want to listen to him being stupid again, and started watching it with the sound off. His doofus act is even more effective when you just look at his facial and body movements. Try it.

  30. mostlymarvelous says

    whheydt

    I’ll make an exception for Jon Huntsman. In 2008, he was pretty reasonable.

    Bob Inglis was also outstanding (until he was knocked out of selection by a tea-partier).

  31. jrkrideau says

    @31 Rob Grigjanis

    I never have gotten a real feel for Bayesian statistics—but I’m still working on it!

    However my first thought when reading about Carrier using Bayes Theorem was the thought that Bayes Theorem is history’s new Quantum “whatsit” in medical woo.

    That review seems to support me. Thanks

  32. blf says

    Since the sun will go red giant in 2 billion years, we don’t have to worry about global warming in the next century.

    Not sure that’s a real quote?

    Snopes rates the 2011 press club luncheon Mostly True, but gives a very different quote:

    WHAT’S TRUE: Gary Johnson said during a 2011 press club luncheon that global warming is in our future’ and ‘the sun is going to actually grow and encompass the Earth.’

    WHAT’S FALSE: Johnson criticized proposed spending on global warming as a largely ineffective waste of money, but he didn’t literally say that we should do nothing about global warming because the sun will eventually envelop the Earth anyway.

    It gives the quote, in context, as (all emboldening in the original):

    Well, climate change — I think the world is getting warmer. I think that it’s man-caused. That said, should we be engaged in cap and trade taxation? No. I don’t think that we should. We should lend certainty to the energy field. We should be building new coal-fired plants. When you look at the amount of money that we’re looking to spend on global warming, in the trillions, and look at the result, I just argue that the result is completely inconsequential to the money that we would end up spending, and that we could direct those monies in other ways that would be much more beneficial to mankind.

    We have a long-term view. Should we take the long-term view when it comes to global warming? I think that we should. And the long-term view is that in billions of years, the sun is going to actually grow and encompass the Earth, right. So global warming is in our future.

    Snopes points out he is acknowledging AGW, and after some additional analysis concludes he seems to think spending money on AGW is pointless. He certainly does not seem to get it; e.g., that silliness about building new GHG generators (building new coal-fired). (I myself also detect hints that he may think AGW is, with apologies to Douglas Adams, “mostly harmless”.)

  33. Rob Grigjanis says

    jrkrideau @39: My own way of coming to grips with Bayes’ Theorem back in the day was to draw pictures. No idea if this will help you or anyone else, or if I’m telling anyone anything they don’t already know, but what the heck…

    Draw a circle to represent the entire population. We’ll call the area of that circle 1 unit, so that areas correspond to overall probabilities. Within that, draw a circle to represent people with red hair; call that area A. Draw another circle to represent people with blue eyes; call that area B. Those last two circles will overlap, because some people have both red hair and blue eyes. So we have four distinct regions;

    1) The one excluding all people with either red hair or blue eyes. Call this area w.
    2) The one with red-haired people without blue eyes; that’s A excluding the overlap with B. Call this area x.
    3) The one with blue-eyed people without red hair; that’s B excluding the overlap with A. Call this area y.
    4) The overlap between A and B, which has people who have both red hair and blue eyes. Call this area z.

    The probability of finding someone with red hair is P(A)=x+z
    The probability of finding someone with blue eyes is P(B)=y+z

    The probability that you will find someone with blue eyes among people with red hair is the conditional probability P(B|A), and that is the area of the overlap divided by the area A;

    P(B|A) = z/(x+z)

    The probability that you will find someone with red hair among people with blue eyes is the conditional probability P(A|B), and that is the area of the overlap divided by the area B;

    P(A|B) = z/(y+z)

    You can see right away that

    P(B|A)P(A) = P(A|B)P(B) = z

    So, assuming P(B) isn’t zero, we can write

    P(A|B) = P(B|A)P(A)/P(B)