I will finally get to the bottom of this. I have discovered that there will be a YouTube interview with the notorious PZ Meyers today at 6pm Central, and I intend to hunt him down and confront him over his long history of stalking me. I will crash this video and tackle the horrible (although, admittedly, handsome) rascal and settle this once and for all.
I wouldn’t be surprised if he doesn’t show up, though. Meyers is a coward who has been dodging me for decades.
I got a mention in the latest issue of the college newspaper, the University Register. Only in the April Fools’ issue, unfortunately, and they misspelled my name, of course.
“The only current known readers of the UR are PZ Meyers and one of his spiders.”
Not mentioned is that PZ Meyers only manages to skim the paper 5 days after it was published.
Or that the spiders only read at a first grade level, so far.
Kent Hovind recycled a video titled Aronra, Professor Dave, & PZ Meyers get OWNED by Kent Hovind’s Assistant
, originally posted by Matt Powell as AronRa & his minions vs. Matt Powell
(no link, sorry, they’ve received enough attention). It’s the same damn argument he’s been making for months: They said we didn’t come from rocks, but I found an article I don’t understand that says we did come from rocks
. Sorry, guy, no phylogeny includes “rocks” in the tree of life. There is no line of descent from “rocks”. We’re all made of carbon, that does not imply that in the distant past there was a Mama Anthracite that spawned a little family of coal lumps that then led to us. I’ve pointed this out to him before, and he paid as much attention to that as he did to the spelling of my name.
What’s depressing about that is how intellectually bankrupt these guys are. Powell has three arguments he makes over and over again, that he thinks are clever: scientists think we evolved from rocks, scientists think squid came from comets, scientists think dinosaurs farted themselves to death. All wrong. I guess that’s better than Hovind, who has one: incredulously stating that you think you’re related to a mosquito
. At least Hovind’s assertion is factually correct.
Hieronymus Bosch, move over. When we want to show scenes of perversity, chaos, and wickedness, new masters have taken over: Meyers and Frazee. Their work is terrifyingly lurid. Take a look at this (I hope it doesn’t get my blog banned):
What hell is this, you say. It’s from a children‘s board book, Babies Everywhere, and it is so salacious in the minds of right-wingers that it has been banned. I mean, look at it. Horrifying, if you look at it through a conservative lens.
You might think it’s just a scene of normal families walking on a city street, but that’s only because you lack a filthy mind and the power of projection. A man alone walking with a child? THE BREAKUP OF THE AMERICAN FAMILY. Two women walking together pushing a stroller? LESBIANS. Two men walking together? Men don’t have friends, must be HOMOS. Old man pulling a wagon with a baby and a dog? OH MY GOD CALL THE POLICE!
It has been banned, but the people responsible can’t quite explain why. It’s like pornography, they know it when they see it.
The book was among dozens of works recently banned from public school libraries in Walton County, Fla. School district officials confirmed the removal of the books to WJHG-TV in Florida. Walton County School Superintendent Russell Hughes told the outlet that it was “necessary in this moment for me to make that decision and I did it for just a welfare of all involved, including our constituents, our teachers, and our students.”
Right. He just has the welfare of the students in mind, so he glanced at this, and in the heat of the moment, decided it was wicked and needed to be blotted out. It’s a palimpsest. It’s the nonexistent basement of a pizza parlor. It’s a thing with reflects back the filthy mind of Walton County School Superintendent Russell Hughes, and therefore we must get rid of it before everyone can see what he is thinking.
Using this logic, clearly Florida must be destroyed, because everyone looks at it and sees a floppy, dangling penis.
Kent Hovind featured me on his wack-an-athest segment last night on YouTube. It was the same ol’. As usual, he never listens to anyone, so he spent a bunch of time telling me that I really do believe I came from a rock, and then he skipped through a few pages of Campbell Biology, reading excerpts from their short history of the Big Bang, nucleosynthesis, condensation of the Earth, etc., to declare that that textbook also says we came from a rock. He also said he’s been in 260 debates, and that he has won every one of them, and that even the professors and atheists all agreed that he had defea-Ted his opponents, while his Igor, Matt Powell, nodded vigorously over his shoulder and his claque jeered in the background.
The man is delusional and insane, and he’s got a cult who believes his every word. He invited me to come on down to his Alabama compound again, but who in his right mind would do that?
I won’t link to him, you’ll have to look it up on YouTube yourself, but only if you’ve been very naughty and feel the need to be punished. Hint: he misspelled my name as Meyers in the title, because of course he did.
Oh, cool. Now Brett Keane is piling on. I’m being dragged down into the slime for sure.
I’ve told you before that the content I made on Scienceblogs years ago has been hijacked — the site was bought up (legitimately, I can’t do anything about it) by a conservative asshole who simply uses it as a vehicle to host ads. It’s a shame, but at least all that stuff I wrote didn’t disappear into the ol’ bit bucket. But now I have learned that they’ve added insult to their legally sanctioned theft.
“pharyngula” (at least they spelled that right) by…who??!?
Man, I ought to give up and have my name legally changed to PZ, just PZ. They couldn’t misspell that, could they?
Oh yeah, they could. I’ve lost track of the number of times I’ve been called PJ.
I’ve been in a few. I hate ’em. Here’s how they work: the ID proponent declares that the thesis of the debate is “Everything is Designed” and launches into his argument:
Cars are designed by intelligent agents. Shoes are designed. Computers are designed. iPhones are designed. My right hand is designed. Therefore, everything is designed.
The scientist who got suckered into this engagement begins to unlimber their long list of counter-examples. “We have natural mechanisms that generate complex forms without the need for a designer…wait, did you say your right hand is designed?”
Sure. It’s made of cells, and cells are designed, so of course it’s the product of design.
“You can’t just declare that everything you don’t understand is designed. That’s the whole point of contention here; you have to address the evidence for your position, not just announce by fiat that everything is designed.”
I’m ready to discuss all of the evidence.
“OK, I begin again. So Tiktaalik…”
Designed. Clearly designed.
“The entire fossil series illustrating tetrapod evolution…?”
Designed.
“The citrate metabolic pathway?”
Designed.
“Cells are…”
Great example. Cells are complicated, with lots of fiddly bits, therefore implying a Fiddler. Shall I throw some big numbers at you to show you how complicated cells are?
“No, that’s OK. I know how complex cells are. You don’t get to simply decide that all complex things have to be designed. Again, that’s what we’re debating! If I show you something of unknown origin, or even something with a well-documented history of natural evolutionary history, you don’t get to just greedily snatch it up and put it in the “Designed” category!”
Yes, I do. The burden of proof is on you, and I can refute everything you propose by pointing out any one thing that could have been designed, and that is sufficient to make it designed.
“By a mysterious invisible intelligence that operated for billions of years before the origin of intelligent life on Earth.”
Now you’re getting it! By the way, welcome to my proof for the existence of my God.
I bring this up because I listened to another Intelligent Design debate, this time between James Croft and the reliably ridiculous Stephen Meyer of the Discovery Institute. It was interesting because I’d be one of those guys who brings a catalog of biological counter-examples to the debate; as a philosopher, Croft ignores all that and drills right down to the logic of the argument the creationists are making. I think that’s a smart approach, even if Meyer is only capable of a different flavor of evasion.
I’ve queued it up below at the start of James’ argument, because all the politeness and niceness in the introduction turned my stomach.
He starts by summarizing Meyer’s position:
Note: Meyer has turned that simple statement into three long-winded, tedious books now. If you can grasp that simple summary, there’s no reason to read any of his books, since they don’t provide any further evidence for his position.
Point 1 is false. Meyer exercises a kind of studied neglect of the actual state of the evidence in biology that allows him to pretend there aren’t any adequate explanations for evolutionary phenomena. Croft focuses on the link between 1 and 2, that Meyer is making an abductive argument while failing to support his primary premises. He points out three problems with the logic of Meyer’s claims which I won’t get into — watch the video. It’s not as painful as it looks: Croft begins at the 14 minute mark, and wraps up at 25 minutes, so the interesting part is only 11 minutes long. The rest is Meyer making noises with his mouth and frequently interrupting Croft, and then there’s the interminable period of the two of them telling each other how nice they are and what a worthy and interesting this conversation was. That bit was aggravating: Meyer is his usual pompous self, pretending that Croft’s annoyingly congenial, smiling manner was an affirmation that there was something of substance to his pretentious bullshit, completely oblivious to the fact that the cheerful fellow with the British accent has effectively torpedoed him below the waterline. He is unconcerned; he’s just going to sail off and write another tendentious, wordy tome repeating his 3 points over and over again.
I’m up at 4:30, and I don’t even have the excuse of going fishing. I’m just a jangly ball of stress right now, and also, we’ve got the bathroom taps open a little to prevent freezing, so all night long it’s drip-drip-trickle-gurgle, and it gets to you after a while. So I gave up trying to sleep and got up to get some work done and check my email.
Oh boy, the Noah’s Ark/DNA guy sent me more email about his “theory”.
On Rosh
Dear PZ Meyers,A few weeks ago, I sent you a copy of my theory on human genetics and Noah’s Ark. Today, I am sending you a second part to my theory that gives special attention to the Scythian Horse Riders that I believe descend from Rosh the son of Benjamin. The theory will only take a few minutes of your time and could dramatically alter your view of the world. Next week, I plan on uploading my theory to youtube and I hope that it will get a lot of views.
This is what he sent me.
Sorry, I’m not going to bother uploading the “figures”, which seem to be random images extracted from various publications. This is not a theory. This is a guy plucking something out of Bin A, the Bible, and something out of Bin B, various scientific publications he barely understands, and declaring “Ha ha! They fit!” even if they don’t.
My view of the world continues on unaltered, my idea that there are a lot of loons out there sadly unperturbed. Confirmed, even.
He might actually succeed and get a lot of views on YouTube, since the YouTube algorithm is undiscriminating, except in the sense it seems good at launching talentless hacks into bewildering heights of popularity.
Yeah, I’ve told the Noah’s Ark/DNA guy to go away and stop sending me his lunacy, but another property of the deeply delusional is that they can’t imagine you wouldn’t be interested in their ravings.
I hope you all have some fun with this conversation between the Knechtle evangelical group and some radical materialist named “Meyers” or “Meyer”.*
They were congenial enough, but I kept slamming up hard against their presumptions about what an atheist must think. No headway was made. I’m pretty sure that they’ll continue to assume that every atheist they meet is an amoral robot or is secretly imbued with the spirit of Jesus.
*I surrender. I have totally given up on correcting people misspelling or mispronouncing a name that is only 5 letters long.
I don’t know who this Meyers fellow is, but he’s very handsome.
