Ted Beale and the books he hasn’t read
Not really. My criticism was that his math was invalid and that he thinks evolution is a simple serial process (the same thing Zach Hancock pointed out), but he ignores that and instead asserts that he is a world-class genius of historic levels, far more significant in the course of human intellectual development than sweet St. Darwin himself, who somehow managed to cripple Man’s correct understanding of his own origins for 167 years and counting.
He has donned the armor of impenetrable narcissism. As usual, it is his own words that demolish him.
Shows what I know, though. He’s got Jesus backing him.
And here’s the more important thing for him to contemplate. If he was wrong about me, well, that’s going to sting a little. But it’s not really that big a deal in the cosmic scheme of things. But if he was wrong about Jesus Christ, on the other hand, that’s a much more serious problem. So if the former turns out to be true, however unlikely, maybe take another, closer, look at the latter.
Naw.
He is a forgettable nobody who has never had an original thought in his life.
He proves it right here.
This is just Pascal’s Wager, which is really Pascal’s Fallacy.
It is centuries old and was known to be wrong centuries ago.
Cthulhu is laughing at Beale right now. Thor thinks he is an idiot but not worth paying attention to.
Brahma has him down for multiple reasons as a tapeworm in his next reincarnation.
Gaia and Sophia have no idea who he is because he is just taking up space on earth.
This is BTW, a terrorist threat but it isn’t a very good one.
Beale’s imaginary sky monster god is going to beat us up after we are dead.
And the proof for this, like everything in Beale’s fantasy world is nonexistent.
‘Thor thinks he is an idiot’
And if Thor the famously dopey himbo thinks you’re an idiot, you’re in real trouble!
There must be a corollary to Godwin’s Law that invoking jeebus is an automatic loss.
At least VD offers an LOL moment:
Of course, a certain politician has squeezed most of the juice out of the grandiose narcissistic lemon, but poor li’l Ted (sfaik) has had to struggle without having had an uncle who taught at MI, even once.
Ahem @ my # 5 – … at MIT….
AstroLad @4: Minor quibble: Godwin’s Law was about the probability of an argument developing into comparison to Nazis increasing to 1 over time. It never suggested that was an automatic loss: That’s a product of the internet discourse around people’s tendency for false equivalency. Godwin himself was fine with comparing today’s rash of fascists with Nazis because, well, they actually have a lot in common. Including symbology.
That said, I’m in favor of invoking Pascal’s Wager being considered an automatic loss. It’s a profoundly unserious argument that actively encourages both wishful and catastrophic thinking as replacements for rational and empirical thought.
What a self-absorbed loser. He got a pretty good dig in at PZ there for
, however the same charge could be leveled at a certain sad puppy himself.
Does he realize no one on his political team cares about wordy pseudointellectual posturing or books or thinking, anymore? They just want to be the biggest bully on the playground — people like Vox Day are due for a swirlie and an atomic wedgie, possibly both at the same time. In the meantime, though, it’s good to see that he’s done the intellectual equivalent of shoving his head firmly up his own anus. I did not believe such a feat was possible, but he’s able to make blog posts from in there.
Isn’t there some ‘basilisk’ on top of Pascal’s Wager? I forgot the details because zzzzz…
(Also, we need some reliable test for extreme narcissism, something you cannot fake. Never accept people like that for positions of great authority)
Knowing the right wing mind, i understand how Venereal Disease can think sociology can be “enslaved” (i.e. “The commies, race mixers and gender ideologues have taken over the field!”) but physics?
Let me guess, Einstein was one of (((them))) so we must throw the Theory of Relativity out and go back to the of good Christian Issac Newton?
Funniest line in a lengthy rant about you? He says that he never thinks about you.
Jesus is just Santa Claus for adults. So it’s a more elaborate and “sophisticated” story but simply a tool for behaviour control. It’s just as imaginary and invented but it’s a lot more dangerous and insedeous. I still don’t understand how people don’t outgrow this phase but instead build whole world views from it (and all the other imaginary pantheon).
This is a grown man. Right? I say right?
@13
Only chronologically. Emotionally he’s still an edgy 13-year-old.
Akira @10
A lot of conservatives have a cliche post-modernist or even hard idealist view of the word; they think that social concepts are more important than the actual world. Look at how they talk about transgender people, or climate change. It would be weird if they had any self awareness, but since they don’t i guess they’re going on whatever let’s them “win” arguments (by annoying the other party enough that they give up)
Akira MacKenzie@10: “go back to the of good Christian Issac Newton?”
Particularly those astrology and alchemy things he endorsed. Arguing with someone as brain-dead as Beale is only beneficial to uncommitted bystanders since even Mark Twain pointed out that religious apologists of the world are habitually terminally stupid.
“No amount of evidence will ever persuade an idiot.” — Mark Twain
Raven, please ask Brahma to reincarnate me as a tapeworm. It sounds a great life, warm and safe, free food, no Daily Mail, no Jehovahs Witlesses at the door….
I am not in the loop, but is this person in any way influential in the right-wing echo chamber? If only a few fellow Christian fundamentalists listen to him, he is basically just another weirdo shouting in the street and you can move on to more dangerous charlatans.
Like the Xian guru Hegseth follows. Or Peter Thiel.
Lol…even my AP Bio students (including the evolution-accepting Christians) think this guy is a joke. Apparently, his YouTube videos are being mocked online for their “white supremecy” and “Christian Nationalism” viewpoints. Maybe the “future” isn’t so bleak if the next generation of thinkers and doers can spot a clown like Teddy Beale.
“Good Christian Newton”? He denied the Trinitarian doctrine.
Yeah, Pascal’s Wager is BS. First, you don’t just have to “believe in God” to win it — you have to believe in the correct version of the correct God, otherwise you’re no better off than someone who doesn’t believe at all. That diminishes your odds a good bit. Also, you can’t just say “I believe,” you have to sincerely believe it. That’s not something everyone can just choose to do to cover their sixes.
I’ve always favored what I call the “Aurelian Wager,” from something attributed (rightly or not) to Marcus Aurelius: “Be a good person and do the most good you can in the time you have. If the gods are just, they will welcome you into their company. If the gods are unjust, then at least you will know you did the best you could have [and there’s little chance that sucking up to unjust gods would have got you anywhere anyway]. And if there are no gods and no afterlife, then you would have made the most of the life you had in this world.”
As for PZ “being irrelevant for at least a decade,” I kinda suspect VD means “Oh noes, I was able to ignore PZ for about a decade, but now I have to respond to him!” Nice to know you’re still living rent-free in that wonky little head of his, innit?
@ 20
Yeah, but the theists love to drag him out as a model scientist anyway.
@birgerjohansson:
Is he influential? Not really anymore.
He’s the sort of person whose primary shtick has always been to sound enough like a smart person to let lower-information people on his side claim they have backing, while creating enough bull and obfuscation to make him difficult to actually refute because he can always point to something in his long screed that you didn’t actually counter and he can keep doing a version of a Socratic dialogue in which he rarely actually commits enough to a real disputable point to let you actually disprove him in any way he’ll accept.
He’s the sort of person who gives cover to other edgelords, but at this point the anti-intellectualism of the movement is so strong that even his pseudo-intellectualism is being rejected by the rank and file. There’s no place for smug wordplay to imply things without actually provably saying them when people have already decided they can say the quiet parts out loud.
His last significant moment of importance, really, was the whole Rabid Puppies thing over ten years ago. and that was (as with a number of his other actions) co-opting a movement somebody else started. Aside from that he has a long history of starting big projects like a publishing house, a social media platform, a Wikipedia replacement, or a new comics company, and keeping at it for a couple of years before either pissing off his supposed allies to the point where he gets kicked out, or just getting distracted by the next shiny thing he can brag about when the previous project starts becoming more actual work than he anticipated.
Michael “Whatever happened to Behe?” Behe was hung up on the same nutty mathematics. Single mutations were rare but double mutations were rare-de-rare-rare-need-Jeebus-rare.
Even when shown to be wrong he would never admit it.
One mystery is where he got his money — Vox Day is rich enough to have bought a Swiss castle, and has clearly never worked a day in his life. His books have never been popular, and while he claims to be a game developer, I can’t think of a single title he’s associated with.
The answer explains a lot: he’s the son of a Minnesota fraudster, Robert Beale, who was sentenced to 11 years in prison for tax evasion, threatening a federal judge, and jumping bail. He apparently skimmed off millions of dollars before being caught. He was also on the Minnesota board for televangelist Pat Robertson”s presidential campaign. Daddy was good to Theodore, apparently.
Oh.
That might explain why he is living in Switzerland of all places.
Switzerland has been know for a century or so as the place for secret numbered Swiss bank accounts and many other places and methods to stash illegally obtained money, launder money, and to avoid taxes.
Supposedly they have lately tightened up their laws under international pressure but there are a lot of loopholes in their foreign money flow laws.
I do know one guy who made a lot of money running a dubious hedge fund.
He managed to make quite a few millions of dollars and moved it all to the Grand Cayman Islands, a tax avoidance haven.
I can’t say it did him all that much good though.
He now lives in the Grand Cayman Islands and can’t come back to the USA.
Because he has some serious warrants for his arrest out from the US government and the IRS.
His wife didn’t want to be stuck in the Grand Cayman Islands, which are fun for a while but small enough that once you’ve been there for a while, you can start to get bored.
She moved back to the USA with the kids and divorced him.
Last I heard, he was drinking heavily every day and not likely to live a very long life.
“Expatriated Americans,
Feeling so all alone
Telling themselves the same lies
That they told themselves at home”
— Jimmy Buffett
HEY, STOP GIGGLING, THIS IS SAD!!!
birgerjohansson @9
Roko’s Basilisk is a thought experiment that’s basically a secular, “rationalist” version of Pascal’s Wager. It was created in 2010 by a member of the rationalist community over at LessWrong.com, who posted under the username “Roko.” The thought experiment posits that, in the future, there will be an all-powerful, post-singularity AI that will use its godlike computing powers to ensure an end to poverty, disease, and even death. Therefore the most effective way to end human suffering is to do everything humanly possible to help bring the AI into existence. The AI will be able to determine with perfect accuracy which humans helped it, which humans failed to help it out of ignorance, and which humans knew that it would exist but failed to help it. To punish the latter group for its failure to ensure mankind’s flourishing, it will create a perfect simulation of each group member and torture it eternally. That’s why it’s a “basilisk:” much as simply looking upon the mythical basilisk can kill you, even learning about Roko’s Basilisk obligates you to help create it or face eternal simulated torture. LessWrong site founder Eliezer Yudkowski considered the Basilisk an infohazard and banned discussion of it from his website for five years.
“Wait a minute,” you might ask. “Even assuming all of this bears out, why should I care what happens to a simulation of me? I’m not a simulation.” To which a believer might respond: “How do you know you’re not in the Basilisk’s simulation right now?” Unfalsifiable claims are, of course, very rational.
@PZ:
At least some of it was probably less “Daddy being good to Theodore” and more “Daddy wanting to obfuscate the location of the money as much as possible to make it impossible to get back”. It used to be said that if he ever went back to the U.S. there would be a few IRS agents waiting to ask him some questions about certain transfers. While that’s probably a lot less of a concern these days with Trump and his cronies gutting any enforcement of that sort of corruption for his cronies, Vox hasn’t been exactly pro-Trump lately, but that’s mostly because Trump hasn’t been horrible enough (and has been horrible in the wrong ways), to the point where apparently he came up with a conspiracy theory that the ‘real’ Trump had been replaced by a body double who was being paid by others to tarnish the legacy of the original.
@raven:
Of course, part of the pressure on the Swiss banking system was specifically because the Swiss had been active participants in hiding money (and other items) looted by the Nazis over the years, and this was provable because the Nazis had kept records. That was one of the few things that made it enough of an international PR problem that they were willing to break with their tradition of secrecy.
@UffDah!:
I’ve been saying for years that Yudkowski et al are exhibit A for the idea that we should try teaching engineers philosophy so they stop trying to reinvent it badly.
Not only is Pascal’s Wager BS for avoiding the possibility of the wrong god, and the idea of pretending to believe, it also assumes there is no cost to believing.
DanDare, bad objection.
Believing itself incurs no cost.
(Acting on the belief, however, does; like, I believe I should be a better person, but I am too cheap incur that cost)