I noticed.
I also read the rules earlier by the way. Did I manage to just hit on the angsty tean brigade or is this thread the general quality of argument outside the science sora? I haven't strayed into this area much before and I have never encountered this level of dissonance from a small group here before.
Is material like this:
The truth often is, but I make no claim to be Jesus Christ.
You ARE a troll with an ax to grind against PZ, you ARE a fellow traveler with right wing/religious nutters and nothing you have posted shows anyhing but how tenuous your grasp of reality and reason is. And you STILL aren't a pimple on the butt of PZ Myers, intellectually.
Now, I suggest you never bring the subject up again here, but find myself hoping you will.
Grumpy
found anywhere else here from otherwise literate members. I feel like i discovered a new territory or something.
The rules of debate I always assumed start with considering baseless threats, whining, presenting that the only possible alternative if I don't like cheese whiz is that I must be a bank robber rapist who goes to pat Robertson's church and has a secret agenda to undermine atheism and kill santa clause. and an absolute failure to provide evidence for there assertions or simply invent my positions so they can attack the ones they think might be good were considered failures and I assumed that meant I entered the wrong division and need to move up.
I am really shocked that not one of the people who challenged me in this thread made a counter point or supported a claim with evidence. I guess this sounds pretty mean but it is just the case, Are there people here who can argue a point or is threats and attempts at character assassination pretty much the gold league here?
Some highlights:
Do you not advocate the opposition of dangerous ideas? Why should non-believers be meek in the face of tyranny?
Do you not advocate the opposition of Rape? Why do you hate America?
Well, he is respected. While he may not have been the keynote speaker at that conference, he was one of the speakers. You may not respect his anti-theistic views, but his science is not in question.
Well, since I never questioned his science teacher status nor maligned the value of what he does do, and since I didn't even ask him for the list nor did he have reason to lie other that to try to out important me for whatever reason, surely you condemn dishonesty and underhanded manipulation? and since his anti theistic views are not even something I think I care about although maybe i would if I ever got that deep, and since basically you pulled every single statement in there outta your ass, well, can you read for comprehension?
No, it's not a straw man. You argued against his credibility by assuming--whether true or not--that he hadn't done any science in ten years. You even made a point of saying that he is not a "research scientist," and as a result is somehow less credible for it.
Only if he wanted credibility as a research scientist which he has not been in over ten years so I guess I if he did then I can understand his reaction. But I can';t for the life of me imagine how he wouldn't be proud of what he does do. Also chasing grants is not a stable life very often. Every 5 years you have to pray that the NIH has funding still and that of the 10-15% of grant applications that get funded, yours will be picked again and if you happen to be researching a less popular kind of cancer in a bad year the breast cancer researchers are going to to take precedence because people value boobies over ovaries for some reason. No a university teaching job is nothing to use as an insult. Unless you don't understand what teaching means and entails. Teaching science is a challenging and rewarding enterprise and popularizing science is also not only laudible but a difficult balancing act which he manages quite well sometimes. Resisting attempts by creationists to censor education and other misdemeanors is also laudable in my book. I think you have to take a step back and ask questions when you don't know rather than assuming my positions with exactly 0 supporting facts. I have a very specific issue with PZ which I have had f=to find creative ways to communicate for various format related reasons. But I have communicated it.
That science speech though. You have to truly not understand what science is to not be horrified by it, Something is slipping there and I'd leave it alone if it weren't so damned uncomfortable to interact with people who think science proves or even warrants adopting specific ontology and you have to be told by someone you trust who should know better to believe that science replaces religion. Because even a basic understanding of science is enough to alert you that he was selling magic there and that would worry me if he stared getting disciples. Goddamn I dislike preaching. I would love to have a civil discussion with him or anyone who supports it but I have yet to encounter anyone who doesn't assume that opposing the platform means that I must be a marketing executive with no sense of duty to anyone but myself and a secret fundamentalist hindu since that is the absolutely only alternative to blind adherence to his doctrines and proclamations. Not surprising in some ways. The dissenting voices have been kicked out over the years, Not that they dont argue among themselves but the claim that they are able to truly dissent is put to the lie following elvatorgate, the great schism.
Your ignorance is not an argument and assertions are not evidence.
Well, wait: do you know that he wasn't the keynote speaker? Do you know that no one told him he was? He closed out a section of the proceedings, so how do you know he wasn't told this was a position of import? You're just looking at the schedule and assuming. I mean, I agree that it doesn't look that way, but how do you know? Rather than asking, you accused.
Is an assertion which you will find is false right here on this thread.
Right, because saying he was less of a scientist than she is not an invitation to whip it out and measure? Please. Can you explain the basis for your assumption that he was acting unethically? Or was it simply that his criticism rubbed you the wrong way and you wanted to get some blood for yourself?
She is a researcher, he is not. He felt that using his blog to denigrate her character was appropriate. He did it by comparing himself to her by suggesting that he would decline any invitation to go to a conference that she was invited to. I think that is petty and bad form. It is a legitimate question to ask if he would even be invited to the same conferences. The funny thing is that I did make an unwarranted assumption there. But it was about Abbie, not PZ. I assumed she wasn't on the invite list to New Atheist type conferences. She actually may be. I don't know. But to turn it around and try to claim credibility as a research scientist with a list of recent accomplishments when he hasn't done research for over a decade is just weird. To do it to try to minimize my value in comparison to his is something I want him to apologize to me for. That is unethical no matter who you are or what your credentials.
The question of whether I was out for blood is irrelevant but the answer is no. I am opposed to devaluing humans which is what I thought he was doing to Abbie and which is what I said in my post.
The more you guys say stupid things like this the more I am forced to type in response and since PZ did make a mistake and really kinda does need to knowledge the mistake now, the more detailed you make the simple fact that he needs to apologize to me and acknowledge the error and move on. My language on his blog is (or was since he banned me) somewhat calculated to be slightly abusive because they have this escape word called "tone troll" which means that a person objects to tone rather than content and by applying the label they consider it legitimate to dismiss any potential argument in such posts. Well, I considered it a challenge. Sure enough, they only know how to read tone. Not one response there even mentioned my actual criticism which was in the following paragraph. Whatever, I don't expect much intelligent response form the comments, especially since the game is how to dismiss people with insults rather than content there. Well, that is entertaining in its own right. But it turns out you get banned for being better at it than they are. Live and learn.
Apologize for what? Stop pretending you were somehow injured by this. You were the one making accusations (across at least two different forums now!) about this man's character, and doing it first.
This forum I made a post to illustrate the point I tried to make to Wynn. She seemed to be interested and I used it as an example. It was and is an appropriate example. I wasn't the one who called up the I'm so mad but I can;t seem to force you to shutup by challenging your claims brigade. It's pretty cheeky to challenge my claims and them blame me for responding.
I want him to apologize to me and acknowledge that even if you are angry, lying in order to delegitimize someone else is still wrong. I am very against what I see as prejudice, and I don't care how well deserved it may be some of the members of the labeled group, there is no difference between prejudice toward black or gays than toward xians or muslims. Trying to rationalize that one has been done here too but it's not valid because it isn't the quality of the beef with the people you hate that makes prejudice wrong. but I think thats a matter of discussion. Unfortunately he has lost the ability to dicuss of late, hopefully he chooses to aplogize to me and that will initiate a slightly more humble phase where disagreement doesn't get barb wire porcupines up the disagrers rectum or whatever they tell people they deserve nowadys who disagree with the canon.
Clearly you're riled up by this. You have an emotional investment. Perhaps you're friends with the person who he disparaged? You're not being rational here. Calm down. Typing in all-caps is for children, not adults.
Again, this is an irrelevant issue the all caps was desperation because nobody could seem to find my actual words so everyone had to resort to making up likely arguments to still not refute but apparently so have some filler to go around the 'how dare you malign my god posts.
I do not expect nor request apologies from any of the faithful who rose up to try to silence the, what was it, hmm i'll find it, here it is, the guy who "And you STILL aren't a pimple on the butt of PZ Myers, intellectually."
But when you realized that I am right, well, to be fair I don't know if you know that or not, but when you realized that it seemed to be getting worse rather than better, the army started threatening me and making value statements attempting to delegitimize me so that your unchangeable truth could be assuaged. So that the command dictated by a silly belief which got stuck in the wrong place and so commanded you rather that being where you could adjust it as needed and command it.
Weird power truths have, they can command us to engage in futile effort and control us if we put them in the wrong place. They can make witnessing what they proclaim as bad into unbearable suffering (well, I think I deserve a little poetic license for being such a good sport about it)
That you attempted the tactic of making my argument go away by shifting the value focus to me rather than my words is strangely the exact same thing PZ did when he realized he was in a bind, change the rules and shift the attention of the audience I guess, to whether his claim that I am a poopyhead is true or not. I try very hard to be just a few degrees less violent (I am not really into being violent anyway and besides, what does violent text look like?) and because I was definitely making a few people uncomfortable He just declared his truth to be established, banned me for being a liar, and to support the charge he linked to a post where he called me a liar. I support lying being a bannable offense btw. so I guess I have to accept that occasionally an innocent person gets convicted of a crime and this time it was me who drew the short straw. Id rather live in a world with some rules than one of pure anarchy.
First, I hope by now you are laughing at this whole mess a little bit, It is quite comedic in some ways I think but also serious and thoughtful too. It is a bizarre storyline for sure, We almost reversed all the roles here. You, played PZ but lacking mod powers. Wynn played me, getting banned, and I played talkrational, providing a running commentary which only made sense to someone who knew all the inside jokes or whatever. Well, ok. That is a painful fit. But, since this is my narrative for the time being, I wonder if you or any of the people who wanted me to stop and tried to accomplish that by posting challenges to my claims, have the ability or inclination to reflect on how it felt to have such a clusterfook with suck incompatible goals motivating totally different response patterns from what would have actually accomplished the goal. I admit, I thought for most of the time that these were actual attempts to debate my clains and it was weird confusing because I didn't know how to deal with that.
This ia a strange question but hopefully I'll br able to explain in a minute, Was there ever a moment where you considered that if you might be able to make me suffer, really me, not the text you see but they guy bumbling along on the other end, that if I could suffer just a little that you might have unloaded some small part of your burden onto me that you might have convinced the truth that demanded action that you had done all you could and that would have to do? That if perhaps If my ego were bruised I would own the responsibility for the problem in a way that you couldn't accomplish without somehow getting me to accept some shame? It would be really interesting if compulsions caused by truths held too tightly or in the wrong spot would immediately try to the same mechanisms of shame and blame through the digital interface that they do in the real world, It might shed some light on those posters who just can't seem to say hello with calling the other guy/gal some creative compound swearword and have an exchange of links without mentioning how the other guy/gal sucks I wonder, when a truth creates suffering but does not offer a solution, if there is a negotiation process for dealing with the frustration by some alternate mean, one of which being transferring the suffering as shame to the other person. Did you feel like maybe, and I'm not suggesting you were all phycho over it or anything, but do you think you might have thought to yourself at some point that if you could make even one person who was following the structured case I laid out, not who was in the same boat as you, but an unbiased observer, think I looked like an idiot, that even if I kept going, you would feel better because you had somehow satisfied your (probably unexaminable at the time since it was busy demanding results? ) truth's requirement to stop my words by instead lessening their power by reducing their value? Did it also feel like you were searching for that hotbutton phrase that could make me defensive and so give you a target to focus on? I ask that because every once in a while someone melts down kind of spectacularly, I'm sure you've seen it happen, and it seems to me like it is absolutely desperate attempt to unload the suffering bu dumping the shame into the other person's weak spot. If that is accurate, why do you suppose we need to give it to another person if it is possible to hand it off? It seems like we could work out a barter system with the occasional stuck truth which puts in those awkward places like this thread where we just say, ok, well, this suffering is because I accidentally got this truth stuck, I'll unstick it later but right now I'm going to need to set the shame down for a seconf. Snd then when you leavem conveniently forget to make it back in time to pick it back up. I mean, if we can unload them into other people is it only because we make a power balance with the one left holding the shame being weaker by virtue of the burden or could we really just put it down?
I really do work on the principle that I like to show my cards and discover where I am wrong rather than be a servant to who knows what random truth would get stuck. I think some weird stuff sometimes. But because I had no stuck truths to serve, I was free to enjoy the artistic and theatrical qualities of this whole bizarre affair where everyone seems to have tried their damndest to see if they couldnt suffer a bit for the sake of a truth that got miscategorized as an ontological reality. Another question did my demeanor confuse you? Did my confidence make it worse or no shange or did it inspire some in you? It isn't so much confidence, I'm not a super-genius or have a track record of being right more often than the next guy, it's just that I'm mostly fine with being wrong. You might notice that the actual topic of this thread is something which I have been reasonably faithfully following exactly like I told wynn I would.
If you recall, this isn't a thread about pz. Well I know that was the apparent storyline and that was everyone's stuck spot, but I was testing the conjecture I made when I first responded to her. That holding onto a truth too tightly actually causes suffering rather than provides a suggestion for alleviating it. What do you think? I'd say it definitely isn't busted anyway. At least in this small sample. And with a not so cosmic absolute truth, I'll loosley name the truth that the ephemeral notion of PZ's integrity is unquestionable because it is real or something. Interestingly, everyone who got stuck by it did try to use that truth to find ways to alleviate the suffering first. Step one, state the truth: PZ is not a liar therefore you must be the liar. Then,when that rang back as not working the next response was pretty much: Hey buddy! Don't be an asshole. Stop. But since absolute truths restrict rather than loosen degrees of freedom, that truth ultimately caused suffering because it created a need but no way to meet it. But in the end, PZ's integrity is not in much danger. He probly should acknowledge the mistake and I certainly would appreciate an apology because it was a kind of a dick move. But if his whole schtick for what maybe twenty years, has been to take the frustration of the masses of people who are getting screwed by creationists and dump it right on their damn heads, it is actually possible that he may be hypersensitive to shame now because he's dumped so much for so long that he simply doent have the mechanism opiled up to loosen his truths anymore. That would explain the weird attack squad around him and it also would make his duty as a blogger take on a quality of a mindfucking burden. That shame needs dumping. He must find more places to dump it, places to dump more, and so on. When I picked up recently on what I called hate speech, I could just as easily call if wholesale shame dumping. Can you imagine feeling responsible for dumping the shame for thousands of people? Think how critical the desire to satisfy a truth which, on a moments consideration, isn't capable of doing what it demands. You can't protect his integrity without controlling him. No one can, while acting with their own integrity, defenf the integrity of someone else if it need some body work. But if the tiniest bit of shame has taken on epic proportions in his mind, he may simply be unable to dump it by the normal means of just taking responsibility, acknowledging the mistake, making his apologies and he's absolved. But if that first step is the weight of the world I might have really messed with him which would be too bad. He becomes the boy in the basement in the Omelas.
But also, if he is getting neurotic about dumping shame only through devaluing others, then I kinda hope this inspires him to take a break, because that is exactly what is unacceptable to me and bullshit is someone out there claiming to represent science and feeding off inflicting pain on others going to go unchallenged in terms of his fitness to represent science. I can't think of a single place Carl Sagan needed to devalue anyone to communicate science.
The obvious thing is to work at loosening out truth, eh? For those of you who got stuck in the grip of such a weird and counter productive truth, not holding the truth so tightly, just saying, 'meh', would have actually solved the problem because I had no intention of bashing PZ here in this thread, other than stating the truth of the matter as an example of the type of thing I was thinking about. This huge long sort of damning expose that we have now was the result of the limited freedom and unreasonable demands which seem to quite possibly be caused by the truths themselves.
/philosophizing
Last order on the agenda:
Okay, so you're not even an atheist. I should have known. There's nothing wrong with his speech. He's talking about riding the world religion through science. Through ideas. Why are you opposed to that? Oh, that's right, you could tear it down...but not today.
You've been figured out, friend. Take your wolf in sheep's clothing act elsewhere.
May I ask what the bleep you think you discovered there?
Please note my second post in this thread:
http://www.sciforums.com/showpost.php?p=2944266&postcount=144
And what is the significance of not
even an atheist. But actually you do know that this is either nonsense or wrong, right?
