I did manage to get to Mike S. Adams’ talk here at UMM. It was a packed room (not our biggest lecture room here, but it was filled to capacity) and I arrived late, so I had to stand outside the door to listen in. Kudos to our students, who were polite and attentive, and let him blather on without interruption.
Adams is a slick, fast-talking, folksy guy, and he made the audience laugh quite a bit. He had to talk fast, though, to keep his story from sinking beneath the weight of its improbabilities, and I do wonder how many of our students actually caught on to his inconsistencies.
To summarize his schtick: it was the standard conversion story, of the sort I’ve heard so routinely from the loons of the right. He was a liberal! Democrat! atheist! feminist! But then, because he is a down-deep nice fellow who is a champion of little guy, who opposes abuses of civil liberties, who thinks we need to stand up for free speech against those in power, who was unfairly persecuted himself, (these were nice stories, you could see that his audience was entirely sympathetic with these positions), he had to take a stand against the extremist politics of the people in power, and side with those who shared his principles.
The powerful were the feminists; the principled was the Republican party.
Repeat after me: WHA…??? How could anyone make such a silly argument?
After his tale of woe, his sad saga of political correctness at his university run amuck and leading to university officials poking into his private email, he bragged of the events leading to his affiliation with people like Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, and Rush Limbaugh, the doubling of his salary, and his mention on the pages of national news magazines. Seriously, the most horrible things that happened to him as a consequence of the vast powers of those awful feminists were that his email privacy was violated (a deplorable act, I agree, and his university administration bungled everything impressively) and he was offended by The Vagina Monologues, and as a result he is richer and more famous, and has obviously allied himself without argument with the truly powerful and wealthy…and he has parlayed this into speaking gigs where he pretends to be the oppressed and abused.
There were other inconsistencies. I frankly believe his accounts of university hiring committees where people tried to turn applicants down because they were religious or male were lies; I can imagine more subtle biases sneaking in, but to claim that ‘feminists’ (it was always wicked feminists) would openly state that someone was unsuitable because they were religious is absurd. I don’t believe him when he said he regretted a women’s resource center pulling ads for Planned Parenthood when he demanded that they also run ads for one of those fake pregnancy crisis centers that offer nothing but religious browbeating against abortion: he was suing the resource center. Is that the kind of action you take when you are sincerely concerned about seeing that women are informed about reproductive health? Baloney. He’s simply an anti-feminist kook. If he could have sued them into bankruptcy, he would have done so cheerfully and profitably, and would have turned it into another of his stories about the underdog (him) triumphing over the tyrants (feminists).
He got a few general questions at the end, nothing too challenging at first—he was asked about his attitudes toward racism, for instance, and got a few happy comments from our young Republicans. The event was scheduled for 7:00 to 9:00, and then at 8:30…trouble. Someone asked how he could be for civil liberties while supporting the actions of the Republican party in making wiretaps without warrant, especially since he’d been so outraged that his university administration had unjustly dug into his private email (his answer: his paranoia about terrorist attacks justifies it.) Then a fellow with a darker complexion and a long ponytail raised his hand to ask a good question, one that was actually very close to what I was going to ask as I was working my way up towards the room. He pointed out the fundamental inconsistency in Adams’ conversion story—it didn’t make sense that a good liberal would, in anger at feminism, abandon all liberal principles to so whole-heartedly embrace all of the completely contrary principles of conservative extremism (his answer: it was complicated, and there was more to the story than he’d been able to tell—I bet). The questions were just starting to warm up and drill down into Adams’ hypocrisy, when one of our local ringleaders, who had jumped up out of his seat when Mr Radical Ponytail had raised his hand, abruptly cut off the questions. I was not surprised. Free speech is fine and all, until it starts to cause Republicans mild discomfort.
It was familiar Horowitzian bombast. I really don’t understand how anyone can take these guys seriously; their angle is to whine aggrievedly about cruel and politically correct liberal academics who strangle free speech and unfairly oppress conservatives with speech codes and denial of their right to air their opinions on college campuses…at college campuses, their expenses paid for, honoraria in their pockets, with those liberal academics and administrators all sitting right there in the audience, listening. You’d think the dissonance between their claims and the obvious reality of the situation would kill ’em dead from shock on the spot, but no…they just rave on obliviously.
No doubt the person you went to see was full of inconsistencies and a glib hypocrite.
But PZ it must be said that on Dawkins latest book that both you and he are might actually be regarded as glib hypocrites and lacking in intellectual honesty or rigor.
I think that Marilynne Robinson provides some devastating blows to Dawkins (see her review http://darwiniana.com/2006/10/23/marilynne-robinson-on-dawkins/)
Are you going throw another temper tantrum a la your spectacularly dishonest response to Eagleton’s review?
And no I’m not a theist but I do value intellectual rigor and honesty. Not the self-serving infantile crap that Dawkins unfortunately has produced.
No doubt the person you went to see was full of inconsistencies and a glib hypocrite.
But PZ it must be said that on Dawkins latest book that both you and he are might actually be regarded as glib hypocrites and lacking in intellectual honesty or rigor.
I think that Marilynne Robinson provides some devastating blows to Dawkins (see her review http://darwiniana.com/2006/10/23/marilynne-robinson-on-dawkins/)
Are you going throw another temper tantrum a la your spectacularly dishonest response to Eagleton’s review?
And no I’m not a theist but I do value intellectual rigor and honesty. Not the self-serving infantile crap that Dawkins unfortunately has produced.
No doubt the person you went to see was full of inconsistencies and a glib hypocrite.
But PZ it must be said that on Dawkins latest book that both you and he are might actually be regarded as glib hypocrites and lacking in intellectual honesty or rigor.
I think that Marilynne Robinson provides some devastating blows to Dawkins (see her review http://darwiniana.com/2006/10/23/marilynne-robinson-on-dawkins/)
Are you going throw another temper tantrum a la your spectacularly dishonest response to Eagleton’s review?
And no I’m not a theist but I do value intellectual rigor and honesty. Not the self-serving infantile crap that Dawkins unfortunately has produced.
“…infantile crap that Dawkins…”
Examples, please.
IRH – you are just baiting aren’t you?
Anyway, in my part of the world, when I was at University no-one would have either turned up or be polite and listened to such an extremist. Anyone seriously interested in politics either left or right was just deranged. The equivalent young political conservatives were almost pitied for being such a minority and seemingly having to wear suits on campus in summer.
(Sigh) what is happening to youth when it doesn’t enjoy its time of studious apathy? And hypocrisy baiting of course!!
Interesting although irrelevant point. Why did you choose to raise in in this post?
Sigh. Can’t you have some more pity for the poor, poor overdog.
Because, Reverend, he’s just some chump troll who’s hoping for some hapless to bite his bait.
I haven’t read Dawkins at book-length yet, but while I have noticed what seems like a tendency to sometimes bring up creationism for contrast in cases where it’s not really relevant to the discussion, nothing in the essays I’ve read could be described as “infantile crap.”
Yes, this IRH is a troll. I refuse to actually critique what he said until he proves otherwise.
I’m not so impressed with Robinson’s piece. There is a point that simply seems to go past her– that the epistemic status of science is grounded, if not in simple common sense, then in its careful, artful refinement and extension. The world that we all share in, the world of the senses that we all learn to describe and reason about in extremely reliable ways, has served as a starting point for an enterprise that continues and improves on those decriptions and reasoning, with astounding success. It is the only game going when it comes to serious description of the world; its limits, such as they are, are limits we would, in all modesty, do better to accept. Passing beyond them into metaphysical fantasies via personal revelations and culture-bound traditions of authority leads to divisive, isolated and ungrounded convictions– hardly a recipe for beginning a helpful human engagement with the world.
Of course the word ‘science’ can be used by anyone at all, and the trappings of science are regularly appropriated by all kinds of charlatans from creationists to psychoanalysts. More importantly, the tools and knowledge that science provides are uniquely powerful– something that makes them important to more than just the quest for knowledge, and to those who have no interest in understanding. What this shows about the evils of science, though, I find hard to understand; hard men (and women) have always seized on whatever tools were available to serve their purpose. That said, I wonder what we should expect from religion if its prayers and invocations worked as well as science. The vision that thought brings to my mind is too dark to utter, though I’ve seen some very ugly computer games on such themes.
Well for a start Dawkins’ postulates a theory of human history that involves the working of a ‘mysterious zeitgeist’ [note his own terms NOT mine]. Zeitgeist means ‘spirit of the age’ and is derived from Hegel’s philosophy. This ‘wave’ somehow – and the mechanism seems rather obscure, moves history along. Moreover ‘whole wave keeps moving’ and that ‘the progressive trend is unmistakable and it will continue’. Hegel is generally regarded as one of the most obscure philosophers ever with many other philosophers charging that Hegel’s thought is nothing other than obscurantist mumbo-jumbo.
Now I think if Dr Dawkins’ went back to Oxford and enrolled as a history undergraduate he might not make it through his first tutorial with that theory. Try reading the essay I linked to on Dawkins’ mistakes and incompetent attempts at human history (he makes quite simple factual errors if nothing else).
There are other problems in his attempts at philosophical arguments and his use of the concepts of complexity and statistical probability are questionable (hint the universe actually goes from order to disorder – it’s called entropy and natural selection can only build complexity as the earth is a open system at the local level). As Thomas Nagel suggested it is not immediately apparent what ‘rules’ or paradigm should be applied to something that if it existed is non-physical and is not bounded by time. Also see Hume on the objections to induction and then try to apply inductive reasoning across from a physical to a non-physical realm.
I’m sorry but if you want to seriously ‘do’ history and philosophy the required intellectual standards are somewhat higher than Dr. Dawkins seems able to reach.
Well for a start Dawkins’ postulates a theory of human history that involves the working of a ‘mysterious zeitgeist’ [note his own terms NOT mine]. Zeitgeist means ‘spirit of the age’ and is derived from Hegel’s philosophy. This ‘wave’ somehow – and the mechanism seems rather obscure, moves history along. Moreover ‘whole wave keeps moving’ and that ‘the progressive trend is unmistakable and it will continue’. Hegel is generally regarded as one of the most obscure philosophers ever with many other philosophers charging that Hegel’s thought is nothing other than obscurantist mumbo-jumbo.
Now I think if Dr Dawkins’ went back to Oxford and enrolled as a history undergraduate he might not make it through his first tutorial with that theory. Try reading the essay I linked to on Dawkins’ mistakes and incompetent attempts at human history (he makes quite simple factual errors if nothing else).
There are other problems in his attempts at philosophical arguments and his use of the concepts of complexity and statistical probability are questionable (hint the universe actually goes from order to disorder – it’s called entropy and natural selection can only build complexity as the earth is a open system at the local level). As Thomas Nagel suggested it is not immediately apparent what ‘rules’ or paradigm should be applied to something that if it existed is non-physical and is not bounded by time. Also see Hume on the objections to induction and then try to apply inductive reasoning across from a physical to a non-physical realm.
I’m sorry but if you want to seriously ‘do’ history and philosophy the required intellectual standards are somewhat higher than Dr. Dawkins seems able to reach.
Well for a start Dawkins’ postulates a theory of human history that involves the working of a ‘mysterious zeitgeist’ [note his own terms NOT mine]. Zeitgeist means ‘spirit of the age’ and is derived from Hegel’s philosophy. This ‘wave’ somehow – and the mechanism seems rather obscure, moves history along. Moreover ‘whole wave keeps moving’ and that ‘the progressive trend is unmistakable and it will continue’. Hegel is generally regarded as one of the most obscure philosophers ever with many other philosophers charging that Hegel’s thought is nothing other than obscurantist mumbo-jumbo.
Now I think if Dr Dawkins’ went back to Oxford and enrolled as a history undergraduate he might not make it through his first tutorial with that theory. Try reading the essay I linked to on Dawkins’ mistakes and incompetent attempts at human history (he makes quite simple factual errors if nothing else).
There are other problems in his attempts at philosophical arguments and his use of the concepts of complexity and statistical probability are questionable (hint the universe actually goes from order to disorder – it’s called entropy and natural selection can only build complexity as the earth is a open system at the local level). As Thomas Nagel suggested it is not immediately apparent what ‘rules’ or paradigm should be applied to something that if it existed is non-physical and is not bounded by time. Also see Hume on the objections to induction and then try to apply inductive reasoning across from a physical to a non-physical realm.
I’m sorry but if you want to seriously ‘do’ history and philosophy the required intellectual standards are somewhat higher than Dr. Dawkins seems able to reach.
Adams is just an infantile jerk:
“I want you and your friends to dress like the angry feminists you criticize.
Wear your oldest pair of blue jeans, preferably without washing them for at least one month. Then, put on a white “wife beater” tank top. Do not shave your arm pits for several weeks (this one is optional) and under no circumstances are any of you to wear a bra (not optional). Use black magic markers to put slogans like “F— Bush” and “F— men” on your tank tops. Then get some “Vagina friendly” buttons from the Women’s Resource Center and place them on your outer garments. Wear no make-up except for thick mascara. Top it all off with a black leather-studded dog collar from the local pet store. Fit it tightly around your neck. Then, you should be ready to go.”
http://blogs.salon.com/0002874/2005/12/30.html
I just spent 10 minutes surfing the Google about him and I feel sort of dirty. He’s a doozie. Up there with the worst of them.
Well IRH, you’ll have to do better than that. How about some extensive quotes from Dawkins showing that his worldview is as you say, rather than an ad-hominem like ‘Hegel is generally regarded as one of the most obscure philosophers ever ‘
Another thing:
No, entropy S = kln(&omega) (k is Boltzmanns constant) Please show how this relates to ‘order’ and ‘disorder’. Define the terms and produce a proof.
How about some of that ‘intellectual rigour’ on your own behalf?
Lots of people at college campuses are against free speech, regardless of which political polarity they identify themselves with.
Zeitgeist.
Here are some recent uses (from .edu sites) on the Google:
Channeling the Pop Zeitgeist: A Visual Literacy Workshop
November 30, 2005 (a U. Minn. site)
Double Zeitgeist In Architecture: Co-Teaching As Opposition To The Sound Building Design Studio (a Tulane site)
HYPERTEXT AND THE CULTURAL ZEITGEIST (a Berkeley site)
Network Neutrality and the Zeitgeist (a Princeton site)
So, it’s not such an obscure term after all. Look for yourself.
Now how am I to ‘prove’ that I’m not a ‘troll’ what possible action could I take? Why if someone decides that the arguments of PZ or Dawkins are not infallible are they under superstition? Not really the spirit of open and critical inquire to simply dismiss a point you don’t like as trolling, and then to not engage with the arguments. That’s not what I call scholarship.
Moreover the review I link to does make an excellent number of of points about the issues involved. If in the case ‘for’ science – if eugenics is bad science (The bad scientific views of for example RD Fisher, WD Hamilton amongst other notable evolutionary biologists) – and is not allowed to count as a minus against science in the broader cultural sense then the question must be why are the worst and most egregious example from religion the only ones to be counted? Why isn’t say the Christian abolitionists and the life and work Martin Luther King Jr. to be given as examples of the ethos of religion positively adding to our moral and cultural life?
Equally what is the ethical status of scientists in the second world war that helped develop technology that now threatens all of our lives? Neutral, trivial unimportant presumably. How are we to decide the best way to use scientific knowledge – on cluster bombs and nukes or on provide shelter and necessities of life of everyone? Shall we decide by doing some more science and coming up with a P value of the ‘rightness’ of dropping some cluster bombs?
I love and respect the scientific process and method. I don’t believe in any Gods but I have too much respect for science to turn it a false God and uncritically worship at its feet. Science does not occur in social or political vacuum. We have too many examples of the use of scientific language and the authority of science to ideologically justify oppression and injustice to blithely postulate that it is ‘inherently’ progressive culturally and politically – equally it is simple minded to suggest that religious is always ‘inherently’ reactionary in political and cultural terms.
Primarily as both activities are carried out by human beings and divide between doing the right thing or doing the wrong thing cuts through us all. Everyone is capable of the most self-serving hypocrisy and cant when it benefits themselves; everyone is capable of the most awful cruelty and abuse of power under the right conditions – even if they wear a lab coat. I am a scientist but I do not think of other human beings as ‘sub-human’ as one poster (Caledonian) at this blog stated he/she did on another thread. If your brand of so called – ‘rationality’ results in large groups of people being given over to the ‘sub-human’ tag then I want NONE of it. Thanks very much.
Now how am I to ‘prove’ that I’m not a ‘troll’ what possible action could I take? Why if someone decides that the arguments of PZ or Dawkins are not infallible are they under superstition? Not really the spirit of open and critical inquire to simply dismiss a point you don’t like as trolling, and then to not engage with the arguments. That’s not what I call scholarship.
Moreover the review I link to does make an excellent number of of points about the issues involved. If in the case ‘for’ science – if eugenics is bad science (The bad scientific views of for example RD Fisher, WD Hamilton amongst other notable evolutionary biologists) – and is not allowed to count as a minus against science in the broader cultural sense then the question must be why are the worst and most egregious example from religion the only ones to be counted? Why isn’t say the Christian abolitionists and the life and work Martin Luther King Jr. to be given as examples of the ethos of religion positively adding to our moral and cultural life?
Equally what is the ethical status of scientists in the second world war that helped develop technology that now threatens all of our lives? Neutral, trivial unimportant presumably. How are we to decide the best way to use scientific knowledge – on cluster bombs and nukes or on provide shelter and necessities of life of everyone? Shall we decide by doing some more science and coming up with a P value of the ‘rightness’ of dropping some cluster bombs?
I love and respect the scientific process and method. I don’t believe in any Gods but I have too much respect for science to turn it a false God and uncritically worship at its feet. Science does not occur in social or political vacuum. We have too many examples of the use of scientific language and the authority of science to ideologically justify oppression and injustice to blithely postulate that it is ‘inherently’ progressive culturally and politically – equally it is simple minded to suggest that religious is always ‘inherently’ reactionary in political and cultural terms.
Primarily as both activities are carried out by human beings and divide between doing the right thing or doing the wrong thing cuts through us all. Everyone is capable of the most self-serving hypocrisy and cant when it benefits themselves; everyone is capable of the most awful cruelty and abuse of power under the right conditions – even if they wear a lab coat. I am a scientist but I do not think of other human beings as ‘sub-human’ as one poster (Caledonian) at this blog stated he/she did on another thread. If your brand of so called – ‘rationality’ results in large groups of people being given over to the ‘sub-human’ tag then I want NONE of it. Thanks very much.
Now how am I to ‘prove’ that I’m not a ‘troll’ what possible action could I take? Why if someone decides that the arguments of PZ or Dawkins are not infallible are they under superstition? Not really the spirit of open and critical inquire to simply dismiss a point you don’t like as trolling, and then to not engage with the arguments. That’s not what I call scholarship.
Moreover the review I link to does make an excellent number of of points about the issues involved. If in the case ‘for’ science – if eugenics is bad science (The bad scientific views of for example RD Fisher, WD Hamilton amongst other notable evolutionary biologists) – and is not allowed to count as a minus against science in the broader cultural sense then the question must be why are the worst and most egregious example from religion the only ones to be counted? Why isn’t say the Christian abolitionists and the life and work Martin Luther King Jr. to be given as examples of the ethos of religion positively adding to our moral and cultural life?
Equally what is the ethical status of scientists in the second world war that helped develop technology that now threatens all of our lives? Neutral, trivial unimportant presumably. How are we to decide the best way to use scientific knowledge – on cluster bombs and nukes or on provide shelter and necessities of life of everyone? Shall we decide by doing some more science and coming up with a P value of the ‘rightness’ of dropping some cluster bombs?
I love and respect the scientific process and method. I don’t believe in any Gods but I have too much respect for science to turn it a false God and uncritically worship at its feet. Science does not occur in social or political vacuum. We have too many examples of the use of scientific language and the authority of science to ideologically justify oppression and injustice to blithely postulate that it is ‘inherently’ progressive culturally and politically – equally it is simple minded to suggest that religious is always ‘inherently’ reactionary in political and cultural terms.
Primarily as both activities are carried out by human beings and divide between doing the right thing or doing the wrong thing cuts through us all. Everyone is capable of the most self-serving hypocrisy and cant when it benefits themselves; everyone is capable of the most awful cruelty and abuse of power under the right conditions – even if they wear a lab coat. I am a scientist but I do not think of other human beings as ‘sub-human’ as one poster (Caledonian) at this blog stated he/she did on another thread. If your brand of so called – ‘rationality’ results in large groups of people being given over to the ‘sub-human’ tag then I want NONE of it. Thanks very much.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy
Entropy describes the amount of energy in a give place at a given instant in time. In simpler terms, entropy change is related to a change to a more disordered state, and/or to the dispersion of energy or matter.
Quantitatively, entropy, symbolized by S, is a state function of a thermodynamic system defined by the differential quantity dS = δQ / T, where δQ is the amount of heat absorbed in a reversible process in which the system goes from one state to another, and T is the absolute temperature.[1] Entropy is one of the factors that determines the free energy of the system.
When a system’s energy is defined as the sum of its “useful” energy, (e.g. that used to push a piston), and its “useless energy”, i.e. that energy which cannot be used for external work, then entropy may be (most concretely) visualized as the “scrap” or “useless” energy whose energetic prevalance over the total energy of a system is directly proportional to the absolute temperature of the considered system, as is the case with the Gibbs free energy or Helmholtz free energy relations.
In terms of statistical mechanics, the entropy describes the number of the possible microscopic configurations of the system. The statistical definition of entropy is generally thought to be the more fundamental definition, from which all other important properties of entropy follow. Although the concept of entropy was originally a thermodynamic construct, it has been adapted in other fields of study, including information theory, psychodynamics, and thermoeconomics.
Furthermore…
An important law of physics, the second law of thermodynamics, states that the total entropy of any isolated thermodynamic system tends to increase over time, approaching a maximum value. Unlike almost all other laws of physics, this associates thermodynamics with a definite arrow of time.
IRH,
Why would somebody think you are a troll? I mean, all you did was redirect the thread from the original topic, Mike Adams, to how much of a hypocritical poopy-pants doo-doo head PZ Myers is… due to some alleged comments in Dawkin’s book. How could that possibly be interpreted as trollish? Jesus must love you to bits.
I say, if the shoe with the curly toe fits…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_death
Using Wikipedia as a source greatly shows your own intellectual rigor and honesty.
Doesn’t surprise me much. Today’s Mallard Fillmore comic (it appears on the local editorial page, and sometimes I can’t help but read it before I set my cereal bowl down on it to read the rest of the page) whines about the “stifling” of free speech by those darned pie-throwing college liberals.
They’re all crybabies, basically. Not satisfied with having the rest of the world as their stage, they have to piss and moan about being victimized on college campuses.
And don’t forget — students got extra credit for listening to his informercial!
This is exactly the point you were supposed to explain — what does entropy have to do with disorder? Claiming entropy *means* disorder demonstrates that you don’t understand entropy. Moreover, it demonstrates you didn’t even read the entirety of the article you linked:
(Emphasis in the original.)
May a giant Pynchonian vagina pursue and swallow Mike S. Adams whole.
Somebody does need to follow him around the country with a giant vagina in pick-up truck (like the Lieberman kiss).
What a fuckwit!
Jeff: and on what grounds, precisely, do you dismiss Wikipedia as a source? I’ve certainly found it valuable, particularly for summarizing information in one place that makes a useful and succinct example/citation….
While I can’t answer for Jeff, I certainly think that posting entire sections of WP, regardless of whether they wander from your own point, instead of, say, throwing in a link in the midst of expanding your argument, in your own words, in response to a challenge to your knowledge of a subject…. substantially increases the chance of your being a dirty, no-good, copy’n’paste troll.
WP can be great general source and, in my opinion, an even better gateway to a topic that is new to you, but I don’t think it should ever be anyone’s primary cite for anything but the most casual claims (and never ANY kind of cite in something academic or professional).
But really, we’re giving serious thought to the points of someone who’s playing the entropy card? On this site? AGAIN?
“Hegel is generally regarded as one of the most obscure philosophers ever.”
Key aspects of this sentence that tip you off that an idiot wrote it: “generally regarded” and “ever.” I would suppose that to qualify as one of the most obscure philosophers (ever) you would have to be one of the ones NOT on every undergraduate introduction to philosophy syllabus. I can only assume Hegel’s obscurity is what prompted Lecrivain to write, “We strive to develop new ideas in philosophy that lead us down strange and unexplored paths. We come to the end of the path, and there always is Hegel, waiting for us.”
And I can’t figure out what entropy has to with anything under discussion here.
“Hegel is generally regarded as one of the most obscure philosophers ever.”
Key aspects of this sentence that tip you off that an idiot wrote it: “generally regarded” and “ever.” I would suppose that to qualify as one of the most obscure philosophers (ever) you would have to be one of the ones NOT on every undergraduate introduction to philosophy syllabus. I can only assume Hegel’s obscurity is what prompted Lecrivain to write, “We strive to develop new ideas in philosophy that lead us down strange and unexplored paths. We come to the end of the path, and there always is Hegel, waiting for us.”
And I can’t figure out what entropy has to with anything under discussion here.
“Posted by: Intellectual Rigor & Honesty”
Surely someone commenting under that handle can’t be a troll!
Much like someone posting as “Common sense” [a commenter over at Orac’s place] surely must know better than doctors like Orac, when we are talking about the cause of Autism!
…Not to mention the whole question: is it logically possible to be “generally regarded” as something, and be the “most obscure ever”?? Wouldn’t this an example of an Epimenides paradox, or is it just garden-variety mental deficiency?
I think that’s because the poster (brace yourself!) is short on actual comments on anything in the blog post other than a really weak segue into getting all concern troll (“I’m a scientist” *snort*) up in the P Zed’s grill. Which is, of course, his goal, regardless of the topic at hand. My favorite facet of these “I’m one of you! But I disagree with you on everything! Let’s all be polite!” trolls is that they seem to think they exist in a vacuum and none of us have been on the fracking internet before.
Oh, and for one of my parenthetical points above, does anyone ever say “I’m a scientist,” not biologist, geologist, physicist or whatever unless they’re:
a) lying
b) afraid their actual field will harm their credibility more than help?
(the above is observation, not elitism, I’m an engineering student, so I got’s no expertise in nothin’)
Sigh! It is hard to stay away from feeding the troll when the Robinson review was so bad.
On the whole she does at every point what she accuses Dawkins on: being tendentious, going outside her area of expertise, being indiscriminate.
Especially tiresome is when she remarks that scientists participates in war efforts as all other parts of society. A similar problem of distinction is when she dismisses Dawkins on eugenics being unscientific. Calling an unsupported idea bad science doesn’t make it so. (BTW, Robinson puts that against “bad religion”. But what is a religion specific objective criteria for that? Internal inconsistency is accepted by believers, so that doesn’t make it bad obviously. Bad consequences like promoting war – that indiscrimination we dealt with above. So what is a ‘bad religion’ really?)
When Robinson starts discuss real science she stops listen entirely. Dawkins usually (I havent read TGD) describes his awe of nature and how it is enhanced by his science. Robinson conflates all details down to fundamentals, and when dismisses them as beyond comprehension. This is exactly the opposite of Dawkins view. And the claim is done at a time when it appears we have started to attack those problems (cosmology and its initial and final states, string theory and the possible states.)
Robinson makes a similar hatchet job on Dawkins on dualism and complexity.
The last takes me back to the entropy arguments in the thread. Entropy as a measure of disorder (probability of states) isn’t a problem for evolution. Whether a system is closed or open we can make ordered subsystems – the “earth is an open system” makes it only easier to discuss.
“Unlike almost all other laws of physics, this associates thermodynamics with a definite arrow of time.”
No. With this description reversible systems are disconnected from the arrow of time. The proper way to look at it is that the arrow of time gives thermodynamics the second law.
The problem(s) of time is partially to find out why the universe started in an unprobable low entropy state – if it had not the second law had not existed. (Eternal inflation naturally explains this. This is one of many reasons I’m constantly blathering about it.)
Dawkins is right, contrary to Robinson – probability is what moves our world. But selection is why it moved our way.
“the “earth is an open system” makes it only easier to discuss.”
And maintain indefinitely; if the closed system is small.
Just accept that Dawkins, PZ Myers and some of those here have an incurable blind spot – we all have at least one but in different areas – and move on. This is at the heart of what is called tolerance.
Very interesting discussion. Phyrangula certainly makes me think. And it helped me wake up to the fact that the thing I perhaps most dislike in the world is dogmatism – “I am right and that to suggest otherwise is stupid, bad or mad etc.” I can’t stand dogmatists of any type. It’s a dangerous mind set that thinks it’s immune to error – dogmatic ideology is likely to be the cause of our collective end. I look at history and I am amazed that so called intelligent people can dismiss the role of what has past for ‘science’ and ‘rationality’ in being used to facilitate unspeakable cruelty and harm, and then go on to speak uncritically of ‘rationality’ and ‘science’ in the process displaying of some the most naïve scientism I’ve ever seen.
Science has taught me to have an open mind – the world is far more complex than we think – science gives all sorts of counterintuitive results and insights yet our ideas must always be open to revision. However science in its philosophical foundations simply goes beyond the evidence at hand. Indeed there are a great many beliefs that people hold that don’t have a fully rational nor fully satisfactory evidential basis. Reading Phyrangula has also made me think hard about the nature of liberalism. I think I’m with Sir Isaiah Berlin in that people will always likely disagree as to the nature and goals of the good life. Hence we must somehow make the idea of modus vivendi workable and recognize that negative and positive liberties are inherently in tension with each other.
I was reading a book about the Crow people the other night – it’s a work that might be described as philosophical anthropology and the author suggests that we need to approach beliefs and statements with what was described as the principle of humanity. That is there should be a sympathetic attempt to understand what the person meant even if it is not immediately obvious.
I also sense a great deal of emotionality and anger from the majority that are part of the Phyrangula crowd. Is a lack of confidence in one’s position that generates such an over the top hostility? I don’t know. I get why people are upset about ID and biology education, and why the reactionary right is something to be combated at every turn but I really can understand why people have to imply that anyone outside of the magic circle are Untermensch. Sorry contra Dawkins, Harris and fellow travellers if I don’t pass the ideological purity test because I can’t honesty equate the likes of Martin Luther King Jr., with the likes Osama bin Laden, but that’s just the way it is.
Anyone who has read Adorno & Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment will have a sense of how the Enlightenment contains its own dehumanizing, destructive apparatus. The book begins by noting, following two World Wars and a shocking genocide, that “Enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant”.
How did the Nazis proceed to exterminate their designated opponents, except through the use of science and technology? The justifications for their actions were rationalistic in form if not content: they were, in their own view, ‘scientific’ racists. With all the best will in the world how can anyone dismiss the abuses of science and the deep strands of scientism within fascist ideology of the period as mere trivia whilst maintaining that they are presenting a balanced account of history? Then again no-one here really ‘into’ history – unless it’s a simple self-serving account – are they?
Let’s be fair: the term that would be better and was probably intended (although possibly vocabulary wasn’t sufficient) was ‘obscurantist’. Hegel can indeed be described as an obscurantist, and is generally recognized as such.
Oh, and Mr. Arun:
You are utterly wrong. We do not all have at least one blind spot, and that is not what tolerance is about.
regarding THIS article and ignoring the trollfest –
I’m willing to bet the reason the lecture hall was packed was due to the extra credit they offered anyone who showed up and listened to Adams’ drivel.
I can’t imagine any other reason that so many rational young minds would sit there quietly (good manners aside). I am glad to hear that at least one student did try, too bad the local ringleader put an end to the questions at that point.
I love the greasemonkey “kill” feature, especially with the
long-winded bloviators.
Thanks to whoever wrote the script.
I only wish I could find a version for haloscan.
Has anyone found one?
Nazi science sneers at rational thinking!
Ghost of the Gould, you fail to realize that while the Nazis were, for the most part, scientific and methodical in the extermination of their percieved enemies, they were motivated by religion, namely, the “Divine Duty of God” of the Aryan Nation that Hitler so often expounded in his speechs.
Oh, and if you read Mein Kampf, you’d also notice how large parts of it reads word for word like Martin Luther’s essays about how it’s God’s duty to exterminate the evil Jews, like, say, burning all their property and land, and rounding them up like animals, and such.
Blaming the tool for the user’s actions is poor logic. Although the point can be easily made that it was not science that drove the horrors of the Nazis but just pure inhumannity. Calling that “science” is like calling Jonestown “Chrisitanity”.
Pulled too much in on the quote and…
Christianity
My Typo Fu is strong.
Kudos to George for using the adjective “Pynchonian”.
Kudos to George for using the adjective “Pynchonian.”
The perfect antidote to all the Adamses and wingnuts and nutcakes of the world is coming!
http://www.powells.com/biblio/62-159420120x-0
http://www.isohunt.com/download/13518571/ascent+of+man.
Originally posted by Aaron Adams at this thread:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/10/the_best_science_tv_show_of_al.php
Why are many of the people who dislike Dakwins bringing up the idea they are deemed/called subhuman? It’s being dropped like a fact, but I have never seem this term thrown around by anyone but their own adherents. Is this a new ID/creationist talking point?
Tangent on disorder: I discovered recently work on definitions of complexity other than the somewhat unintuitive Kolmogorov (algorithmic information) complexity which defines random strings as the most complex.
http://www.talkreason.org/articles/complexity.pdf
has a bit of a summary.
Interesting complexity has minima at both perfect order and perfect disorder/randomness, so people have tried to quantify that. One version is a product of Shannon entropy and a measure of deviation from the uniform distribution; another, which at the moment appeals to me, is Bennett’s logical depth, the time it would take a universal Turing machine to actually execute the minimum description length program to re-construct the original string. If I understand it right, both extremes would have low depth, as the execution time is simply the time to read the random string or write the patterned string, while an interestingly complex string would force the Turing machine to run back and forth as it computed the interactions between various parts of the string.
yeah, and cutting & pasting long comments verbatim from one thread to another and posting them under a different pretentious moniker (at least 4 by my count)? not at all trollian.
whay not pop back to the lab and do some of that evolutionary biology you do?
“The perfect antidote to all the Adamses and wingnuts and nutcakes of the world is coming!”
oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy
Thank you George…you just made my week!!!
Technology doesn’t kill people, people kill people. (You might be surprised to learn that this saying dates back – at least – to Roman times, as “a sword never kills anyone, it’s a tool in the killer’s hand”. Really.) It’s true that a madman with an AK-47 or a hijacked airliner can do more damage than a madman with a knife, but it would be absurd to suggest abandoning airliners for this reason, and as the airliner example suggests, a technological society abounds in improvised weapons. Getting rid of the AKs might not do much even if you could pull it off.
Except, for some reason, *genuine* rationalists (and not ideologues in a cloak of false rationalism like Nazis or communists) don’t seem to kill that many people at all. Hmm. Maybe it would be more productive to focus not on the weapons, but on their wielders? If people could be made less willing to embrace murderous ideologies and slaughter anyone who deviated from the party line, then we wouldn’t have any more religious *or* ideological massacres.
It’s true that not all evil comes from religion (although quite a lot does). I wouldn’t even say that *all* evil comes from rigid belief systems. But seeing the common thread between religion and communism or fascism makes it clear that a lot of evil and suffering does come from dogmatism (both in and outside religion per se).
George,
Soooooo… Dr. Adams is advising young women to wear sleeveless t-shirts with no bra, a leather studded dog collar fit tightly around their necks, and thick mascara. That is sure teach those bitches in the vagina monologues a valuable lesson! Or he could be looking for some new wank material since his subscription at Suicide Girls ran out.
I can’t stand dogmatists of any type.
How dogmatic…
I also sense a great deal of emotionality and anger from the majority that are part of the Phyrangula crowd. Is a lack of confidence in one’s position that generates such an over the top hostility? I don’t know.
Yes, it’s very difficult to come up with some other reason why (at least in this country) people might get angry and emotional (ummm…”passionate”?) over issues like this.
Hey! Here’s an actual comment on PZ’s article!
This is a surprisingly effective tactic used by the fanatics. They keep trying to represent themselves as being oppressed, downtrodden, marginalized — as though they’re still being fed to the lions (which, honestly, sounds like a damned good idea some days).
Combine this with
(1) A sense of moral outrage and absolute certainty in one’s own correctness (“Look how sinful America is! Look how degraded! Shame on you! What about the children? For fuck’s sake won’t someone please think of the motherfucking children?!?!?!?! … No, Mr. Foley, you sit in the corner, please.”)
(2) An absolute belief in entitlement (“America is a Christian nation, founded on Christian ideals, which is why the Decalogue* should be installed in every public building, school and roadhouse urinal, or you’re oppressing my right to be a brainless right-wing cultist.”) and
(3) Money out the wazoo
…and you get a bizarre mix such as the one PZ described here. These people, I’m fairly sure, are mentally ill — but that does not mean they have the right to behave as they do without being shamed into silence by the reality-based majority.
We still are a majority, you know, and we’re right when we say these people are loonies. It’s not intellectual elitism to do so, but even if it is, so what? Is michael Jordan being an elitist by doing something better than most can? How about Tiger? So why is the term “intellectual elitism” regarded as being derogatory?
You don’t have to be an atheist to see how crazy these idiots are (it helps, but it’s not necessary) — and there is no reason at all for us to sit silently by while nutjobs like this one systematically and deliberately destroy everything that the rational, skeptical and reasoning founders — the scientific thinkers who dared to hope that future generations would try to cherish the same principles of enlightenment they ascribed to — put in place.
America was not and is not a Christian nation; America is a rational one. (Really; that’s still our legacy.) We need to remember that, and we need to remind others of it as often as necessary until the religious fringe is just that again: A shameful, dirty little secret that keeps its damned mouth shut when company’s coming to visit.
====
* Originally a Jewish document.
What a load of cobblers. I was wondering if this dope and I had read the same book; so I got my copy of The God Delusion, checked the index, and found Hegel isn’t even listed. And if he thinks Hegel is an obscure philosopher, he needs to go back to college.
Zeitgeist is a word in common usage, though maybe not on the comics page. (Except, perhaps, Zippy)
Warren, I decided years ago that people who complain the most about intellectual elites (the ones that aren’t getting paid to use that phrase that is) are the ones that really need to consider if they may in fact be stupid. They of course don’t think so, they are sure that they know everything about any possible subject that you can bring up to them and that you are the one who is stupid. Being a sheep sure seems empowering, doesn’t it?
As for Wikipedia, I find that it does have some use but then there’s this sort of thing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=PZ_Myers&action=history
Someone has way too much time on their hands, and see my comment above.
There are way too many concern trolls in this thread right now with stupid names that sound a bit too much like “Concerned Women for America” or “Focus on the Family”. It’s just too smooth, I’m wondering if they are trolls or just astroturfing.
George said:
>Adams is just an infantile jerk:
>”I want you and your friends to dress like the angry feminists you criticize….
commissarjs said:
>Soooooo… Dr. Adams is advising young women to wear sleeveless t-shirts with no bra, a leather studded dog collar fit tightly around their necks, and thick mascara.
Adams is mocking feminists by playing on stereotypes. Most stereotypes have some basis in reality. There certainly is a sizable contingent (or at least visible contingent) of feminists who dress that way. I assume he thinks he’s being humorous. Matters of taste are subjective, and many people share his … lack of comprehension of the style choices by that crowd. Thus he mocks it. Yes, he is being an infantile jerk. But note the responses that measure the same level of infantileness with all the suggestions that he is a closeted homosexual. Doesn’t do much to make the critics look better.
One third of the facutly hires here at the University of Nebraska for a couple of years at the beginning of the decade were set aside for ‘underrepresented groups’. The ‘opportunity hire’ program, as it was called, encouraged academic departments to identify candidates who were African American, Hispanic, or (in some fields) women. These candidates would then be pursued, without a competitive search, and hired, if possible. We have the University’s own documents stating this as an explicit policy. We have the names of the people who were hired. The departments which were most hurt by this policy were science departments, because it’s tough to find competitive hard-science candidates from underrepresented groups; when you do, usually Yale has already made and offer; and, well, scientists generally believe in that meritocracy thang.
This is a very common kind of program, and it occurs at a large number of universities. The two universities on whose faculty I’ve served both were doing it. Defend it, if you can, but don’t deny it happens.
Odd Jack:
No, it’s pretty much a general talking point for whiners of all stripes objecting to anyone who has a clearly defined, unapologetic stand on an issue.
On the trailer for the new movie about the Dixie Chicks, one wingnut at one of the protests said “There’s nothing wrong with free speech, just don’t do it in public.”
I used to keep an eye on Adams, but it’s become increasingly obvious that his attention-seeking wingnuttery is just a cover for the fact he’s got nothing to say. I’ve got the whole Mike Adams story at my blog, if anyone’s interested.
Um…if you’re talking about this thread, I think I missed those. Can you point to some examples?
Unless you’re referring to my comment about him never having seen an unfaked orgasm. I was not intending to imply that is homosexual, but rather that he is the sort of self-serving, sexist asshole who wouldn’t bother to make sure his partner enjoyed the sex. I’m not saying he doesn’t have sex with women, I’m saying that with his attitude, he probably does so–poorly.
I’ve seen affirmative action programs at work, and I have some reservations about their results in some cases. But I’ve had reservations about other search outcomes too. Where a search is partly aimed at affirmative action, I’ve always seen strong efforts to ensure that high-quality candidates in the targeted groups are recruited. I’ve also seen such searches hire outside the target groups on occasion. I do think real efforts to achieve a more representative balance are often justified, for a number of reasons. Most important of all, even the sorts of cases cited by G. Harbison are a very long way from the anti-religious and anti-male bias that’s claimed in his introductory quotation. Why the odd effort to equate them?
I’m sorry, hiring a woman on the basis of her sex, without allowing qualified men to compete for the same job, isn’t anti-male bias? Could you explain this?
“This is a surprisingly effective tactic used by the fanatics. They keep trying to represent themselves as being oppressed, downtrodden, marginalized — as though they’re still being fed to the lions (which, honestly, sounds like a damned good idea some days).
Combine this with
(1) A sense of moral outrage and absolute certainty in one’s own correctness [snip]
(2) An absolute belief in entitlement [snip] and
(3) Money out the wazoo
…and you get a bizarre mix such as the one PZ described here.”
Change (3) to political power and that rubric covers so much of the insanity in human history it’s scary. It explains just about every totalitarian regime that ever existed, for example.
I am going to attempt to change a subject without being labeled a troll. People participate in e-conversations for a variety of reasons: gossip, camaraderie, break from tedious other tasks, spleen vents, news, information, discussion, intellectual discourse, etc. A science blog like most (but by no means all) blogs caters to individuals in each of these categories. What apparently irked people about IRH was that the participants missed out on their (expected) feeding frenzy– the Adams’ blood-in-the-water stimulus did not reach its necessary climax (yup there was a better analogy here).
Anyway, the central argument posted by IRH (and we are at the level of intelligent discourse here) has hardly been addressed: that, in a finely nuanced world with a variety of cultural norms, moral systems, with a rich historical tapestry and with science as our most effective tool for knowledge acquisition, is dogmatism the best approach to any problem? The response are rife with ‘straw man’ bashing.
A laudable objective for the discussion might be: Sure Adams appears to be a fraud (I did not hear his presentation and have not yet queried internet sources), his is apparently one of many such frauds, using fancied oppression, or religion, or scientism as a cloak for personal aggrandizement or croneism, or ‘security.’ What would be some of the necessary dialogs so as to keep such fanatics from completely railroading our democracy? How can we as present or future scientist’s engender an understanding of science or perhaps create a ‘science for the common (wo)man’, because surely, failure to do so will be the undoing of our heritage of the Enlightenment. And just as surely, the ‘Answers In Genesis’ people already have such a
formula. Finally, while it is in a sense both ego-serving and sheik to identify yourself (or myself) as a member of an elitist, rarified, exclusive group. The dire consequence of rarity can be extinction.
Finally, while it is in a sense both ego-serving and sheik to identify yourself (or myself) as a member of an elitist, rarified, exclusive group. The dire consequence of rarity can be extinction.
================================
Is an elitist a sheik?
What are you attempting to say?
I do believe he’s trying to communicate, but his primitive speech is difficult to make out. ‘Chic’? ‘Whelk’? ‘Discombobulated’? Bah, who knows?
Mothra:
IRH’s chosen name suggests an intent to tweak a few noses, which might contribute to his being labeled a troll, and his argument sounds like it stems from an oversimplified misunderstanding of Dawkins’ position. However, I haven’t read the book in question yet, so I haven’t commented. I will certainly agree that both straw-man bashing and “feeding frenzy” (or “dogpile,” if you prefer) argument dynamics have become surprisingly, and rather distressingly, common around here, and I feel that this is likely to significantly impact both the general credibility of the community and the quality of discourse within the site. I wonder, however, what you would suggest be done about it.
“”Unlike almost all other laws of physics, this associates thermodynamics with a definite arrow of time.”
No. With this description reversible systems are disconnected from the arrow of time. The proper way to look at it is that the arrow of time gives thermodynamics the second law.
The problem(s) of time is partially to find out why the universe started in an unprobable low entropy state – if it had not the second law had not existed.”
What I said here doesn’t make much sense to me today. Of course the second law exists irrespective of the initial state of the universe. What I wanted to say was that the thermodynamic arrow of time would not exist, since we would not see any entropy increase if it was already maximised. (Modulo no universal expansion of course, the more fundamental arrow of time in an eternal inflation cosmology.)
The other thing I wanted to say was that the TD arrow isn’t local. (As for example the cosmological expansion arrow.) I managed to mangle both claims!
Damien:
I have also a current interest in complexity measures other than in the algorithmic domain, and I thank you for your analysis of Bennett’s logical depth. In my reading I had missed to analyze it and see that it belonged to the ‘max in the middle’ category.
What interests me is that such measures are natural for describing complexity in materials and networks. They max out in ‘glassy’ states with order on all distances between ordered crystalline and random amorphous. Perhaps they also apply (in a complex manner :-) to organisms (besides brain networks) where structures and functions on all orders of scale are selected for.
As you recently suggested in another thread mutual information may be a useful idea here – I know of neural complexity as defined by Tononi et al. ( http://www.striz.org/docs/tononi-complexity.pdf ) It relies on mutual information exchanged between all possible neural clusterings.
Mena:
“then there’s this sort of thing.”
Ah, a Robert O’Brien thing. It seems Wikipedia abhors a troll…
“”Unlike almost all other laws of physics, this associates thermodynamics with a definite arrow of time.”
No. With this description reversible systems are disconnected from the arrow of time. The proper way to look at it is that the arrow of time gives thermodynamics the second law.
The problem(s) of time is partially to find out why the universe started in an unprobable low entropy state – if it had not the second law had not existed.”
This doesn’t make much sense to me today. Of course the second law exists irrespective of the initial state of the universe. What I wanted to say was that the thermodynamic arrow of time would not exist, since we would not see any entropy increase if it was already maximised. (Modulo no universal expansion of course, the more fundamental arrow of time in an eternal inflation cosmology.)
The other thing I wanted to say was that the TD arrow isn’t local. (As for example the cosmological expansion arrow.) I managed to mangle both!
Damien:
I have also a current interest in complexity measures other than in the algorithmic domain, and I thank you for your analysis of Bennett’s logical depth. In my reading I had missed that it belonged to the ‘max in the middle’ category.
What interests me is that such measures are natural for describing complexity in materials and networks. They max out in ‘glassy’ states with order on all distances between ordered crystalline and random amorphous. Perhaps they also apply (in a complex manner :-) to organisms (besides brain networks) where structures and functions on all orders of scale are selected for.
As you suggested in another thread mutual information may be a useful idea here – I know of neural complexity as defined by Tononi et al. ( http://www.striz.org/docs/tononi-complexity.pdf ) It relies on mutual information exchanged between all possible neural clusterings.
Sure. Dogma in any form is bad and the cause nearly all of the worlds problems. However… One needs to consider the fact that just as someone’s car mechanic can “seem” dogmatic, when they insist its some Paris Hilton’s types own stupidity for trying to “clean the engine” by adding laundry soap to the gas tank, when someone with limited or “no” comprehension of a scientific subject, or just rational thought in some cases, finds themselves confronted with an expert on either, its impossible to not “sound” dogmatic. One of the most distressing things I have ever encountered in my life is the imfernally stupid fact that about half the people I ever dealt with when writing computer software insisted *they* knew what it did and was supposed to do than I did. Not because they actually understood anything past clicking on the pretty button to get it to go Bing!, but simply because, in their strange little world, the machine worked like X, and I, even as the one that coded the program, couldn’t **possibly** know more than they did about what was going on.
There are way more Paris Hiltons in the world than Dawkinses, there are also way more, smarter, but still ignorant, Joe Nobodies than Dawkinses, and nearly all of them, especially if they are significantly religious, are all “certain” that what ever vague, inaccurate and barely comprehensible explaination they have come up with for a subject is “true”. The religious are more prone to this especially, since their entire up bringing has been based on, “Once you have had a revelation or had something explained to you in a nice comfortable and simplistic way, no more discussion is required, or maybe even **allowed**.”
Of course someone that actually knows what the hell they are talking about sounds “dogmatic” to these sorts of people.
I just adore the Mike Adams posts over at World O’Crap! sz just takes a skewer to whatever drivel he publishes.
The best parts are always the ‘Dr. Mike Adams puts another liberal/feminist in his/her place’ anecdotes, which are usually completely over-the-top and unlikely. Extremely giggle-producing.
These anecdotes always involve Dr. Mike Adams (you must always call him Dr. Mike Adams, btw) chasing down some malefactor and giving her (it’s usually a her) a stern lecture, or Dr. Mike Adams coming out with the perfect line to give some silly multiculturalist a much-deserved comeuppance.
The situations are so obviously occurring in the fertile mind of Dr. Mike Adams, and the comebacks are so obviously what Dr. Mike Adams wishes he said, that the commenters all offer differing theories of what they think actually happened. My guess would be, usually, ‘nothing.’
Still, I imagine he must be an annoying colleague, and I can’t imagine what he must be like as a professor. His latest diatribe was yet another injustice he has suffered: alas! he was not given a full professorship, which, of course, in his own mind, was richly deserved. I believe the feminists caused this outrage as well, but it could have been the ‘diversity people’ as they are almost as evil, apparently.
What a hotbed of unrest his campus must be! One wonders where the news stories of all this animosity, demonstrations, prejudice against white males in general and Dr. Mike Adams in particular are. The liberal media failing the American public (and Dr. Mike Adams) once again!
Hey PZ its your old friend Ben Edwards…just wanted to point out that Admas was scheduled from 7-8, not 7-9 as you stated. Just a thought that you should check your facts before assuming bias.
re: feeding frenzies: An online community I’m in used to refer to its “immune system”, where newcomers not in line with the local linguistic or intellectual norms would get piled on or something and driven off. Actually I think they were more likely to get ignored, but we had the concept of such a system.
Anyway, with all the name-changing trolls/idiots who come through, that might be the proper analogy: evidence-based antibodies piling onto the offender. The analogy can be extended: the reaction may be getting more sensitive; the reaction may be doing damage to the host community, relative to ignoring the intruders and letting them pass through; skin-like barriers are cheaper and more effective than purging them after the fact.
Look here, the official entry for the event:
It would be a little unusual to bring in a ‘nationally known’ speaker and schedule them for only an hour; the standard practice from past events with politicians and pundits (for example, when Alterman was here) is to give them an hour to talk and then have an extended Q&A.
It’s kind of a waste to go to all the effort and expense of bringing in a speaker and then limit the exchange of information to a few tens of minutes at the close of his talk, especially with a controversial speaker. But then, that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? You wanted to bring in a speaker to sing out conservative talking points, but actually examining his ideas critically aren’t on the agenda.
In case anyone is wondering who my “old friend” Ben Edwards is, this will explain all. He’s like the guy at the end the Dixie Chicks trailer: “Freedom of speech is fine, but my god you don’t do it…publicly”. Completely clueless. Standard issue Republican.
Adams responds at ClownHall:
What IRH is doing in rather hysterical fashion is trying to redact the Robinson review, apparently feeling impatient that it hasn’t been taken up at length on Pharyngula yet. I’m halfway through Dawkins’ book but read all of Robinson’s review yesterday. The review was an entertaining read — it’s written in a mode of high literary contempt by a very good writer — and makes one point that I’d like to see Dawkins address (about God being outside of time), but much of it devoted to the sort of ‘see, scientists have done bad things too!’ straw man argument that’s not exactly unfamiliar to Dawkins, I’m sure. Robinson sees Dawkins as either hopelessly naive, intellectually dishonest, or simply ignorant of religion and history, reiterating what’s appearing to be the common thread of critiques of TGD (Jim Holt said some of the same things, with much less of a barb, in the NY Times review). However, the *crucial* issue of self-correction by reality-testing, as a virtue of science that religion lacks, isn’t engaged by these reviewers. And to that extent they miss a huge point of Dawkins’ championing of science *over* religion.
I’ll be interested to see what the science blog community has to say about the critiques of TGD appearing in ‘intellectual’ nonscience media like NY Times Book Review and Harper’s. (Though I note Harper’s also recently published a disgraceful AIDS-skeptic article by Celia Farber.) Even more interesting will be what Dawkins has to say!
Adams responds at ClownHall:
fight! fight!
Hey, “Intellectual Rigor & Honesty”, you’re not any relation to Larry Fafarman, are you? Like, say, the identity relation?
No doubt the person you went to see was full of inconsistencies and a glib hypocrite.
But PZ it must be said that on Dawkins latest book that both you and he are might actually be regarded as glib hypocrites and lacking in intellectual honesty or rigor.
Uh, why must that be said, when it isn’t relevant to the topic, and you’ve provided no argument for it? Particularly, how does the content of Dawkins‘s book demonstrate anything about Myers? Would you agree that someone who is intellectually rigorous and honest would necessarily admit that they are really an intellectually sloppy lying scumball when that is demonstrated to be so?
Completely clueless. Standard issue Republican.
Showing up, telling a falsehood, having the falsehood demonstrated, but never admitting fault is standard issue Republican, but it isn’t completely clueless.
Hey Ben, show us that you’re not a fucking asshole, for once in your life.
What apparently irked people about IRH was that the participants missed out on their (expected) feeding frenzy
You write this and expect not to be labelled a troll? Troll and asshole, I’d say. Crawl back into your hole.
I’m sorry, hiring a woman on the basis of her sex, without allowing qualified men to compete for the same job, isn’t anti-male bias? Could you explain this?
Yeah, like if I have a bowl of green M&M’s and a bag of red and green M&M’s, plucking a few red ones out of a bag to put into the bowl instead of just selecting randomly shows anti-green bias.
And if he thinks Hegel is an obscure philosopher, he needs to go back to college.
Mr “Intellectual Rigor” seems to have confused Hegel with Heidegger.
Bennett’s logical depth, the time it would take a universal Turing machine to actually execute the minimum description length program to re-construct the original string
Wow, what an excellent concept. Not only does it yield a minimum value for “uninteresting” random strings, and does so with a straightforward formal characterization, but the formal characterization seems intuitively right — that it’s not merely the length of the program that matters, but also its structure, and specifically its computational complexity. A real paradigm shifter … thanks, Damien.
How did the Nazis proceed to exterminate their designated opponents, except through the use of science and technology?
What a pathetically ad hoc argument. The Nazis were defeated through the use of science and technology; and do keep in mind that the Nazis did most of their killing with machine guns and a rather low-tech insecticide.
Sorry contra Dawkins, Harris and fellow travellers if I don’t pass the ideological purity test because I can’t honesty equate the likes of Martin Luther King Jr., with the likes Osama bin Laden, but that’s just the way it is.
For someone who despises dogmatism, you’re showing an awful lot of it. Neither Dawkins nor Harris has ever equated MLK Jr. with ObL. In fact, what I find most disturbing about Harris is his completely dogmatic special treatment of Muslims compared to adherents to other religions; consider his recent L.A. Times editorial in which he lambasted liberals for thinking that U.S. or Israeli policy in the ME has anything to do with the rise of radical Islam, Al Qaeda, and ObL. Harris, like many American chauvinists and consumers of AIPAC propaganda, seems to have a crypto-racist view of Muslims and Israelis (the former being necessarily bad and the latter necessarily good).
Did anyone read Marilynne Robinson’s review of The God Delusion in the November Harper’s Magazine
The cultural Daleks that post on this site aren’t going to bother to read Robinson’s essay. They’re just going to keep right on truckin’.