In the first 24 hours of our fundraising campaign, we’re almost 3/4 of the way to our conservative goal of $20,000. When we hit that, though, don’t stop! We set a goal to cover our current expenses, but we know more will be coming along, depending on how far Carrier wants to take his foolish suit.
It’s sad, too, because he has to be spending at least as much money on his lawyer, all for an unattainable award (he won’t be able to squeeze $2 million out of us; we’re operating on a shoestring as it is), on a journey that, win or lose, is doing a heck of a lot of damage to his reputation.
Good one. I’m unemployed for at least another week but there will be some dollars going in as soon as its feasible.
Oooh that was my first time getting in the first comment! Is there a prize?
You must be new here. I hate it when people think making the first comment is an accomplishment — I used to delete those stupid “First!” comments until it sunk in.
So no, no prizes. Ever.
PZ, what are you going to become when you’re go past curmudgeon? I’m just asking because I’m not familiar with the term is all.
Damn my early morning caffeine-less spelling!
And he knows this. It’s not about the money. It’s about shutting y’all down and shutting y’all up. It’s about “winning”.
Surely there must be some form of Bayesian calculations y’all can show Carrier to persuade him, in his “own language”, that the returns from his current efforts will come out negative.
Without implying an actual diagnosis, which I am incompetent to render… Is the similarity to our new President obvious to everyone? This willingness to burn down the country in defense of ego, despite the fact that it won’t even yield a Pyrrhic victory?
Having known similar people in my life, this (or some similar drama) was clearly in the cards years ago. Makes a show of his uber feminist cred, while actually believing the rules don’t apply to him? Check. Publicly engages in borderline behavior, while rationalizing that it is not only acceptable, but heroic? Check. Confesses to minor offenses with elaborate mea culpas, both to indicate his superior virtue and to deflect more serious accusations? Check and check. Becomes enraged at any perceived slight? Checkity check. Carries this to the extreme of suing the living fuck out of people for perceived slights that are neither civilly nor criminally actionable? Just a matter of time. Oblivious to the fact that doing so makes his overweening narcissism obvious, doing more damage than any imagined slight could have? Dad? Is that you?
Imagine, for a moment, that you literally can’t tell the difference between a trivial insult and the attempted savage murder of your person. Then imagine, for a moment, someone trying to explain to you that repelling savage attempted murders “isn’t worth it.” Wouldn’t you find that person’s argument unintelligible (not to mention a bit frightening)?
I predict that he will not only pursue this to the bitter end, but will either lodge a new suit, or lament the injustice of the rigged judicial system to his sympathetic sycophants. Or both.
True.
1. By now, everyone would have forgotten about this guy. The world moves fast, we have far bigger monsters to worry about i.e. Trump and his cabinet, and his 15 minutes of infamy would be long gone.
It’s all rather stupid.
2. In the past, I”ve read some of his writing and liked it.
Never again. Carrier by himself vaporized his credibility and I won’t waste the time.
Raven @ # 10: Carrier by himself vaporized his credibility …
Between this and the curious case of Dr. Robert M. Price, I feel growing doubts about the “no-historical-Jesus” hypothesis just on the basis of 20th-21st c. evidence…
the self destructive impulse is by nature irrational
it is a pity but it often comes with people who seem to lack empathy and an inability of considering any idea but there own.
They imagine themselves as the great hero like Samson at the pass with the jaw bone of an ass or the Heroes of Thermopylae.
uncle frogy
To A Masked Avenger
I politely disagree with the comparison between Richard Carrier and Trump. At the extreme, both might be sociopaths, but that’s where the similarity ends. Trump is an extreme narcissist, borderline detached from reality, where the only metric that matters to him is “does this make me look good?”. Trump is incompetent. Carrier is extremely competent, thoughtful, and does not regularly brazenly lie and contradict things he said just 5 minutes prior. Just worlds apart. As a non-professional, I suspect that Trump could qualify as mentally incompetent in a clinical sense. Carrier, definitely not.
I will say that the accusations to Carrier came as a surprise to me. The defamation suit came as an extreme surprise to me. I am a famously bad judge of character. I haven’t been following the sexual harassment claims. If true, and I don’t know if they are, that just means he’s a serial sexual assaulter. Unfortunately, that’s common in our society. That doesn’t make him anything like Trump. Not even close.
I just don’t understand what he’s trying to accomplish with the defamation suit. I haven’t yet summoned the courage and strength to visit his new website, to read his explanation. I suspect that I’ll find just more heartbreak.
PS: I still suspect Carrier is right on the Jesus myth thing. Robert Price has always had some wacky ideas from my perspective. Don’t tar the ideas of one person because someone else’s ideas are wacky. At least in the area of ancient history, Carrier has seemingly always been on point. Even then, Carrier doesn’t proclaim Jesus-myth as “definitely shown”, and freely admits that the evidence is weak, and we may never “know” one way or the other. In his book, he says it could be a 1 in 3 chance that Jesus existed, although he suspects it’s closer to 1 in 1000. That seems exceptionally small, but a 1 in 1000 chance is not really that small, compared to the confidence that we have in our everyday beliefs.
Ugg. I did summon some courage, and I went over to Carrier’s new / old(?) site, and I read his posts on the topic.
I don’t know what to believe.
However, I don’t regret my large contribution to your defense though. I dislike defamation suits on principle, and assuming that Myers et al are not lying, and I believe that they are not, then this defamation suit is bullshit, and I wish for your swift legal victory.
EnlightenmentLiberal,
Narcissism and incompetence are unrelated. It’s more or less coincidental that Trump is both a malignant narcissist and also an incompetent on approximately the mental level of a dull fifth grader. There are also highly competent rocket scientists, literally and figuratively, with NPD.
It’s true that overestimation of one’s competence is symptomatic, but that doesn’t require that one have no competence. As for whether Carrier overestimates his competence… just run through the checklist of creationism. Belief that an entire field of study rests on a conspiracy to hide the truth for reasons of personal gain? Check. Belief that one has found the critical insight that would revolutionize the field but for the collusion of the establishment to exclude him? Check. Belief that one’s lack of standing in the field is perverse proof of one’s dangerous paradigm-overturning insights? Check. Dismissal of all who disagree as shills, boobs and incompetents? Check.
Note that one can be competent and wrong; one can be competent but less competent than one believes. Look at Wu-Yi Hsiang, a competent math professor at Berkeley who nevertheless clings to the delusion that he has solved the sphere-packing problem using little more than high-school geometry.
To A Masked Avenger
Sometimes, the so-called expert consensus is wrong. The so-called experts of Bible studies departments are not worthy of the name “expert” nor “academic”. For example, are you familiar with Thomas L. Thompson?
http://ocabs.org/journal/index.php/jocabs/article/viewFile/80/47
In short, Thomas L. Thompson was the academic, in academia, who first wrote that agnostism was warranted concerning the existence of the Abraham and the other Biblical patriarchs. For that sin, his university denied his PhD, he could never get a job in university in his speciality, and claims of being an anti-semite followed him for decades. He was ostracized. Then, after several decades, his views won out.
It has happened before, and it’s happening again with Jesus mythicism. Does that mean Jesus mythicism is right? Obviously not. I don’t mean to promote such a fallacious argument. However, is this compelling evidence concerning the lack of intellectual honesty and rigor in Bible studies departments around the world? Hell yes.
Please. This is exceptionally simplistic and naive. It’s not an accurate description at all. One does not need to resort to a centralized conspiracy to explain these facts, similar to how does not need to resort to a centralized conspiracy to explain the existence of modern religion itself.
Carrier doesn’t just dismiss fundamentalist scholars and “presuppositional” apologetics, which is religion masquerading as scholarship. He also dismisses the scholarship of biblical scholars who are unemployable at fundamentalist institutions, who are not Christian, are even atheists in many cases.
But I’m leery of going back and forth much more, because I smell apologetics. Of COURSE the experts are often wrong; for millennia the best astronomers subscribed to a heliocentric universe with epicycles. But to recognize the folly of such conspiracy theories by creationists, while giving extra benefit of the doubt to those you sympathize with, is a pretty blatant double standard.
Bottom line: the dude who can’t get an academic job, who sponged off his wife until she got tired of his “heroic” “polyamory,” who attributes his unemployed status to universal failure to recognize him as the transcendent genius of the age, who attributes all disagreement to incompetence and crass pursuit of income, is not QUITE the great mind of the age that he thinks.
This despite the fact that he is not by any means an idiot.
Again, I don’t think that’s fair at all.
And yes, he often is full of himself. No argument here.
And again, I believe that you’re giving way too much credence to half a dozen voices in academia that half actually bothered to try to rebut Carrier, and you’re ignoring the other half dozen voices in academia that endorse historicity agnosticism or mythicism, and you’re giving way too much credence to an ill-founded consensus of the broader so-called academic community of experts. Their recent track record with Thompson shows that they are not to be trusted, especially on the topic of mythicism of important religious figures.
Too much credence? How much credence am I giving here? And how are you determining this? Psychic ability?
I’m referring only to Carrier’s responses to his critics, not to the strength of their criticism. The question at hand isn’t who is right; it’s the glaringly obvious hallmarks of over-inflated self estimate. Which is only one sign of malignant narcissism, among many, all of which he exhibits. Plenty of people were surprised when this thing erupted, but plenty of others — who have had prior experience with malignant narcissists — weren’t at all. See above for a quick rundown of the strongest indicators.
Sorry, I forgot sarcasm doesn’t convey in text. That was meant to be a jibe about being first.
Well it is to me!
Enlightenment Liberal@various,
Carrier’s swollen-headed crankery extends well beyond mythicism. There’s his “Bayesian historical method”, which neither real historians nor experts in Bayesian statistics take seriously (he also tells Bayesians they have completely misunderstood their own approach, and really, they are frequentists). Then there’s the conviction that he has discovered how to derive general relativity from quantum mechanics – something which has somehow eluded all physicists for a century. And when I first went to his blog when it was located here, the first article I came across was an unhinged rant against vegetarians.
Just had an email from go fund yourself ,i hope that’s what it was .The total is now $17.481 ,and they want more money off me ,i am poor as a church mouse ,if fact i can’t afford to live in a church .
To KG
I still think there’s a world of difference between Carrier’s standard self-absorbed narcissism, and Trump’s. Carrier is run of the mill. Trump is on a whole other level, and it is dangerous for us to ignore just how extreme Trump is. Meh.
EnlightenmentLiberal@16,
Your link really does not support your claim very well. As regards Thompson:
That’s rather contrary to the claim that Biblical studies is an area impervious to unorthodox ideas. And even at the time, Thompson was able to publish his study and finish his PhD, while wikipedia’s biographical article on him suggests that Dykstra’s account is considerably over-simplified:
That he was able to publish, complete his PhD, and gain even a “guest professorship”, rather undermines the claim that the area of Biblical scholarship was completely impervious to new and sceptical ideas even then. And the accusations of antisemitism appear to have had nothing to do with his scepticism about OT narratives, which one would not guess from Dykstra’s article. (Incidentally, it’s also interesting that the thesis examiner who rejected his thesis on theological grounds was none other than our old friend Pope Palpatine.)
Also, Dykstra, who is arguing that the “search for the historical Jesus” is a complete waste of time (not exactly a mythicist position, but certainly not an anti-mythicist one), is publishing, in 2015, in Journal of the Orthodox Center for the Advancement of Biblical Studies. How is he able to do that if there is an academic conspiracy to exclude such unorthodox views?
If you’re going to attack a strawman instead of my position, then I see no reason to reply. Maybe the strawman will reply instead.
Definitely incorrect. But this is something that is either blindingly obvious, if you’ve dealt with it before, or impossible to make someone see, who hasn’t. Note that Trump’s fanbois honestly can’t see the blatant indications of even his Trumpian levels of narcissism. Every narcissist seems to have their enablers and apologists.
EnlightenmentLiberal@25,
You said@18
Pretending that this is significantly different from an accusation of sacademic conspiracy is plain dishonest.
… but unsurprising, since you clearly can’t answer the specific points I raised, or you would have done so.