A couple of years ago, someone put together a compilation titled “Best of PZ Myers Amazing Arguments And Clever Comebacks”, and I missed it! O, my ego! It just grew two sizes larger!
Oh, wait. It’s on YouTube. I just read the comments.
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Pz myers is a douchebag SJW.
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maybe avoid this guy in the future, he’s a twat!
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PZ is an idiot and an asshole.
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SJW morons will be SJW morons. Myers is one disgusting primate.
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I’m sorry, but PZ is a douche.
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PZ Myers gives a bad name to atheists…just so you guys know, he hurls rape accusations at fellow atheists when they disagree about feminism…
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This guy is a total moron trying to look like an intellectual.
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fuck PZ. shes a weak ass bitch.
Momentarily nonplussed…but then I realized these are comments on YouTube, and my ego inflated another two sizes.
Sometimes one is praised with faint damns.
Looks like the maker of the video almost instantly capitulated to the criticism he received from the video.
No more videos of PZ I guess.
It’s been a while since I watched the live action PZ experience. The animated spin-off was okay, but it just doesn’t have the wardrobe budget and special effects of the original.
I mean, it’s no Noam Chomsky Holiday Special, but it’s certainly on a par with Saturday morning Richard Wolff. Quite why I watch so many elderly white Americans on youtube I don’t know. Possibly to remind myself that the demographic isn’t entirely malignant. Or I’m weird.
#2: Yeah, they went on to do something like 14 videos of Hitchens and 8 videos of Harris and a couple of Shermer, so they obviously had better things to do.
#3: Surprising true fact: I just cut down some carpet remnants from Ikea for my wardrobe. I was way ahead of Game of Thrones on that.
I seem to have shocked most of the commenters by saying that Free Speech is not dogma and not unconstrained. Once a heretic, always a heretic, you know.
Difficult to be sure but it looks like you may have touched a nerve or two. Pity.
/I seem to have shocked most of the commenters by saying that Free Speech is not dogma and not unconstrained.
Americans have to quit worshiping the US constitution especially a couple of those pesky amendments.
Those commenters should visit Germany where some types of expression are not advisable. http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/07/europe/china-tourists-nazi-salute/index.html
Come to think of it, a lot of that Nazi filth in Charlotteville would be “warmly” welcomed in Germany.
Wow, twenty minutes, and it’s only part 1! I’m getting a Coke and some popcorn.
They always say SJW like it’s a bad thing…
After watching: that’s a nice video of some witty remarks you’re making, PZ. I enjoyed it.
The segment at the 12 minute mark is interesting. This alludes to the destructive agent of belief in God which is contradictory for PZ to agree earlier that their are successful christian scientist. Either subscribing to the “magic man” diminishes scientific exploration or it doesn’t. The topic stays in the grey area because factually it is easy to show that the argument holds no water by simply pointing out many christian success stories. This keeps the topic in a perpetual argument and I think there are better arguments for atheist other than the “God did it” nonsense. I think the belief in a creator bridles or curbs scientific reasoning but the benefits are subjective and will always be argumentative. Who is to say what should work for any individual much like a pregame ritual for athletes? For example, whatever was working for Kekule should be packaged and sold much like the LSD era Beatles. Many scientist who believe in a creator likely would describe it as a beacon or guiding principle that gives meaning to their work and life.
The argument has a gradient and “God did it” should likely not be used as an excuse to not learn glycolysis pathways in biochem, but I would be shocked a person who wants to go into a science related field would allow that to inhibit their progress. The people the atheist claim are using this mindset to a destructive extent are either non-existent or they don’t matter anyway because they do not do science for a living. In my opinion, this is simply a topic cooked up in the minds of atheist in order to toss themselves a softball argument (or rather hit off the tee) for a problem that doesn’t exist. The validity of creation has its deepest gradient at the origin creation processes making it quite acceptable to ascribe the beginnings to a creator much like other daydreamed suggestions for the origin. So, the suggestions can be very detailed driven but still useless so I contest that details, by themselves, make for a good argument to thereby say creation with lack of details is lesser especially when discussing a creator at the point of origins.
We do know that whatever the origin process is/was that it is no longer occurring making it very difficult to study especially when we also know that life comes from life, cells come from cells. So, I agree a fair amount of demonstration is needed but on both sides. In the meantime, for me being created or placed here specifically by a creator fits right along with many other origin explanations and are all nice daydreams.
Overall, a very neat clip. I especially liked PZs remark about being a professor when given 5 more minutes.
Yes that appears to be it. Hard to draw a moving line. Hitch’s Canada free speech speech is one of my imperfect favourites. We don’t really have free gestures even, shaking your fist being an assault etc. albeit little policed, and I wouldn’t bother with the law too much here, as the correct answer is impossible. Instead I would aim to lower average stress levels, via economics, for better average behaviour, and more bowing. There’s little time for ettiquette in the more gruesome jobs. But if we’re going further down the regulatory route, there are some accents I would like outlawed. These are, in ascending order of offensiveness, Brummie, Northern Irish, North Welsh, Margaret Thatcher.
The guy who called our beloved doc a disgusting primate is unknowing to him stating that Evolution is true .
@10 i would put the Liverpool accent top of the list.
@11 – I dropped the ball there. Good catch. Note how close it is to North Welsh. This is surely becoming scientific.
@9 – If by origin you’re hopping from physics to non-physics, or vice versa, this will require falling-apart physics, and projections to here will be invalid, since logic is an aspect of spacetime. To project further beyond this certainly-wrong point is ambition indeed.
richardemmanuel, #10
“Margaret Thatcher” isn’t actually an accent. That’s just how a mammalian brain renders the modulated waves of capitalistic evil her species uses to communicate with the human race. Similarly the visible form she appeared to have – a kind of sentient beige broccoli golem in a suit – is just the closest our visual cortices can manage to what she actually looks like in the lightless hell dimension (Grantham) that she comes from.
10 richardemmanuel
I see nothing wrong with the N. Irish or N. Welsh and would not recognize a Brummie accent but a New York City accent really grates. Thatcher’s was not an accent so much a combination of distilled poison and huge arrogance warping her vocal cords.
jrkrideau, #14
You very nearly said her full name a third time on the same thread. Don’t frighten us like that! She’s like Beetlejuice in that regard – say her name three times and she appears. Then she steals all the milk within a ten mile radius, threatens war with Argentina and you have to go through an elaborate exorcism procedure involving detailed rubber puppets and three decades of economic downturn.
Gould has attempted to solve the incompatibilities between science and religion by declaring that they are ruling different realms: science the realm of the objective and the universal, religion the realm of the subjective and the personal. That’s a mistake.
The non-religious live in the latter realm too. We don’t choose our life partners by following some procedure. Our tastes are not based on protocols. We too are astonished by the beauty (and the cruelty) of nature. We too may be deeply moved by a wonderful piece of music. These are not religions exclusive property.
Religion is when people confuse the two realms and do not respect their borders. For example, most of us feel grateful for the birth of their child. This feeling is personal and subjective by definition. But religion is asserting the existence of Somebody or Something to be grateful to. And the existence or non-existence of something is a matter of fact, not of personal taste, and belongs in the realm of science.
That is where religion goes wrong: mistaking the miraculous for miracles. And that’s where religion will always go wrong, because that’s what religion is.
Religion. Spoiling every wonder by spouting bullshit about it.
@ Carto – weird but wonderful is a good look.
@ jrkrideau – don’t look it up. You can’t unhear it. But it is a bit Noo Yoik. N.Paddy and Gog Welsh are harsh, and Scouse also contains too much white noise. You can see what I’m doing, I’m developing the rules for aural aesthetics, for some future laws, which are curiously going to agree with the prejudice I started with. But that bit’s a secret. It’s going to be for sure, like Leonardo’s beauty sketches. Now Brummie and Noo Yoik have the sounds in the wrong places, ruining anticipation. This is breaking the rules of the mathematician Mozart. And certainly no error on the part of the anticipator. You may as well say Australians speak correctly? Welsh has many spellings, for many words, which vary according to which precede and follow, in order to make the sounds flow nicely. Sound first, spelling later. However, something went wrong up north, and the music lost harmony. They may attempt to tell you it sounds nice, almost natural, but Satan can never be discounted.
The only one of those comments that isn’t a content-free insult is dishonest spin doctoring.
PZ boosted awareness of credible sexual assault allegations that were already made by women against prominent atheists. The commenter’s making it sound like the allegations were made up by PZ out of whole cloth.
It tells you something about these YouTube assholes that they have to make shit up to make people they don’t like look bad. Then again, making shit up to smear your ideological opponents is nothing new for conservatives these days.
@17 Strayans heaps tawk Englnd good and that
richardemmanuel
Oi, don’t knock the Brummie accent, I find it pleasant!
@19 – This is the dialect of some tribe I lack knowledge of, but am against in advance. I have assumed the higher ground. This is the art of word war. Consider yourself metrically wrong-footed. And footrically wrong-metted. You can’t go around making up new words willy shakespeare. They won’t catch on. Don’t be telling me popty-ping means microwave. Just because it is a much better description. Descript scripture at your own peril. We can’t agree on language, so we can’t know where to censor.
Now are words really so powerful? Could mere ideograms on a slice of a tree run the world? I promise to pay, in God we trust. It would be laughable if that were so. You could probably persuade a lot of people that a fortune was lost in 2008. Lost where? Money lost in a casino is……in the casino. Nothing was lost. It is most terribly difficult to lose wealth on a planet, and generally requires earthquakes, meteors, or war. But so it was written. And so it was read. Global debt is similarly written at a most alarming number. But the necessary interplanetary lenders are written about rather less.
Language is most terribly important. Reading left to right, or right to left, is a matter of taste, but reading before and after is a matter of reality. Humans are hopeless at Time. Time should not be written separately – this is a spelling mistake. It was spotted by a pedant, but not quite caught. His sentences were held in Time after all. Where God plays dice there are many times at once – a mere tautology to say many wheres, and calculation here can be quicker.
Infinity is mispelled all the time, the correct spelling requiring continuous typing. Continuous creation. These are simple things. simple errors. Yet it is commonplace, amongst humans, to project beyond a certainly-wrong point, to where logic falls apart, to where sentences are no more, to reflect back that the billions of years, the millennia of pointless suffering, were magically set in motion in order to gradually reveal, by the most inane series of non-sequiturs, a philosophy of behaviour a labrador could have come up with. Apart from the more stupid bits. And I tell you what, I think they may be wrong.
@ 20 – I have knocked, but you must let my knocking into your heart.
I am just here to compliment you on using “nonplussed” correctly!
re: richardemmanuel #21
I’ll have what he’s having.
re: oliversarmy #23
PZ knows English words. Imagine that!
I’m not sure, but those witty putdowns of PZ almost seem to be ad-hominems. You’re suck, therefore your argument is false….
richardemmanuel @ 21 Oi! Don’t come the raw prawn with the Stralians mate!
Odd how far we’ve come: used to be atheists understood places where free speech doesn’t apply such as lying to children or practicing religion in the classroom, but it seems lying about race, sex, gender, sexual orientation or trans status is very important and must be protected at all costs!