CORRECTION: New evidence suggests that the screenshot discussed in this post and elsewhere was not a forgery but the result of a glitch. I offer a correction, and an apology, and a discussion of the implications, here.
So the mighty Paul Elam has acknowledged — in the comments section of Girl Writes What’s blog, at least –that there might just be some sort of problem going on with regard to, you know, that whole fake screenshot thing. You know, the blatant fraud that A Voice for Men mangling — sorry, managing — editor Dean Esmay seems to have engaged in to cover up a mistake.
But, Paul being Paul, he somehow manages to turn his sort-of acknowledgement of the problem into an attack on me, bizarrely blaming me (the person who actually pointed out this fraud) for him not knowing about it before today:
As much as I hate to say it, Futrelle does have a valid point. I am looking in to it today, and unlike Futrelle, I will address the results of my inquiry in public no matter where they end up.
I don’t mind looking into problems, even when they are pointed out by such a bald faced liar. I would have actually been aware of this sooner if his blog were worth reading. I had to become aware of it in your comments to even know there was a problem.
Well, Paul, I would have happily brought my findings to the comments section of A Voice for Men, rather than the comments section of Girl Writes What’s blog, but you may recall I am banned there. And I wonder if anyone there would have had the courage to stand up and say that, gosh, this Futrelle guy has a point, given how quickly people are censored there for deviating from your site’s perverse “conventional wisdom.”
And gosh, Paul, how unfair it is to expect the publisher of a site to be aware of what’s, you know, published on it. Concerns about the story were brought up by your own commenters shortly after it first ran. Esmay referred in an article and an editorial note to my alleged “lies” about the story; it didn’t occur to you to even go look at what I had said? And even aside from the phony screenshot, or anything I’ve written, did you really think that Esmay’s bizarre explanations for the original mistake made any kind of sense?
In other words, are you incompetent, or are you lying about being unaware of the problem until now?
In any case, I await the results of your “investigation.” I am especially eager to see how you will manage to spin things so it becomes someone else’s fault. Will it be some evil conspiracy that “set you up?”
And when exactly have I lied, Paul? Could you offer a citation? When I point out the lies on your site, I fucking back up each claim.
[EDIT: Added some stuff in the “gosh, Paul” paragraph and made a few other changes.]
Forgot to add – it wasn’t Hitchens’s integrity I side-eye with the waterboarding thing; not at all, good on him for having done it. It’s the idea that someone intelligent can’t get his head around what it would involve, and how it’s torture, without experiencing it. I don’t think it’s even a matter of empathy, it’s just failure of imagination. Plus … if it wasn’t torture, whywas it being done to prisoners at all? I mean duh!
Basically, that essay was hideous enough that unless it’s an apology saying “ohshit I’m really sorry for all the dumbass stuff I wrote in that article; I was totally wrong and stupid,” nothing else that he wrote is going to cancel that out and make him not-misogynist.
Kittehserf, I guess it does fall under an appeal to emotion though: I want x to be true (or false) therefore I accept x to be true (or false).
To be fair, Jonesy could use Fallacy of Composition on us about Hitchens, wrt the whole not reading all his works thing, but I’m inclined to believe that there are some generalizations that are acceptable to make once you’ve read enough of someone’s works, and that fallacies aren’t the be-all end-all to discourse and argument.
So in conclusion, my thesis is Hitchens was a misogynistic asshole. And Elam is too. And the popularity and wider audience of one’s lesser sexism is offset by the vitriolic ranting to a smaller audience of the other. So they are both bad.
Pretty much my conclusion with the pair of ’em, SittieKitty!
It’s interesting about the appeal to emotion – does it apply to when someone’s just got their own beliefs and knows they don’t have physical/empirical evidence, but is content anyway, or is it more about when they’re trying to persuade other people? I’m a total non-starter with philosophy and the like (I’ll stick to the Bruces’ Philosophers Song). I’m curious about this bit in the sense of whether it matters or not if other people aren’t adversely affected by the belief. If you’ve lurked here a while you might know why I’m askin’. 😀
Sounds kind of like The Courtier’s Reply, which is a term PZ Myers coined after someone said that Dawkins hadn’t studied enough theology.
Or, as Newton said, “I, sir, have studied it; you have not,” which is as pretty an argument from authority as you are like to see.
Ooh, now we’re getting into thorny ground, because the flip side of this is the belief (often used by creationists, for instance) that everyone’s opinion should be given equal consideration, even if they obviously don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. Actually knowing about a subject is indeed a Good Thing.
And, um, many many of Dawkins’ arguments do fall apart if you’ve ever studied theology (and even those that don’t have usually been discussed at great length in theological circles, yet he presents them as if they’re new and incontrovertible).
An interesting question… There’s two ways to look at it: either a) fallacies only apply during discourse between two or more people, or b) fallacies apply even when only internally grappling with concepts. I’m of the mind that fallacies apply all the time, because I think that internal discourse is still discourse and people are very easily convinced to lie to themselves, perhaps more easily than they lie to other people. So I reject premise A, that fallacies can only apply during discourse between two or more people.
That being said, I also adhere to the principle of informed choice, so it doesn’t matter if someone is living their lives through a fallacy of some sort. If you’ve considered the options, and – more importantly – understand the options and that your faith in something (not necessarily God, but faith in anything) is based upon an acceptance that you recognize there is no empirical evidence for it but you choose to accept it as a belief anyway, then what does it matter if it’s based upon a fallacy? You’re still informed about your decision, and that’s really the most important part of it.
I live by the principle that as long as I’m not harming others I should be allowed to do what I want – and I hold others to that standard as well. As long as you aren’t harming others, you should be able to act in and believe in anything you wish to. It’s not someone else’s job or right to tell you how to act or what to believe and to do so damages your ability to exercise informed choice.
My 2¢ on the matter anyway.
(Haha! I’m apparently slipping under the blockquote monster’s radar! And I’m sure I just totally jinxed myself…)
Yep! Which is why I think fallacies are a stepping stone in discourse, not the end of an argument. And why I’m inclined to ignore people who say things like:
and:
(Lookit my blockquoting go! Now I’m just tempting fate…)
Well, I’ll be the first to admit that I have read neither Dawkins nor theology.
Wait, shit, I pressed Post Comment instead of coming up with someplace to go with that.
Shit.
I can only say in defense my mind has been stunned into a happy fog by the grinning boy on my lap.
I actually think Dawkins *hasn’t* read enough theology, in that he often appears to have read no theology at all.
The Newton quote makes me smile – if the person he was talking to was saying
a) gravity
b) cat doors
are Not A Thing, then Newton was right, he knew more than they did. 😉
I’m with you on what you said about the informed choice. I don’t know I’d call it lying to oneself, because one knows it might be wrong, and nothing that matters weighs against it. (Argh, my sentences are turning into spaghetti.)
The interesting thing is when it’s a subject that has no bearing on physical matters, where such evidence isn’t really relevant, and where the emotions are as good a guide as anything. Maybe it’s partly how much one allows significance to emotions, serendipity, and the like.
What really matters are kitties with potatoes, of course. (Philosophical argument to end all arguments.)
http://youtu.be/GGzeK_7H3Lc
Gah, sorry, I didn’t mean to derail us onto Dawkins.
Eh, Dawkins, Hitchens, cut from the same cloth.
I tend to think that once people have made an informed choice, it’s not a lie anymore. Mostly when I say “people lie to themselves”, I’m talking about the people that don’t want to admit that they could be wrong, or that there might be more to consider, and so stick their hands over their ears and shout “lalalalalalalalala” in order to not think about it. If someone’s thought about it, and then decided against it, I don’t think it counts as lying to themselves, as long as they are honest about their reasons for deciding against it.
This has made the rounds, but clearly cats are dogs, not potatoes:
That makes sense! 🙂
I’ve seen that video before. So funny!
Man, screw all of the new atheist movement. That we’re having an argument about whether we should apologize for these idiots is ridiculous.
Daniel Dennet is a whiny idiot, Hitchens was a racist misogynistic imperialist, Sam Harris is a racist mandarin for american imperialism, Richard Dawkins is a misogynistic and arrogant dullard/crank scientist, and their legions of well-off white kid followers have taken all of the idiotic privileged middle-class myopia of their holy prophets to its logical conclusion every time they post a fake facebook screenshot about some super smart atheist “pwning” a “theist” on r/atheism or talk about how women are so “irrational” or post about how black people are inherently criminal or justify pedophilia and beastiality or go on about the glories of eugenics or fethishize reason and logic to the point where having any sort of humanity becomes “irrational” or…
It’d still be the stupidest internet movement ever if MRAs didn’t steal their thunder. If someone started a mock blog for atheists, it’d be updated just as frequently as this one.
P.S, I say all of this as someone who is not religious at all. I calls it like I sees it.
>>Didn’t he only come to that conclusion after benig (very briefly) waterboarded?
Yep, hence why it’s not worth many points. Just barely “Can declare he was wrong when faced with direct experience of how full of shit he was, when it’s a mostly inconsequential matter because the time when it actually mannered is long past” territory.
Also known as the Andrew Sullivan Threshold.
BlackBloc, that MRA troll is still replying to you. His latest replies are pretty silly.
I mean in my journal.
Thanks, BlackBloc, I thought that was the case. I didn’t remember how strongly he said beforehand that it wasn’t, and I’m not turning my brain to sludge trawling through his godawful bloviation to find it. (Count me among those who think his writing style sucks as badly as his opinions.)
j – I was just checking to see who came up with that ridiculous term “Brights”. I thought it was Dennett: it wasn’t, but he wrote this laughably obtuse defence of it:
“There was also a negative response, largely objecting to the term that had been chosen [not by me]: bright, which seemed to imply that others were dim or stupid. But the term, modeled on the highly successful hijacking of the ordinary word “gay” by homosexuals, does not have to have that implication. Those who are not gays are not necessarily glum; they’re straight. Those who are not brights are not necessarily dim.”
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brights_movement
Hello, saying you’re a Bright when you’ve already set yourself up as The Smart Ones Who Aren’t Theists carries the screamingly obvious implication that everyone else is dim.
Seems sort of odd that a bright fellow isn’t bright enough to grasp that …
Are cats ever off topic? Should I care?
Adult Cat Finder
Lol kittehserf, I love that quote. No follow-through at all. “Those who are not gays are not necessarily glum; they’re straight. Those who are not brights are not necessarily dim … they are…???” Even he couldn’t come up with some appropriate alternative that might help to reinforce his point.
opium, kittens are never irrelevant. Never.