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.]
Ah, and since I’m being a bit rude by not addressing the OP at all:
I really want to see how they weasel out of this whole mess. Fantastic job. 🙂
God, we’re all such Nice Owners – not like all those goddam catladies who neglect them! It’s almost like kittehs LIKE getting treated badly! All western felines are felinazi pussies.
namegoeshere: “evo-psych of course is a legitimate field, though it’s a shame journalism prefers to give prominence to the worse studies out there.”
Would you lead me to the good studies then? Because everything I’ve read or heard of evo-psych was misogynistic and full of crap.
The reason why Dawkins’ is a crank is because he wrote a book (a looong time ago, far far far before movement atheism even existed) called the Selfish Gene – which is, guess what, /sociobiological/ nonsense. It really is super old and you’ll be surprised how long the man’s been writing nonsense! The reason I bring it up is because he /still/ defends it whenever its brought up, despite it being the product of a very stupid age.
Hitchens’ a racist because he called Wanda Sykes a “black dyke” and said a whole bunch of ridiculous things about MOOSLIMS (that whole bunch of nonsense more fits into his imperialist thing I must admit).
Daniel Dennet is just a generically obnoxious atheist. I think it’s integral for movement atheism to be as obtuse as humanly possible, so he wrote a book called Breaking The Spell where he purports to analyze religious belief and it is one-two punch of stupid. “Golly gee I just do not understand how the hell the masses could believe in /basically/ flying spaghetti monsters and men coming back to life from caves and prophets flying on horses hoo boy we need to discover the roots of this mass delusion!” I haven’t read all of it but the parts I did read were so eye-rollingly boorish and arrogant I decided that he was very much apart of the scenery.
@Kitten, exactly! I’d like to see the higher ups going into office in the morning, working four hours, going home again, spending two hours or so at home, going back to office, working some more, and finally coming home super late.
J: I read the selfish gene ages ago. From what I remember though, he’s main thesis is that we ought to regard the gene as the unit evolutionary selection works on rather than the individual. As far as I can tell, that’s a valid thesis. Then he loses himself in metaphores, like calling genes “selfish”, although “selfish” refers to an individual’s motivation and only applies to things with minds, i e not genes.
Regarding Dennett I haven’t read what he writes about atheism. Being a philosopher I’ve read some of his philosophical work. I think he’s written some good stuff in philosophy of mind, but… I’ve also read his “freedom evolves” which is a book on free will. Out of more than 300 pages, about 20 pages are any good. That’s when he critizises Robert Kane, one of the most prominent names in the free will debate, who defends a theory pretty much opposite Dennett’s. Dennett actually seem to respect Kane and has some insightful criticism to offer on this point. The rest of the book is just classic compatibilism, a theory that has been around since the seventeenth century and were really popular during the eighteenth and nineteenth century (today’s compatibilists usually have a bit more complicated theories than the classic one). Dennett’s theory on free will is exactly this centurie’s-old one, except he dresses it up in lots of talk about evolution and brains. And you know, that’s fine by me. Arguing for and defending an old philosophical theory is a perfectly respectable thing to do. What annoys me though is that he seems to think that his evolutionary talk actually brings something new to the free will debate, that he’s advancing a fresh view, when he’s in fact defending a centuries-old one.
I’m also annoyed how he often talks disrespectfully about his opponents in the free will debate. His respect for Kane is really the exception here. With most of his opponents, he seem to think that they hold the views they hold because they just haven’t thought properly about the matter – because they’re more or less stupid, and therefore haven’t seen the light the way Dennett has. So I can easily imagine what he sounds like writing on religious issues.
@dväghundspossen
Workers everywhere always get screwed by the bosses! I was chatting up a clerk in a department store once and she told me that she was basically forced to stand on her knees FOR THE WHOLE NIGHT SHIFT. She couldn’t even bring in a chair for when she had to stand at the desk, unless she showed proof of a ‘physical disability’. She only got to actually, literally /sit down/ for the two fifteen minute breaks they’re mandated. When I told her my mom had to do that as a nurse and that her knees were now shorn of all cartilidge, the clerk told me back, “it’s a living.”
I’m sorry about all this nonsense your husband has to go through. Solidarity.
J, yeah, they’ll do whatever they can get away with. When I worked as a practical nurse years back I was handed out a schedule that was literally impossible to work according to, since I was supposed to be at several places at once. I called the employers and said it was impossible, and they just repeated that I had to be really efficient, and I repeated back that efficient or not I lacked the superpowers needed to clone myself and teleport, and they once again said I had to work efficiently. Then I called my labour union and they said giving an employer that kind of schedule violates this or that law. So I called back to my employers and said “the union says this is illegal” and finally I got a decent schedule.
That’s why it’s so important to have big labour unions. A big union can hire lawyers and sue people for instance, but there’s no way a half-time practical nurse can come up with the money needed to sue her employer.
Also, we managed to raise our shitty salaries to a little bit less shitty by having the janitors and garbage collectors go on strike for all of us (naturally, you can’t go on strike yourself being a practical nurse). There’s still a huge power imbalance between employers and employées, particularly when there’s high unemployment and lots of people are desperate for jobs, but as a lone employer you have no leverage.
dvärghundspossen: good thoughts and solidarity to your husband and his co-workers. I hope they get management to wake the fuck up.
So, Jake Jones managed to derail this thread just about completely.
*Fantastic*
Also notice that he pulls out the ‘but people criticizing Hitch may not have read him’ card, when I specifically pointed out on the other thread that I used to read Hitch religiously. (in multiple senses)
Anyway.
(ps: why do we call him racist as well as imperialist? Well, read some analysis of that, including some quotes that are…illuminating)
….there, that’s loads of derail.
@namegoeshere
I have Masters in Psychology. Is that good enough? Granted, this doesn’t make me an expert, but from what I’ve seen from the field of evo-psych, leads me to believe that it has got a long way to go before it reaches the level of academic vigor and credibility of, say, Cognitive Psychology. At this point, I put evo-psych on the same level of Freudian style psychoanalysis.
I should probably say Freudian Psychoanalytic theory. Pardon me.
@theladyzombie:
I forget, were you one of the folks who sometimes hangs out at Pharyngula?
I mention that because every time somebody steps in with the whole ‘well, that’s just the popular papers, there’s good science out there’ the response is ‘link it, show us the good science.’
Much like Pecunium’s challenge here–where are these moderates? Show us the MRA moderates.
To nobody’s surprise, they don’t quite seem to have an answer.
I’ll just leave this here.
Howard, I read Pharyngula and other FtB blogs regularly but I don’t comment. Mostly because I don’t have anything to more to add, and I’m not all that confident of a person.
Falconer, your link is localized.
Late to the party; I missed the fuss due to date night. Sorry to rerail, but:
Is this a reference to anything whatsoever?
Trying again.
What I get for typing it in from memory rather than Ctrl+C.
If this link doesn’t work, I won’t try again, so: I’m trying to link to Freethoughtblogs, because j seems to either be ignorant of its existence (an unlikely thing, I’ll admit) or to be discounting them from hir definition of “movement atheism.”
@inurashii: I don’t think it’s a reference to a specific occurrence, just general “Futrelle is a lying liar liar” poisoning-the-well like how Andy Schlafly’s Conservapedia promotes “liberal = liar” every chance it gets.
Have they ever made any actual allegations of David lying? Ever?
Nope. It’s just projection on his part. He’d love to not have to address any of this publicly.
He’s really completely transparent. It’s like he has no self-awareness at all.
They make vague general allegations about me lying, but never anything specific that I know of.
Well, anything that anyone but them would consider lying. I’m sure Paul would consider me a liar for citing feminists in my “debate” with him to be lying. I’m sure they think I’m a “liar” for quoting them “out of context.”
Hembling accuses me of lying here:
http://www.avoiceformen.com/misandry/depraved-and-futile-boob-makes-jtos-argument/
You can be the judge of that.
They’ve accuse me of all sorts of weird things, though. They accused me of starting the “beating women” subreddit and announced they had PROOF! But then somehow that proof never materialized and they dropped the subject. Huh I wonder why.
Of Course how can we trust you, David, when you’re a known liar?
AVFM needs to get its act together.
Seriously, after all I’m only a David sockpuppet performing a socratic exercise with him.