Tuesday, February 4, 2020

Hate Mail - You Only Fear Reading Your Opponents If You Don't Have Confidence In Your Own Argument

As a matter of fact, I have not read the Center for Science And Culture paper that found that 90% of Judge Jones decision in the Dover case was cribbed, errors and all, from papers submitted by the ACLU.  I was unaware of that issue until you accused me of having read it, though I certainly will try to get around to reading it and, if the primary sources are available, the ACLU papers alleged to be cribbed, the actual statements of Michael Behe that they are accused of misrpesenting in their submissions to the court, etc.  Considering what I'm about to say,  I'll link to it, though I've only read the first page.  I'm not afraid of it.  I certainly  won't be bullied by ignorant hypocritical "free speech absolutists" who want to peer pressure me into being as ignorant as they are.  We are not peers, it takes mutual agreement to have that relationship, I won't be peers with people like that. 

I try to read the whole record, the extent to which that's possible, before I judge whether or not something is accurate or true.  If the judge in that case didn't bother to fact check the source he based 90% of his ruling on, there was a time that would shock me but I'm not shocked anymore.  I think a judge who did not understand the issues presented by both sides - and I've looked enough at the work of both sides to know that's frequently not an easy thing* - any judge who would render judgement on that basis is not producing reliable justice, they are choosing a side on personal preference. 

You seem to think there's something wrong with reading things for fear of that giving you mental cooties or something.  I wonder if that superstitious and idiotic idea comes from the widespread faith in Dawkins' idiotic idea of memes.  If that's the case, well, it doesn't surprise me that Dawkins would invent an idea fatal to intellectual academic practice and that a philosopher of Dennett's type would adopt it. 

Naw, I read all kinds of things I don't agree with and things I only agree with in part and find that those old fashioned practices of testing them against their claimed sources, then checking the sources works to ward of infection by the screaming memeies.  There was a time people weren't afraid of reading, I barely remember it, having grown up when TV made people so stupid and universities started credentialing stupid people so they can pretend they're smart when they're not.  

I have read some of Michael Behe and find he's not as widely advertised, some idiot Biblical fundamenatlist.  I take him at his word that his skepticism of neo-Drawinism came from looking at recent science because I got mine from looking at the original claims of Darwin and his early supporters.**  I certainly think he's a better scientist than many of the guys you put your childlike faith in.  Dawkins, Dennett, as I recall you once presented James Randi as a figure of science.  And I'll bet it wasn't on the basis of fact checking and testing them.  I would bet that easily 90% of all such popular understanding of science is based on copying and mimicking sources without fact checking.  Whether or not he's as good a scientist as Jerry Coyne, I do't know, I do know he's not as dishonest a polemicist as Coyne is. 

It's ridiculous for allegedly educated people to erect a Trumpian wall against reading what their intellectual opponents say and, if they're going to talk about what their opponents claim TO ACTUALLY ENGAGE WITH WHAT THEIR OPPONENTS SAY.  I wonder if what they actually fear is finding arguments against their preferred ideologies and the basis of their professional status that they can't refute.  While there might be good reasons for someone to not participate in the degraded entertainment form of a debate with some of their opponents, those too ignorant to argue such issues, to make a blanket refusal to even read them or to try to make reading them a forbidden act is downright intellectual Nazism. 

No, I have said in other contexts I refuse to think like a Nazi thinks, part of how Nazis think is being a coward in reading people who I don't agree with. 

No, reading Michael Behe to see what he really said is not only harmless it's the responsible thing to do.  He's not going to get anyone killed.  I will point out it's part of the absurd position that the relatively obscure and remote topic of evolution, elevated way past its actual importance due to its usefulness to atheists,  is in need of such protection when you, as well, are a free speech absolutist who has no problem with giving a forum and a fully paid legal representation to Nazis, fascists, Stalinists, Maoists, white supremacists, Trumpzis, and other fans of the biggest mass murderers of the 20th and, now 21st centuries.  Geesh! talk about your messed up priorities.   No real American style liberal would be that stupid, I don't think real liberals can be that stupid and stay liberals. 

*  Behe's arguments are often based in molecular biology of an extremely complex kind as are those who would refute him.  While I think it's unreasonable to expect all judges to have the necessary knowledge to be able to understand those issues, any honest judge would admit they are incompetent to make such judgement.  Though I'll bet few of that arrogant clique would admit to that.  Which is why it should be a legal policy that there be members of higher courts who do have at least the mathematical and scientific competence to, if presented with enough supporting evidence, to render an intelligent judgement on it.  

**  I lost my ignorant, childlike faith in Darwinism and Darwin from reading its original articulation that had nothing to do with the issues that Behe raises.  Darwin was pretty much a scientific illiterate, I doubt he could get a BS degree in biology today.  Though maybe in psychology.   I think it was always pretty bad science that not only relied on some bad practices, it brougth those right into the heart of what was alleged to be science.  And, most of all, I think it relied on its ideological use and support of class and racial inequality for its success in history.   I think all of the worst practices of the behavioral and social sciences and much of evolutionary science has its origins in Darwin bringing explanatory myth and invalid comparison into science.  I mentioned recently some of the problems of his claim that human animal husbandry was at all like what happened in nature to create new species, among those was one that Darwin's contemporaries identified, human husbandry over thousands of years had not, by selection, produced new species.  And there are many other problems with it.  I think one was identified by Darwin's co-inventor of natural selection,  A. R. Wallace in his criticism of Darwin's use of the term "natural selection" while claiming that the process was non-teleological.  

That kind of thing is ubiquitous in the claims of non-teleology which I think is entirely an ideological claim of religious faith, in this case the atheists' faith against intelligent design.  I have also noted that in order to do that, atheists are constantly shoving god substitutes into gaps, naturals election, probability, random chance, which really are no explanations at all. 

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