Friday, June 3, 2011

If you ever wonder......

......why I speak about IDIOTS in the way I do, well, here are some examples of why:

First, here is a post by joe-boi on UD:

Joseph

05/24/2011

5:34 pm

kairsfocus-

MathGrrl has to be a ruse and this is all a prank.
When she spews stuff like: The record shows that no ID proponent has provided a rigorous mathematical definition of CSI as described by Dembski

For the record I have to call her a liar- either that or she is purposely obtuse.

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Here are the key phrases from the next post in the thread, from kairosfocus:

05/25/2011

2:52 am

Joseph:

It is increasingly clear that MG is simply pushing talking points, even in the teeth of patent reality. But this is reality, not one of those comedies where denial denial denial and dismissal, drumbeat fashion can substitute for reality.

Similarly, we again see that MG is unwilling to face and address on the merits the specific challenges to her main claims. Notice, how she is clearly unable and/or unwilling to click on links and address specific points on the merits.

Let’s repeat, again.

First, on CSI and its “rigour,” that has been addressed over and over again, in most specificity to the issue of rigour, at 34 – 5 above. Similarly, the talking points MG tends to use over and over as thought hey have not been cogently answered, were last dissected in 23 – 24 above. And, the overall summing up of the issues MG has needed to explain herself on has been kept up in the editorial response to Graham at no 1 in the CSI newsflash thread; which MG has persistently ignored.

When it comes to ev, 137 above shows my links to the places in the CSI Newsflash thread where it is dissected by Mung. (One of MG’s tactics seems to be to wait until something is buried under enough posts in a thread, or has been continued in a successor thread, before repeating the assertion that was rebutted.)

She knows or should know better than she has acted.

GEM of TKI

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And key phrases from the next post in the thread, from kairosfocus:

kairosfocus

05/25/2011

3:12 am

MG:

I am finished with trying to answer you on points, as the only result is dismissal and reiteration.

The message you have got through at length is that you are so far utterly unresponsive to duties of care about truth, fairness or reciprocity in discussion. Secondarily, after coming on three months now, you show no signs of relevant capacity to handle the concepts and the mathematical reasoning associated with those concepts.

In further short, the well-warranted conclusion is that you are — on evidence of coming on three months of attempted discussion in the teeth of drumbeat repetition of a wall of dismissive talking points — being selectively hyperskeptical and/or willfully obtuse to the point of being willfully defiant and dismissive of what you know or should know. Which, in the context of promoting highly misleading talking points by drumbeat repetition in defiance of repeated correction, is tantamount to making willfully deceptive false claims. To lying, in brutally direct short. (A word I do not like to use, but which — regrettably — is looking ever more like the appropriate one.)

And I am still deeply offended whenever I recall your snide, atmosphere-poisoning allusion to Galileo’s whispered “it still moves” after he was forced to publicly recant by threat of torture. I remind you, that no-one is threatening anyone with torture here, and that if anyone is playing the august magisterium imposing its views by fiat and threats to careers, it is the evolutionary materialist magisterium, as say the recent Gaskell case shows, and earlier ones going back to the likes of Sternberg, Bishop, and Kenyon made all too plain. In short, you have indulged in a turnabout, blame the victim, false accusation.

You have some serious explaining and apologising to do, madam. For weeks or months now.

I simply point you to 195 just above and the onward links above and in the previous thread.

If you are interested in getting serious after coming on three months that is.

Good day, madam

GEM of TKI

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And from kairosfocus's next post in that thread:

199

kairosfocus

05/26/2011

1:16 am

Onlookers:

It is time to draw some conclusions (some of which, regrettably but needfully, will be painful) on the past several months worth of exchanges at UD on this general topic.

Some of those conclusions — as just pointed out — are not happy ones; and, it is to be noted before I go on that this morning I have received a comment elsewhere along the following lines:

[Condescending diminutive of my name] you’re a delusional, dishonest, hypocritical, pompous, narcissistic dolt.

You’re going to get a lot of exposure here: [blog address of an attack blog, communicated to management, UD]

Your [homosexual reference] buddies at UD won’t be able to protect you there. The truth about you and your insane religious and political agenda will come out for all to see. Consider yourself ‘outed’.

This is an example of the turnabout accusation rhetorical attack, crudely slanderously uncivil and self-justifying mentality we unfortunately too often have to deal with on the part of objectors to design thought; here in the crudest form of utterly unwarranted personal insults. Perhaps, too, this commenter needs to know that there are jurisdictions that are applicable (jurisdictions where the US’s fatally flawed libel laws do not hold), in which patently false and utterly unwarranted accusations are actionable. And even before we get to the level of action, the notion that “this is not a Sunday School,” or the like, is a thinly disguised way of admitting that one is being rude, uncivil and out of order.

The red herring, led away to the strawman caricature, and then the pouring on of ad hominems and igniting through incendiary rhetoric, the better to cloud, choke, confuse, poison and polarise the atmosphere, is the strongest proof of a want of basic broughtupcy and of utter want of a serious case on the merits.

Such a person should therefore pause and think twice before hitting send, when that message is going to be received in jurisdictions other than what s/he — most likely, he — has become used to. (And BTW, if you will take the moment to look above, you will see that when J went overboard above, I corrected him at once. Civility is the first requirement of serious dialogue that moves towards soundness and truth.)

A commentator like this — instead of resorting to abuse and insult — would better expend his or her energy seriously addressing on the merits the issues here, where I have laid out what serious minded citizens have to think through if they are going to come to grips with origins science and the significance of the dominant a priori evolutionary materialist school of thought for not only the world of thought but for our wider civilisation.

People like the just cited, sadly, do not seem to understand the matches they are playing with, or the fires they can set in our civilisation, even though Plato warned in his The Laws, Bk X 2350 years ago as follows:

[[The avant garde philosophers, teachers and artists c. 400 BC] say that the greatest and fairest things are the work of nature and of chance, the lesser of art [[ i.e. techne], which, receiving from nature the greater and primeval creations, moulds and fashions all those lesser works which are generally termed artificial . . . .

[[T]hese people would say that the Gods exist not by nature, but by art, and by the laws of states, which are different in different places, according to the agreement of those who make them; and that the honourable is one thing by nature and another thing by law, and that the principles of justice have no existence at all in nature, but that mankind are always disputing about them and altering them; and that the alterations which are made by art and by law have no basis in nature, but are of authority for the moment and at the time at which they are made.- [[Relativism, too, is not new; complete with its radical amorality rooted in a worldview that has no foundational IS that can ground OUGHT. (Cf. here for Locke's views and sources on a very different base for grounding liberty as opposed to license and resulting anarchistic "every man does what is right in his own eyes" chaos leading to tyranny.)] These, my friends, are the sayings of wise men, poets and prose writers, which find a way into the minds of youth. They are told by them that the highest right is might [[ Evolutionary materialism leads to the promotion of amorality], and in this way the young fall into impieties, under the idea that the Gods are not such as the law bids them imagine; and hence arise factions [[Evolutionary materialism-motivated amorality "naturally" leads to continual contentions and power struggles; cf. dramatisation here], these philosophers inviting them to lead a true life according to nature, that is, to live in real dominion over others [[such amoral factions, if they gain power, "naturally" tend towards ruthless tyranny; here, too, Plato hints at the career of Alcibiades], and not in legal subjection to them . . .

In the slightly more sophisticated form of the so-called new/gnu atheists, the same underlying attitude unfortunately still applies: a priori materialists see themselves as the “brights,” and any who differ with them are therefore ignorant, stupid, insane or wicked.

At the further sophisticated level we have been dealing with for some months now, all of that crudity of thought is fuzzed out by using indirection, allusion and suggestion, rather than direct declaration. That is how for instance MG managed to suggest by citing Galileo’s apocryphal “It still moves,” that this is a case of religion persecuting science. Somehow, it slipped her attention that no-one is threatening anyone with the thumbscrews here, and if anything it is the Materialist Neo-Magisterium in the Holy Lab Coat that has been persecuting those who it deems heretics in recent years.

Similarly, in the eagerness to play the rhetorical game of pushing persuasive talking points through the tactic of drumbeat repetition — see how easy it is (“nothing wrong with repeating a point over and over again is there . . . ?”), it became all too easy for MG to lose sight of the duties of care to truth, fairness, and reciprocity in a serious discussion. And, in the end, such behaviour becomes subtly willfully deceptive; tantamount to lying.

But such a process is so subtle that one may not see what one has actually done; until it is far too late.

And that is why the thread above is so subtly painful.

Oh, that it had gone in a different path, of genuine exchange of thoughts; as MG et al were invited to, over and over and over, in her case to the point of a guest post at UD.

But, day by day, week by week, it became all too plain that the point was to project talking points and play the game of selectively hyperskeptical objection, not to actually engage in genuine exchange of ideas.

So, the real bottomline for this thread was laid out in 34 – 35 above, which in the course of all but a fortnight since, MG has plainly been unable to respond.

We can therefore freely conclude that — despite the many talking points to the contrary — the concept, complex specified information is meaningful and relates to a key challenge in origins science. Secondly, the Chi metric — as the log reduced form shows — is based on well accepted information theory concepts, starting with the common basic definition of quantified information, Ik = log (1/pk).

It then raises the issue of a threshold sufficient to swamp the search resources of the solar system or the whole cosmos, and in so doing arrives at a highly useful result. Namely, a criterion of difficulty by which sufficiently specific pieces of functionally meaningful information will be so isolated in the space of possible configurations, that it is maximally implausible to try to explain them on chance and/or necessity. This is backed up by the needle in the haystack/infinite monkeys type analysis similar to that used to statistically ground the second law of thermodynamics. Such FSCI, however, is routinely and only observed to be the product of intelligence.

And so, we are well warranted to infer from CSI or FSCI as reliable sign to the best, empirically and analytically warranted explanation, design.

Never mind the ongoing drumbeat repetition of the many talking point objections to the contrary.

(Indeed, we recall here how at a certain point Einstein’s theory of Relativity became a subject of ideological objection in his native land. At one point, he was subjected to a public meeting with one speaker after another rising to subject the theory to shrill objections. His reply was, that if his theory was false, just one speaker on the merits would have sufficed to overturn it. Likewise, in the face of a cloud of angry mosquitoes tanked up on talking points and spreading them far and wide, we have yet to see that one sound speaker on the merits.)

GEM of TKI

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All that verbal sewage from joe-boi and gordy is just a small example of the sanctimonious, dishonest, hypocritical, rancid bile that is regularly vomited by IDiots on uncommon descent.

Want to see for yourself the 'civil, honest discussion' that UD says it welcomes? See the thread at the link below, and the threads where the very civil Elizabeth Liddle is involved, and pretty much all of the UD site. Then ask yourself who is being civil and who is not.

http://www.uncommondescent.com/intelligent-design/footnote-on-einstein-dembski-the-chi-metric-and-observation-by-the-judging-semiotic-agent/



Here's an example of joe-boi's 'civility' toward Elizabeth Liddle, who happens to be a real scientist, unlike joe-boi who is just a mentally deranged, stupid, uneducated, lying, impotent, cowardly failure:

71

Joseph

06/03/2011

5:19 am

Lizzie:

I didn’t say that DNA self-replicates “on its own”.

LoL! What do you think the “self” in self-replication means?

But it is certainly a molecule, and it certainly self-replicates,

No, it doesn’t. You do not know what you are talking about.

Self-replication means it replicates by itself- so you need to buy a vowel and then come back when you have a clue.