Tis but a scratch
Joe Duemer's travails have spawned some good advice from the veteran Mike Golby in a piece entitled, Speaking to Brick Walls
Uh-oh, Joe Duemer's at it again......trying to reason with Warbloggers
"Where will it all lead us | I thought we had freed us | From the mundane seems I'm wrong again | Could be they lack roots, they're still wearing jack boots they're | Marching somewhere in the pouring rain
I can stand a little egg on my face." [Howard Owens]
What is it with Joseph? I'd like to know. He persistently tries to reason with war bloggers.
In a recent effort to save him, I sent him the voluminous e-mail archives I had collected on various hard drives during my days of speaking to such animals. They were sent to him in a lead case escorted by several U.S. Marines on loan from the local embassy. The archives contained really poisonous stuff but, as Joe was having a lengthy chat to Mike Sanders at the time, I felt I could prevent him incurring bills similar to those which I'd had to pay for psychiatric care, ongoing electro-convulsive and drug therapy, and counseling after my bout with said Sanders.
I expect to return home in 2016.
Did he listen to me? No. He behaves like a vicious little cocaine addict without a brain to burn and picks on one war blogger after another. He recently undertook the rehabilitation of one Howard Owens and it is for this reason that I return to the subject of war blogging. Joe's recent brush with the Ventura Vulture makes compelling reading.
See if you can follow this transition. I recently read an article by Stephen Dawkins in Free Inquiry, not currently available on the Web the issue Winter 2002/2003 Vol 23 No. 1, on why he refuses to debate with the creationists. He says he received advice from Jay Gould who watched his views on punctuated equilibrium distorted so that it appeared to support the creationist preposterous beliefs. Just for the record here was Gould's reply:
Since we proposed punctuated equalibria to explain trends, it is infuriating to be quoted again and agin by creationist—whether through design or stupidity, I do not know&mdash as admitting that the fossil record includes no transitional forms. Transitional forms are generally lacking at the species level, but they are abundant between larger groups.So Jay and Stephen refused requests to debate with them. Dawkins likened debating with the "Intelligent Design" folk to King Arthurs duel with the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, not unlike Joe's encounter
Dawkins did have a fun time toying with them however, begging off from one debate pleading that he hadn't yet had time to finish up with the flat-earthers. Debating with most war bloggers is not unlike Dawkin's experiences it usually leads nowhere and tends to legitimize the nuts. If they didn't have something reasonable to say why would you debate with them. Indeed.
Comments
People have to fill their lives with something norm...
Your juxtaposition of a political debate with a scientific one may indeed have more implications than you realize. I think that the evolution-design battle is a perfect example of Kuhn's theory of scientific revolutions, that scientific paradigms do not rise and fall based on the findings of science done within a given paradigm ('normal science'). Rather, they rise and fall in response to non-scientific or sociological factors. I really don't like the whole range of implications of this thesis, but this debate seems to comfirm it perfectly.
If you've ever listened to one of these debates (the intelligent ones with Behe or Dembski, not the creationist Evangelical Christians who latch onto them), the argument usually comes down to a banal squabble over how many "problems" with a theory amount to a reason for abandoning that theory or proposing an alternative. For one person, the so-called problem is just an "anomaly" which if explained will strengthen the theory. For another person, the anomaly is a early sign of weakness in the theory, and those trying to solve the puzzle are just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. I'll go this far with Kuhn--science itself does not have a clear way to determine whether puzzles are problems to be solved or signs of a failed theory.
Of course, this does not decide the matter for either side; perhaps it still gives more strength to the evolutionists. And to be sure, most evolutionists still think that Dembski, Behe and the like are crazy, just as I, as a political scientist, think that almost all conspiracy theory is stupid. The point is that it is much harder in science to evaluate alternative paradigms or grand theories than it is to solve the scientific puzzles that scientists are trained to solve thoughout their careers.
Funny. For me, the final reason for not debating--one I periodically forget--is that most of these guys, for all their crowing about "facts" & "evidence" don't have much respect for the structure & purpose of argument.