Petrushka writes:
There’s a rumor that all of aurelio smith’s posts at UD have disappeared. Big win for Winston Ewert.
I looked, and sure enough, Smith’s comments are all gone — even from his guest thread.
UD has sunk to a new low.
112 thoughts on “Aurelio Smith’s comments vanish from UD”
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Oh that Designer, you just never know what antics it’ll be up to next.
Or are we warranted in assuming it wasn’t a miracle? I just never know, because for some things (like P. falciparum‘s chloroquine resistance) it seems like you needn’t think the Designer is even a slight possibility, while if there are extant issues with the origin of life it’s an automatic default to the Designer.
Come to think of it, we need the rules for ID magic. Then it’ll be science for sure.
Glen Davidson
Now that is moderation in action. 🙂
http://iliketowastemytime.com/sites/default/files/imagecache/blog_image/soviet-censorship-naval-commissar-vanishes.jpg
Ewert wins the debate.
!!!!1111111!!!!
UD seems to have configured robots.txt so that the site is not cached.
Wise move on Barry’s part.
Wise move? Are there wise moves when you are an ID proponent? Might just as well try a career in spoon bending. 🙂
It’s a time honored move, endorsed by Stalin and Big Brother.
Who controls the past controls the present, and who controls the present controls the future.
The effect of censorship does decay over time, but it has a long half-life.
Yeah, but who are you dealing with here? They’re really not very clever, and censoring on the internet tends to be noticed and commented upon.
They don’t really care for one simple reason–they have no credibility anyhow, thus they have none to lose.
Glen Davidson
petrushka,
Well, 1917 to 1991 was only 74 years.
Well, I think the obvious move is to invite Ewert here to defend his honor.
Barry doesn’t have any, so he can’t be shamed, but Ewert, Marks and Dembski shouldn’t be very happy that the internet will remember them as having done so badly in a debate that their opponent was simply deleted.
Hmmm, do I sense “objective morality” guiding a special one who has “a standard of integrity far beyond what the world requires”?
petrushka,
+1. Ewert seems to have higher standards.
I just find it strange that nobody from the rational side has posted a comment on UD with respect to this. Or is this because Barry has banned almost all rational beings and is hovering over the delete key for the few that remain.
His brief foray was interesting, especially his disavowal of FIASCO. His later back-pedaling suggests he may have been leaned on by Galapagos Finch.
Alan Fox,
Shame we only have snippets of it now.
This alien-abduction of Aurelio’s comments must be the explanation of the time-warp in that thread. For example in comment #226 Mark Frank replies to FifthMonarchyMan’s comment, whose comment number Frank gives as 244.
Bizarre. But Aurelio Smith lives on in negative space, in the form of others’ responses to his comments.
I wonder what the handful of UD regulars that comment at TSZ think of Barry’s most recent tactic. Let’s hear from Phoodoo, Mung or any of the others. I wonder if they are proud of Barry.
More importantly, are any of them brave enough to raise it at UD, as none of us can.
Reciprocating Bill,
How will the “BlogCzar Years” memorialize this?
Barry is so dumb that he leaves quotes from Aurelio in his minions’s comments.
Both his idiot Joe and fifthmonarchyman respond to things now deleted which Aurelio had said before, eg his statement which had to have been before EL’s #113 in thread quoted it
We have this cute little bit which, at comment now numbered 242 demonstrates Mung’s psi powers in responding to a “future” comment numbered 244
And then we have the spectacle of the big arse Kairosfocus at what is currently comment 287, quoting Joe quoting Aurelio (and of course, KF not being able to resist his own loudspeaker)
But note, that supposed comment #276 from Joe which KF likes enough to quote and edit, is currently comment #259.
That means we have lost 17 comments by that point in the thread. Presumably all 17 were from Aurelio, since Barry Arrington wasn’t smart enough to delete any of the other people’s responses to Aurelio.
I could go on, but why bother, it’s just more of the same stupidity and lack of integrity on the part of all the UD regular denizens. Barry setting the tone, of course … and the others are willing (at least so far as can be observed) to let the truth be deleted without protest.
You would have to pay me thousands of dollars to comment in any place which is under Barry’s venial thumb. What a pointless waste he is!
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edit: fixes to blockquote; hope I got it all correct finally
No,
I stand corrected 🙂
I spent the first 29 years of my life on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain. I saw Soviet-style authoritarian censorship in action, and I can swear Arrington would have been fully qualified for such a job. Big Bazza Is Watching You!
The first hint at UD that Papa Joe Arrington may be trying to alter history to direct the future:
“Reciprocating BillMay 8, 2015 at 5:30 pm
OT:
I see that Aurelio Smith has not only been banned, but silently vaporized, not just from one thread, but from the entire site.
He persists in negative space, his outline visible in responses to his posts.
Dog bites man, I suppose.”
And it seems like only a week ago that UD had this headline:
Censorship of dissident ideas in an age of science
Yeah, it’s all just fun and games to us — no one’s going to be personally harmed if lickspittle Barry corrupts UD (or if Kairsofocus does, or whichever of their so-called leaders happens to be the Censorship Czar of the Year).
But your life reminds us that it’s not always just fun and games.
Those UD people do indeed have a deadly serious intent: they intend for western democracies to be pushed into an iron-curtain style realm of ignorance, where it will be forbidden to criticize religion (christianity, at least; Islam may still be fair game because “wrong god”) and where anyone who did dare to criticize would find their words disappeared on any media owned/influenced by the Koch Brothers, 21st Century Fox, et al.
And western democracies are chock full of useful idiots who feel that we should self-censor and avoid “controversy” and that Charlie Hebdo had it coming. Look at the goddamned 145 writers who betrayed their ideals of free speech (the same exact free speech which allows them to practice their craft to begin with) when they signed the letter protesting PEN awards. Barry Arrington’s new best friends, those people …
I’m not willing to get too carried away with congratulating ourselves on being Noble Defenders of Free Speech. This site, this thread, these commenters, are nothing compared to persons who risked being sent to a gulag, or who risk at this very moment being murdered by terrorists for printing an “offensive” political cartoon. But taking the piss out of a tin-pot Barry or KF is the first line of defense.
Stalin, Big Brother…and Darwin advocates of course.
Atheists are some of the biggest censors on the internet, so let’s not forget to include them. Guerilla skeptics, Eugenie Scott, Coyne, Prethero, Deborah Kelemen, Neil DeGrasse Tyson, National Academy of Science, Smithsonian, Dawkins, Krauss, Steven Novella, …you guys are some of the best, and certainly the most prolific-make sure you take your credit.
I just have to give all due respect to the posters here who think that there was any discussion at all going on between Aurelio and Winston in that thread.
What does it matter whom the discussion was “going on between” when some tin-pot tyrant decides to delete the very existence of one of the participants in that thread? Deleted incompetently, of course, because Barry Arrington is a nincompoop and left ghost-quotes inside other people’s replies — which prove that Aurelio had existed there for awhile — even if it’s no longer possible to reconstruct exactly what Aurelio was saying or who he was saying it to in at least 17 deleted comments.
Just out of idle curiosity, Mung, were you there at the moment witnessing whichever thing happened to break Barry? What could have made BA lose his ever-lovin’ mind like that? If you’ve got the gossip, do tell.
So, for my own edification, has Barry ever deleted all the posts of anyone else from UD? Isn’t perhaps just a tad bit of skepticism in order?
Skepticism about what?
Skepticism that all of Aurelio’s posts were deleted out of that thread? Um, no, that’s a fact.
Skepticism that it was Barry Arringon who did the deleting? Um, maybe that’s a valid question. If not Barry, then who?
Kairosfocus has been enough of a wanna-be dictator in the past to be a suspect now. Was it KF? Does he have the admin power to do so? He clearly can and did insert stuff into other people’s comments on that thread. Can he delete them entirely?
Is there anyone else on the list of potential suspects?
Have I/we been blaming BA incorrectly in this case? I would even apologize publicly to him if someone were to provide evidence that a UD admin other than Barry initiated the deletions of Aurelio’s comments in that thread. True, BA’s still a mean-hearted twerp, and he still would be responsible for running a blog site where deleting the entire existence of a participant is considered morally acceptable. I wouldn’t apologize for saying that, because that’s demonstrably true.
But I would apologize in this specific case for blaming Barry directly for deleting Aurelio if he weren’t the one who actually did the dirty work.
The posts are gone. Odd how you consider the thinnest of evidence as evidence for ID yet when the evidence is clear and directly in front of you (or, rather, not) you talk about skepticism.
I believe that’s what KF calls selective hyper skepticism. You might want to check, your bias is showing!
From someone who claims to know about computers, bit of a selective, specific bug no? What are the chances of that.
Care to make a design inference?
Like you’d be able to recognize such anyway.
Well, Winston responded to Aurelio, so I guess Winston thought there was a discussion.
Elizabeth, if you posted some bit of nonsense, and then I posted a response, and then you never bothered to engage my critique, that’s hardly a discussion.
It would be a subjective judgement, though.
The biggest problem I find with discussions about ID is that both sides tend to assume that the other side is being deliberately evasive/obtuse and/or blinded by ideology. I don’t know how that can be fixed, although my chief motivation for providing this site was to at least provide a forum where we could try. That’s why I delete nothing, apart from a very narrow and tightly defined category of material, and even there, the post is left intact, and only the material redacted.
That’s because what appears to one person to be a reasonable discussion, or possibly, a series of successful rebuttals, can appear to another to be something quite different. So the first step is to leave the exchange visible, so readers can at least make their own judgement.
A second step would be to try to find some common ground for engagement. So often, we aren’t even talking about the same thing – what one person means by “evolution” or “search” or whatever, isn’t what another person means. Or metaphors are interpreted at different depths.
That’s why I appreciated Winston’s clarity on what he meant by a “search”. Which was not what most people originally thought he meant, as far as I could tell.
I think this must be an accident – may be an unanticipated by-product of banning him. It is too obvious and pointless to simply delete all his comments.
People have been banned before from UD. We all know that.
Did all their posts disappear as well?
akiak the answer is no. But I could be wrong.
Maybe I will go look for any remaining posts by keiths.
I was wondering that. I don’t know of such a thing in WordPress, but it may be that certain banning actions also remove all posts, and that whoever wielded the banhammer picked up the wrong weapon.
Certainly mine, from two incarnations, mostly seem to be there (some may be missing, I don’t know – certainly specific posts are sometimes deleted).
Both types of bannings have occurred in the past: the traditional you-cannot-post-any-more, which comes in either the ‘is no longer with us’ or the silent varieties, and the fully Orwellian unperson treatment. Barry and his colleagues in the Party are not as thorough with the Memory Hole as Winston Smith was, so breadcrumbs persist: the unperson is quoted by others, and the post numbering goes haywire…
As a moderator on another forum, I have witnessed from the inside several erasures. Sometimes a person will request erasure because their web history has become embarrassing. They have a new job or a new partner. Depending on the software, this can be easy or hard. I don’t believe it is likely to be an accident. It can put the website down for a while.
I note in passing that UD was intermittent recently. I commented on that.
[delurk]
DaveScot sent most of the evidence of my brief commenting career at UD down the Memory Hole, though a few stranded anchor babies remain.
I suppose, in the same way that we mustn’t impute DaveScot’s sins to Barry, the orphan quotes should not be sent to perdition merely for the sins of their progenitor!
[relurk]
Mung:
I find three instances of a commenter’s entire output being silently deleted from UD, as documented on the BlogCzar thread at AtBC. All occurred during DaveScot’s regime as BlogCzar.
DaveScot was subsequently deposed, then banned by Barry hissself.
Yes, that’s probably true.
As far as I know, if you delete a user in WordPress, that deletes everything posted. So the trick is to disable the account without deleting it (maybe change the password to something that the user couldn’t know).
I’m guessing something like that happened here.
Makes sense. After all, Barry has had little practice banning others, and could easily have made a mistake due to inexperience.
*chuckles*
Indeed, it’s three button presses to delete a user account and can only be done by someone with admin permissions. Speaking as one who has had several sockpuppets (as well as in accounts in my own name three or four times) silenced) their chief weapon is perpetual moderation and disabling the login in some way. Oh and the latest wheeze of IP blocking…I’ll come in again.
Colour me sceptical! Let’s see if anyone owns up. I’ll not be holding my breath.
In WordPress, “Delete user” removes all comments by that user unless you take the option “Assign to” and you can then associate them with another user.
I wouldn’t be too quick to make excuses for Barry until he acknowledges that Aurelio’s history has been deleted. But I won’t hold my breath waiting for this to happen.
OK, so it could be done by accident, then, if you went to Delete User instead of Ban User, yes?