As the original Moderation page has developed a bug so that permalinks no longer navigate to the appropriate comment, I thought I’d put up a page for continuing discussion on moderating issues. The Rules can be found there so anyone with an issue should check that they are familiar with them.
26th June 2015: the bug has now affected this page so there is now a new Moderation Issues page here.
walto,
Two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner. I suggest that it is you who is unwilling to recognize the true nature of government.
In the referenced discussion, we were discussing political ends that you support.
I would not. I would only use defensive force to protect people and their property from the initiation of force or fraud.
Thank you for recognizing that.
Alan Fox,
I understand your view. The fact remains that the force of the state is used to take the property of people who have committed no crime. We can argue about whether or not it is justified, but there is no argument about the fact that the threat of violence is what backs up state power.
Beautiful cinnamon roll too good for this world too pure.
I don’t see you renouncing any of the benefits of living in a first-world nation with a government that collects taxes to achieve goals you support, Patrick, like maybe roads you drive on, or police and fire department that keeps your meth-lab neighbor from burning down your whole neighborhood … and I”m pretty sure from the mere fact that you’re posting here and not in prison somewhere means that you’re not a principled tax resister. So you’re evidently willing to go along with the system (perhaps protestingly, but not protesting in such a way that will actually cost you anything you want), you just choose to slam someone else for wanting the system. No big dif.
I think the word you’re looking for to describe yourself is: hypocrite.
The problem wasn’t with “force,” but with the idea that they’re MY ends. Obviously every goernment requires the use of force. Patrick may prefer a “state of nature.” Those with the most guns there do best.
You’re being way too nice to Patrick here, walto.
Yep, libertarian heaven is Somalia.
Patrick,
I’m no friend of state power: government should be servant, not master. But I’m not sure what, practically, you are advocating. That people should get out and vote for the less corrupt option? That we should campaign for office ourselves? That governments should not be allowed to collect taxes?
hotshoe_,
There are men and women with guns who will kidnap or kill me if I were to defend myself against the government, however ethical that defense might be. I’m working with politics on the local and state level to try to make a difference.
I do “slam” people who support this corrupt system because using other people as a means to your own ends is immoral. I would not do that to another human being.
I save that word for people who use euphemisms like “will of the majority” and “taxation” to hide from themselves the bare fact that they’re really talking about tyranny and theft.
Ah, I see you are! Well you are to be congratulated for that.
I’m just always too nice, I think; it’s a congenital fault of mine. I’ve got to work on it. ;>}
walto,
I would prefer the minimal government possible. That might be none at all or it might be an army capable of defending the borders and a police force capable of preventing force and fraud internally. It certainly isn’t the ever growing leviathan we have now.
I’d like people to understand what they’re really saying when they “want the government to take care of it.” I want force to be the last possible alternative considered, not the first. I don’t want thugs committing atrocities in my name. I don’t want to control others and I don’t want to be controlled. I want all relationships between people to be mutually consensual.
One small step toward that is using accurate terms. Statists don’t like to admit that they are initiating force, but that is exactly what they are doing.
🙂
@ walto
I’m not asking you to kiss and make up with Keith, walto, but would you consider trying meeting half-way on this. I’d consider it a great favour.
Alan Fox,
All of those are good. Like I said in an earlier comment, I’d like to shrink the government to minimum possible level. That might be none at all, but given that there are other governments around that may not be possible.
For some practical examples from the U.S. perspective, I see these as a good start: http://www.downsizinggovernment.org
I’m not a libertarian, so I am more comfortable with the exercise of state power than Patrick is. However, I agree with him that we shouldn’t kid ourselves about the nature of that power.
People have to be coerced to do things against their will.
And I’ve derailed the Moderation Issues thread. Sorry, petrushka.
If anyone wants to continue this, I’ll start a different thread. Either way, I’ll stop commenting on off topic issues here.
Patrick,
I have to go to bed, but I think an OP would be interesting, though it may unfortunately need policing with the strong views on display. 🙂
I think it was me starting the OT by mentioning moderation issues. I thought it went well, though 🙂
I’ve been on the receiving end of government force several times. The first time I won the lottery for the hunger games in Vietnam.
You can talk about the greater good, but it is supported by force. I also spent seven years in children’s protective services. I have a fairly dim view the implementation of such efforts, however well intentioned.
So I have spent 9 years in government service, seven of them devoted to assisting abused children. Yet I am not a big fan of the policies or leadership of such services.
Alan:
How about it, walto?
Walto, you listed some specific things you would like to force people to do or to pay for. All very nice things. Who could possibly object?
I have personally seen the bared teeth. I have been the teeth. I had for seven years the absolute and unopposable power to take children from parents. I think I avoided doing a lot of harm, but I can’t say the same of the system I worked in.
Neil Rickert said:
When Eugenie Scott was Executive Director at NCSE, she had this to say (and it is still up on that site):
So no, it’s not just Lewontin, Neil. And when the Executive Director issues a statement like that on NCSE, that’s about as close as it gets to officially defining the methodology.
O/T: I was wondering, if ID is dead, why does the NCSE still have ID all over it’s front page?
Alan Fox said:
Neither I nor anyone else thinks Lewontin “speaks for the entire scientific community”, Alan, although the way Lewontin phrases his statements, it’s clear he thought he was speaking on behalf of the entire scientific community. Quoting him in support of the argument that self-described materialist scientists seem to be biased against certain possiblities is entirely fair.
Did someone else at UD (besides Aurelio Smith) have their entire post history deleted?
William to the rescue.
Keep moving those goalposts, William .
Eugenie Scott doesn’t speak for science, either. She did at one time speak for NCSE.
There are some scientists who assert that methodological naturalism is required for science. There are other scientists who disagree. Count me as among those who disagree.
NCSE doesn’t set policy for science. Actually, I don’t think anyone sets policy for science. It’s up to individual scientists, journal editorial boards, etc, to decide on policies that they will follow in their own domain.
I was the victim of CPS only once, so I guess it didn’t sour me on the concept forever.
But honestly, even with the years of systemic failure that you must have witnessed, what’s the moral alternative? Is it moral to leave children to be tortured by their family, as if we just can’t be bothered to care enough to intervene? You know that a non-governmental intervention might occur and might work: a loving neighbor might be able to unofficially adopt the neglected child without lethal friction from the family — but you also know that in most cases the neighbors can’t intervene into the family’s life without making things worse.
I care about the children next door, but believe me, I’m not going to risk asking them if they’re okay without their parent’s prior permission — and the parents are the ones who have “teeth” ie guns in their home, not me. If those kids actually do need help, they’re going to have to get it via a mandated reporter going to CPS. Do you think that the world is really going to be a better place if we collectively agree to repeal all child-abuse-reporting laws, defund all government child-service agencies, take the teeth out of any anti-abuse laws and just say “pretty please don’t hurt your children, it makes us feel bad but there’s nothing we can do because we can’t use any force against you”?
I think it’s immoral to put the burden of caring for abused children on the one or two neighbors who are willing to stick their necks out, to take on the risks without compensation and without backup. I don’t know if the current governmental system is salvageable, but I know that the old it-takes-a-village system never worked well enough once we got ourselves out of the villages.
Old graveyards are filled with little tiny markers for the four and five and six year olds. It wasn’t just epidemic childhood diseases that killed them. Now, the system still sucks, but a child being murdered by their parents is so rare it makes headlines. Is it genuinely worse, or better, that they get the chance to live to adulthood?
Rich:
Indeed.
William, you stated that:
Surely even you understand how laughable that claim is.
Patrick:
JonF:
I am happy and proud to be associated with TSZ. Our foes not only can comment here without censorship, they can even post their own OPs! That was a stroke of genius on Lizzie’s part.
Consider what that accomplishes:
1. It renders ridiculous the claim that we are “afraid” of addressing our opponents’ arguments.
2. It shows that we want a level playing field, even to the extent of granting authorship privileges to our foes.
3. #1 and #2 demonstrate our confidence in our criticisms of ID and creationism. When your position is strong, who needs artificial advantages?
4. It establishes TSZ as the “anti-UD”. This is the place to have open discussions about ID (or any other topic), and even ID supporters recognize that.
5. It deprives the people who hide at UD (like KF, Eric Anderson, etc.) of an excuse for not appearing here. Anyone who claims to want open discussion, but nevertheless prefers UD over TSZ, isn’t being honest.
Lizzie took a risk in establishing such an open policy, but I think it has paid off handsomely.
Also, JonF, you seem to think that some great harm comes of simply allowing Sal to post his YEC crap here while blithely ignoring challenges and rebuttals.
But keep in mind that the real audience isn’t Sal — it’s the other readers of those threads. The onlookers can see Sal’s positions being systematically dismantled by you and others, and they can see Sal desperately trying to dodge the issues you raise. You’re doing a genuine service to those readers, and it’s not at all futile.
Sure, some of them will be impervious to evidence, just like Sal. But not all of them. I speak as someone who was raised a YEC and who would have jettisoned it much sooner had I been exposed to arguments like the ones you and the others are presenting against Sal’s flimsy positions.
(Alas, the Web wasn’t even a gleam in Berners-Lee’s eye back then. Kids these days don’t know how good they have it…)
I was going to do a Walto / Keith’s ‘congenital mirth defect’ joke, but it’s about as funny as a burning orphanage.
Quote mining is lazy. It demonstrates nothing other than that someone else said something, over which then, in the absence of the person saying it, we can bicker endlessly.
If Mung wants a Guide to Appropriate Quote Mines, how about this ground rule: Argue In Your Own Fucking Words. If you have a juicy quote, Google it. If the bulk of the sources reference Creationist websites (chances are that’s where you got it from anyway), then give it a rest. It illustrates the bankruptcy of the Creationist position that so much is done by copy-paste.
As to Lewontin, The New York Review of Books is not a guide to How To Do Science, and nor was Lewontin offering such advice. He was describing Sagan’s position, which may or may not also be his own. Should anyone care? He was a Marxist too. Does that matter? Bottom line: if William has a better way to do science, he should get off his pontificating arse and actually do it, and stop whining about how everyone else does it. But if there is evidence for design, it must be material evidence.
And for people like me, who, living in a culture where Biblical literalism has never had much traction (caveat on recent fundamentalism, both Christian and Islamic) never came across YEC mythology till the internet allowed the visibility of websites like AIG on to my screen, Sal’s recent foray here has been a revelation. I never bothered looking closely at YEC “explanations” because the religious motive for promoting them seemed (and still do seem) so simplistically literal. Seeing at first hand how such motive-driven explanations fly in the face of the evidence when examined dispassionately, and how impervious Sal, who I assume is typical of YEC Christians, is to looking at the broad picture… well, it’s astonishing.
Sal, do you ever take a walk in country where the geology is exposed?I’m lucky, I guess, living where I do, and seeing so many beautiful examples. There’s a nearby peak that has an eroding escarpment where I could take you to gather fossilised oyster shells which lie in vast quantities. How did that happen 2,000 ft above sea level and why is it just a bed of oyster shells, with nothing to be seen of fossils of any other flora or fauna?
I hope you try hotshoe_’s suggestion of Earthcache walks that she mentions here.
Alan, I have admitted that I have occasionally shitted up this site. I have also promised try to stop doing that or leave the premises. I think that should be enough.
I note that keiths has made neither any such admission nor any such promise, but he nevertheless requires me to make a further admission, and to something I strongly disagree with.
You two would make a hell of a diplomatic team, but I’m not signing your version of SZ’s Treaty of Versailles anyway.
Good grief, how on Earth would I know what has happened to every single post ever made at UD? I don’t even read most threads there. Can you two at least try to be reasonable?
Try and look at the context, keiths & rich. Scroll up and look at my posts. I had asked Alan why he thought he was particularly chosen to have all his prior posts deleted. As far as I know, he’s the only one this has ever happened to.
Now, here’s a situation where the context of what I actually said is available in this very thread and I’m correcting you about my meaning concerning something I just wrote. Will you continue to quote mine this in the future and misrepresent what I meant, even after the author has corrected you, right here and now, right after I said it?
Or, will you in the spirit of good debate accept my correction? If not – if you insist on using my quote in a manner I did not mean it – how is that not quote-mining?
William,
Nobody expects you to.
Yes, you are squirming around in the gaps between words as usual.
In short it is perfectly reasonable to think that you would know that UD has a history of not only deleting a users entire comment history but of deleting individual comments, editing others and so on. Do you deny you are aware of this activity?
Pot meet kettle.
So, are you really so unreasonable as to think that I or any other ID advcoate thinks that Lewontin or Scott or Sagan or others had actually been voted in to speak on behalf of all scientists? In the same manner that anti-ID advcoates use quotes of some ID advocates to support a point about metaphysical bias or political agendas, it’s fair game to use the quotes of sceintists that do in fact represent metaphysical biases. Ciorneilus Hunter, at his blog, finds examples of this bias all the time.
How else would you expose such bias and make the point that it exists than by quote and reference of such instances as part of your argument?
William J. Murray,
Bias exists. Got it. So what? Stop quote mining a quote-miner and make a point.
I haven’t ever heard of anyone’s entire prior post history being deleted, which is what I was talking about to Alan, and why I asked him why his prior posts were specifically selected for en mass deletion. Yes, I know UD edits and deletes individual posts.
Do you know of someone else that had their entire history of posts deleted at UD?
If that’s what you need to tell yourself when I correct your erroneous inferences, there’s not much I can do about it.
It’s the endless recycling of these second-hand quotes that is particularly irksome. The same ones, over and over and over and over and …. Copy and paste / link to Gil / “as noted Harvard geneticist RL says” yadda yadda yadda. Nothing of scientific import to say, but just look how biased (these) scientists are! Grrrr grrrr. They’d accept ID otherwise, ‘cos it’s just Obvious.
RTH:
Twins separated at mirth?
WJM:
I looked into it when Aurelio Smith was vaporized. Three prior instances are documented on the AtBC Blogczar thread.
William J. Murray,
Further, having waded through that third-hand 2006 mess, there is very little to take exception to – it doesn’t even support the point you are trying to advance. Evolutionary processes, conventionally defined (ie, variations and their changes in frequency due to differential survival and reproduction), do not have goals. If there IS an entity with goals that is also directing, that’s as may be, but the processes of evolution carry on regardless when it isn’t. It is important to erase the notion of teleology from a student’s mind in respect of evolutionary mechanisms of adaptation, and most of those quotes appear to have that aim. Organisms don’t, on the best evidence available, direct their own evolution.
I wasn’t familiar with that. Thanks for bringing that to my attention.
Allan Miller said:
How do you know this?
How do you know organisms don’t direct their own evolution? How do you know the entire process isn’t teleological?
You argue against my perspective of materialistic bias in science by insisting that such materialist views are valid a priori positions in science and must be taught to students?
Good grief.
William J. Murray,
What??? How could it be otherwise? Where would such intent reside in a disparate population of competing entities?
It’s as if I said “the wind does not have goals”, or “falling objects do not choose to fall”, and you said “how do you know this”?
Listen to yourself. Good grief, indeed.
You’d have to do the impossible and crack open one of those books, read past the assumed bias, to try and understand why it is not an ideological statement. Easier to stick with Gil’s abstraction – after all, it confirms your prejudice; why would you put any work in to find out otherwise?
[eta: I’ve created an OP since this is OT for Moderation]
Notable: I have no alternatives to policies I disaprove of. That is why I am not an activist. I have no faith in politics, but I look at the centuries and approve of the general trends of social evolution. I think that separates me from conservatives and libertarians. My disdain for current politics separates me from liberals and progressives.
Regarding children, I take the view common among authors of the best children’s books. Most adults, including those charged with educating and protecting children, do not protect children. They protect themselves.
We don’t. But what we do know is that there is no evidence for either of those things. Hence they can be dismissed until there is such evidence or you go and find such evidence.
Yes, indeed. It’s like arguing with a 5 year old, except I know some 5 year olds that have a greater ability to learn.
I’m sympathetic with this complaint. I have been treated in a similar fashion, and I agree that it is unpleasant. I said something about moderation that contradicted some other things I’d written. When it was brought to my attention, I said something like, ‘You’re right, I didn’t mean that last thing and shouldn’t have written it. I was wrong to have done so.” That post was nevertheless brought up several times subsequently by someone who had seen my retraction.
People say they’re interested in honest, civil debate, but tthat sort of behavior demonstrates a single-minded interest only in WINNING at any cost. It’s disgraceful. So why do you defend it when your buddies at UD do it? When they do it, it’s OK?