- Over the last month, UD has been down more often than it has been up. In addition, Barry and News have been AWOL, leaving the keys to the kingdom to a pompous, arrogant, sermonizing narcissist. My apologies. That was uncharitable. It appears that Gordon Mullings, the Montserrat messiah, has been left to clean up after the party.
If UD does go the way of the dodo, I worry about Bornagain77 and Kairosfocus. Two individuals whose entire meaning for existence appears to be centred on their UD personas. Hopefully they have other outlets for their “sky is falling” rants.
Until last week, I haven’t visited UD in several years. Never thought about it.
Maybe KF will take this as another portent of the approaching apocalypse. For some reason he brings to mind the Woody Harrelson character in the movie “2012” where he’s watching the Yellowstone super-volcano going up and cheering it on.
There was one positive thing about UD–it would run abridged versions of articles from Evolution News which allowed for two things. First, you didn’t have to read the original article and, second, you could post indirect comments which were a backdoor way to go after EN. Although the nutty articles available for comment were myriad, my favorites were the two series by Neil Thomas (Darwin was an idiot) and Richard Weikart (Darwin was a proto-Nazi). These two managed to lay some serious whoop-ass on Darwin (you know what they say about defaming the dead), from which I doubt Darwin will ever recover. I know I’m still reeling from this double-barreled attack on the master of Down House…….LOL
This is interesting. If you go to https://uncommondescent.com/ and then type old. in front of uncommondescent you can see the old site, with the last posts from yesterday morning. However, if you directly type old.uncommondescent.com you go to the new site. The old site is still at the old IP, so my guess is this is just temporary. I don’t have an account any more so I can’t login, but one of you might try just to see what happens.
Aleta
Didn’t work for me when I tried it. 🙁
Hmmm. Works for me, with Chrome on a Mac. First time I tried it I got a privacy error, but I just went to advanced and said let me see anyway.
https://old.uncommondescent.com/archives/ works, and then deleted /archives/ works for me also
And, for what it’s worth, just to see if it works, I’m downloading the whole old site with Sitesucker.
This is probably not important at all, but I like trying to figuring out how the internet works.
aleta,
I tried it and was able to post a comment. Weird!
Looks like Origenes has discovered the old site also.
I logged in with some old credentials from another lifetime, to my surprise, and posted a comment!
Got a note, however, that my comment is awaiting moderation, so I doubt it will ever go through.
And I found another old account that is still active. Good thing I didn’t know about this as I might have succumbed to the temptation to post these last few months.
Got in using MS Edge. I use Opera as my regular browser and that doesn’t seem to work
I have succeeded in downloading much (maybe all, but I don’t know what is missing) of the old Uncommon Descent site in it’s original format, with comments numbered and dated. I wonder if this is of interest to anyone? I know Joe Felsenstein and maybe others of you have some connections to organizations that might be interested, or maybe not.
Let me know if any of you have thoughts.
Thanks
I have found when you do that, it’s browser specific.
On the other hand, several browsers use the google rendering engine.
Hmmm. It seems to work on both Firefox and Safari on Mac as well as Chrome, but maybe they are all related.
The hopefully-entire content of Uncommon Descent are on the Wayback Machine at the Internet Archive. Easily available. Go to archive.org and in the search box put https://uncommondescent.com
However I hope aleta keeps her copy just in case.
Interesting. FWIW, archive.org is slow and a local copy such as I have is very fast, so someone wanting to do some serious research would find my downloaded copy convenient.
Also, I don’t think the wayback machine is complete. I compared a few posts and the comments on the wayback machine aren’t complete.
Now will anyone ever care? I don’t know. But I think a complete dump as of this moment that could run locally might be useful if anyone ever had some serious work to do.
aleta,
How big is the file, aleta?
Joe Felsenstein,
Joe takes us down memory lane at The Panda’s Thumb.
The file is about 16 gb.
Here’s a comment that I posted earlier on Panda’s Thumb:
It must be a bitter blow for the likes of KF, BA77 and Denise O’Leary when you think of the millions of words they poured into that site over the years, I wonder if they’ll band together to create a new site – UD Redux, for example.
I’ve uploaded the UD download to a google drive. It’s a compressed 2 gb file. Here’s the link, if you’re interested.
drive.google.com/sharing
I suspect the deciding factor to close was probably because News wanted to retire and Barry couldn’t find anyone to post several OPs everyday. And there are only so many ways to rearrange KF’s word salad and pretend that they are unique OPs.
Why there? Does it have anything to do with a certain echo box? Would you ask him for Science?
There’s a lot of dubious characters that hide there too. I wonder why. Are they not aware of tsz? Or is it by choice? Even the “peaceful war” guy showed up there ( but not here) to gloat about the voluntary shut down of an unremarkable website as if it were the end of ID.
Thank you very much! I want to take a look – for old times’ sake. Sometimes during the last year I wondered how big the effect of the one-sided termination of the quasi-symbiotic relationship between UD and Panda’s Thumb’s Uncommonly Dense Thread was: now it seems that it could have been lethal…
DiEb,
The antievolution.org threads in their “After The Bar Closes” group were at one time connected to Panda’s Thumb, nominally, but they ceased to have any real connection years ago. Steve Story started the Uncommonly Dense thread which needled UD. With UD’s kairosfocus / bornagain77 era, things got boring, repetitive, and silly. With Steve Story’s untimely death in an accident, the participants in the thread all felt that it was best to let the thread die with him. It is perhaps no surprise that UD got killed off within a couple of years after that — it had been brain-dead for a while.
Just FYI: Looks like maybe the old.uncommondescent.com site is no longer up, so that was short-lived. The name now points to the DI archived version..
Someone over there is obviously reading TSZ. 😉
I know TSZ has extended a welcome to any UD regulars who would care to visit but I doubt their pride would allow them to take up permanent residence here as an alternative forum. That makes me wonder if there are any moves afoot there to set up a new ID blog.
Joe Felsenstein,
Everyone has to believe in something. You have your “religion”. Others have theirs.
The difference between the two is one: HOPE.
YOU HAVE NONE. ZERO.
Just in case you didn’t know or suppressed this phenomenon because of your preconceived ideas…
I hope this helps…
Dembski finally explains his reasons :https://evolutionnews.org/2023/04/uncommon-descent-a-farewell-and-remembrance/
It’s not like the thumb-sucking pandas want. But again, them pandas never get it right.
So you don’t trust the rabbid pandas either? They were so happy to see UD gone…
Reading through Dembski’s lines, I’d say it’s all about controlling the message. It always is. UD independents started to deviate too much from the party line. I personally fault EN for accepting Darwins crazy concepts including “natural selection”, the craziest of them all.
It’s definitely not like the atheists ever posed any threat with their boring, illogical comments. Take this panda for instance:
Poor fellow doesn’t know that the” evidence ” is utterly lacking upon closer inspection, he at least double-counts the years and geographical spread of the craziness, and finally, he disregards the thousands of years and counting when the smartest people held and hold opposite views.
aleta,
I’m sure everyone appreciates aleta’s efforts in saving and sharing the Uncommon Descent records. I certainly do.
I thought it would be worth downloading myself as if a bunch of people save the files, there’s more chance they’ll survive.
Unfortunately, I think there is an issue that my old desktop and laptop are Windows10 and my phone is Android. I think aleta’s files are in Mac format as I get “unknown file type” and I don’t have a five-year old handy.
ETA : Ah,the 2gig zip file seems to be downloading to my laptop now.
ETA2 No good. Tried Chrome, Firefox, and Opera. All starts OK after ignoring warnings. Gets to around 40 Mb (promising download completes in 40 mins or so) then “Failed, network error” on all three browsers.
ETA3 Speedtest tells me download speed is 35 Mb/sec currently.
ETA4 Set up ZIP Extractor and the zipped 2GB file has now downloaded (via Chrome).
ETA5 Zip extractor tells me 235098 files are in the zip file and I think it is in the process of opening them but I have to keep clicking “page unresponsive”. Not sure if I’m getting anywhere.
J-Mac,
I see this claim now and again. Hope for what, exactly? I don’t get it……..
Hi Alan. The files are just html, so Windows vs Mac shouldn’t make any difference. There are about 235,000 files, so it appears you have downloaded the whole thing. (I download it myself htis morning just to make sure it is complete, and it is.)
Zip Extractor should extract the files to a folder on your computer. Do you see the folder that Zip Extractor has created? Does it have any files in it?
I partially agree with nonlin above when he writes, ” I’d say it’s all about controlling the message. It always is. UD independents started to deviate too much from the party line”
The UD discussions were contributing very little to a serious defense of ID, and the regulars were mostly too far out to be taken seriously (I say generously). Why spend money to provide a place to mainly support kf’s never-ending rehash of his ideas, or have Jerry tells us that no one knows anything, or for BA to proselytize about the Shroud of Turin? And I agree News wanted to retire and that other guy didn’t last long. It just wasn’t adding anything to the ID cause, from their point of view, and wasn’t worth the continuing expense.
Not everybody has to believe something. I’m quite comfortable with uncertainty.
Perhaps it’s my childhood. I grew up rural. It was fairly common to have electrical or water outages. I’m happy when cars start and when ordinary things work, but not surprised when they don’t.
So by temperament, I don’t expect ideas to be perfect or consistent. Life is messy.
It’s easy to understand the appeal of religious certainties when you see the comfort and strength they bring to those who have lost somebody dear to them, for example. I think Marx was right when he referred to it as the opium of the people. It may be illusory but the hope it provides is a spiritual anesthetic that neither science nor atheism can hope to match.
People differ in their need for certainty.
Since reality doesn’t offer certainty, people who cannot tolerate ambiguity will gravitate to ideologies.
J-Mac,
I think you make a great point here – religion offers HOPE. And, as you have noted previously (well, actually rabbited on about it interminably, but…) in addition to confirmation bias, there exists “optimism bias” wherein people tend to believe stuff that makes them happier, or more hopeful, regardless of evidentiary support.
It is helpful in explaining why people cling to fairy tales. However, I am a little surprised that you, J-Mac, would pursue this line of argument: it is quite the own goal.
What Seversky said.
Sorry, RL intervened. The 2GB file (old.uncommondescent.com) downloaded and is now on both laptop and desktop hard drives. Yes, the folder tells me it contains 238095 files but refuses access. I am far from the most computer-savy person so likely I’m missing something obvious.
No worries, will have another tinker when I have time.
aleta,
It’s not really complete, because the images are not included. AFAICT, all of the images are still read from an uploads directory at old UD.
I thought about making a more compact version, without all of the repeated stuff (Archive links, Latest comments, loads of CSS, Ad-scripts, views by category, date and so on) and getting a full list of UD-based images. But I’m not sure I’ll ever get around to it.
Have you read any fairy tales?
Not Bowdlerized?
I used a program to download the site, and I don’t know whether it got everything. But the old.uncommondescent site is gone, so I don’t think one could get it anymore.
And, Alan, I don’t know why your computer won’t give you access to the files. They are just html. Find the index.html file at the main level and open it with a browser. If your computer won’t give you access to any of the files there is some type of Windows permissions problems that I wouldn’t know anything about. Sorry about that.
No worries. Now Uncommon Descent is gone, and the pro-UD/ID regulars have lost their last venue for commenting on and discussing ID, having the saved files just in case* seems enough for now.
* in case of what, though? I can’t come up with anything.
Maybe Tucker Carlson might consider running a pro-ID site now he’s out of a job?
I think it’s fairly clear in-case-of-what. In case some ID advocate mischaracterizes what they said on UD and what ID opponents said in response. It’s been known to happen.
I’m so glad you have survived the deadly virus. This must be the final proof of the evolution, no?
Now that I have had more time to think about it, if the few remaining participants in a blog I owned were dominated by KF, BA77 and RELATD, I think I would pull the plug as well.
It’s not pride — it’s something else.
The ID movement has been, from the very beginning, part of a cultural movement to fight against the secularization of Western culture. (Such anti-secularism is not itself historically new — I’m reading a lot about the anti-secularism of the 1930s and 1940s for my book project on the early history of cognitive psychology.)
For the ID true believers, even coming into a space that is contaminated with secularism would risk spiritual contamination. All of us here are, from their perspective, at best the Devil’s useful idiots — we do his work without realizing it. To engage with us in anything like respectful debate would give us more credit than we deserve.
But, given that perspective on ID, there is simply no longer any need for an ID blog, because ID has won. Not in the sense of having supplanted evolution as a scientific theory, but that was never the real goal.
Look at the kooky views openly displayed at Uncommon Descent — denial that climate change is caused by combustion of fossil fuels, open derision of the very idea that gender might not be strict binary, lots of anti-vaxxers and paranoia about governments.
These are all now mainstream talking points of the Republican Party of the United States.
The ID movement no longer needs a blog because they have captured the whole damn party.
If you want to see where this is very well headed, consider what’s happening in Ottawa County, Michigan (paywalled, Washington Post). Coming soon to our national government!
When he said that religion is “the opium of the people” he meant that it desensitizes them to their suffering — religion does nothing to mitigate their suffering, but it offers a meaning to that suffering:
It is true that neither science nor atheism could do what religion does, and cannot replace it. What is necessary, Marx thought, is to abolish religion by abolishing the need for religion. And that only be done, he thought, through a complete transformation in the basic structure of society such that our real needs are actually satisfied.
With the actual satisfaction of our real needs, we would no longer crave the illusory satisfaction that religion offers.
This is what I think. They were embarrassing to the movement: why support them?