In other words, he's one of the chief IDiots.
The video is interesting for several reasons. Not only does it have the look and feel of a 1950's American propaganda film but it mimics the same utter lack of critical thinking that characterized that genre of film. Perhaps this is intentional since the goal is to attack rationality and critical thinking and the last thing you want to do is be accused of using the very tools that lead to evils such as eugenics, evolution, atheism, and Marxism. (But see "doublethink," below.)
The film is about C.S. Lewis and his views of science and scientism. C.S. Lewis, you might recall, is famous for two things: writing about religion and writing science fiction. (Maybe that's only one thing.) He died almost 50 years ago but that's practically modern as far as the IDiots are concerned. What could possibly have changed in only 50 years?
Watch the video to see the worst examples of Intelligent Design Creationism in action. Here are a bunch of people who think they're intellectuals but in fact what they're doing is demonstrating in public that they have nothing to offer beyond some whining about how the scientific way of knowing is blowing them out of the water and making them living anachronisms in the 21st century.
George Orwell is mentioned in the video and that brought to mind the idea of doublethink from his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four.
To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself – that was the ultimate subtlety; consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of doublethink."No wonder the IDiots are afraid of people like George Orwell.
The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them... To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just as long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies – all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.
208 comments :
«Oldest ‹Older 201 – 208 of 208Oh boy, I can play this idiot game as well.
I predict 41.
42.
No, the effect isn't the same, because I don't need to follow that pattern. I could pick whatever cell I liked. Anyway, even if we grant your example, that still shows that the state of the universe at t-minus 100 years does not determine the state of the universe at t. And that was the main point of the anti-determinism part of the argument.
Yeah, so you got it wrong. That doesn't mean that my extraordinary abilities don't still need an explanation. That just tells us what we already knew, that you're such a clown you can't even say with any certainty what drivel is going to spring from your lips next.
@Luther Flint
I must say that you certainly have a bug up your butt about human exceptionalism.
Must have been a real shock to you when you discovered that the earth was not the centre of the universe and does in fact revolve around the sun.
Although it would come as no surprise to me for you to argue in favour of geo-centrism.
Well, at least in the case of free will you haven't created your own special terminology.
I don't think I could handle another session of the transcendence/culture flip flopping.
With respect to your spreadsheet "proof", this is just a ham fisted attempt at humour isn't it ?
You aren't really deranged enough to consider this compelling, let alone coherent, are you ?
I'm thinking it's well past time for the men in white coats to unplug the internet connection, remove the keyboard gently but firmly from your hands (and letting the drool drain off) and escort you back to the rubber room.
A change in the meds may be in order as well.
The earth business doesn't bother me at all. My point is simply that humans are the only creatures we know of that are able to make decisions and to choose to do things in a way that shows we cannot be fully determined by any forces external to us. That's what the spreadsheet proof shows. And the fact you hate it despite not being able to come up with anything wrong with it simply shows that some humans are so terrified of reality they prefer to hide behind a notion of themselves as the puppets of higher power.
Hi Andy,
It is hard to try an answer without entering into a defence of Larry, who I know is able to do that himself if he cared. However, you confirm that all you wanted was to say that Larry engages in propaganda, and thus I suggest that you should have shown something of Larry's that was as bad as this video. I don;t think you would find it. Larry engaged in a few hyperboles here in his answers to you, but he never was like the video. Not even close. So I think you overjudged Larry while accusing him of doing exactly that.
As for the video, come on! I was so nauseated by the propagandistic level that I could not finish watching it. Example, they did isolate a few words by the US president to make him look as "possessed" by "scientism." The word scientism itself is a derogative term, not the name of any philosophy. Man, it was as OTT as Larry presented it (I would say it's worse than that). And yes, despite Larry disowned his own words as sarcasm, I would not. One clear goal of the video is to attack rationality and critical thinking by engaging the audience into emotional turmoil. Associating scientists with "evil." The video is not appealing to reason but to emotion and rhetoric.
So sorry, but I don't think that you will find anything by Larry that looks like 1% of this video crap. Also remember that the IDiots are all about this and nothing else. I think that your judgement of Larry's blog is OTT. Not just wrong, but terribly wrong. I cannot see how would anybody conclude with good reason that Larry's blog is propaganda, let alone that kind of propaganda.
As for commenters, I do not think that you can blame Larry for what we say.
See ya in another thread. I have had little time these days, so might not come back to this thread again.
But the Dover case is a shameful episode because it was in large part won because of Miller's lies.
I'm an attorney. I've read not only the judge's opinion in the Dover case, but most of the transcript. Your statement above bears only as much resemblance to the actual facts as the two words "Dover" and "Miller" provide.
There were many, many reasons the Dover case was won. The central issue in the case was whether what the defendants had done constituted an establishment of religion. By far the most powerful evidence on that front was provided by the defendants themselves, who for example took up church collections to buy copies of "Of Pandas and People" to place in school libraries, then ordered the science teachers to tell their students this text was available. Defendants then proceeded to lie in court about collecting for the book purchase - not a way to convince the court of your bona fides when you say you had no religious motivation at all.
After this sorry show and many others on the part of defendants and their witnesses (including Behe, whose utter dismantling on cross examination was so total the trial judge has recommended it should be taught to law students), there wasn't a lot that plaintiffs' witnesses had left to do.
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