You still have yet to show how the insurrection failed to meet this definition.
an act or instance of revolting against civil authority or an established government.
You are just making up your own personal definition, and then showing that this particular insurrection did not meet it. That’s fine if you want to do that, of course. I’m no hypocrite. But the definition above was clearly met.
No, I’m using the word in its standard meaning, a meaning actually confirmed by the synonyms and examples in the very Webster entry you cited!
No, it was not. Again, English does not seem to be your strong subject. What occurred was a “protest” – albeit an unruly and undisciplined one – not an “insurrection.” A protest, even when accompanied by some law-breaking (blocking traffic, parking in the wrong places, violating noise by-laws, etc.), is not an “insurrection.” But I’m sure you will continue to misuse the English language in accord with whatever political aims you have.
It was both. They are not mutually exclusive terms.
Anything else you need explained regarding usage of the English language?
True.
False. It was only protest, not insurrection.
You never have taught me, and never will be capable of teaching me, anything regarding the general use of the English language. Maybe regarding the specialized jargon of psychiatry, but not regarding everyday communications.
This seems to miss the point entirely.
The title of this thread also misses the point. At least, as I read it, @Puck_Mendelssohn was not making a point about Weikart’s book. He was making a point about the moral character of the argumentation coming from the DI.
When we make judgements of moral character, we rarely do it on the basis of a book. How we make those moral judgements is evidently quite complex.
As an example, @Evolution_is_a_Hoax posted a lot of statements that I saw as false. Nevertheless, I judged him as an honest person – honest, but mistaken. There’s another poster here who comes across to me as thoroughly dishonest, yet I am not aware of many actually false statements.
How we make moral judgements is complex. Most people in this thread are reacting to moral judgements that they have made. Repeatedly complaining that they may not have read the book just does not seem particularly relevant.
But he indicated that he found that sort of argument in Weikart’s book. I’ve been pressing him for specifics. What is “immoral” about Weikart’s arguments? What is “immoral” about arguing that certain applications of Darwinian ideas, i.e., social Darwinism, can have, and in fact have had, bad moral and social effects?
You say that whether or not people have actually read Weikart is not relevant, but it’s utterly relevant. You cannot argue: “The position of Weikart is immoral” if you don’t know what the position of Weikart is. And if Weikart’s position is a subtle, complex one, requiring book-length treatment for its expression, you can’t know his position (at least, not in full) without reading the entire book. Most of the people here are making very sloppy inferences about what Weikart argues based on reading a few snippets, and several of them have gone out of their way to find negative reviews of Weikart and claim those reviews are justified – though they can’t possibly tell that those views are justified until they have actually compared what Weikart wrote with what may be a caricature of his views in the presentation of the reviewers.
If you want to talk moral philosophy, I’m happy to talk moral philosophy; But I was not making a point about the moral philosophy of Darwinism, Nazism, etc. I was making a point about people who smear Weikart as a person and an author when they don’t even know what he said, or have only a half-baked and imperfect conception of what he said. Are you defending attacks on an author’s ideas and personal motives coming from people who haven’t bothered to make sure they have author’s ideas straight before they start mouthing off against him?
No Eddie. You have not “refuted” my argument that DI editorial control over the book makes it a DI book. You have in fact carefully avoided the issue of editorial control.
This sort of mendacity is one of the reasons that I avoid interacting with you.
And this sort of baseless ad hominem attack is another of the reasons that I avoid interacting with you.
Skeptics and engaged scientists (the sort most likely to join NCSE, be they atheist or theistic evolutionist) are of course among those most likely to be aware of the DI’s long history of dishonesty.
And I find it irony-meter-explodingly risible that you whine about “vicious prejudice” Eddie, as you are probably are the participant on this forum that that label best fits.
Your responses to me in your last post are wholly without substance, so now would seem an excellent point to return to refusing to interact with you.
Thank the Lord!
Meanwhile, in another discussion, “Eddie” is refusing to read five short blog posts, 'cuz that would be too much work.
And, meanwhile meanwhile, if you DO read whole books by ID proponents on a regular basis and write detailed reviews expressing precisely and accurately what the quality and value of these books is, you’ll get tagged as “reflexive” in your negative reaction to these, even though he hasn’t read the books.
You really haven’t. There was the one initial post, where, my assumption then being that it was impossible that you could know anything about Weikart and still not disapprove, I tried to deflect you from the project of defending Weikart.
No good deed goes unpunished, of course, but if you think after this thread that you are still trying to figure out why I don’t like Weikart, I’m surprised. I provided you two quotes which make Darwin a but-for cause of both Nazi ideology and the Holocaust – barking mad stuff, the kind of thing which, barring some truly extraordinary context, immediately marks a writer as a pornographer for religious extremists. I pointed out the “woke” nature of his methods of slandering dead white men by the unjustified imputation of racism. I pointed out the way that despite actually identifying the Naturalistic Fallacy (as pointed out by @T_aquaticus), he then employs it both to make his argument and to sell books. I pointed out the way he continuously conflates evolutionary theory with the unfortunately-named, but unrelated, phenomenon of “social Darwinism.”
So, I did try to spare you the unpleasant scene of you rushing to defend Weikart. I really did think you had no idea, and I obviously was wrong. But I do find myself wondering why, since it does appear you had some familiarity with the man, you bothered asking the questions at the beginning of this thread in the first place. Obviously you knew why people condemn this man. They are obviously right to do so. So why pretend there is something there to defend?
Absurd. Weikart, and everyone at Discovery, are sworn foes of “wokeness.” Denyse O’Leary writes against “wokeness” almost daily. And calling a specific person a racist, when there is literary evidence for the charge, is not “wokeness.” On the other hand, looking into every nook and cranny for possible racists, sexists, homophobes, etc., and imagining one has found such people based on nothing resembling evidence, but mere paranoia – that is the outcome of “wokeness.”
And you ignored all the other qualifying statements, both in the work you were quoting from and from his many other works. Hardly scholarly. But very, very lawyerly.
I have not defended Weikart’s conclusions. I have defended the reasonable demand that an author be read before he is criticized. You are the only one here who has actually read an entire book by Weikart, so you should be the only one talking. Yet, as you may have noticed, many others are talking. And yes, I’m talking, but not to defend the contents of Weikart’s books, but merely to state clearly that most of the people writing about Weikart here are faking and bluffing, and basing their understanding of him on very limited evidence. But it’s nothing new around here that science-trained individuals don’t have a clue how to reach fair conclusions in the humanities or social sciences, and nothing new around here that those same science-trained individuals would offer firm and loud opinions anyway.
This is obtuse even for Eddie.
Not of its methods. Very much like with postmodernism, it’s “deplore the results, embrace the methods.”
None of those qualifying statements actually help in any way or mitigate the outrageous absurdity of the statements I quoted. He still is insisting that without Darwin, there’d have been no Nazi ideology and no Holocaust. And yes, it’s very lawyerly to notice that fact.
I pointed out where he says he does not blame Darwin for the Holocaust. It’s clear from other things he says that there were Nazi racialist doctrines (e.g., about the German “Volk”) that did not depend on Darwin. But yes, he does say sometimes that Darwin was a necessary condition for Nazi ideology (not the Holocaust specifically, but Nazi ideology). So there is some unclarity in his presentation, based on the fragments I’ve seen.
That’s why, before rendering any judgment on him, I would read whole works, in which he lays out things in more detail, with all the academic qualifications. It might be that when everything is read, what seems like contradiction is in fact coherent.
But even supposing, for the sake of argument, that in the end his thought is a mess of contradictions, it doesn’t follow that he must be an evil ideologue bent on confusing or misleading people. He might be just a bad scholar or unclear thinker. I am open to such conclusions – but not before I have read a sustained piece of his writing.
You, on the other hand, aren’t satisfied with just showing contradictions and saying that he is not a clear thinker, that his thesis is muddy, etc. You seem determined to paint him as actively evil in intention. And it would require much more command of his body of work than you have demonstrated to come to such an uncharitable conclusion about another human being.
Of course, no one here cares about that; they’re inclined to hate Weikart anyway, merely because he’s associated with Discovery, and they are quite willing to take your half-memory of the text (which you aren’t sure you ever finished reading) as an accurate statement of his views and his arguments. Let’s be honest, Puck; this place is a place where many people who hate ID, hate the DI, and hate the very idea that there might be design in nature come to gather and vent their spleen on anyone they see as directly or indirectly connected to such things. And it’s a place where scholarly nuance, including admitting strong points as well as weak ones in an opponent’s argument, is conspicuously absent. I’m sensitive to this, more than most here, as I had to undergo a long apprenticeship to become a scholar, and, during that apprenticeship, if I ever offered the sort of prejudiced, bellicose, unbalanced arguments that are typical here, my professors (at every level from freshman essays through to Ph.D. dissertation) dressed me down. I was expected to quote fairly and in context, never to render judgments on works I had not read in their entirety, etc. What we see here is nothing like a scholarly discussion of Weikart’s ideas; what we see is the usual PS hatchet job, which (not surprising, since many of the people are the same) resembles the old BioLogos hatchet job, and the Panda’s Thumb hatchet job, etc.
That, of course, is beside the point, because the quotes I gave – which remain outrageous and absurd – do not “blame Darwin for the Holocaust” as such. Rather, they assert that Darwin was a but-for cause or, as he puts it, a “necessary” cause for Nazi ideology and the Holocaust.
I gave two quotes. In the first he says Darwin was a necessary cause for Nazi ideology; in the second, he says Darwin was a necessary cause of the Holocaust.
Again: both of these positions are rip-roaring insane.
Now, mental infirmity of one sort or another might, indeed, cause this kind of thing, rather than bad faith. And just as there’s little point, sometimes, in entertaining questions like “was Hitler insane?” there may be little point in figuring out whether Weikart’s advocacy for evil is the product of mere incompetence coupled with accident, or of an evil motive. The value of the work, in any event, remains the same.
Are you saying that Neil Shubin would agree with you about whales belonging to the Osteichthyes? If so, please give me some page numbers from Your Inner Fish or some reference to one of his other works.
Just stop digging. Let’s agree that you know very little about modern taxonomy. By “modern” I refer to the last 40 years or so. Do you have any idea what a clade is?
I freely admit I know much less about modern taxonomy than you do. But that has nothing to do with my question. You made a claim about the classification of whales which I have not seen, not only in older taxonomic works such as I read in my youth, but even in any newer biological writings that I have read.
I’ll ask my question again: Does Shubin (since you recommended him specifically)–does anyone regarded as competent modern taxonomist–say that whales belong to the Osteichthyes? Or are you the lone voice crying in the wilderness on this point?
No need for your usual asperity or personal comments. Just answer the question, with references.
I think this is an alternative to the First Rule of Holes. Instead of “just stop digging,” it’s “see if you can dig another just as deep.”
And yet you refuse to accept that I know what I’m talking about regarding a very simple question of classification. Why?
What newer biological writings have you read that contain information on this?
Yes. Everyone. To be fair, I don’t have a copy of Your Inner Fish handy and can’t say that he specifically mentions whales or discusses formal classification. But there are plenty of other references, for example Benton MJ. Vertebrate Paleontology, 3rd edition, 2005 (which seems to be the only book I have with a formal classification of the vertebrates). Another book, Vargas P. Zardoya F (eds.). The Tree of Life. Sinauer, 2014, defines the group, but you really have to search for it.The Wikipedia page on Osteichthyes has more references. I do note that some authors have at times rejected the group as paraphyletic (including only what you think of as bony fish) and substitute the name Euteleostomi for the clade, but this is not common. Other people don’t give the group a name at all.
Amusing, coming from you.