Title Author Date

Academic Extinction TalkReason , Apr 12, 2005

Dr. Berlinski:

It is up to you whether or not to respond to the comment we posted to PT, and if you choose to respond, it is up to you in which form to do so and where to post your response. Surely you realize that, since you have falsely accused us of deliberately misspelling Dembski's name, we'll be interested in your response only if it will address that specific false accusation rather than a general discussion of our site's policy and behavior.

Talk Reason

Related Articles: A Response to Berlinski

Title Author Date

Academic Extinction Berlinski, David Apr 12, 2005

Paris

Dear Editors:

Thank you for your response. I am uninterested in posting this letter anywhere. It is intended for your eyes. I am obliged to ask you to
attend precisely to what I, in fact, wrote, and not what you imagine I wrote. The sentence in question is as follows:

1) At Internet web sites such as /The Panda's Thumb /or /Talk Reason/, where various eminences repair to assure one another that all is well, it is considered clever beyond measure to attack a critic of Darwin's theory such as William Dembski by misspelling his name as William Dumbski.

a Note that my reference to /The Panda's Thumb/ and /Talk Reason/ is disjunctive and not conjunctive; and that

b as a matter of logic and English grammar, 1) does /not/ imply that William Dembski's name was misspelled at /either/ The Panda's Thumb /or/ Talk Reason, although, /in fact/, it was misspelled at /The Panda's Thumb /and not /Talk Reason/.

In this regard, compare 1) with

3) At Internet web sites such as /The Panda's Thumb /or /Talk Reason/, where various eminences repair to assure one another that all is well, it is considered clever beyond measure to attack a critic of Darwin's theory such as William Dembski by insisting that his mathematical results are written in Jello.

That Dembski's mathematical results are written in Jello was a claim made at /neither/ The Panda's Thumb /nor/ Talk Reason; still the claim
was considered clever beyond measure at both sites, no doubt because it /was/ clever, if not clever beyond measure.

What is at issue is whether you regard infantile verbal abuse ranging from the distasteful /(William Dumbski, How creationists suck/) to the contemptuous (/The Art of ID Stuntmen/, /Icons of Obfuscation/) as clever. I have no way directly of knowing, of course. For all I know you may collectively wince when you read such stuff. If so, you have not winced conspicuously, the more so, I am minded to add, since you seem either to have written or to endorsed some of the stuff in question.

Sincerely yours,

David Berlinski

Related Articles: A Response to Berlinski

Title Author Date

Academic Extinction TalkReason , Apr 12, 2005

Dr. Berlinski:

Since you don't want your letter posted, we will not do so. It is hard to figure out, though, what you wanted to achieve by sending it. We have read your article in The Daily Californian and its gist is clear beyond doubt - despite your protestations and excursions into English grammar every reader of your article can see that you indeed falsely accused TR of misspelling Dembski's name. Therefore your grammatical-linguistic maneuvers are clearly attempts at evading the real question and burying it in irrelevant extraneous ruminations. Likewise, your repeated disparaging remarks about the section "The Art of ID Stuntmen" (which is a section containing well substantiated articles demonstrating
unseemly methods used by many ID advocates in their attack upon science) are in the same vein of distracting attention from the fact of your false accusation. You must know that besides this section TR contains many other sections where the essence of ID and many other topics are discussed, so presenting TR as though its contents are mainly represented by "The Art of ID Stuntmen" is just another example of a lack of scruples and of intellectual honesty, which is on a par with a false accusation in The Daily Californian newspaper. No wonder you don't want this discussion made public.

TR

Related Articles: A Response to Berlinski

Title Author Date

Academic Extinction Berlinski, David Apr 12, 2005

Paris

Dear TR --

Quite the contrary. I've already posted my remarks on The Panda's Thumb.
You may make them as public as you wish. I have no objections. By all means send them to The Daily Californian. Grammatical linguistic
maneuvers? I pointed out the plain meaning of what I wrote. There is no hidden gist. I quite understand that you -- and many others at The
Panda's Thumb -- read into my remarks a /specific/ accusation that was not there. Other readers did not. May I suggest that in this respect you took offense where no offense was given but failed to take notice where
notice was adverted. The gravamen of my complaint, after all, lay not with the misspelling of Dembski's name, which is, of course, an /example/ of the genre and not the genre itself, but with the fact that
rhetoric of this sort is considered acceptable. It is considered acceptable by /you/. Consider your own words: "The Panda's Thumb is dedicated to defending the integrity of science against all attempts to weaken it, distort it, or destroy it." The integrity of science?
/Dumbski, Berdumbski, how creationist suck/?

I would not dream of denying that TR very often runs intelligent and even perceptive articles about ID. Nor for that matter did I represent
TR as if the whole were captured by a part. I drew your attention to a fact. In the case of those stuntmen, it is not the quality of the
articles that is at issue but the way they are described. Entitling a section with the words The Art of ID Stuntmen is less vulgar but no less unacceptable than the practices that I attacked. If anything, ID proponents are sincere to a fault. In writing about the "unseemly methods used by many ID advocates in their attack upon science," you are
again assuming rhetorically the very burden of the task that it is your obligation to discharge analytically. I do not support ID, as you know, but I deny that you have done anything to demonstrate that their methods
are unseemly, especially when TR has hardly a remarkably record in breaking its glacial silence on unseemliness in other quarters, and I reject entirely the claim that ID is devoted to an attack on science.
The essays that you have run do nothing to support this charge. In the course of a letter explaining to me that you are entirely too pure to indulge in low attacks on your opponents, you have managed to indulge in a low attack on your opponent.

DB

Related Articles: A Response to Berlinski

Title Author Date

Academic Extinction TalkReason , Apr 12, 2005

Dr. Berlinski:

While you are entitled to your opinion of Talk Reason or of any of its sections, it looks like your opinion is strongly colored by your anti-Darwinian passions making your judgment not exactly impartial. The title "The Art of ID stuntmen" is fully justified by the behavior of many ID advocates. For example, the essay by Elsberry and Perakh in that section documents many invidious actions by Dembski, Meyer, and some other ID advocates who routinely compare their opponents to Lysenko, Salem judges, the Taliban, Himmler etc. Another vivid example is Dembski's post to Amazon, where he promoted his own book disguising as an unbiased reviewer. There are many more examples of such not quite respectable behavior documented in articles posted in "The Art of ID stuntmen" section, which quite properly justify its title. One cannot fail to notice that while you are very sensitive to the insufficient (in your view) respect for ID champions on TR, you seem not to be concerned with the facts of the often not-very-respectable behavior of your ID friends. Frankly, we see no reason to continue this discussion, so no further replies from you are expected.

Best wishes,

TR

Related Articles: A Response to Berlinski

Title Author Date

Academic Extinction Elsberry, Wesley R. Apr 13, 2005

I think that David Berlinski's point concerning "acceptable" rhetoric does not hold up to scrutiny. "Panda's Thumb" has a generally open comment system. The public can, and does, offer comments upon topical posts, as well as in an off-topic thread, "The Bathroom Wall". The rhetorical content of public comments ranges from the coarse to the profound. What do we generally find "unacceptable" at the "Panda's Thumb"? Illegal comments, for one. Offensive comments, for another. Yes, we who run the weblog determine what is "offensive". There are people who abuse the comment system, and we are working on ways to encourage those who leave thoughtful commentary and discourage -- or disbar -- those who habitually abuse the comment system. We, meaning those of us who are official contributors to the "Panda's Thumb" weblog, try not to interfere too strongly with the comment system. Let me note that we tolerate quite a bit of coarse rhetoric that is aimed our way, as well as that aimed at ID advocates.

Berlinski's complaint as amended by his letters shifts from an accusation against "Darwinian biologists" actually making coarse rhetorical jests at the expense of ID advocates to an accusation that the contributors at PT or TR tolerate coarse rhetoric aimed at ID advocates. Since at PT we pursue a generally open comment policy, yes, we do tolerate rhetorically dubious content there. As noted before, dubious rhetoric in public commentary has targets on all sides of the issue, and PT has tolerated copious helpings of such even when those targets have been our contributors. Contrast this situation with that of weblogs run by and for the Discovery Institute's Center for Science and Culture, which do not accept comments and have had critical trackbacks removed as well. Fortunately, the DI has lately become more tolerant of critical trackbacks.

As a contributor on PT and TR, I have my own views on the proper approach to dealing with rhetoric. I do take note of and comment upon matters that are plainly issues of rhetoric. I am sincere in my belief that the ID movement is one based primarily on social and political issues, and has only a distant secondary interest in scientific issues. I have put in the time and effort to take up and critique many technical claims of ID advocates on their lack of merit. I also point out the all-too-common lapses that may be seen in the rhetoric deployed by ID advocates, as in the essay that Mark Perakh and I wrote concerning the improper use of analogies ID advocates made of biologists being like Soviets and Nazis. And I certainly have no problem in being scornful of behavior in ID advocates that merits scorn. I don't intend to handicap myself by failing to comment upon the rhetoric of ID advocates. I find it amusing that ID advocates often fail to properly note the existence of the technical critiques while managing to take offense at the rhetorical arguments.

Related Articles: A Response to Berlinski