Re: Cohen
Subject: Re: Cohen
From: Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com>
Date: 6/9/09, 16:39
To: Michael Hogan <Michael_Hogan@condenast.com>

... and here's another version with less typos.

The Further Adventures of William Dembski and His Band of Merry Theologians

    Back in 2006, biologist and commentator Jerry Coyne penned for The New Republic a review of Ann Coulter's recently-released GODLESS, which, Coyne noted, made use of several commonplace and inaccurate attacks on the feasibility of natural selection; she had been tutored for the purpose by prominent intelligent design proponent William Dembski, among other major figures from that moment. Dembski is a mathematician and theologian who rose to the top of the nascent intelligent design pack in the late '90s after putting forth what he claims to be a scientifically rigorous technique for proving that certain features found in biology, among other aspects of nature, can be attributable only to the intervention of one or more intelligent entities. As for the identity of those entities, Dembski is usually coy, often claiming that there "are many possibilities." Among these possibilities, we may determine, is that Dembski is lying; in a 1999 interview with the Christian magazine Touchstone, Dembski stated unambiguously that "[i]ntelligent design is just the Logos theology of John's Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory." In the years since, with intelligent design being increasingly under attack as theology disguised as science, and with ID's proponents being increasingly reluctant to admit that this is the case, Dembski has understandably been more hesitant in giving due credit to either John or the Logos.

    At any rate, the fact that Coyne bothered to attack Godless in general and intelligent design in particular was, according to Dembski, an indication that the theory of evolution stands on shaky grounds. "Why does a giant of evolution, like Coyne, need to sully himself with an extended critical review of Coulter’s GODLESS?" Dembski asked, rhetorically. "Can you imagine Einstein reviewing a popular book by a journalist critiquing his general theory of relativity? Why does evolution need so much defending?" This is an interesting question. Here's another one: if it is an indication of evolution's weakness as a theory that one of its proponents feels compelled to critique a widely-read book by a well-known commentator, is it an indication of intelligent design's weakness as a pseudo-theory that its most well-known proponent feels compelled to critique a not-so-widely-read book by someone who is largely unknown?

    I ask because this is exactly what happened just a few months later, when Dembski first got wind of a book I had just written and promptly began to attack it. He was certainly well within his right to do so; though the book itself had not yet been released, the marketing copy and promotional blurbs were already making the rounds, and these were sufficient to indicate that the volume would consist in part of allegedly humorous assaults on intelligent design in general and Dembski in particular. "Rubbish like this should steel us to work doubly hard to put these people out of business," Dembski wrote at the time. In fact, I did go out of business for a little while, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion having just been released for the X-Box 360. I played as a cat-like Khajit, specializing in the various agility-dependent skills but also dabbling in alchemy and illusion magic for purposes of strategic balance. Meanwhile, Dembski got  ahold of my book and attacked it again, joining forces with many ex-girlfriends in denouncing my alleged "obsession with sex." Why, to paraphrase Dembski, does intelligent design need so much defending? And from a mere 12th-level Khajit, at that?

    Dembski may or may not have heeded his own exhortation to work "doubly hard." Despite his complaints that mainstream scientific journals have refused to consider any pro-ID papers for publication, neither Dembski nor any of his fellows seem to have been writing many in the first place; the peer-reviewed journal that they founded years ago for the purpose of publishing their own, too-hot-for-mainstream-science work has not seen the release of a new issue since 2005. This is not to say that Dembski has spent the last several years just lying around and playing his X-Box 360, like some other people whom I won't name out of respect for myself; he's also been teaching philosophy, theology, and variants thereof at a couple of universities overseen by that paragon of scientific progress, the Southern Baptist Convention.
   
    Perhaps more noticeably, Dembski has also been blogging. In April of 2005, he established Uncommon Descent as a means of responding to his critics, of which he has plenty, and defending his various strange undertakings, of which he has plenty more. There was, for instance, the time when he and his friends at the pro-ID Discovery Institute decided to make a Flash animation ridiculing Judge John Jones, the Bush-appointed churchgoer who, despite being a Bush-appointed churchgoer, ruled in the 2005 Dover Trial (known more formerly as Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District and even more formally as something longer and more formal) that intelligent design could not be taught in public school science classes. The animation in question consisted of Judge Jones represented as a puppet with his strings being held by members of the American Civil Liberties Union, which had represented the plaintiffs in the case; aside from being depicted as unusually flatulent, poor Judge Jones was also shown to be reading aloud from his court opinion in a high-pitched voice (Dembski's, it turned out, but sped up to make it sound sillier). The point of all of this, as The Discovery Institute explained, was that Jones had supposedly cribbed some 90 percent of his decision from findings presented by the ACLU (in fact, they were composed by a separate law firm), and that this was a very unusual and naughty thing for Jones to have done. On the contrary, judges commonly incorporate the findings of the winning party into their final opinion, either in whole or in part, and Jones' own written opinion actually incorporated far less than 90 percent of the findings in question; it turns out that The Discovery Institute had included common words like "the" and "of" into their calculation of the similarities. For his part, Dembski agreed to reduce the number of fart noises in the animation and to allow Jones himself to supply his own voice. Though no doubt grateful, Jones appears to have declined the offer.

    Throughout this and other similarly silly episodes, Uncommon Descent has served as a major staging ground for the ID movement's various rhetorical adventures into the larger world, as well as a convenient fortress within which to regroup when these adventures go wrong. Consequently, it is read perhaps just as widely among those who have risen in opposition to the movement as it is by those who have risen to champion it. The latter look to it for intellectual ammunition, the former for cheap laughs. Someone is getting the better end of the deal.
   
    One notable incident went down in May of 2006, at which point Dembski had already recruited several co-bloggers to make regular contributions. Most of these are Christians and at least one is a full-fledged creationist, but another one, Dave Scot, is a professed agnostic, thus helping to lend credence to the creed that ID is no creed. As skeptical as he may be on matters of deity, though, Scot is strangely susceptible to claims put forth by chain e-mails written in multi-colored texts and flamboyant fonts; having received one to the effect that the ACLU was about to sue the Marine Corps to stop Marines from praying, an outraged Scot posted it on the blog in order that his readers could join him in being affronted. After all, the e-mail told him to. "Please send this to people you know so everyone will know how stupid the ACLU is Getting [sic] in trying to remove GOD from everything and every place in America," exhorted the bright red lettering above several pictures of praying Marines. "Right on!" added Dembski in the comments section.

    Of course, the e-mail was a three-year-old hoax; the ACLU spokesperson named therein did not actually exist, and neither did the ACLU's complaint. Scot was unfazed by the revelation. "To everyone who’s pointed out that the ACLU story is a fabrication according to snopes.com -- that’s hardly the point," he explained, referring to a website that catalogues and debunks hoaxes. "The pictures of Marines praying are real." Nonetheless, Scot deleted the comments of those who did the pointing out in question and tweaked the text of the hoax e-mail with strategic placement of the words "rumored" and "alleged" to make it less blatantly false (the original text may be found here), and then wrote a few additional comments attacking the ACLU for things they would do "if they could get away with it." For his own part, Dembski had no further comment.

    Mr. Scot did not let such silly mistakes discourage him from making further silly mistakes, and remained one of Uncommon Descent's most prolific contributors until earlier this year, when he suddenly ran afoul of Dembski by breaking party ranks on the subject of racism. Among other things, the blog had come to specialize in attributing racist views to early proponents of evolution and racist implications to materialist evolution as a whole. Scot, though, bucked the trend with a post noting that racism obviously exists outside of "Darwinian" circles, citing the Christian Identity movement as a notorious example. Dembski deleted the post and cracked down. "I expect your posts to have at least some tangential relationship to Darwinism, ID, or the metaphysical or moral implications of each," he wrote, addressing his contributors. "The purpose of this site is not to provide a place for you to jump up and rant on one of your pet peeves. DaveScot will no longer be posting at UD." Apparently, ascribing racism to proponents of evolution was relevant to a discussion on evolution and religion, whereas ascribing racism to proponents of religion was not relevant at all. Dembski should have at least been grateful that Scot refrained from pointing out that the Southern Baptist Convention for which Dembski works was founded solely in support of slavery.

    Meanwhile, the world kept turning. The intelligent design-favoring documentary Expelled, which starred the otherwise lucid Ben Stein and dealt with the alleged purges faced by intelligent design supporters in the realm of academia, was released in 2008. In between Expelled-themed attacks on those academic institutions which had been hassling those who disagreed with the prevailing views of their university employers, Dembski wondered aloud whether a certain professor was sufficiently Calvinist to maintain even his post-employment status as professor emiritus at Calvin College, insomuch as that the professor had apparently veered into the dangerous habit of "freethought." Elsewhen, longtime contributor Denyse O'Leary attacked Nature and other "big science mags," quoting a lawyer friend who'd noted that the magazine's mission statement held that it was intent on "prompt publication of significant advances in any branch of science." Making use of his lawyer-logic, the unnamed fellow claimed that "[t]o report advances and serve scientists means not to report setbacks, or the exposure of fallacies in widely-held theories that would tend to put mainstream science in a bad light." O'Leary agreed, not having bothered to check and see if this was something accurate enough to warrant agreeing with, which it was not insomuch as that Nature does indeed report on "setbacks" and "the exposure of fallacies." On another occasion, Dembski himself reported to his readers that "[t]here’s a hilarious typo in the illustration accompanying the article on the recent Salk Institute evangelical atheism conference that appeared on the front page of the Science Times today. The fact that this got by the author and the editors at the NYT speaks volumes about the broader cultural illiteracy of the science-worshipping, liberal literary establishment." Though having been alerted to the existence of the typo and having been given a fairly strong hint to its nature by way of a blog title that basically spelled it out, at least one of Dembski's readers couldn't find the mistake and had to ask what it was; it was eventually explained that the Greek letter for "d" had mistakenly been used in place of the Greek letter for "a." The fact that a Christian who was told of the typo could not find it anymore than could the author and editors who were told of no such thing didn't seem to prompt Dembski to draw any conclusions about the "broader cultural illiteracy" of his own followers.

    As much as he puts into his blog, his professorships, and his voice acting, Dembski is still as prolific an author as ever. His latest effort, set for release later this year, takes on the wave of pro-atheist books that have seen publication over the past couple of years. Among the pundits whom he'll be countering is Vanity Fair's own Christopher Hitchens, author of God is Not Great. If you happen to spot Hitchens having some sort of alcoholic drink, it will almost certainly be out of sheer terror.

On Tue, Jun 9, 2009 at 2:29 PM, Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:
Howdy-

Here's the intelligent design piece; let me know what you think. I had to mention that Dembski has attacked me on his blog for purposes of full disclosure; that and other parts can be edited for length and undue self-indulgence if necessary. Also, I found a nice little hook insomuch as that Dembski's upcoming book will include attacks on Hitchens, among others.


Thanks,

Barrett Brown
Brooklyn, NY
512-560-2302

The Further Adventures of William Dembski and His Band of Merry Theologians

    Back in 2006, biologist and commentator Jerry Coyne penned for The New Republic a review of Ann Coulter's recently-released GODLESS, which, Coyne noted, made use of several commonplace and inaccurate attacks on the feasibility of natural selection; she had been tutored for the purpose by prominent intelligent design proponent William Dembski, among other major figures from that moment. Dembski is a mathematician and theologian who rose to the top of the nascent intelligent design pack in the late '90s after putting forth what he claims to be a scientifically rigorous technique for proving that certain features found in biology, among other aspects of nature, can be attributable only to the intervention of one or more intelligent entities. As for the identity of those entities, Dembski is usually coy, claiming that there "are many possibilities." Among these possibilities, we may determine, is that Dembski is lying; in a 1999 interview with the Christian magazine Touchstone, Dembski stated unambiguously that "[i]ntelligent design is just the Logos theology of John's Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory." In the years since, with intelligent design being increasingly under attack as theology disguised as science, and with ID's proponents being increasingly reluctant to admit that this is the case, Dembski has understandably been more hesitant in giving due credit to either John or the Logos.

    At any rate, the fact that Coyne bothered to attack Godless in general and intelligent design in particular was, according to Dembski, an indication that the theory of evolution stands on shaky grounds. "Why does a giant of evolution, like Coyne, need to sully himself with an extended critical review of Coulter’s GODLESS?" Dembski asked, rhetorically. "Can you imagine Einstein reviewing a popular book by a journalist critiquing his general theory of relativity? Why does evolution need so much defending?" This is an interesting question. Here's another one: if it is an indication of evolution's weakness as a theory that one of its proponents feels compelled to critique a widely-read book by a well-known commentator, is it an indication of intelligent design's weakness as a pseudo-theory that its most well-known proponent feels compelled to critique a not-so-widely-read book by someone who is largely unknown?

    I ask because this is exactly what happened just a few months later, when Dembski first got wind of a book I had just written and promptly began to attack it. He was certainly well within his right to do so; though the book itself had not yet been released, the marketing copy and promotional blurbs were already making the rounds, and these were sufficient to indicate that the volume would consist in part of allegedly humorous assaults on intelligent design in general and Dembski in particular. "Rubbish like this should steel us to work doubly hard to put these people out of business," Dembski wrote at the time. In fact, I did go out of business for a little while, Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion having just been released for the X-Box 360. I played as a cat-like Khajit, specializing in the various agility-dependent skills but also dabbling in alchemy and illusion magic for purposes of strategic balance. Meanwhile, Dembski got a hold of my book and attacked it again, joining forces with many ex-girlfriends in denouncing my alleged "obsession with sex." Why, to paraphrase Dembski, does intelligent design need so much defending? And from a mere 12th-level Khajit, at that?

    Dembski may or may not have heeded his own exhortation to work "doubly hard." Despite his complaints that mainstream scientific journals have refused to consider any pro-ID papers for publication, neither Dembski nor any of his fellows seem to have been writing many in the first place; the peer-reviewed journal that they founded years ago for the purpose of publishing their own, too-hot-for-mainstream-science work has not seen the release of a new issue since 2005. This is not to say that Dembski has spent the last several years just lying around and playing his X-Box 360, like some other people whom I won't name out of respect for myself; he's also been teaching philosophy, theology, and variants thereof at a couple of universities overseen by that paragon of scientific progress, the Southern Baptist Convention.
   
    Perhaps more noticeably, Dembski has also been blogging. In April of 2005, he established Uncommon Descent as a means of responding to his critics, of which he has plenty, and defending his various strange undertakings, of which he has plenty more. There was, for instance, the time when he and his friends at the pro-ID Discovery Institute decided to make a Flash animation ridiculing Judge John Jones, the Bush-appointed churchgoer who, despite being a Bush-appointed churchgoer, ruled in the 2005 Dover Trial (known more formerly as Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District and even more formally as something longer and more formal) that intelligent design could not be taught in public school science classes. The animation in question consisted of Judge Jones represented as a puppet with his strings being held by members of the American Civil Liberties Union, which had represented the plaintiffs in the case; aside from being depicted as unusually flatulent, poor Judge Jones was also shown to be reading aloud from his court opinion in a high-pitched voice (Dembski's, it turned out, but sped up to make it sound sillier). The point of all of this, as The Discovery Institute explained, was that Jones had supposedly cribbed some 90 percent of his decision from findings presented by the ACLU (in fact, they were composed by a seperate law firm), and that this was a very unusual and naughty thing for Jones to have done. On the contrary, judges commonly incorporate the findings of the winning party into their final opinion, either in whole or in part, and Jones' own written opinion actually incorporated far less than 90 percent of the findings in question; it turns out that The Discovery Institute had included common words like "the" and "of" into their calculation of the similarities. For his part, Dembski agreed to reduce the number of fart noises in the animation and to allow Jones himself to supply his own voice. Though no doubt grateful, Jones appears to have declined the offer.

    Throughout this and other, similarly silly episodes, Uncommon Descent has served as a major staging ground for the ID movement's various rhetorical adventures into the larger world, as well as a convenient fortress within which to regroup when these adventures go wrong. Consequently, it is read perhaps just as widely among those who have risen in opposition to the moment as it is by those who have risen to champion it. The latter look to it for intellectual ammunition, the former for cheap laughs. Someone is getting the better end of the deal.
   
    One notable incident went down in May of 2006, at which point Dembski had already recruited several co-bloggers to make regular contributions. Most of these are Christians and at least one is a full-fledged creationist, but another one, Dave Scot, is a professed agnostic, thus helping to lend creedence to the creed that ID is no creed. As skeptical as he may be on matters of deity, though, Scot is strangely succeptible to claims put forth by chain e-mails written in multi-colored texts and flamboyant fonts; having received one to the effect that the ACLU was about to sue the Marine Corps to stop Marines from praying, an outraged Scott posted it on the blog in order that his readers could join him in being affronted. After all, the e-mail told him to. "Please send this to people you know so everyone will know how stupid the ACLU is Getting [sic] in trying to remove GOD from everything and every place in America," exhorted the bright red lettering above several pictures of praying Marines. "Right on!" added Dembski in the comments section.

    Of course, the e-mail was a three-year-old hoax; the ACLU spokesperson named therein did not actually exist, and neither did the ACLU's complaint. Scot was unfazed by the revelation. "To everyone who’s pointed out that the ACLU story is a fabrication according to snopes.com - that’s hardly the point," he explained, referring to a website that catalogues and debunks hoaxes. "The pictures of Marines praying are real." Nonetheless, Scot deleted the comments of those who did the pointing out in question and tweaked the text of the hoax e-mail with strategic placement of the words "rumored" and "alleged" to make it less blatantly false (the original text may be found here), and then wrote a few additional comments attacking the ACLU for things they would do "if they could get away with it." For his own part, Dembski had no further comment.

    Mr. Scot did not let such silly mistakes discourage him from making further silly mistakes, and remained one of Uncommon Descent's most prolific contributors until earlier this year, when he suddenly ran afoul of Dembski by breaking party ranks on the subject of racism. Among other things, the blog had come to specialize in attributing racist views to early proponents of evolution and racist implications to materialist evolution as a whole. Scot, though, bucked the trend with a post noting that racism obviously exists outside of "Darwinian" circles, citing the Christian Identity movement as a notorious example. Dembski deleted the post and cracked down. "I expect your posts to have at least some tangential relationship to Darwinism, ID, or the metaphysical or moral implications of each," he wrote, addressing his contributors. The purpose of this site is not to provide a place for you to jump up and rant on one of your pet peeves. DaveScot will no longer be posting at UD." Apparently, ascribing racism to proponents of evolution was relevant to a discussion on evolution on religion, whereas ascribing racism to proponents of religion was not relevant at all. Dembski should have at least been grateful that Scot refrained from pointing out that the Southern Baptist Convention for which Dembski works was founded solely in support of slavery.

    Meanwhile, the world kept turning. The intelligent design-favoring documentary Expelled, which starred the otherwise lucid Ben Stein and dealt with the alleged purges faced by intelligent design supporters in the realm of academia, was released in 2008. Meanwhile, in between Expelled-themed attacks on those academic institutions which had been hassling those who disagreed with the prevailing views of their university employers, Dembski wondered aloud whether a certain professor was sufficiently Calvinist to maintain even his post-employment status as professor emiritus at Calvin College, insomuch as that the professor had apparently veered into the dangerous habit of "freethought." Elsewhen, longtime contributor Denyse O'Leary attacked Nature and other "big science mags," quoting a lawyer friend who'd noted that the magazine's mission statement held that it was intent on "prompt publication of significant advances in any branch of science." Making use of his lawyer-logic, the unnamed fellow claimed that "[t]o report advances and serve scientists means not to report setbacks, or the exposure of fallacies in widely-held theories that would tend to put mainstream science in a bad light." O'Leary agreed, not having bothered to check and see if this was something accurate enough to warrant agreeing with, which it was not insomuch as that Nature does indeed report on "setbacks" and "the exposure of fallacies." On another occasion, Dembski himself reported to his readers that "[t]here’s a hilarious typo in the illustration accompanying the article on the recent Salk Institute evangelical atheism conference that appeared on the front page of the Science Times today. The fact that this got by the author and the editors at the NYT speaks volumes about the broader cultural illiteracy of the science-worshipping, liberal literary establishment." Though having been alerted to the existence of the typo and having been given a fairly strong hint to its nature by way of a blog title that basically spelled it out, at least one of Dembski's readers couldn't find the mistake and had to ask what it was; it was eventually explained that the Greek letter for "d" had mistakenly been used in place of the Greek letter for "a." The fact that a Christian who was told of the typo could not find it anymore than could the author and editors who were not told any such thing didn't seem to prompt Dembski to draw any conclusions about the "broader cultural illiteracy" of his own followers.

    But as much as he puts into his blog, his professorships, and his voice acting, Dembski is still as prolific an author as ever. His latest effort, set for release later this year, takes on the wave of pro-atheist books that have seen publication over the past couple of years. Among the pundits whom he'll be countering is Vanity Fair's own Christopher Hitchens, author of God is Not Great. If you happen to spot Hitchens having some sort of alcoholic drink, it will almost certainly be out of sheer terror.

On Mon, Jun 8, 2009 at 10:07 AM, Michael Hogan <Michael_Hogan@condenast.com> wrote:
Hey Barrett, I like the idea. Let’s try it!


On 6/5/09 11:18 AM, "Barrett Brown" <barriticus@gmail.com> wrote:

No problem, I know how it goes. Would you be interested in a piece on what the intelligent design folks have been up to since the 2005 Dover Trial? Specifically, William Dembski, the de facto leader of the movement, has a blog called Uncommon Descent which I've been following for the last couple of years and which is replete with all kinds of ridiculous drama and goofiness comparable to that found at Conservapedia. Let me know if this interests you.

Thanks,

Barrett Brown
Brooklyn, NY
512-560-2302

On Thu, Jun 4, 2009 at 2:08 PM, Michael Hogan <Michael_Hogan@condenast.com> wrote:
It’s the issue with Cohen being a “friend of the magazine.” Sorry about that.



On 6/4/09 2:04 PM, "Barrett Brown" <barriticus@gmail.com <http://barriticus@gmail.com> > wrote:

Okay. Was there something specific about this piece that needed Carter's approval, or is everything going to need to go through him?
 
Thanks,
 
Barrett Brown
Brooklyn, NY
512-560-2302

On Thu, Jun 4, 2009 at 10:37 AM, Michael Hogan <Michael_Hogan@condenast.com <http://Michael_Hogan@condenast.com> > wrote:
Barrett,

I still haven’t heard back from Graydon, who is really busy these days, but at this point I think I’d better pass and let you take the piece elsewhere if you so choose. Sorry about the long delay for no payoff here.

Hope we can find something a little less tricky to do together soon.

Best,
Mike