Don't tell me there's any proof for creationism.

Real life's tactic is to use a word or an idea and use it wrong and repeatedly wrong. When told he is wrong he keeps being wrong until he so frustrates the other side by his complete lack of understanding or ability to begin to understand that they resort to flailing at him personally. When they finally give up or the thread gets locked for the personal attacks RL moves on to the next word or idea he can use wrong.

Real life gets off on frustrating others. It's the tactic of a child or an idiot.

My guess is he/she is too old to be a child.

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TheCorrectResponse wrote:

USA
This guy is a real piece of work isn't he? Its like his mom got him the non-sequitur see and say. The cow go "red herring"; the dog goes "circular logic". I mean even if he is ignorant as he seems he MUST know that people just have to go back and read his posts to see what the truth is.

People have actually gone to the trouble of summarizing my questions to him and telling him to answer them before their own questions and he even ignored them. Today he says I ignored his answers, yet there are his post to prove him wrong. Then he has the nerve to tell "aperson" how he apreciates his thread because he values the exchange of opinions

Just out of curiosity what do you make of this idiot?

Since you asked: I have agreed & disagreed w/RL as have others on here. My overall & overwhelming experience has shown rl to be one of integrity - very much unlike you. Despite numerous personal attacks fired his way - I have yet to see rl fire back to anyone in the same manner. You on the other hand have a personal problem when someone doesn't agree with you and feel the need to spew emotion-based & disrespectful barbs. Hopefully you'll grow out of that maturity level. Time will tell.

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I'll just say the posts are there for all to see. How many times must I ask nicely for answers, how many times must I point out the mischaracterizations? How many times must I state science that is straight out of textbooks to be told its a strawman argument? But not given the decency to reply to my answers. How many times do I have to kiss his a## before I am allowed to react. Parados has summed it up nicely. If you want to play the game then lets play. Don't mischaracterize what everyone says and then cry when they have finally had enough.

Perhaps if I was the only one this happened to you would have a point, but clearly he does this with everyone. Which is probably why the science forum has degenerated to homework questions and what happens when you put a cat in a microwave? Who wants to bother with people like this.

The part about his showing integrity when numerous people have reposted his many lies is a rich conclusion indeed.

Well I'm done with your buddy so you can relax. His "integrity" is still whole Laughing

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TheCorrectResponse wrote:

what happens when you put a cat in a microwave?

That is a perfectly valid question. The fact that you are too much of an elitist to take it seriously reflects more on you than on the question itself.

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Thank you kicky. I had no idea that as an "elitist" I should be pro cat torture. Embarrassed

I hope they bring it up at our next elitist meeting.

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TheCorrectResponse wrote:

USA
This guy is a real piece of work isn't he? Its like his mom got him the non-sequitur see and say. The cow go "red herring"; the dog goes "circular logic".

Just out of curiosity what do you make of this idiot?

RL can be frustrating, but he also helps keep discussions going without diverting the thread to discussions of himself.

RL also has a knack for focusing on the 'talking points' of creationist challenges to science, and revealing the creationist mindset.

One of the problems science has always had is that many of its concepts are not obvious at a common sense level, and they are hard to communicate to portions of the population who are not willing to study, and more inclined to listen to glib nonsense challenges.

RL offers us a good chance to find ways to express scientific ideas in the most common sense, straight forward way possible, so that the huge portion of the population who won't normally take the time to understand science can have a quick way to grasp what is being said.

It's up to people like us to find ways to answer RL's questions in short, compelling ways so that science can start to win creationist debates even in audiences with very short attention spans.

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What does common sense have to do with RL Laughing

I think, in general, ignorant people want to be ignorant because it is easy. Calculating a Hamiltonian for a process takes years of preparation just to get to that level of expertise. Googling Hamiltonian and then misrepresenting it and saying its gibberish takes a couple of minutes. And if the next guy doesn't know any more than you, to him you sound intelligent. So how does that guy determine who really knows what he is talking about and who is the poser?

That is the part that is so upsetting to me. I think its pretty obvious to nearly all that RL is clueless but there are other who spout the same crap but are clever enough to confuse people.

I like Feynman's definition: and fool is someone who doesn't know something but is willing to learn. We all fall into that category from time to time, everyone is ignorant about something. A damn fool is someone who doesn't know and is unwilling to learn.

So I don't think it matters how clever the response you are not going to win over Creationists because they fall into the damn fool category.

Its funny because unlike some on A2K I don't necessarily have anything against religion. To me the argument is not Science versus religion, it is 4000 year old science versus current science. Which is what makes it so much more absurd.

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Ros:
Here is a reply from gunga from another thread. How would you go about explaining to someone who does not understand science how absurd these statements are? How does he know its not your statements that are ridiculous?

Quote:

Plasma is the basic reality of matter in the universe and there is no reason which I am aware of to think it has a beginning or end. Unlike "dark matter(TM)" and/or "dark energy(TM)", plasma is real and it actually does comprise something like 99% of the material in the universe.

Stars and galaxies both are created by the z-pinch effect of Birkland currents arcing through plasmas and that explains the filamentary structure of much of the observable universe.

Stars themselves once formed behave like focal points of cosmic electrical discharges and are powered by electrical currents and are not thermonuclear engines as has been taught; that is why our sun behaves more like a plasma physics phenomena than a thermonuclear one. The fires on the surface of the sun are basically of the same nature as what you see in an arc welder.

As a star moves through regions of space with lesser or greater electrical potential difference wrt itself, it heats up and cools off periodically, which is the reason for things like the little ice age of the 1600s, the medieval climate optimum, and the present warming period.

Rush Limbaugh is entirely right in claiming that man has less than nothing to do with the world's weather. The sum total pollution man has ever produced is less than one medium sized volcano and if WW-II did not cause the great man-made eco-disaster, it's never gonna happen.

Quote:

z-pinch effect of Birkland currents arcing through plasmas

...sounds impressive to me! See what I mean?

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TheCorrectResponse wrote:

Its funny because unlike some on A2K I don't necessarily have anything against religion. To me the argument is not Science versus religion, it is 4000 year old science versus current science. Which is what makes it so much more absurd.

To a certain extent, it's the absurdity which makes it fun to debate.

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TheCorrectResponse wrote:

Ros:
Here is a reply from gunga from another thread. How would you go about explaining to someone who does not understand science how absurd these statements are?

You can't. Gunga doesn't object to evolution because of science, he objects because he doesn't like the idea of a natural world which doesn't make humans something special. He feels that there will be a moral collapse and degradation of civilization if evolution were correct, so he rejects the possibility of correctness out of hand.

All of his extraneous beliefs regarding cosmology and other things are symptoms of his fear of a non-special status for human beings and moral choices. He rejects almost all 'standard' science because he can't bring himself to allow mainstream science any credibility because that would lend credibility to all scientific theories, including evolution (which he hates most of all).

Gunga has lots of very 'colorful' ideas though, and he just loves pseudo-scientific mumbo jumbo. Some of his web sites are outrageously classic examples of scientific thinking gone wrong. Gunga is not alone, many people just love new age hokum and modern snake oil. Although I'm not sure their reasons are all the same.

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TheCorrectResponse wrote:

What does common sense have to do with RL

I don't answer RL's questions with just RL in mind. I usually generalize his arguments to try to understand how people (in general) might be misunderstanding something.

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TheCorrectResponse wrote:

Ros:
Here is a reply from gunga from another thread. How would you go about explaining to someone who does not understand science how absurd these statements are? How does he know its not your statements that are ridiculous?

Quote:
Plasma is the basic reality of matter in the universe and there is no reason which I am aware of to think it has a beginning or end. Unlike "dark matter(TM)" and/or "dark energy(TM)", plasma is real and it actually does comprise something like 99% of the material in the universe.

Stars and galaxies both are created by the z-pinch effect of Birkland currents arcing through plasmas and that explains the filamentary structure of much of the observable universe.

Stars themselves once formed behave like focal points of cosmic electrical discharges and are powered by electrical currents and are not thermonuclear engines as has been taught; that is why our sun behaves more like a plasma physics phenomena than a thermonuclear one. The fires on the surface of the sun are basically of the same nature as what you see in an arc welder.

As a star moves through regions of space with lesser or greater electrical potential difference wrt itself, it heats up and cools off periodically, which is the reason for things like the little ice age of the 1600s, the medieval climate optimum, and the present warming period.

Rush Limbaugh is entirely right in claiming that man has less than nothing to do with the world's weather. The sum total pollution man has ever produced is less than one medium sized volcano and if WW-II did not cause the great man-made eco-disaster, it's never gonna happen.

Quote:
z-pinch effect of Birkland currents arcing through plasmas
...sounds impressive to me! See what I mean?

Wow... that is some crazy sh!t. How exactly does one have an electrical differential with respect to oneself? I'm pretty sure that's not possible, at least not in a homogenous body.

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ROS;

Then I am a little confused, you said:

Quote:

RL offers us a good chance to find ways to express scientific ideas in the most common sense, straight forward way possible, so that the huge portion of the population who won't normally take the time to understand science can have a quick way to grasp what is being said.

I assumed this applied equally to gunga or anyone else who spouts this stuff. I was just giving you the chance to show me how to: find ways to answer RL's (or any one else?) questions in short, compelling ways so that science can start to win creationist debates even in audiences with very short attention spans.

I'll admit I may have started you off with a pretty big hurdle. But I just thought if you could do it with that bunch of B.S. I might have a chance of doing it with an easier post.

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TheCorrectResponse wrote:

ROS;

Then I am a little confused, you said:

Quote:
RL offers us a good chance to find ways to express scientific ideas in the most common sense, straight forward way possible, so that the huge portion of the population who won't normally take the time to understand science can have a quick way to grasp what is being said.

I assumed this applied equally to gunga or anyone else who spouts this stuff.

No. I find Gunga and Spendi and RL posts VERY different.

In particular RL's arguments (at least some of them) are far more cunning than the others. Maybe you just haven't experienced any of the more creative ones yet.

Here's a sequence as an example:

RL recites the standard creationist dogma that the SLT prohibits evolution.

We recite the standard answer that the SLT doesn't apply to Earth because it's not a closed system.

But if you look carefully you will see that there's a flaw in that answer, because the SLT 'applies' to everything, but it simply has a different outcome for a 'closed' system than an 'open' system.

The answer given is actually correct, but it isn't delivered in precise scientific language, so RL uses the imprecision of the word 'apply' to make it appear that the whole answer is incorrect, when in fact, several words in the answer simply need more precise definition and usage.

Ultimately, in order to correct the precision of the answer given, we would have to recite the actual SLT in mathematical terms, but by the time we do that we have lost the impact of a common sense answer. This is a common creationist debating tactic which makes use of the fact that creationist arguments don't require detail and accuracy, as a matter of fact, they depend on ambiguity.

RL uses the imprecise nature of the answer to set up a condition in which his challenge appears simple, yet the precise answer is so complex that only a mathematician can really grasp it.

I think it's a good debating tactic. It turns the need for 'simple to grasp' concepts into a 'high ground' from which to argue from, and it makes the best use of what he's got to work with.

After all, think about it, RL doesn't have a leg to stand on. All the evidence is against him. All he can do with the hand he's been dealt is to bluff, and yet here we are, still playing the game with him. That may be frustrating for us, but I don't think I could play that hand any better. Endurance in the face of insurmountable odds has got to be worth something.

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I guess you just have an infinitely higher regard for RL than I do.

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I don't happen to have a high regard for "real life," and neither does Ros, i suspect. I don't "hate" him either. However, Ros is correct that "real life" has shown a good deal of fancy foot work in his debates. For example, he always categorizes anyone who does not agree with his position on "morality" as a "moral relativist." This is completely inaccurate, because it ignores the actual definition of "moral relativism." Moral relativism holds that what is right and wrong can vary over time and between cultures. I have my own notions of what is right and what is wrong, and it does not change with historical perspective or consideration of cultural antecedents. But "real life" is being clever, because he has branded his opponent. He was never interested in the truth or logic of the discussion, only with scoring points. My position on morality is that it is a subjective judgment. The difference between "real life" and me in such a discussion is that i will admit that my notions of right and wrong are subjective, but he won't admit that his are subjective--he claims they are "god-given."

Ros has very accurately analyzed "real life's" method. His effort is one to score points apparently (apparently in sense of appearance), rather than in actuality. The member "real life" is not interested in evidence, in science, in logic, or even, for that matter, in truth--he is interested in producing a seemingly plausible argument from which he can ridicule those who disagree with him. He once went on at length about how pretty much no one else reads these threads (the evidence is good that this site has a very high readership, "real life's" sneers notwithstanding), but it is obvious from his method that his object is to appeal not to those with whom he argues, but to the casual reader. A distillation of his arguments would produce a guide book for fundamentalist arguments to support a scriptural view of the world.

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I never said I hated him. It would be pretty tough to hate someone virtually. But I certainly don't agree with ROS that he shows any cleverness in debate. To me running away and refusing to answer questions is not an intelligent debate tactic it is cowardice. In the same way that I don't regard debate as knowingly misinterpreting what people say and when you're called on it lying and saying you never did it. I call that being a liar and a poor one at that. In just the last day or two Parados has gone to the trouble of repeatedly pointing it out to RL and RL denies it over and over. Some here might consider this good debate, some like Baddog1 may consider it a sign of integrityto each his own.

I have no trouble in saying I've been bested in a debate. But I certainly don't see that RL has done that. As for RL keeping people playing the game with him, that may be true of some people but after only a handful of posts with him its people minus one. I know what I know and what I don't and have no interest in stroking his ego by acting as if he is either knowledgeable or clever.

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stay the course?

Quote:

After all, think about it, RL doesn't have a leg to stand on. All the evidence is against him. All he can do with the hand he's been dealt is to bluff, and yet here we are, still playing the game with him. That may be frustrating for us, but I don't think I could play that hand any better. Endurance in the face of insurmountable odds has got to be worth something.

now you just make him sound like bush. trash rl all you want, he's not that bad. no i know, you were trying to make him sound better, not worse.

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TheCorrectResponse wrote:

I never said I hated him. It would be pretty tough to hate someone virtually. But I certainly don't agree with ROS that he shows any cleverness in debate. To me running away and refusing to answer questions is not an intelligent debate tactic it is cowardice.

RL has a full range of debate tactics, not all of them so clever. Some of them, as you've seen, are simply obtuse diversion (I get bored with those as well). But I would point out that we find ourselves talking about the SLT even when it was pointed out that it was a diversion a long time ago. Some of us have been parrying RL's arguments for several years now. Maybe you just haven't seen his 'best work' yet.

(Don't worry RL, even though I enjoy some of your debate tactics, you're still wrong about everything Wink

)

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TheCorrectResponse wrote:

In the same way that I don't regard debate as knowingly misinterpreting what people say and when you're called on it lying and saying you never did it. I call that being a liar and a poor one at that.

I have personally called him a liar repeatedly, probably several times in this thread.

I'm sick of the 'sound bite' arguments against science, I'm going to call a spade a spade and call RL (and the others) a liar when he lies (which as you pointed out he does often).

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Don't tell me there's any proof for creationism.

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