{"id":624,"date":"2008-04-05T18:30:10","date_gmt":"2008-04-05T18:30:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scientopia.org\/blogs\/goodmath\/2008\/04\/05\/lying-losers-and-cheap-victories-uncommon-descent-at-its-best\/"},"modified":"2008-04-05T18:30:10","modified_gmt":"2008-04-05T18:30:10","slug":"lying-losers-and-cheap-victories-uncommon-descent-at-its-best","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/2008\/04\/05\/lying-losers-and-cheap-victories-uncommon-descent-at-its-best\/","title":{"rendered":"Lying Losers and Cheap Victories: Uncommon Descent at its best"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> I just had to promote this to the top level of the blog. <\/p>\n<p> If you remember, way back in December, I <a href=\"http:\/\/scientopia.org\/blogs\/goodmath\/2007\/12\/sal-strikes-again-fourier-transforms-and-advanced-creation-science\">posted something about Sal Cordova&#8217;s new blog<\/a>. (As an interesting sidenote, Sal started his blog after<br \/>\nsupposedly resigning from Uncommon Descent, claiming that he was returning to school, and that the evil darwinists would sabotage his academic career if he<br \/>\ncontinued to be associated with UnD. But of course, now, he&#8217;s back with<br \/>\nthe UnDs.)<\/p>\n<p> Anyway&#8230;  I was mocking him because on his blog he was posting something about how math and physics were going to prove his young-earth creation rubbish. What I mocked was that he posted what he called &#8220;fundamental theorems of intelligent design&#8221;. These consisted of a couple of equations without bothering to tell you what the symbols in those equations meant.<\/p>\n<p> He also babbled about fourier transforms &#8211; copying and pasting equations<br \/>\nfrom wikipedia, again without bothering to define anything (and in fact, copying<br \/>\nand pasting the <em>wrong<\/em> equation.)<\/p>\n<p> Sal showed up to &#8220;defend&#8221; himself, rather poorly. Then he disappeared. The<br \/>\ncomment thread died out on December 20th of last year.<\/p>\n<p> There was no activity at all on the thread until March, when two pretty random<br \/>\ncomments were posted. And then, again, silence.<\/p>\n<p> Until April 2nd. On April 2nd, Sal showed up again, and posted a comment. More than three months after his last appearance on the blog; more than three months since the comment thread ended; more than one month since the last comment of any kind.<\/p>\n<p> Then, on April 4th at 8am, Sal posted a comment over at Uncommon Descent,<br \/>\nin which he declared victory: &#8220;Look at the very end of that blog at Mark Chu&#8217;- Log. I posted right there in hostile territory on April 2, 2008. Did you notice no one offered a rebuttal?&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p> Yes, this is the Uncommon Descent version of victory. You make an idiotic mistake, make a fool of yourself trying to defend it, wait four months to post a reply comment to a thread that no one has looked at for months, and less than two days later, crow about how no one dared to offer a rebuttal.<\/p>\n<p> Of course, now there are multiple rebuttals. But even if no one had<br \/>\nbothered to reply at all &#8211; the simple fact of the matter is that this is a perfect demonstration of the typical tactics of the UD folks. Don&#8217;t engage in real<br \/>\ndebates. Don&#8217;t have real discussions. But find ways to misquote people,<br \/>\nto pretend, to create a fake victory. Truth doesn&#8217;t matter. What matters<br \/>\nis whether you trick people. The fact that Sal posted something absolutely<br \/>\nmind-boggling stupid on his blog &#8211; that means absolutely nothing in Sal&#8217;s world. The fact that he still doesn&#8217;t have any clue about what he was talking about<br \/>\nall those months ago, then he never managed to come within miles of making<br \/>\na coherent point &#8211; that means nothing in Sal&#8217;s world. <\/p>\n<p> What matters is winning &#8211; where winning is defined in the shallowest possible<br \/>\nway. Let months go by, post something in a months-old comment thread, and then wait less than two days before you crow about how no one could rebut you. That&#8217;s Sal&#8217;s idea of victory. Not winning an argument; not doing an experiment; not<br \/>\nproving a point; no&#8230; victory is a <em>trick<\/em>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I just had to promote this to the top level of the blog. If you remember, way back in December, I posted something about Sal Cordova&#8217;s new blog. (As an interesting sidenote, Sal started his blog after supposedly resigning from Uncommon Descent, claiming that he was returning to school, and that the evil darwinists would [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-624","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4lzZS-a4","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/624","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=624"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/624\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=624"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=624"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.goodmath.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=624"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}