183 Egyptian political prisoners sentenced to death: international silence. One Australian reporter given prison sentence: international outrage.
Nobody wants to see the Al Jazeera journalists freed more than I do, but the western hypocrisy over the conduct of the CIA and Israel backed military dictatorship, which toppled Egypt’s only democratically elected government, is absolutely stinking. In the same week the Al Jazeera journalists were jailed, the United States resumed military supplies to its Egyptian puppet regime.
The BBC has been compounding the stinking hypocrisy by constantly broadcasting reports implicitly arguing that the Australian journalist should be released while the Egyptian journalists kept in prison. They have repeatedly broadcast the assertion that there is a difference between Al Jazeera’s English and Arabic output. The latter, the BBC say, was indeed biased to the Muslim Brotherhood (Egypt’s only democratically elected government) whereas the English language service, for which Peter Greste worked, was not.
The BBC thus seeks to square the circle of supporting the release of Peter Greste and at the same time taking the British government line of supporting the Egyptian dictatorship’s elimination of its political opponents.
The truth is that Peter Greste is only superficially the victim of an Egyptian dictator. At root he is the victim of a western foreign policy that believes the interests of Israel outweigh all other interests in the Middle East.
Clark. sorry for the clutter but it is not nice to be on the end of slanderous vitriol. I am not saying any more and Jemand is welcome to leave the written versions of the workings of his mind for all to read here, Craig and the moda permitting. They are like the droppings that the fox leaves overnight by the chicken house.
moda=mods
I think moda is Italian for fashion!
More ad hominem, Mary?
I don’t agree with Pat Condell’s position on Israel. Did I ever say I did?
And, why do you keep referring to the website about atheism, Mary? You never follow it up with any explanation, you just make the statement – “this is the person who linked to this website” – as if that means anything at all. Do you imagine that everyone here, like you, is a brain-dead religious imbecile who hates atheists? And you want them to hate me because I am an atheist? So much hate in your Christian/Muslim heart.
And then you link to various things about Tony Abbott as if *I* were Tony Abbott or as if I should be punished for the deeds of this cretin. How does that work? Do people beat you up for the sins of David Cameron?
What is your agenda here, Mary?
Your responses make so little sense that it might require a complete shift in thinking to understand them.
Is it possible, even plausible, that you are no friend of Craig Murray’s but a very subtle saboteur who simmers away with barely concealed anti-Jewish propaganda with a depressed tone and a forum-sliding technique of cutting and pasting whole swathes of questionable news FOR THE PURPOSE of discrediting this blog and making it unreadable for the many casual visitors who are genuinely concerned about political machinations?
Yes, I know that was a long sentence. Read it again. And then again.
Every time someone criticises you, however small the criticism, however friendly the nudge, you lash out with your claws. Is that to preserve your special status on the blog? Has Craig ever met you in person? Has anyone ever met “Mary” in person?
I don’t think other people here, even Habbabkuk, knows what you really are. But I think we’re getting somewhere in these sessions, “Mary”.
“One even burgled his mother’s house. Unheard of that white Australians could do such a thing.”
Liar, liar.
One burglar was Aboriginal and the other was WHITE.
Get your facts straight “Mary”.
Oh, and thanks for your concern for my mother’s wellbeing. A noteworthy ommission from someone who parades “herself” as a compassionate advocate of victims.
Interesting.
Mary it’s just a bandwagon. Your critics share very little common ground except their denigration of you. That’s why it’s best to stick with the issues – most of them hate the issues even more than they hate you, which is why they use criticism of you to diert attention.
Jemand, it is as yet too early in the day for me to find links. My feeling is that you’ve never interacted personally with the natural feelings that lead to xenophobia. Your fears are thus unconscious, and hence supported by non-conscious rationalisation. This means that you can’t see it.
Obviously, this is a quite a personal claim I’m making about you, but I’ve been through the process of facing my own xenophobia which, rationally, I didn’t realise was there and affecting my thoughts.
Jemand, Canspeccy’s arguments about “genocide in Leicester” are as crazy as a jar of words; your bullshit warning should have been flashing. Canspeccy’s argument which you supported was that mixing of “races” would reduce human biodiversity, but it relied statistically on classifying characteristics between arbitrary “racial” groups before the mixing, but classifying purely on the basis of individual variation within one big group (ie. without “race”) after mixing – so the assumption based on “race” was effectively hidden in the question Canspeccy asked. Again, your bullshit warning should have activated; you’re scientifically competent enough to have spotted the loaded question.
Jemand, you do a lot of good thinking and post interesting comments here, but you seem to have a blind spot about your own feelings. Xenophobia isn’t an obnoxious set of beliefs that people deliberately hold for the hell of it. It’s a set of feelings the bearer of which is only vaguely aware of, feelings which the bearer is pressured by society to feel guilty about, which he hence represses and rationalises, but which affect his attitudes and behaviours nonetheless.
Clark, it doesn’t make any sense that just because you are/were a xenophobe, that I am one too. It also implies that there must be an equal and opposite condition that produces “xenophiles” of which you might have become one by swinging too hard the other way. Projecting your own psychological developments on to others doesn’t always work and in this case it is entirely invalid. I am not a xenophobe.
My views on immigration are simple, valid and morally defensible. I acknowledge that they are self-interested, but no more than two people drowning are self-interested when swimming toward a small piece of flotsam.
I hold only two concerns about immigration in relation to the Australian experience. One is overpopulation, an issue that instantly identifies the ignorant who have no ability to read a graph nor any inclination to pause for a moment’s thought. The other is character, of which I also include ideological/political/cultural dispositions and not just those of criminal habit.
To suggest that any of these three things (ideology etc) are not valid concerns, is to contradict oneself in the face of all the commentary that is produced on this blog by those who rail against this or that ideology, political activity or cultural practice. I don’t want neo-Nazis coming to my country. I don’t want people who commit “honour killings” coming to my country. I don’t want communists coming to my country — any more than I should want heroin traffickers infiltrating this land to poison its people.
Does all of that make me a xenophobe? How bizarre.
So in my selfish way, I prefer that immigrants be well educated, secular, physically healthy and of good character. It’s a big ask, I admit, although I am happy to waive one or two things except that concerned with character. I don’t give a jot about their colour. That is the obsession of others on this blog, not mine.
Re Canspeccy’s discussion of biodiversity, I stand by everything that I wrote. There was not a scintilla of “racism” in the discussion except for your ideological objections. You apparently introduced ideological values into a technical discussion as if discussion of natural phenomena must accommodate your feelings. On the other hand, if you are going to base ideological values on false science, then the technical details will need to be fixed first – sans ideology.
Back to the pseudo-pathological condition of “xenophobia” ..
Just to clarify, do you advise people to let their guards down and retain no sense of caution when dealing with anything unfamiliar (xeno), whether it be a stranger knocking on their door at 3am, new and improved technologies in face-recognition and voice-to-text, movements of large numbers of people from one region to another, sudden changes in climate, unforeseeable impact events … Is it a phobia to observe and question the potential undesirable consequences of action and/or inaction when introduced to something unfamiliar? Or do you just go ahead and sign on the dotted line next to the smiley face and let fate deal with the after effects, if there are any?
It’s too easy to roll out the suffix -phobe to taxonomically classify your ideological dislikes and enemies, Clark.
And your unquestioning support of “Mary” with her machine-like production of cut-n-paste anti-Israel/Jew/West screeds and childish stabs at her critics is entirely questionable. Is she really that perfect that you have no positive criticism for her? Have you even ever tried?
Show the character that you imagine yourself to have Clark and dare to be different! I know you have the brains, but give us the moral and intellectual integrity and not this nouveau leftish custard that passes itself off as something good that we should all be eating.
re: “sorry for the clutter but it is not nice to be on the end of slanderous vitriol”
apologies for commenting on the comments rather than Craig’s content; as a (verified) human I should remind the people present here that there also exist a different form of presence at sensitive digital watering holes such as this excellent website
(from HBGary US tech supplier for technology of ten plausible sock-puppet PSYWAR identities per Workstation)
…for the purposes of infiltration, data mining, and ganging up on bloggers, commenters and otherwise “real” people to smear enemies and distort the truth.
one of the only defences against this PSYWAR is to be aware of it, consider it as a background possibility for some of the comments that are crafted here.
Now specifically commenting on the Al Jazeera journalism/journalists, isn’t there sometimes a whiff of ‘statecraft’ about some of Al Jazeera’s output – weren’t they accused of staging some ‘Wag the Dog’ style media-video events to support Arab-Spring/Syrian ‘overthrow’ etc.
Perhaps the Egyptian court was right in this case? – I have no idea – mine is just an opinion. Sometimes courts pass the right verdict, does anyone (real) have a link to a reasoned analysis of Mr Greste’s trial and the presented evidence?
Jemand, what I’m saying is that both what are called “xenophobia” and “xenophilia” are just natural urges that everyone has. They are adaptive; you can see the survival / reproductive advantages of both, and each is needed to balance the other.
The point is that we’re never taught about the innate urges. We are taught what is conventionally acceptable at a social level, but evolution which produced the urges was never considered when the social conventions were developing. The conventions we are taught conflict to some extent with what we naturally feel; those feelings get labelled “bad”, so our ego deals with them by covering them up and pretending they don’t exist.
Please note that I’m not making moral judgements, and I don’t see you as an enemy. I’m describing a set of processes that apply to all of us. Most of those who declare “I am not racist” haven’t really thought about what they mean by that; they’re just reflexively rejecting a label that carries negative value-judgements. They’ve never inspected and observed their own feelings when in the presence of people of varying ethnicity, and/or they’ve never noticed (or they’ve suppressed their awareness) that they feel differently toward people depending upon how much or how little they have in common.
Jemand, it is the natural human condition that we advertise our consciously held beliefs while suppressing our responses to those feelings that would contradict the self-image that we build, maintain and project. After decades of practice, and with the vast majority around us doing just the same thing (though around a host of different issues), we simply fail to notice our internal contradictions. But they inevitably show themselves eventually, like coming to believe that genocide occurred in Leicester.
The critical disconnection to perform is to challenge the conventional assumption that any perceived (or admitted) feelings of ‘X’ within, say, John imply that John “is an ‘X’ist”. Wrong. John is only ‘X’ist if he permits his feelings to motivate ‘X’ist behaviour. Recognising and compensating for the feelings is how “racism” is overcome at the personal level.
Jemand, to summarise, I am not calling you “a xenophobe”; I don’t believe in using those blanket descriptions that reduce a complex person to a stereotype. However, I’m as sure that you contain the both the xenophobic and xenophilic motivations as I am that your chest contains lungs.
So Clark, my concerns about stressed water resources in Australia (driest inhabited continent), the rapidly depleting energy and mineral resources and the environmental impacts of a growing population that is driven mostly by immigration (of mostly English, New Zealanders) is just a conscious rationalisation of my unconscious xenophobia?
And if I admitted, in this session, to secretly feeling more comfortable in the presence of Asian people than white people, again I am internalising my racism and trying to construct defences against the awful realisation that I am, in fact, a red-necked white racist supremacist loon?
Thanks, Clark. It’s a long journey but with you holding my hand and guiding me, I think I can find a way forward.
Jemand
26 Jun, 2014 – 9:44 am
“Liar, liar.”
“One burglar was Aboriginal and the other was WHITE.”
That was not what you said in your original post about the burglary was it Jemand?
Tis you that lies.
Jemand, no, I don’t think you’re a White Supremacist or anything like that (though I think you suffer slight islamophobia), and I expect you’ve developed very rational objections to immigration, though if you were operating entirely logically, you should also have come up with a number of advantages and I don’t think you’ve mentioned any. And you’d need some kind of quirk not to notice how batty Canspeccy often is, and to fail to notice that his “science” is contrived, convoluted bunk.
Doug Scorgie, I think you’re right that Jemand didn’t mention the white burglar, but I doubt he meant to mislead. That’s the way such things work; unconsciously: important facts get omitted, and the omission is unconsciously ignored, just like all the propaganda the journalists are adamant they’re not producing.
I would prefer that Jemand did not discuss me behind my back so to speak, spreading his denigration of my contributions. I have already had a character assassination from him.
He certainly likes to hold the floor and listen to the sound of his own voice.
Thanks.
Doug Scorgie, careful!
Facts were still coming in from the police at that time and I am still in the dark as to a few details such as if anyone has even been convicted.
So either quote my lies or fuck off like a good little nobody.
Clark, I’m not sure if you’re trying to take the piss out of me, vex me or are on your own misguided course of judging other people.
But you are much like your friends here. What you don’t know, you invent and speculate as if suspicions were facts. And instead of discussing ideas, you and the others prefer to make judgements about people. You know what they say about people, events and ideas, don’t you? Mary, is an exception ONLY because she refuses, always refuses, to discuss ideas and justify her slurs, and YOU refuse to comment on her anti-Jewish obsession. Who’s in denial there?
In relation to immigration being a great thing in your mind, how does it change the fact that overpopulation is killing our biosphere? Why should I advocate the advantages of asbestos? Why should I extoll the amazing usefulness of coal? Am I charged with the responsibility of giving equal time and fair airing of alternative views? I’m not the fucking BBC, Clark.
No one participating in a debate is required to present the ‘other side’ – that doesn’t even begin to make sense. Do you recommend that I do what the BBC has been severely criticised in doing – ie present a false balance of views by allowing CC denial fuckwits to expound on the benefits of high carbon-dioxide vs Climate Change?
It’s just better to cut your losses and turnback on this matter, Clark. You don’t really want to go down the same route that Scouse Billy did with you on matters of health.
Mary, you attack others all the time.
You have spread lies about me.
You refuse to acknowledge the crimes of your chosen people.
You refuse to acknowledge the crimes committed against the “races” and cultures that you despise.
You refuse to show the sort of balance that Clark lectures on.
You refuse to explain yourself.
You refuse to correctly quote other peoples work.
You refuse to admit when you are wrong and you refuse to apologise for your mistakes.
You have nothing in your online character that could be liberally described as a virtue.
Jemand
27 Jun, 2014 – 11:27 am
“Doug Scorgie, careful!”
“Facts were still coming in from the police at that time and I am still in the dark as to a few details such as if anyone has even been convicted.”
“So either quote my lies or fuck off like a good little nobody.”
——————————————————–
Can anyone find Jemand’s original post about the burglary at his mother’s house?
I think he was talking about Aborigines.
Jemand, it’s you that’s concerned about immigration. It isn’t “a great thing” in my mind; it’s not often on my mind at all. I regard it as an effect more than a cause. And of course I make judgements about you, as you do of me and as we all do of each other. I think my judgement of you is considerably milder than your judgement of Mary, for instance. But you seem upset, so I’ll shut up.
Jemand, just to let you know I watched the video you linked on the other thread. Pat Condell seems rather angry, and makes arguments similar to Canspeccy’s. But that sort of labelling and political stereotyping doesn’t appeal to me. And I don’t think of religion as a big problem; I think it can enable violence and is often used to encourage it etc. but it isn’t really a cause of violence. It’s not the cause of the benevolence sometimes seen in religious communities, either. Violence, benevolence and religion all spring from human nature.
Yes, dig away Doug. You will find a reference to Aborigines in my original post/s but you won’t find any reference suggesting that it was ONLY Aborigines involved in the crime, nor will you find any suggestion that Aborigines have a predisposition to criminal behaviour.
If you read my post with any good will, you would have seen that I was countering the bullshit that Mary peddles that Aborigines do not commit crimes on their own volition and under the power of their own moral choices. While she didn’t use those exact words (how could she?), she does attack all references to “brown people” committing crimes as if they do not and refuses (yet again) to acknowledge that some of her chosen people cause problems for themselves.
But go on, pull out the original if you can find it and let’s pick over it like a scabby sore. I’m sure there’s something in it for you to throw at me like an old shoe.
Clark, yes I am concerned about immigration. Did I say that I was not?
Here’s why. People kill native environments. It’s a fact. You might not care but that’s just part of the problem of getting the message out. Too many people just don’t give a shit until “too many people” starts to affect them personally – first in their wallet and then in their personal well being as they have to wait in a queue to receive medical attention. If you want unlimited population growth and all of its attendant problems, go ahead and support pro-growth. Don’t worry about future generations who will need to clean up the mess, just support what feels good here and now.
WRT Canspeccy, he can speak for himself and I believe he did. I recall (correctly?) that he said he was not racist and that he prefers biodiversity, including within the human species, and went on to explain how merging populations of organisms diminish diversity.
Instead of taking him at his word and debating the technical points, you accused him of having (latent?) racist views based on nothing more than your suspicions. Craig cautioned against second guessing people’s motives in commenting here for good reason. I also don’t see how contradicting someone’s personal declarations contributes anything of substance to a debate. If I told you that I was a bald dwarf, why contradict it unless it is to discredit me?
WRT Religious violence.
“And I don’t think of religion as a big problem; I think it can enable violence and is often used to encourage it etc. but it isn’t really a cause of violence. It’s not the cause of the benevolence sometimes seen in religious communities, either. Violence, benevolence and religion all spring from human nature.”
So religions that espouse, condone, approve, celebrate or in any other way encourage violence are not “cause[s] of violence”? If a religious cleric instructs followers to engage in violence, the religious justifications have no effect of inciting the violence that follows?
Could we say the same thing about political ideology, Clark? I mean, can we let fascism off the hook now that we know that ideas don’t kill people, only people kill people?
Surely people are motivated by something when engaging in violence. It can’t just be an inappropriate outburst of bottled up rage when a group of men get together with their firearms, plan a raid on a village and go about murdering innocent people.
There are many things that, when kept separate, are benign but when added to something else become either toxic or violently explosive. Don’t you think that guns and religion mixed with human nature makes for a dangerous combination? Or do you think that people should be free to have guns and/or crackpot religious programming?
Jemand, if it wasn’t religion it’d be something else, like whether you should crack your egg at the big end or the little end. If people want to get upset, they’ll dress in red and attack anyone in blue or whatever. Blues will publish tracts about the evil threat of the reds, and flags of different colours will be dramatically burnt. Or someone will see the name of God when they slice a cabbage, and someone else will call it apostasy.
To prevent violence, you have to keep everyone reasonably content and busy. You can criticise their religion if you feel like it, but their religion already says that anyone who criticises it is working for the Devil so you may as well not bother, it just makes things worse. The best thing you can do with religion is encourage all the cultural activities, festivals, celebrations, music, singing, dressing up, feasts; all that stuff is great for bringing people together. When
Canspeccy falsely asserted that “merging populations of organisms diminish[es] diversity”, much like he argued that most Indians are better off than most Brits by using a highly misleading statistical comparison. Yes, Canspeccy claims not to be racist, but he’s forever banging on about immigration, he encourages people to vote BNP, he finds arguments as to why people of different “races” shouldn’t breed together, he refers to “mongrel” populations, and he asserts that genocide has occurred in the English city of Leicester.
And like you, Jemmand, he’s very worried about the rate at which immigrant Muslim populations breed. Jemand, excessive interest in other people’s reproduction just looks rather weird and distasteful to most folks.
Clark : “Jemand, if it wasn’t religion it’d be something else, ..”
But it is not just “religion”, Clark. It is Islam. We don’t read much about Buddhist terrorists or Scientologist suicide bombers, do we?
If all religions were the same, I would expect a similar level of insane devotion to murder in its own name. But I don’t see it. Do you?
You are quite sure that if religion didn’t motivate violence, then something else would. Well, other things do. Like jealousy, greed, restive warrior genes, stress related rages, humiliation, vengeance.. But I fail to see how giving people yet another reason to kill each other is somehow a solution. Especially if that reason is highly organised and exists today only because it has the right attributes for aggressive propagation, like Amway.
We have all heard the claim by slogan chanting gun owners that if killers didn’t have access to guns, they’d just find another way of killing. We have seen other massacres, like in China, where knives or machetes were used. But I don’t see the same level of violence in China, nor in other places, where gun ownership is either banned or highly regulated. Giving people another means of killing each other is not a solution to that problem.
Clark : “To prevent violence, you have to keep everyone reasonably content and busy.”
In the good old days when times were bad, you had to get up at sunrise, go out and kill a rabbit for a meal and build your own home before sunset if you didn’t want to perish for the elements. They weren’t too busy to find time to slaughter each other over notions of this God or that in those times.
And in this age of extraordinary opportunity and access to resources, people still languish in and torture themselves within the confines of their own minds. Suicides for no other reason than ‘thoughts’ are at an all time high because so many people cannot find the elusive spirit of content.
The best thing you can do to keep people content and busy all day, every day, is tell them to believe in a God that loves them if they pray five times a day, spread His word throughout the land and sternly deal with those who refuse to ‘surrender’ to God’s will (the actual meaning of the word ‘Islam’).
Clark : “You can criticise their religion if you feel like it, but their religion already says that anyone who criticises it is working for the Devil so you may as well not bother, it just makes things worse.”
This is something of an age-old dilemma. Do I say or do something now in order to stop it, or let it go on in the hope that it will fade away. Islam is not fading away, Clark. And it is not transforming itself into a Western-friendly, weekend hobby for boring people, like Christianity mostly did.
I think many Germans, after the first World War, thought that the Nazis were a flash in the pan outfit. They were dealing with all sorts of personal difficulties in the economic chaos after the war, too much to really notice or care about the inroads made by a blustering little political party. Little did they realise that the party that wouldn’t go away would reinvent one of the most destructive military dictatorships the world has ever witnessed. No one saw that coming except the true believers.
Clark : “Canspeccy falsely asserted that “merging populations of organisms diminish[es] diversity”, ..”
You will have to take up those objections with Canspeccy, Clark. I am not Canspeccy.
Clark : “And like you, Jemmand, he’s very worried about the rate at which immigrant Muslim populations breed. Jemand, excessive interest in other people’s reproduction just looks rather weird and distasteful to most folks.”
And like me he probably has two legs, some teeth and a liking for ice-cream. So what? Like I said, I am not Canspeccy.
Incidentally, I never used the word “breed”. I observed, as do demographers, that there is a trend in Muslim growth. I never even made the observation about the origin of that growth – ie immigration, birth, or conversion. And like all good scientists I ask questions, I see potential problems and I advocate solutions – for better or worse.
Furthermore, I do not have an “excessive interest” in other people’s “reproduction” as I have articulated immediately above. But I do have a strong interest in the dynamics of transforming societies. Don’t you?
He’s doing it again. Even the anti Jewish thing. I am anti Zionist and their crimes against the Palestinians.
I repeat:
‘I would prefer that Jemand did not discuss me behind my back so to speak, spreading his denigration of my contributions. I have already had a character assassination from him.
He certainly likes to hold the floor and listen to the sound of his own voice.
Thanks.’
What a nasty piece of work.
Jemand, I don’t have to take the matter up with Canspeccy because it’s simple maths; you can’t increase the diversity within a pack of playing cards by shuffling them. It’s also bloody obvious that organic evolution produces copious diversity without needing to enforce any political borders whatsoever.
You’re a scientist? What’s your field and level of expertise? A scientist’s role within the scientific method is to challenge existing theory. When I challenged Canspeccy’s (probably fraudulent) theory, you supported him with rhetoric devoid of evidence or theory. My provisional explanation for your dereliction scientific duty is that Canspeccy was saying something you already wished to believe – and in that, you resemble the person who commits violence and attributes his actions to religion.
Jemand, what was worse was that Canspeccy was having some success peddling his pseudoscience; Resident Dissident and Duncan McFarlane were starting to accept his false argument – and you supported him – offering no evidence at all, instead merely appealing to your own authority as “a scientist”.
You motivation? Unconscious bias, I hope, rather than conscious dishonesty.
Clark : “I don’t have to take the matter up with Canspeccy because it’s simple maths”
No it’s not, Clark. It’s more set theory, statistics and group dynamics if you want to put it into mathematical terms. And then it becomes ideological which rarely demonstrates any sensible relationship with science.
Let me put the technical argument this way. On one side of the wall, you have A and on the other you have B. Bring them together and eventually you have AB with neither pure A nor pure B surviving. Whatever mutations produce biodiversity within AB will be subsumed by the greater population. One species AB instead of two species A + B. That’s called diminishing biodiversity.
Clark : “It’s also bloody obvious that organic evolution produces copious diversity without needing to enforce any political borders whatsoever.”
Who’s talking about “political borders”? There you go again mangling a technical argument with an ideological one.
Scientists have found “lost tribes” and “lost worlds”, isolated by land features and oceans (not political borders), wherein unique species of people and animals have been found. The so called “Florensian Hobbit” being one example of both the creation of biodiversity in isolation and its destruction when modern man made eventually invaded his territory. Goodbye Hobbit!
Whatever the origin of these borders, isolation produces biodiversity.
Maybe the best way of putting it is that biodiversity is dependent on environmental diversity or isolation diversity.
And that is where I leave the technical debate for you to quibble over the political ramifications by yourself since you don’t wish to pursue the matter with Canspeccy. Because I did not, do not, will not advocate “political borders” to deal with matters of human biodiversity.
Clark : “You’re a scientist? What’s your field and level of expertise?”
Not biology, nor physics. So I think we are both in equally unfamiliar territory here, Clark. Not that that should matter because scientific reasoning knows no arbitrary boundaries.
Clark : “A scientist’s role within the scientific method is to challenge existing theory.”
Is it? I thought it was to discover new knowledge and contribute it to the pyramid of human consciousness. In the absence of any theory, what would the role of a scientist be?
Look at these fragments, Clark :
“..(probably fraudulent) theory”
“you supported him with rhetoric devoid of evidence or theory”
“..your dereliction scientific duty ..”
“..you already wished to believe..”
“..you resemble the person who commits violence and attributes his actions to religion.”
“..pseudoscience..”
“..and you supported him – offering no evidence at all, instead merely appealing to your own authority as “a scientist”.”
“You motivation? Unconscious bias,..”
It appears that you prefer to focus on the person, rather than the ideas themselves. I don’t actually recall you presenting any evidence for either your arguments nor powers of knowing what people think, wish or what motivates them.
Like I said. If you have a problem with Canspeccy’s arguments, take that up with him. If you have a problem with MY arguments, take that up with me – BUT don’t conflate the two of us and claim that Canspeccy’s arguments are mine, whatever the similarities. Remember, butterflies and moths are very similar.
Jemand, a “political border” is a border between countries, a line on a map, as opposed to a physical boundary, such as a range of mountains or a river; my argument was not ideological. The term “immigration” assumes the existence of political borders.
Yes, challenging theory is only one of the important scientific roles, not the only one as I erroneously implied.
Isolation enables diversification in the form of speciation, but it does not cause it.
Jemand, this paragraph of yours is a complete mess:
If that really represents your understanding of genetics and inheritance, you are blustering way beyond your expertise. Why? Because you like the ideological conclusion it leads you to – enforcing racial sexual segregation.
Jemand, here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meiosis
Jemand, 10:00 am; I apologise; I thought this was rhetorical, but I now realise that it is a genuine question:
Yes it is. My Hippy friends tell me that science is “just another belief system” like a religion. I tell them no, it’s a disbelief system, in the sense of “I’m not going to believe any assertion that isn’t substantiated”. The scientific process is to a large extent adversarial. Someone publishes their theory, and many others try to knock it down, pick holes in it, or refute it with conflicting evidence. That which has so far survived such onslaughts, and which integrates intelligibly with other fields, constitutes the body of science.
Google “rabbits in the pre-Cambrian” to see what I’m on about.