BS: Pseudointellectual Smackdown!

Subject: RE: BS: Pseudointellectual Smackdown!
From: banjoman
Date: 17 Sep 14 - 05:51 AM

I thought from its title that this thread was about WWE Wrestling which is on every Friday evening (UK)and certainly expounds loads of Pseudointellectual thoughts.
Dawkins is, and always has been, an asshole.

Subject: RE: BS: Pseudointellectual Smackdown!
From: GUEST,Stim
Date: 16 Sep 14 - 10:17 PM

The one thing that you miss, Shaw, is that the religious fundamentalists don't care. The don't much like the modern science-based world, and they feel like they don't fit, and so they create a world they like better. Can't really blame them for that. Our world is a bit of a mess.

Subject: RE: BS: Pseudointellectual Smackdown!
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 16 Sep 14 - 07:55 PM

In another thread, pete-the-archetypal-thicko-insulting-ignoramus claims that science is a faith position. In this thread, some lunatic claims that science is a religion (incredibly unoriginally, of course). Well, these are the last desperate clingings-on of the religion that, fearfully, sees the world as ever more yielding to explanation by science and not by its silly doctrine. The irony is that proponents of this argument don't see that they are demeaning their own position, fatally, by making such fatuous claims. They want, seemingly, to drag science down to the level of religion. That's hilarious, is that. Liverpool won tonight, by the way. Even the Reds have God on their side.

Subject: RE: BS: Pseudointellectual Smackdown!
From: GUEST,Rahere
Date: 16 Sep 14 - 05:50 PM

You'll have to do better that that in refutation, Greg: I'm simply saying neither is reliable. Christianity, for example, was supposed to have replaced the Jewish rulebook: so what has Rome spent the last 200 years doing? Writing a new one. And Science does the same, Ohm's Law breaking down with superconductors, for example.
A pragmatic engineer keeps one eye on common sense.

Subject: RE: BS: Pseudointellectual Smackdown!
From: GUEST,CS
Date: 16 Sep 14 - 04:44 PM

Dawkins is something like the Katie Hopkins of pop philosophy.
He might be an OK scientist, I don't know, but he's a damned awful dick-head.

Subject: RE: BS: Pseudointellectual Smackdown!
From: Musket
Date: 16 Sep 14 - 01:15 PM

Rather ironic that this thread begins with pseud...

Private Eye have an occasional column that some of the tripe here could fit into rather neatly.

Subject: RE: BS: Pseudointellectual Smackdown!
From: Richard Bridge
Date: 16 Sep 14 - 12:57 PM

You'd maybe expect an expert to be able to spell "pretence".

Subject: RE: BS: Pseudointellectual Smackdown!
From: GUEST,leeneia
Date: 16 Sep 14 - 11:23 AM

Is there such a thing as a pseudo-intellectual? Does anybody willingly decide to be such a thing?

I think that if A has a bigger vocabulary than B, and if A tussles with difficult subjects, while B can't be bothered but feels he SHOULD be bothered, then B sneers at A as a pseudo-intellectual.

The last person that I've heard use the term 'pseudo-intellectual' was Spiro Agnew, vice president (for a while) under Richard Nixon.

Subject: RE: BS: Pseudointellectual Smackdown!
From: GUEST,Stim
Date: 16 Sep 14 - 09:40 AM

Atheism is a base. There are lots of self-identified atheists who organize themselves into groups to forward their ideas, to provide mutual support, and to act in concert against the ills of the world. A lot of them subscribe to Dawkins tweets.

Subject: RE: BS: Pseudointellectual Smackdown!
From: Greg F.
Date: 16 Sep 14 - 09:17 AM

Science has bencome a religion

Oh, please - not that tired old saw.

Subject: RE: BS: Pseudointellectual Smackdown!
From: GUEST,Rahere
Date: 16 Sep 14 - 09:02 AM

The trouble is, even Science has bencome a religion. Just look at the history of science books, they have the greatest of difficulty in recognising:
1. that science existed before Newton
2. that Newton wrote twice as much on esotericism as on physics
3. that the founding fathers of modern science were almost to a man Masonic, bound together by a proto-religion recognising a divine ergos.

And you get exactly the same tactics used by the Churches from them:
1. Anti-heretical discrediting
2. The full Shakespearean panoply of disinformation extendin to outright lies, to a degree which should if their own rules of debate were accurately observed, discredit them through every trick of fallacious logic.

The simple fact is that the base of agricultural science was in place by 1300, and metallurgy by 1500. Cosmology has a direct line of dewscent from 1400. And much of that earlier thinking was somewhat guided by religion, into the bargain, which is why the Royal Society isn't prepared to go there.

The problem is, how much noise is in the scientific machine? I know, for example, that between 1968, when I stopped chemistry in secondary school, and 1975, when I had to restart it as an ancilliary subject studying management in a scientific university, the entire structure of the periodic table was recast, and some fundamental axioms I was taught as certain then were replaced by others which are very different yet apparently every whit as certain.

Let's look at the Higgs Boson as an example. The only evident case for spending a pharaonic sum of money on the Large Hadron Collider is that there seems to be a gap in the table, that it looks "right" that there "should" be something there. Or perhaps there just is a gap? The periodic table demonstrates the real atomic world isn't nice and square, the lanthanides and actinies all occupy the space just one element in each instance would normally fill if it were all neat and tidy. It is now starting to look as if in a very similar way, the model was wrong, that we not only have a Higgs Boson, but a whole crew of Higgs particles, from Powder-Boy to Admiral. So much for the use of religious arguments to justify science, then, and for science as an objective argument in and of itself alone.

Which rather demolishes the Dork's purist arguments, methinks. Where's Savonarolo when we need him?

Subject: RE: BS: Pseudointellectual Smackdown!
From: Musket
Date: 16 Sep 14 - 02:26 AM

Atheism isn't a base.

It is a word used to describe not having a base so far as superstition is concerned.

He does stick to science. He berates those who dismiss discovery because it can't be referenced in a book of fairy tales.

I'd be frustrated too if my branch of science, if I had one, was dismissed out of hand by ignorant superstition.

Subject: RE: BS: Pseudointellectual Smackdown!
From: GUEST,Stim
Date: 16 Sep 14 - 02:14 AM

Actually, he makes inflammatory statements about all kinds of things that have nothing to do with religion. He even manages to offend atheists sometimes. Not the smartest thing in the world to go against your base.

Subject: RE: BS: Pseudointellectual Smackdown!
From: michaelr
Date: 15 Sep 14 - 09:03 PM

Chopra is a charlatan. Dawkins is an asshole.

Chopra sells snake oil. Dawkins sells truth.

I don't like either of them much, but it's plain to see which is wronger.

Subject: RE: BS: Pseudointellectual Smackdown!
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 15 Sep 14 - 08:17 PM

Translator's note: "making inflammatory statements" means "cutting through the religious bullshit".

Subject: RE: BS: Pseudointellectual Smackdown!
From: GUEST,Stim
Date: 15 Sep 14 - 07:08 PM

Whatever sort of scientist Dawkins is, he gets more press for making inflammatory statements than he ever got for his real work. And even his inflammtory statements get him less press than anything a Kardashian does. Even Rob Kardashian.

Subject: RE: BS: Pseudointellectual Smackdown!
From: Greg F.
Date: 15 Sep 14 - 06:24 PM

Pompous yes - but that don't mean he's wrong.

Subject: RE: BS: Pseudointellectual Smackdown!
From: Mrrzy
Date: 15 Sep 14 - 06:16 PM

Dawkins may be an actual intellectual, but he's still a pompous ass who could use some smacking, down or otherwise.

Subject: RE: BS: Pseudointellectual Smackdown!
From: GUEST,Rahere
Date: 15 Sep 14 - 09:05 AM

No, someone who merely thinks he's an intellectual will get so far up the nose of anyone real he'll not so much be smacked down as be smacked squarely in the chops into the middle of next week.
The thought of smacking the Dorking into that distance in disproof of his entire space-time continuum is quite appealing, given the way his mates have been disposed of lately.

Subject: RE: BS: Pseudointellectual Smackdown!
From: GUEST,Sapper twidling his thumbs in Greenhill Loop
Date: 15 Sep 14 - 08:51 AM

Marianne, perhaps it's a pseudointellectual being slapped down by a pseudointellectual??

Subject: RE: BS: Pseudointellectual Smackdown!
From: GUEST,Marianne S.
Date: 15 Sep 14 - 02:57 AM

Does the title mean a pseudointellectual has smacked someone down or someone has smacked down a pseudointellectual? Clarity please.

Subject: RE: BS: Pseudointellectual Smackdown!
From: Greg F.
Date: 14 Sep 14 - 11:20 AM

Jack: Can you justify the pejorative adjective you have chosen to deploy in the thread title, please?

No, he can't, nor will he.

Subject: RE: BS: Pseudointellectual Smackdown!
From: Musket
Date: 14 Sep 14 - 03:27 AM

The little boy who shouted that the emperor has no clothes was described as arrogant and precocious.

It'd help if we recall that anybody who defends reality against superstition is normally accused of quoting "Dawkins memes " by our Jack, who has difficulty understanding that dismissing perpetuation of superstition is accepting reality , even if it does make his faith look silly at times.

Eyup Jack.

Subject: RE: BS: Pseudointellectual Smackdown!
From: MGM·Lion
Date: 14 Sep 14 - 03:22 AM

Jack: Can you justify the pejorative adjective you have chosen to deploy in the thread title, please?

Bill: Maybe; but surely the 'rightness', if we agree it is there, outweighs the 'arrogance' -- which may be a bit of a subjective concept anyhow: vehemence in postulation of one's truly held beliefs does not necessarily constitute arrogance (he said arrogantly!)

≈M≈

Subject: RE: BS: Pseudointellectual Smackdown!
From: Bill D
Date: 13 Sep 14 - 11:50 PM

Oh, Dawkins is quite arrogant....even about things he's right about...

Subject: RE: BS: Pseudointellectual Smackdown!
From: Ed T
Date: 13 Sep 14 - 08:11 PM

Jack TS, where have you been and what have you seen?
It has been awhile;)

Subject: RE: BS: Pseudointellectual Smackdown!
From: Steve Shaw
Date: 13 Sep 14 - 07:17 PM

Say goodnight to the folks, Gracie.

Subject: BS: Pseudointellectual Smackdown!
From: Jack the Sailor
Date: 13 Sep 14 - 07:01 PM

Chopra vs Dawkins. Battle of BS!!

Deepak Chopra: "I am pissed off by Richard Dawkins' arrogance and his pretense of being a really good scientist. He is not"

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