Blimey. I switch my phone off and stay away from the Net for one day (and a Sunday at that) and everything goes to hell. Apologies to Auriol and Leasey (and anyone else who was trying to get in touch). I heard your messages and will get back to you.
PooterGeek was crawling with comment spam this morning and I’ve been relegated to a “Flappy Bird” in the Truth Laid Bear ‘Blogging Ecosystem—this despite being linked to by a piece of Crooked Timber well-poisoning. (The Poisoning Of The Well is followed instantly by a Straw Man. Crooked Timber remains unrivalled as a resource for those in the academic community charged with the teaching of elementary logical fallacies.)
Satan on a moped, what a start to a Monday.
Thing is: I was lost in music, caught in a trap, no turning back, lost in music. More specifically I was trying to grok a drum machine called Guru so that I could build a hip-hop beat around a lovely piece of Richard Brincklow piano playing. To really understand most new computer music programs these days you need to devote long periods of unbroken concentration to figuring out their quirks. Calling Guru a drum machine is pretty insulting—I actually bought it for its powerful ability to dissect streams of rhythmic sound—but it might as well be “just a drum machine” for my grasp of it to date. It looks beautiful and is very clever, but has an interface as intuitive as the cockpit of a 747.
As revenge for having to listen to his new catchphrase—“a 2:i is a perfectly good degree, Damian“—I hand-edited Richard’s keyboard performance and have begun to loop it into manipulable chunks. It is now the basis for an “anti-Spiritual”. You are welcome to listen to a verse of Bow Down Below. As you can hear, it isn’t finished, but it’s still copyright and playright Brincklow and Counsell 2005. I’d love to play you some of our SciArt stuff, but Rich is in the process of the more heavy-duty, needs-a-degree-in-music orchestration on our current favourite Break Bones.
On the subject of my last post, the fake Merkel speech wasn’t really German, people. It was geeky pseudo-German, like the famous “Blinkenlights” warning poster. Those of you who didn’t get it could read it again in the right spirit (and perhaps with a window to Babelfish open on your desktop for any real German words) and you’ll get the drift of it. Here’s a nice New York Times piece about “Denglish”, and here are the ultimate Blinkenlights.
I did like BiB’s comment very much.
I think you need to distinguish between:
A.
1. Carol is a jerk.
2. Carol says P
therefore
3. P is false.
Which is an instance of the poisoned well.
and
B
1. Carol usually talks bollocks.
2. Carol says P
therefore
3. There’s a good chance that P is bollocks.
Which isn’t.
Superb description of what Crooked Timber has become, or rather what Chris Bertram has descended to.
Bravo.
Chris,
Looks like special pleading to me.
Thank you for the clarification, Chris.
It seemed obvious to me that you had linked to Ms Gould’s latest writing because it might show her up as silly or prejudiced. Now I understand that your purpose was to draw people’s attention to another account of Ms Gould’s supposed experiences that you didn’t believe in order to undermine her previous account of her supposed experiences that you also didn’t believe—a priori.
The exercise for readers is now to decide whether this is this Begging the Question, shifting the Burden of Proof, or falling for the Relativist fallacy.
Well you’re right that I didn’t believe both what she said earlier and what she said later.
You otoh, seem to have believed what she said earlier.
The relevant principle is surely that when we gain particular evidence that a person’s testimony is unreliable (and I’ve just given you some) then that evidence should cause us to re-evaluate their earlier testimony. For example, when we discover that someone is willing to lie or embellish we look at what they said before we made that discovery in a different light.
At least, that’s what we do if we’re rational: no fallacy required.
In fact, as I bloviated over there, there are two aspects of la Gould’s reporting, one of which may well be true, and one of which almost certainly isn’t.
I don’t doubt, allowing for her justifiable exaggeration, that poppies were thin on the ground in the Edgware Road area.
I do doubt that it’s significant.
Because although the area has a high concentration of Muslims, it’s a very small area compared with others where muslims are concentrated. And it’s a shifting area of short-stayers. Or pluted bloatocrats and their slaves.
I was in Budapest this March, and on their national day I found it extremely moving that they were all wearing their commemorative badges, but it would have been unseemly for me to have worn one. And while I know a few Pakistanis in London whose relatives fought with us in the services, some of whom wore poppies, it might well be considered unseemly for those who didn’t, or didn’t have a services connection, to do so. As an example of a stick to beat Muslims with, she invariably picks duff examples. There are loads of better ones.
“when we discover that someone is willing to lie or embellish we look at what they said before we made that discovery in a different light”: Indeed. So, Chris, to cite just three typical examples from your very own, very crooked oeuvre – and no, we really can’t be bothered to supply URLs – do tell us again all about how:
(1) an article describing how anti-Semitism is increasing in Europe in fact describes merely its presence;
(2) Melanie Phillips, whom no sane person would describe as being on the left, nevertheless is a member of the “pro-war left” and can be used to make infantile generalisations about them – even as you object shrilly to any generalisations at all about the “anti-war left”;
(3) because Christopher Hitchens’s militant secularism (as of 2005) isn’t shared by some obscure bunch of religious nutters in Kansas (as of 2002), he must be a hypocrite.
Or better yet, just shut the fuck up.
A pity you can’t supply the URLs and have to rely only on your feeble memory.
(1) I believe is substantially inaccurate. But as I recall SIAW, you never actually read the article in question and gave the lame excuse that the Financial Times was unavailable in the town where you lived!
(2) I’ve described Mad Mel as having a “pro-war blog” not as a member of the “pro-war left”. That characterization is accurate.
(3) No idea what this refers to.
Teehee …
Reading skills: “can’t supply” is not the same as “can’t be bothered to supply”.
Nor can we be bothered to get into another boring non-debate with you. After all, the point we wanted to make has been amply made.
“can’t supply” is not the same as “can’t be bothered to supply”.
In standard English, this is correct. In Siawese “can’t be bothered to supply” means “Though we have no evidence for these assertions, we’ll make out that we have but that we can’t be arsed to supply it.”
Wrong again. It may seem strange to a petty-minded, obsessively self-referencing weasel such as yourself, but we really, truly can’t be bothered.
Anyone who’s that fascinated – and suspects, for obvious reasons, that Bertram’s bullshitting yet again – can easily follow up the links by searching for “Bertram” on our blog. Much good may it do you: Bertram specialises in endless variations on the theme of “Well, yes, you may have thought I said that, but what I really said was …”
Oh, and if you want to say that we’re lying, wy not come straight out with it?
Oh, and if you want to say that we’re lying …..
To say that I’d have to be sure that you were intending to mislead. But I can’t rule out that you have simply lost your grip on reality. In fact, that strikes me as the most promising hypothesis.
Has anyone out there, before Gould’s latest piece, ever heard of anyone being accused of being Jewish because they wear a poppy?
Can anyone understand why an anti-semite should connect the poppy with Israel/Jewishness?
(Just one last time, Damian, we promise …)
Bertramese: “I can’t rule out [the possibility] that you have simply lost your grip on reality” > English:
perhaps (1) “I can’t work out how to do a search on a Blogger.com blog”;
and/or perhaps (2) “I can’t be bothered with all this, I have much more important things to do” (which would be fair enough, as we certainly have);
and/or, most likely, (3) “I can’t think of anything else to say, so, as usual when that happens, I’ll resort to the world-weary scholar shtick while continuing to avoid making an honest response to any criticism of anything I’ve written”.
As we said, the point we wanted to make has been amply made – and then some. So it goes, and so we go. That’s all.
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