Category: trolls

I get emails from loons

May 11, 2020 • 1:00 pm

Here’s an email I got this morning from someone named Robert. What a lovely morning!

Hello Mr Fraudster,

Scientists ten times your worth (Ronald Fisher, Pauli, Freeman Dyson, B Josephson and many others) understand that ESP is entirely within the realms of scientific possibility. So I suggest you pipe down your propaganda/business PR (meant to sell more of those “atheist” books/magazines and popularize your blog). Mind you, your statements are not in the least unexpected since you have been trained by the lying, anti-science pseudomarxist Lewontin, who deliberately miscalculated genetic distances and pushed his propaganda through the american anthropological association. THAT is the new, prevalent anti-science argument in academia these days, same as the old anti-science  argument.

Of course I don’t deny that ESP is within the realms of scientific possibility. Almost everything is that’s not inherently self-contradictory (i.e., a grasshopper that’s also a platypus). But the sad fact is that there is not a scintilla of evidence for ESP.

What’s curious about his email is that I myself wrote some criticisms of Lewontin’s “genetic distances between races” arguments—or rather reproduced Lou Jost’s criticisms. I’m not sure exactly what is bugging Robert here. All I know is that it takes all kinds to make a world. To call this man a jackass would be an insult to jackasses everywhere, who are cute and amiable.

.

 

A typical banned comment

July 15, 2019 • 10:15 am

I’ve received considerable opprobrium for giving Steve Pinker a forum to answer critics who accused him of somehow being complicit in the sex crimes of Jeffrey Epstein. I’m not going to reproduce the hateful emails, comments, or Twitter accusations I’ve received for providing that forum, or for speaking out on Pinker’s behalf, but I will reproduce one below. Since it accuses me of a crime, I have no compunction about reproducing the entire comment, IP address and all. In its direct accusations of criminality it is not typical, but its tone is quite similar to that I’ve seen in many comments and emails.

Note as well the gratuitous and anti-Semitic addition of “Goldbergs and Cohens” (yes, every name on the list is Jewish).

Needless to say, the comment won’t appear, and perhaps “Goyem” will cry out that he—I suspect these people are usually men—was banned. Free speech!

Years of writing on this site have more or less inured me to nonsense like this, but what I’ve never gotten used to is how horribly people behave on the internet—in ways they’d never behave were they to address you face to face. I’m not asking for sympathy, as I let myself in for this stuff by taking strong stands in a public forum. Still, I often wonder if posting under one’s real name would cure this behavior. A reader informed me that a new study says no, using one’s real name might actually exacerbate bad behavior. And, at any rate, I’m not going to force people to use their real names.  I can take stuff like this, but I don’t have to publish it.

It is this kind of low behavior that erodes my faith in humanity and drives me to seek solace among my ducks.