Ethical disagreement
So this Ramsey fella is still at it, so now it’s six days instead of five. He is, clearly, getting some kind of jollies out of goading me – and of course he is succeeding at goading me. I find him highly irritating. But then – that is because he is being so 1) belligerent 2) dishonest. Snake swallowing tail. He succeeds at irritating me by being so obviously determined to irritate me. Naturally that does succeed (unless one is a Buddhist monk, of course). Somebody making a big point of a repeated personal attack is naturally bound to be irritating (except to a Buddhist monk).
At any rate – Ramsey is having himself an enjoyable time, but at the price of displaying himself as a dishonest troll with a vendetta. He is insisting on claiming that he can tell that the book is bad on the strength of four paragraphs. Like today for instance – Jeremy told him, “And lastly, READ THE BOOK, then criticise it. It’s much better that way around.” Ramsey replied:
Stangroom: “And lastly, READ THE BOOK”
With all due respect, I prefer to read books when I see signs that they are likely to be good. Every quote that I’ve seen from it so far–and quotes cited by the authors at that–show problems, and not just in tone but in content.
Jeremy didn’t say, ‘read the book,’ period, of course, he said ‘READ THE BOOK, then criticise it‘. In other words, don’t criticize the book when you haven’t read it. Criticizing a book you haven’t read is dishonest and unethical. Ramsey’s way of carrying on is disgusting.
OB,
I read his blogger profile, then hopped on over to his blog to see what this (Engineering PHD student, in case anyone was interested?) guy reckons he’s about.
My horribly-prejudiced, jaundiced, cynical, etc snap judgement is that there’s a definite “I am a *master* of absolute logic” self-image going on here, and he’s mister ‘takedown’, nobly exposing the erroneous ways of the mighty – PZ, yourself, etc. Horrible stereotype, sure, but he does fit it unhappily well. Ho hum.
Yeah, I know, ad hominem central, but I really don’t have the time/energy/child-sapped brainpower to go a-fisking…
But then, you’d probably already sussed that out in the first five seconds.
Ho hum.
Of course I could be accused of being Ms Takedown myself – but I don’t think I’ve ever spent a week slandering a book and its authors without having read the book. I sure hope I haven’t.
I haven’t seen his blog. Can I summon the energy to look at it…?
“J.J’s blog used to be called “An Irrational Rationalist,”
His aim was to write mainly about religion, rationalism, and most importantly do stuff ‘other’ atheists were not doing correctly!!?
As he says himself “However, there’s only so much that I can say about those topics before I start repeating myself,”
Keep up your pretentious “geeky, silly, fluffy, sneezy, dopey, or, uh, you get the picture stuff.” You are doing quite fine!
In contrast to popular opinion around these parts, I must commend J.J. for pioneering a new form of literary criticism which removes the need to actually read the work one is criticizing.
Not coincidentally, how do people feel about Moby Dick around here? I wasn’t keen on the part where the robot from the future played chess with Ahab, but the pirate scenes made up for it in spades.
The best part about Moby Dick was the talking monkey. Hands down.
As to this Ramsey nutter, I’ve never read any of his work. But I can assure you despite this it’s not worth the bother. Incredibly poorly thought out stuff, the lot of it. Even his mistakes–and this makes up most of his writing*–are uninteresting–the sort of pointless, unispiring and generally crude gaffes anyone with a grade four education or better would regard as past merely trivial and well on their way to jejune. There are chimps that employ language more elegantly and usefully. Seriously, don’t bother. I certainly don’t intend to.
*The rest, oddly enough, is poorly-realized soft core porn. Trust me. I know. Insofar as I’ve never read a single word of it.
Pioneering? Not exactly. I seem to recall a recent extended discussion in these very pages of an essay by a person much, much, MUCH smarter and infinitely more respectable than Ramsey which nonetheless relied upon the same innovative – dare I say postmodern? – approach to criticism.
Not that I’m comparing the two gentlemen in a substantive sense, but if one lies down with methodological dogs one might well get up with a few metaphorical fleas…
There’s an odd’s on chance that you will get up with metaphysical fleas, G, which, though perhaps metaphorical, bite as though they are real.
Beware of straining at metaphysical fleas only to swallow a metaphorical camel.
That’s my postmodern aphorism for the day. It means absolutely nothing.