Tag: sock puppets

  • Building bridges

    Wally Smith wrote an article on a forthcoming book in October 2009. In fact it’s dated October 26, 2009, which happens to be the date of Chris Mooney’s “My Thanks to ‘Tom Johnson’” post. The opening paragraph of Mooney’s article, given all that we know now, is so richly ironic that one feels dizzy reading it.

    Last week, the New Atheist comment machine targeted the following post, in which I republished a preexisting blog comment from a scientist named “Tom Johnson” (a psuedonym). In the comment, Johnson had related  how some of his New Atheist-inspired scientist colleagues had behaved toward religious folks at bridge-building conservation events.

    You see what I mean, I’m sure. Mooney insults us for being skeptical about a post that smelled like dead fish at the time and is known to be certified, thrice-rotten, hypertoxic dead fish now, a post by a dedicated liar and trash-talker and one-man “comment machine.”

    Let’s take a look at the fragrant work of the trash-talking comment-machine writing (for once) under his own name.

    He says he hasn’t read the book yet, which is fine, because he’s not reviewing it, he’s discussing the collaboration of the co-authors, a pastor and a scientist (who are also married), and the general collaboration of what he calls “the faith-based community” and science. He’s in favor of the collaboration. He’s against what he sees as obstacles to the collaboration. He spots one in particular…

    …engaging the religious seems to be low on the list of scientists’ priorities. Instead, some leading scientists are running (quickly) in the opposite direction, holding contests to come up with the most mocking labels for scientists and others willing to engage the faithful. Blog exchanges on the topic by respected scholars have reached zero consensus and read like they belong more on an elementary school playground than in any serious, forward-looking public forum. As a scientist speaking about his own field, there’s little more to call this than a disgrace – especially so if we ever expect to apply science effectively beyond peer-reviewed journals.

    Oh what do you know – it’s all about Jerry Coyne. As it was in the beginning, so it was at the end – it was all about that pesky Jerry Coyne. (If it hadn’t been, I might not have sniffed him out. Think about that, Wally. Your obsessions give you away.) Jerry Coyne, unlike our author, belongs on an elementary school playground…far away from the scatological fantasies Wally engaged in as the YNH bloggers.

    His conclusion is stirring:

    Hopefully Hayhoe and Farley’s book will be a welcome change of pace in terms of building bridges – not breaking them down – and will help us realize that, if we spend all our time fighting “enemies” in a culture war, all of us are going to lose.

    Wally has invested quite a lot of time in fighting his perceived enemies over the past year and a half, but it’s nice to have his advice anyway.

  • Orlando

    Remember Orlando Figes? Remember what he got up to?

    The future of one of Britain’s leading historians was looking increasingly uncertain tonight after he admitted that he was the author of anonymous reviews that praised his own work as “fascinating” and “uplifting” while rubbishing that of his rivals.

    Oh that. He used a pseudonym to trash people. This was considered a bad thing. Not an excusable little lapse in manners, but a seriously bad thing.

    John Sutherland, professor of English at University College London, suggested Figes’s position at Birkbeck could be under threat. “On the whole academics are pretty tolerant,” he said. “Clearly in the present climate he’s a star, and Birkbeck needs stars because of the upcoming research assessment exercise. They’ll find it easy to prove that he provides impact. On the other hand, he’s done something that’s dishonest and possibly actionable.”

    It’s not the kind of thing an academic ought to do, you see. It could be seen as antipathetic to the values academics ought to support and live by.

  • Hammill the prodigal

    Hammill, as I said in a comment earlier this morning, is Walter Smith, known as Wally, a graduate student in biology at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.

    He said last summer that he would never do it again. He’s been doing it again.

    He’s been sowing little seeds of hostility and paranoia and mistrust. He’s been ever so gently tarnishing the reputations of gnu atheists. Again.

    For instance on this post, which of course drew him like a fly to honey, because it was both scornful and inaccurate about me. His kind of thing! (I don’t know why he hates me so particularly, given that I’m hardly the only vocal atheist out there, but he does.) He saw an opening for some poison, and he was ready. He was worried about the way new atheists talk.

    Just look at the words used to describe Josh here or others from several blogs over the past week: blatantly misrepresented, intellectually lazy, deceptive, dishonest, untrustworthy, deliberate distortion. They all sound like something from a political attack ad in late October, not salvos in a mutual debate or discussion. I don’t want to read too much into intentions or motives, but I don’t personally see them as an attempt to invite mutual debate. I see them as an attempt to quash dissenting opinion through character attacks without giving the heart of the debate a chance to find the table – a marginalization or distraction strategy, if you will. That’s certainly politics, although I would argue it’s far from the good kind.

    And four more paragraphs of the same kind of thing – the very best most refined kind of concern trolling. Now read it again with the YNH blog firmly in mind – the lies, the accusations of lying, the obscenity, the sexism, the multiple socks all confirming the lies – that’s our refined concern troll.

    Then another solemn refined comment in the same vein. Then warm agreement from one of the people he deceived. Then me asking a different anonymous commenter, TB, if it was the same TB aka Tim Broderick who called me a liar repeatedly at the Intersection. Then another concerned, conscientious, hand-wringing, highly respectable intervention by Wally the confessed serial liar.

    For the sake of argument, consider for a moment that TB is who you say he is and what you say happened is an accurate representation of what did happen. Beyond the obvious ethical considerations of providing the real name of another poster who has not personally divulged their identity on a site, how is a past argument relevant to the current discussion? Shouldn’t an argument be judged on its merits and not on one’s perception of the character of the person making it? Unless there are clear logical flaws in what TB has been saying here, I fail to see how pointing out a past dispute serves anything beyond an attempt to undermine one’s character, which is the point I was making several posts above. I hesitate to use this word due to the small firestorm it’s caused in this post, but dropping a pseudonymous commenter’s real name along with what appears to be an entirely unrelated, negative character reference seems an undeniably political move. (If there is a connection between the past and present somewhere that I’m missing (and I may be) that makes all of this more relevant, feel free to correct me.)

    Feast on the rich, multiple, layered ironies of that comment.