Mr Stodgy’s day out

Dear readers,

find over the fold a response to a post by the Mr Stodgy of blogging, that eternal student and would be teacher Bruce Everett. Maybe one day he will grow up but some how I doubt it.

Quote of the week #9 – “Hap” on Pearson’s un-scholarly nihilism straw man of Nietzsche

In response to a piece of un-scholarly work by Christopher Pearson;

“I don’t care to speculate on the philosophical abilities of Popes past and present. Nonetheless, Pearson obviously hasn’t actually read the Nietzsche book he cites, or he might have noted that Nietzsche explicitly rails against ‘nihilism’ (or at least, a particular version of it), and could be expected to have virulently opposed both communism and consumerism.“

(”Hap“, 2007)

Over and over and over I see this straw man in various manifestations. Some theists fail to see how ethics/morals can arise and function without the existence of absolutes (John Howard included amongst them), so then they go and state that without God (or whatever other metaphysical thing) mandating moral absolutes, there are no morals. This is of course the argument from ignorance fallacy. Just because one can’t comprehend it, doesn’t mean it is wrong.

Warning: This post from this point onward quotes and links to some strong language.

Thus begins a rather ponderous post that seems to exist only to attack the author of this blog. But I shall show that the master of the stodgy argument and would be teacher Bruce Everett has nothing much to say and that his understanding of both the world and the purpose of discourse is not as he thinks it is.
What is with Everett’s faux whimpyness about “strong language”? Especially when said strong language is “bleeped” in the text, just part of his own “Bullshit” quotient I guess.

If one logical fallacy isn’t bad enough, then they bring on the straw man by stating that those who don’t believe in said metaphysic (or are incredulous to metaphysics in general) are somehow unable to arrive at analogous a posteriori. Baloney.

It seems to me that anyone could build a straw bale house with the number of times that Everett evokes that idea of the straw man argument. So according to Mr Stodgy If any one dares to blaspheme against his religious faith he becomes even more pretentiously obscure. Everett’s use of the term ‘a posterori” on this ocassion is a perfect example of his desire to appear so very learned at the expense of clearly making his point.

Basic atomic theory was a metaphysics postulated by the ancient Greeks. It made certain predictions about the nature of matter. Modern atomic theory doesn’t pre-suppose the ancient Greek metaphysic, but makes (somewhat analogous) predictions about the nature of matter without delving into metaphysics.

Modern atomic theory is a science, not a study in metaphysics but makes predictions once relegated to metaphysics. So imagine a student of ancient Greek philosophy rocking up at CERN and telling them that they can’t make predictions about the nature of matter because they don’t subscribe to the same (or even similar or particular) metaphysic.

Imagine the same scholar of ancient Greek philosophy telling their students that those at CERN choose not to make predictions about the nature of matter. It’s the same as afore mentioned theists telling people that Nietzsche was nihilist or that atheism automatically leads to nihilism.

Ah so Everett thinks that like atomic theory one day we will look back and see that Nietzsche will be seen as the legitimate precursor to some great and meaningful scientific understanding of the Moral universe. Well I have news for you Bruce, apart from some dusty corners of some universities no one cares about the rantings of Nietzsche. Who seriously believes that all atheists are Nihilists? As I have repeatedly said abandoning the deity does not explicitly mean that one abandons the moral framework that comes from one’s faith tradition. Only fundamentalist atheist like Everett thinks that one has to throw every thing out.

***

Quote of the Weak – Iain Hall on whatever he can’t get his head around this time

Try to take this in the the spirit it’s meant Iain. I don’t know how much of your kooky hate mail has been filtered into and lost via my deleted items folder since I installed said filter over a year ago. We wouldn’t want you wasting your time now would we?

“You are probably right about the philosophical sections not needing much of a going over by Moi, however I did think that what he was doing was trying to muddy the waters of his argument on the causes of terror and to give the impression of a depth of understanding that was just not there. So I decided to point out the high bulls**t quotient in that section of the post.“

(Iain Hall, 2007)

Yeah. Iain’s repeated trope. “It’s deliberately ambiguous! Blah blah! Pseudo-intellectual crap whaaa!*”, or “blah blah, full of sound and fury signifying nothing!*”, for example demonstrated back in May during a disturbing hissy fit readable here and elsewhere throughout his angry blogging history.

Angry Blogging History??? Kooky Hate mail??? what a wonderful example of projection we are given by Everett here (and elsewhere for that matter ) I write about politics , religion and anything else that takes my fancy but one thing that I do not do is write angry , oh I do have a take no prisoners attitude when it comes to debate but I have found that anger is not a good friend at the keyboard. What Everett fails to comprehend is that I see online debate with him and other minions of the left is a game I play for fun.

Heck, this circus isn’t new at all. This Google search shows up only a few of his “sound and fury” broken record repetitions of MacBeth in response to things too complicated for his “Aussie bloke*” tastes. His “baffle them with bulls**t” canard is another of the auto-responder sound-bites that comes out when the arguments of those “Leftists*” are supposedly made ambiguous so as to exclude the “common man*” (all a fabricated pretext for invective of course).

The amusing thing is about this little exercise in internet searching is that anyone you care to cite will have little phrases or aphorisms that they like to use in their prose. Like this one about Everett and his often cited “straw man” and also his obsession with “logical fallacies” Sorry Bruce but your example is rather pointless.

Sorry Iain. Most “Aussie blokes” and “common men” when faced with something they don’t understand either do their homework or just resign themselves to the fact that they don’t understand. They don’t go out and have an inferiority complex, hissy fit, derr-gasm.

Parading ignorance may win some people over (after all it works for creationism), but somehow I doubt if the average, ordinary, Aussie folk can sympathise with you.

Here speaks a true intellectual elitist, a master of the baffle them with bulshit discourse. As I see it there are no really complex notions about the nature of our humanity. There are only deliberately complex, and obscure, ways of discussing them. This is the realm of the philosophers; a place where jargon exists to make meaning obscure. Thus only members of the “club” can discuss such lofty topics and outsiders can be derided because if they do not use the correct “group speak”, irrespective of wether their comments have merit.

Of course the thing that Everett and his Ilk really hate is some one like Moi who refuses to genuflect at the alters of their intellectual temples; I have no inferiority complex and it is an example of Everett’s hubris that he should make such a claim.

And while you are at it, you could perhaps explain (to your regular readers, I won’t actually be paying attention) why you have referred to yourself as an “existential atheist” in the past, while taking a swipe at Hap for his use of continental philosophy. Your rail against the use of said philosophers would seem to preclude the use of the term “existential” in any context other than a Thins advert.

The thing is one does not have to be a communist to like the colour red. Neither is it essential to be a fan of French philosophy to like the notion that one can only be sure of that which we perceive through our own senses. So I say that I am an existential atheist because I can only understand the universe according to how I personally experience it and I deny the existence of the deity. What is so hard about that?

Or instead perhaps you could tell them how on one hand you allege pretence while on the other you repeat catch phrases from MacBeth, or borrow other people’s vernacular with little success; “This sir is what we call an ad homonym attack and not the most skillful one.”

The thing is that the Bard’s work has been around for a very long time and so very many phrases and aphorisms have come into common parlance. In fact I regularly used many of the phrases that you chide me about long before I actually read the plays that they come from. Of course it will be obvious to those of you who are good spellers that the word highlighted is in fact the wrong variation of the word in this context. Everett is trying, again to suggest that my spelling is less than perfect (as if that is news ). Hint Bruce check your own text; I found at least half a dozen errors of your own…

Incidentally I’ve been planning to write about “knight speak” and pretence of moral superiority in on-line discussion ever since I started blogging (thanks to a chappy by the initials DW from the LinuxSA discussion list), so I guess you could pip me at the post by answering…
Did you slap him across the face with the back of your cyber glove when you pulled that one off? Guns at 50 paces? Bugs bunny impression? Y’know, the one with the gauntlet.

I just write as the muse takes me, in fact my post started out as a comment and it grew from there, really a case of organic blogging at its best. Now while I admit struggling with the rather confusing section in Haps post about “ethics ” the real target of my piece was his section about Terrorism.

Seriously, if you can’t digest the discourse or dialectic running on a blog, then either do your homework and then proceed, or find something else to do. That’s what the “ordinary” folk do. Anything else is all sound and fury signifying nothing.

~ Bruce

Translation: You aren’t a member of the philosophy club so don’t dare write about anything to do with the meaning of life or the nature of humanity.

PS. Don’t fret Iain. I’m not systematically scanning your blog etc for stuff to write about. Geez, I’ve got drafts backed up to the whazoo. Don’t expect me to give you a bollocking unless your silliness spills out from your part of the ’sphere and onto a topic I’m planning to write about (like your difficulties with falsificationism at Smogblot which I’m seriously considering using as an example of why so many culture warriors such as yourself, don’t even understand what science is).

The amusing thing about Everett is that he is rightly considered a joke by many sensible bloggers. For all of his bluff and bluster about how insignificant I am and how he is not looking through my blog for things to write about he does cite me twice in the sidebar widget of his blog and he seems to regularly choose to write about my blogging. So he is either self-deluded or he is lying about the reason he chooses to cite my blogging so often. There are clearly many far worse blogs than mine out there and some that are better, something I have no trouble acknowledging.

As any one can deduce from the pictures I have used to illustrate this post Everett is a chap who wants to present himself as something special. In these pictures(published by him in his own blog ) he is showing himself in guise of a comic book “super villain”. Is that over the top, or what?
Hap and Everett make a good pair, both of them try very hard to convince the world that they have fine intellects, and both of them fall into the trap of thinking that the effectiveness of their argument requires lots of obscure references and ponderous allusions. However when you get down to it, both of them have a far greater commitment to self-aggrandisement than they do to the clear communication of their ideas. To put it simply both will choose, every time, to describe something as an individually operated, manual earth-moving device when it is actually a spade. That was one point I sought to make about my previous critique of Haps post and it is very much the case with everything that Everett writes.
Why is it so? Perhaps this is the result of their being still too caught up in the academic mindset, where they feel it is essential to have to have at least two references for every opinion that they espouse. Maybe in a scholarly paper this is a requirement but blog posts are not essays for assessment, they are essentially opinion pieces that should be accessible to the public who choose to read them.