OMG, Drcraigvideos is down for ‘community guideline violations/ multiple copyright infringement’!
Well it could be baseless flagging, but I doubt it, that seems to be a rather one way street. I mean I like having folks like Craig around in that if you don’t have folks like Craig around, you can’t show how stupid they are.
It is more than possible that Craig was uploading multiple complete hour long videos to which they did not have the rights and that this has come home to haunt them.
Indeed it may also be that Craig and his stunningly repetitive ‘debates’ has decided that having all this material online is simply a hostage to fortune. I mean he’s in serious danger of people finding out that he hasn’t had an original thought in his ‘debates’ in 30 years, and that all the ideas he has in debates are just rehashes of arguments that died out, often centuries ago, because they were so unconvincing!
Odd timing though, looks like it happened over the weekend. hmmmm…. Many thx to DogmasDemise for the heads-up.
Of the people I talked to at The Reason Rally, (of the stuff I’d done) this was mentioned more than anything else as the key factor in ‘saving the saved’. Two more episodes were meant to be put out before the Reason Rally (they are all scripted, just need a couple of weeks to put them together), just all the distractions that WLCs DMCA abuse and Dawahfilms flagging harassment took up all my spare time. The Reason Rally, above all else convinced me that this is an area to focus on. I am hoping to get 1/3 to ½ the time devoted to this (probably means somewhat under half the videos will be WDPLAC).
“OMG, The Bible says WHAT?!”
The bible is batshit crazy. Most Christian have never read it, and so Im going to make the media. I may even start this up as a guest spot for people read their favorite crazy bible verses. This may take the form of a ‘mid-week short’.
SCIENCE BITCHES, IT WORKS
I’ve already got permission to get the footage from within a nuclear reactor for an experiment (~June). Last year I showed you how close the edge of the unknown was and even demonstrated, for the first time as far as I can tell, that gaseous potassium is evolved when the metal is thrown into water, and its GREEN! This year I’m going to show you the REAL face of the unknown, and how it could affect your life. Yup going to go inside a nuclear reactor to look at something a billion times smaller that your typical human!
Nailing the religious types in the 2012 elections.
I would have liked to have been more active here, but regrettably I got sidetracked into DMCA and flagging complaints.
Build the community.
The secular atheist community on YT emerged strongly, quickly overtaking all the religious communities. In order to maintain and take full advantage of this position we need to increase the number of people producing good media regularly. I will be moving towards facilitating that goal. There will be two mechanisms, 1) A (biyearly?) competition for people who have produced at least 3 good videos in three months. This way promotional effort is focused on those who are both committed to, and capable of producing the goods 2) donation of equipment (green screen, cameras, sound equipment etc) to active folks who are making quality content videos, but that have the amateur-ish look that doesn’t fly so well on youtube these days. Basically, imagine if someone had supplied ZOMGitscriss with a camera, green screen and other kit early on how much this would have helped.
-Deploy the resources where they will have greatest benefit for the community.
Create a DVD.
This is another project I’ve been trying to get done for about a year, to create a dvd of the work, if not for sale, then simply so it can be hosted and torrented. Indeed I had wanted to get a thousand or so pressed (several kgs) to give away at the Reason Rally. Sadly again event overtook the aspirations.
This year I’m not going to get enough time to go touring, so sadly no touring or dark sky astro video. I might yet be able to get a good timelapse of Mars though! Hope for clear skies
I greeted the materialization of pre-suppositional apologetics with glee. Creationists might as well have shouted it from the roof tops that they have been routed on every argument they have put forward to date, and so they are now reduced to this grotesquely unconvincing and childish argument that if they start with the presumption that god exists, then god exists.
Yup, pre-suppositional apologetics is an ‘argument’ that whatever you suppose exists, exists! I mean damn, it’s not like we can test those suppositions for validity against anything, like their value in reality or some shit.
So I had this PAINFUL discussion with Eric Hovind, in which I told him I assumed the universe exists. Why assume this? well how would you distinguish a ‘matrix style reality’ from reality? Well Eric, how would you?
After you have assumed the universe to exist, you then need to assume that you can create models about it, and that models with predictive capability are better than those that are not. These are self selecting criteria for beings that want to survive in such a universe, that is organisms that don’t assume they can learn something about the universe don’t survive long in an environment with those that do! (Yup, evolution FTW!)
One of the first models you establish is logic, and the utility of boolean operators like ‘true’ and ‘false’. These are all things Eric MUST have done to even pose his ‘killer’ question ‘is there such a thing as absolute truth?’
Merely asking the question implies a model forming approach to reality (implicit assumption), and indeed the very inclusion of the word true means that he has accepted models such as logic are an adequate way of describing the universe.
I guess it’s to be expected of the dogmatic that they will behave dogmatically, but Eric simply couldn’t handle the fact that this is how his brain worked, and how he models reality and thus his response to everything became ‘but you can’t be sure about it’, even after this has been explained to him a dozen time. In the end he made it up to FORTY EIGHT TIMES. Compulsive obsessives, this man is your GOD!
Even better, is if I adopt Erics ‘pre-suppositional’ position, that is whatever I presume is true, then I come to the startling knowledge that ERIC HOVIND IS AN ATHEIST. Indeed if I start with the pre-supposition that Eric has confessed to being an atheist, then you KNOW that Eric Hovind has confessed to being an atheist! I know this is absolutely true because the Ghost that never lies told me it was absolutely true, further this was confirmed by title that is always accurate! hmmmm, yup, that’s Check-mate Eric!
Dawahfilms was always a pretty nasty piece of work, but his latest comments show a lust for violence that is really very unsettling.
Peace will only be reached when they fear for their lives.
Courtesy of an Islamic Education at IIUM
The summary of the Mission should read as follows: Integration, Islamization, Internationalization, and Comprehensive Excellence
The very tone of this paragraph is the presumption that Afghanistan would be better off without ‘the enemy’. Well of course, but who is the enemy, ‘the West’ or Islam? Well what about the Afghan ‘brothers and sisters’ that remember life under the Islamic rule, under the Taliban and want nothing to do with it?
Remember how great things were when we had Islamic Rule under the Taliban?
Those who see Afghanistan at a cross roads where it can choose to join the rest of the civilized world, or can revert to Taliban style Islamic law. After all, Afghanistan has already seen Islamic law for 5 years, and it transformed the country for the better, right?.. oh wait..
The ’16’ dawahfilms refers to are from when a US service member went loco and went on a shooting spree killing many women and children (hardly a ringing endorsement!). Not really a government sanctioned action to base a counter-policy on. Similarly the idea that ‘the enemy’ (America?) who is curiously the very same government that Dawahfilms CHOOSES to remain a citizen of, is actually targeting families to ‘make them pay’ is a willfully puerile interpretation of the US foreign policy. IF the US had as its goal to kill families, I think they have the military capability to enact such a policy with greater efficiency than to merely kill 16 people. To even suggest that ‘making their families pay’ is the intent of the US suggests a willfully malicious mis-interpretation of facts. Further to do it as a motivation to ‘make your enemies pay’ with the stated goal that ‘Peace will only be reached when they fear for their lives’ suggests a lust for a violent solution that seems to go hand in hand with taking Islam seriously as a religion.
Look this is the thing, Gandhi, the British trained lawyer (University College London), knew that the British were ultimately an enlightened people of law, and that therefore he could achieve all of his goals (getting the Imperial power out of India) without violence. Now let me ask you a similar question. How do you think Gandhi would have approached the situation if instead of getting a modern first world education he had attended an Islamic school?
“Peace will only be reached when they fear for their lives” (?)
To be honest when I first got the take down notices, about 6 of them in an hour or so (4 content inappropriate with no chance of appeal, and two privacy complaints) I thought,
‘another harassing and minor annoyance in running the channel. A quick email to YT should sort it out.’
I was then simply stunned when youtube claimed these videos had been reviewed by professional and impartial moderators and were removed for either hate speech or privacy violation. The more so as some of these videos constituted some of the milder things I’ve said about religion. The bottom line was, if this really was the new bar for hate speech, not only would it in an instant render the Thunderf00t channel unviable, it would render virtually every rationalist channel unviable. Youtubes actions were simply unintelligible. Indeed if someone had told me these were youtube actions, I simply wouldn’t have believed them. But there were the words on the screen in black and white.
I had no option but to make the video “Youtube starts banning ‘religiously offensive’ videos“. There were simply no other alternatives. A fairly high stakes game given that youtube could easily have said my action violated the terms of service and just killed the account. But then again, if the words I had in black and white on the screen were correct, then channel was already dead, and the only thing left to do was give a good accounting of itself before the inevitable banhammer.
By coincidence this happened about one week after the Hamza Kashgari incident.
Kashgari made about 3 vanilla tweets mildly critical of Islam only to find himself in fear for his life. He fled Saudi, only to be arrested in Malaysia. There he was deported back to Saudi with no due process to face a potential death sentence over three tweets. That’s fucked up beyond ALL recognition. But it really underscores the problem that religions find arbitrary things offensive. Given this simple observation, having a clause in the Terms of Service about not offending religions is simply incoherent.
If youtube really is willing to give religion this latitude of freedom, and to further scale what they consider ‘hate speech’ by how offended people are, then youtube would inevitably find itself in thrall to the Imams. Many of them find anything that is not Islam offensive beyond comprehension, as was demonstrated by the Imam crying over the three tweets of Kashgari calling them ‘the worst thing he’d ever read’.
So it was that I wrote potentially my last email to youtube asking them to apply whatever policy they had uniformly, which, taking ‘The Best emotional PORN‘ as the benchmark, would mean either about 7/10 of my videos would be hate speech, and they should delete them and ban my account, or reinstate the videos (which are vanilla compared to some of the videos on my channel).
The BEST emotional PORN, the new bar for ‘hate speech’, Really?
Thankfully, some 48 hrs later, with over 17000 thumbs up, well over a thousand mirrors and ~160k hits Youtube had a change of heart over what constituted hate speech.
Now I have mixed feelings about this. The Churchill quote about ‘The United States will always do the right thing…. once all other options have been exhausted’ kept coming to mind.
Sure Youtube had done the right thing, and had the humility and plasticity to correct their previous mistake (a fairly honorable and humble act), but only once all other options had been exhausted. You then look at what other options youtube had on the table (banhammer, ignore or stick to original judgment), and this is BY FAR the most dignified thing they could have done.
So all things considered, I think this is as happy an outcome as could have been hoped for. For the strong response of the community (and yes, it was the communal action that made this possible, for I as an individual had tried to take this to a sensible resolution and failed (I have the gut feeling it was not my email that swung the balance here)) ensured that free speech is maintained on this forum.
Many Thanks to all who made this outcome possible!
For those who have been paying attention to the sky over the past few months, you will have seen Venus crawl out of the evening twilight, and Jupiter sink towards it. These two VERY naked eye planets (both outshine even the brightest stars) are now only about 15 degrees apart (about the spread of your fingers held out at arms length), with that value set to shrink to about 3 degrees over the next 3 weeks. Get the popcorn is ‘cos its gonna be a fantastic show!
The ballet is highlighted in the sequence below.
Venus Jupiter conjunction of 2012 (click to enlarge)
A) t= 0. Jupiter and Venus hang in the evening sky. Venus, by far the brighter of the two lies below Jupiter, and the pair are separated by about 15 degrees. For reference, the Moon and Sun are about half a degree in diameter, and your outstretched fingers at arms length are about 15 degrees in angular size.
B) t= 5days. The moons orbit takes it out of the solar glare and by the 26th it resides between Venus and Jupiter. This will be a spectacular sight for those who get to see it, with the 2nd, 3rd and 4th brightest objects so close together in the sky. The angular distance between the two planets has now closed to about 10 degrees. Most of this apparent motion of Jupiter is due to the Earth moving around the Sun, while with Venus, about half of the apparent motion comes from this planet orbiting the Sun.
C) t~21 days. The Venus, Jupiter conjunction of 2012. The two most spectacularly bright planets appear at their closest (~3 degrees).
D) t~33days. The Moon has now made a complete orbit since it last visited these planets. When it last did, Jupiter was the higher, and Venus the lower. The second time the moon visits these planets the order is reversed! Venus the beguiling bright is now the higher of the two objects! The objects are again separated by about 10 degrees.
For those who want to see what this looks like in animation form, take a look! Download the free solar system visualization software Celestia (http://www.shatters.net/celestia/)
Can you debate William Lane Craig? Well my immediate response is whats the point? It’s quite easy to show that William Lane Craig essentially delivers exactly the same ‘debate’ almost by rote.
Popular debates favor style over substance, which is why the ‘debate’ is an irrelevance in the acquisition of knowledge. In areas of contention, you propose experiments capable of distinguishing the various proposed models. You then go and perform said experiments and the knowledge of mankind moves forwards. Notably Craig will NEVER makes any testable predictions, which is why his arguments never change and he never moves forward.
In this sense you might as well ‘debate’ a recording of William Lane Craig as William Lane Craig himself, as intellectually the physical presence of the man adds nothing to the forum. Incidentally, I can also tell you from personal experience that this is why watching William Lane Craig debates gets so terribly monotonous. It really is ‘pull the draw string’ and watch the man espouse the rigorous gold standards of the virtues of logic immediately prior to remorselessly and unproductively sodomizing them with a large, rusty and particularly unpleasant looking metal pipe.
Now none of that would actually be a problem if Craig was presenting some devastating argument that no one could address, but that’s simply not the case. Craig merely rattles off his ‘5 pillars’, conveniently forgetting to tell people that none of these arguments actually convinced him that god exists, they just form a conformational bias on his ‘personal interaction’ with god. In that sense the only argument that actually needs to be addressed is the one that convinced Craig, and boy how simple it is to address!
People all around the world have these personal interactions with different ‘Gods’.
The ‘gods’ people people have personal relationships with seem to depend remarkably on where in the world you live!
Now Craig will be the first to stand up and say ‘but that doesn’t logically prove my God doesn’t exist’. Well yeah sure, but it does put Craigs personal relationship with ‘God’ into the exact same deeply unconvincing category that Craig puts everybody elses ‘God’s into. Bizarrely it is this exact deeply unconvincing argument that is the very foundation of Craigs belief in ‘God’, and it is upon these foundation of sand he builds his pillars of conformational bias.
Well initially I was willing to give William Lane Craig the benefit of the doubt, but I have to admit, the charity of that position is evaporating faster than dew in the desert!
So a thread was started on the ‘Reasonable Faith’ forum (forum of William Lane Craigs website).
In this drcraigvideos was making posts suggesting that he was fully legally endorsed by William Lane Craig to file these DMCAs.
Now up till this point, I was happy to believe that, “well these ‘reasonable faith’ people, they’re not crazy creationists, they must be able to see the writing on the wall here”. So, after one of the admins (Philos, who lists his profession as ‘In academia’ (wlc?)) had locked the thread earlier this evening, I wrote him a personal message telling him of the shit that they were in. How drcraigvideos claim to be legally acting on William Lane Craigs behalf made him legally culpable, and that drcraigvideos actions had a ring of truth about them given that:
1) drcraigvideos blog is directly linked on the reasonablefaith website.
2) drcraigvideos videos are directly linked to the reasonablefaith website. Damn, you only have to click the links in the scrolling banner to find this out!
I also gave him some brief background on why what drcraigvideos was doing was illegal, and why it was in their favor to take action on this themselves. Lets be real, it is at this point unthinkable given the number of emails reasonablefaith must have received that they are not aware of the situation (I also left them a voice message and asked this admin, Philos, to pass on this message to WLC). If William Lane Craig chooses to do nothing while someone acting in his name, and claiming with his permission is filing bogus DMCA claims against WLC critics, it is VERY challenging to find an academically charitable way to interpret William Lane Craigs behavior.
So I come back an hour or so later, and what do I find?
1) I’ve been banned. Cute! Being banned without a SINGLE post!
2) the ENTIRE thread of ‘Thunderf00t DMCAed in William Lane Craigs name’ has been deleted.
Can’t really screen cap something that’s not there, but look for this post yourself!
I blame myself. I had assumed that when dealing with ‘Professional Academic Philosophers’ that you might get some integrity. Instead all I’ve seen is reasonablefaith using EXACTLY and VERBATIM the methods used by PCS those many moons ago. Dig a hole, then try to delete everything incriminating as soon as possible, then claim it never happened. Shit, I’ve not seem someone scramble to delete the damning data this quickly since a creationist first donned Joker make-up! Oh yes WLC, I have EVERYTHING recorded
You don’t have to think about it long to realize that the future of mankind relies on the effective combating of pseudo-science.
That is the future of mankind relies on an increase level of knowledge. When the rate that knowledge is being lost, or polluted by pseudo-science equal that where it is being gained, to a first degree approximation, equilibrium is reached and mankind stagnates.
Combating such disinformation will at some point therefore become as important as research.
Sadly as we get to know more and more, it becomes easier and easier for bullshit merchants posing as scientists to go undetected or unchallenged, and the harder it becomes for Joe Public to distinguish real scientists from increasingly slick impostors. Arguably there is no field where this is more true than in climate change, where a small and very well funded group of ‘climate change deniers’/ pseudo-scientists seek to dis-inform society about the impact of the anthroporgenic release of carbon dioxide.
Thankfully, the National Center for Science and Education (The NCSE), who have done such sterling work in keeping creationism out of the class room are now moving to keep such disinformation on climate change from being dissemination in schools.
It has been marvelously funny reading the comments defending ‘Two Citations’ Craig on my latest vid. The superficial nature of these comments can maybe best highlighted by this hypothetical.
IF I had put up a video as ‘a professional scientist’ saying how Craig MIGHT be a good philosopher, but is merely a layman when it comes to science, and that as a professional scientist I find his arguments very unsophisticated and frankly embarrassing. (all in an insipidly smug patronizing tone)
Who seriously believes that these exact same people would have NOT gone absolutely ballistic highlighting the exact same problems with the vacuous nature of these arguments that I did. Damn, I’m almost tempted to do it, yknow as one of those ‘Double-Check and Mate, sucker’ type moves.
Anyways, it clearly got under the skin of these people to have it highlighted that their ‘leading academic’ has a pathetic citaion record. Nothing bites like the truth eh boys!.. Which leads to the obvious question:
