Lo and behold, Dembski has finally managed to find Shallit's deposition transcript, months after it was available if he'd really wanted to find it. If this was a scavenger hunt, he'd have finished last. Now, since I've been perfect in predicting his behavior so far, let me try another one. He will now pick the deposition apart and make fun of it, whether it deserves it or not, in an attempt to claim that he thinks it should be embarrassing to Shallit. He'll strut and pose and huff and puff and pretend to be laughing at Shallit's deposition in the desperate hope that everyone will focus on that and forget the real issue.
He's hoping this will distract attention from the fact that his original claim was that Shallit's deposition was an "embarrassment" and a "liability" to the ACLU (attorneys for the plaintiffs) and that's why he didn't testify at the trial. But of course, we all know that his claim was false, that in fact the ACLU wanted him to take the stand even after his deposition took place and it was the defense attorneys, after hearing his deposition, who filed a motion to prevent him from testifying.
Dembski refuses to admit this despite the fact that he has been shown the motions and the judge's ruling on them. Why? Perhaps because his ego simply can't let him admit that he was wrong. More likely, because he simply doesn't care whether what he said was true or not, only that it made an enemy look bad. Oh hell, let's stop mincing words: Dembski is a liar. He may not have known it was a lie when he told it, but after having it proven false to him repeatedly, the fact that he continues to leave his claim out there uncorrected has precisely the same effect.
He simply doesn't care what's true, only what is expedient to him, and it is expedient to ignore reality in this situation and try and change the subject. His sycophants won't care, his followers likely won't know and they only really care that he's standing up for God. One wonders, however, what God might think of this dishonest behavior. And remember, this behavior is from the same people who continually tell us that evolution destroys morality. How amusing.
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When it comes to truth, Dempski is a major relativist. Once in response
to something I wrote, he favorably paraphrased Richard Rorty, as having said, "Truth is what people let you get away with." If truth is indeed, want you can get away with, then no one should let Dempski get away with what he thinks of as truth. But for course, whatever truth is, it is not "what you can get away with" and Dempski cannot turn an error or a lie into truth by repeating it over and over.
In the original post Ed Brayton wrote:
Interestingly, the copy of Shallit's deposition that Dembski has finally managed to lay hold of is not a copy of the one that's posted on the NCSE web site. As a couple of commenters have noted on Dembski's blog, pages 74 to 77 of the deposition are missing from his copy, while the one posted on the NCSE web site is complete. Coincidentally, pages 74 to 77 happen to be of the few places in the Deposition where Thompson's questions manage to stray into relevance, thus giving Shallitt the opportunity to make a few telling points about the worthlessness of the concept of specified complexity. Was the omission a chance accident resulting from blind naturalistic forces, or was some sort of designing intelligence involved? Dembski himself has so far failed to comment on it.
With such high-powered IT experts as Dave Scot on their team, I'm sure the IDer's will manage to get hold of the NCSE's complete copy any decade now, so there doesn't seem to be much point in continuing to be coy about its location (the deposition is in the file APPENDIX III Tab O.pdf).