This simpering sycophant to John A. Davison has been spamming the site recently, yammering away to get everyone's attention despite the fact that he has been banned. Please do not reply to V.Martin, or anyone who is babbling about Davison — their posts will be deleted as soon as I notice them. This particular irritating fool has not only been morphing his username to get past my filters, but has at least once imitated a regular here, a particularly obnoxious and contemptible strategem that guarantees that I won't ever be lifting the ban.
One reason he has been so frantic is that his hero, Davison, has an interview online with Jason Rennie of the Sci Phi Show. Strangely, though, Rennie doesn't have any mention of the Davison interview on his page, which may not be a surprise — it's an embarrassing spectacle. The man has lost it. Listen if you don't mind a painful experience. I don't mind mentioning it since it's merely one more piece of evidence to demonstrate that one anti-evolutionist is clearly nuts.
Near the middle, he whines quite a bit about Pharyngula and makes a false accusation or two. He claims I deleted an entire comment thread to suppress him, which is not true; I've disemvowelled him and finally banned him for being repetitious and dull-witted, but his comments are still buried somewhere in the archives. He also claims there is a conspiracy to block him, again not true: many sites have tired of his tendentious personality, his incompetence and ignorance, and his inability to respond rationally to any comment, preferring instead to repeat his boring claims over and over again. There's no conspiracy, what we have is global near-unanimity on Davison's obnoxious nature.
One other interesting comment near the end: Rivista di Biologia also reviles him and wants nothing more to do with him. It tells you how awful his stuff is when it doesn't even rise to the standards of creationists.
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I'm surprised that even Cathy Lee Crosby and Fran Tarkenton have abandoned him.
In evolutionary terms, it might be said that he expresses traits that cause him to be negatively selected in every population he tries to join.
A dead end, to use a more colloquial phrase.
PZ says:
Apparently this was at the request of Captain Paranoid, John Davison. He was afraid his pearls of wisdom wouldn't see the light of day, and so had Rennie post the interview in the raw unedited format, right away.
Has anyone ever run him through the Crackpot Index? I suspect he'd be off the charts.
Amazing. The guy's a creationist and believes God is dead, he calls himself an "experimental scientist" and appears to understand the concept of scientific rigor well, but rejects any and all evidence that contradicts his beliefs. This guy's one of a kind, all right.
I have a sort of grudging respect for an out-and-out kook like this guy as opposed to an ideological prostitute like Behe. Davison's spun a whole worldview for himself out of scattered out-of-context quotes and personal bias, and he's put some effort into it -- how many creationists do you know who've bothered to write their own manifesto? The guy drops another 16 IQ points, he'll be Gene Ray.
Can't you ban someone by ip address?
The problem with banning IP adresses is that some people use proxies (regularly changes IP adress), and you may inadvertently be banning other people who try to access the site with proxies... or the troll may be using one, and then the block lasts only until the proxy changes IP.
Another problem with banning by IP is that some people still use ISPs where IPs are assigned dynamically. Not everyone has an always-on connection with a static IP.
The guy drops another 16 IQ points, he'll be Gene Ray.
I wonder how Davison liked those mashed potatoes?
He lost me as soon as he said that he was born in the same year as Mickey Mouse...
A strange thing for a Warner Bros character to be proud of, that...
Why are evilutionists mean to old men? I should be as keen at his age.
I am sorry to say that I listened to the whole thing.
Excuse me while I go go into a seizure after trying to follow such twisted logic....
John is what he is. Strong evidence that evolution can generate a great deal of variation.
this yahoo used to be a regular on the Richard Dawkins Forum... I assume he was banned because he's been gone for a while...
Actually, I'm almost ashamed to admit it, but today I was looking at your list of banned commenters, PZ, and I had totally forgotten about this guy with one-post blogs, so I checked him out. He now has the latest incarnation of his blog up (since March 20), but since he has banned anyone who posts under a pseudonym, there are hardly any comments, except for his own, of which there are a lot. If you're really brave, or need some laughter for the night check out http://evolutionisfinished.blogspot.com/. I would not recommend trying to post a comment.
He must have the all-time record for longest comment (by himself) on there. I feel rather sad for him (well, not really). But he does state that he feels left-out by both creationists and evolutionists. "Nobody likes me-sniff-sniff," he cries. Sounds like a sad, lonely old man to me.
Actually, I'm almost ashamed to admit it, but today I was looking at your list of banned commenters, PZ, and I had totally forgotten about this guy with one-post blogs, so I checked him out. He now has the latest incarnation of his blog up (since March 20), but since he has banned anyone who posts under a pseudonym, there are hardly any comments, except for his own, of which there are a lot. If you're really brave, or need some laughter for the night check out http://evolutionisfinished.blogspot.com/. I would not recommend trying to post a comment.
He must have the all-time record for longest comment (by himself) on there. I feel rather sad for him (well, not really). But he does state that he feels left-out by both creationists and evolutionists. "Nobody likes me-sniff-sniff," he cries. Sounds like a sad, lonely old man to me.
Oops, sorry for the double post. I thought something had gone wrong. Apparently it didn't.
I believe he actually posted the entirety of the Origin of Species as a comment. All I can say to that kind of devoted wingnuttery is...wow. He even went so far as to create a special Blogger account using the name "Charles Darwin" so he could post the comment as someone else. He may be a repetitive crackpot, but he is certainly an inventive and entertaining one (in small doses, of course.)
The double post is better, but it sounds like V. Martin is worse, than that one commenter here who was on the whole notable for occasional insightful and intelligent comments, a vacuum-like absence of tact or decorum, a brass burr up his(?) ass, and an irritating habit of responding to previous comments in a machine-gun-like volley of short, snarky postings--often 7 or 8 of them. More than once I found myself wondering whether his seemingly schizophrenic personality was the result of someone else maliciously posting under his username, like happened to TAW above, but no posts ever disowned anything any of the previous posts attributed to him claimed...very odd.
Hi all,
Just to clear up one confusion. I did not post the interview to the sciphi show podcast feed because it is not a Sci Phi show episode. The interview will be included in a collection of interviews (as yet unnamed) as a follow up to a collection of interviews I did earlier with ID proponents and critics called The ID Files which you can find at http://www.podiobooks.com/podiobooks/book.php?ID=120&link=search_title
The first edition had interviews with Mike Shermer, Sal Cordoca, Mike Behe and Nick Matzke.
The second edition will include the interview with John Davison, along with Scott Turner, Mike Behe, Walter ReMine, Salvador Cordova, Massimo Pigliucci, Mike Gene, Elliot Sobel, Glenn Morton and many others. In case anybody wonders why proponents are represented in greater number than opponents, they are the ones willing to do the interviews. I invited PZ but never heard back, and I have invited other critics but haven't heard back or they declined. If you are interested in contributing an interview critical of ID please drop me a line at thesciphishow@gmail.com and i'll see what we can work out. Provided you have some appropriate expertise i'm happy to include pretty much anyone.
If you have any other questions about the project or want to know more I can be reached at the same email address.
Alternativly if you would like to learn about some philosophy and science fiction you can always tune into the regular sci phi show at http://thesciphishow.com and have a listen. I have interviews with all sorts of interesting people and the regular show covers the philosophical ideas contained in various peices of science fiction. I have regular interviews coming up with Richard Swinburne, Chandra Wickramasinghe, Orson Scott Card, Cory Doctorow and Kim Stanley Robinson and i've done interviews in the past with Mike Shermer, Sue Blackmore, Alvin Plantinga, Queintin Smith and others.
I hope this isn't too much of an ad ;)
Feel free to direct him my way. I've been experiencing a shortage of persistent trolls. Hit and runs tend to be boring, and Wo is MI ran away.
To be fair to Jason, the moderation on his blog is very light, so he is to be commended for that.
"I've always wondered why people...assume that a unanimous negative reaction to their posts points to the existence of an 'in crowd'. If large numbers of people publicly state that they consider you to be a tiresomely self-satisfied little excrescence with nothing worthwhile to say, it doesn't necessarily mean that the group is dominated by an 'elite' with a shared agenda. There could be a simpler explanation." -- Angus McIntyre on alt.peeves
Actually there seems to be one - consisting of himself. He explained at length on Good Math, Bad Math how his goal was to be banned from as many blogs as possible. IIRC the successes included Richard Dawkins Forum - and now GMBM.
It seems Davison has a persecution complex. Perhaps it grew on him after he stopped doing competent research, as a means to form an 'explanation' why it all went awry. He acts so deranged that I wouldn't put such a visible selfdelusion past him.
I find the analogy between his theory "now evolution stopped" (by magical means, apparently) and his problem "now science and career stopped" (not so magically, perhaps) rather humorous. So he has that at least.
Actually, I think that's your problem. It is that you're including pretty much anyone. What is a creationist with "expertise", and what is a biologist, physicist, etc with expertise? Are they on the same footing? Why do you think most biologists won't "debate" creationists? It's simply because they don't have a case at all. There is no subject of debate. Even the most obscure things to the public, like the non-evolution of the bacterial flagellum and other "irreducible complexity" schemes by proponents of "intelligent design" have been proven wrong already, and they keep pounding on that crap.
Rennie isn't much better - he's one of these 'philosophy trumps evidence' types.
Worthless.
Yeah - what is ReMine's 'expertise'? Self promotion? Arrogance?
"I'm surprised that even Cathy Lee Crosby and Fran Tarkenton have abandoned him."
I thought this comment deserved a tip of the hat!
There is a running theory that V.Martin is none other than Davison in disguise. He once indulged in faux Slavic or something which slowly devolved into perfect english. I suggested that DaveScot (Davison's once best buddy) taught him how to manipulate the interweb so that he could circumvent blog security by using aliases and dynamic IP addresses.
>I disemvowelled him
Really, just removing aieou from his posts seems like he's getting off rather light. And probably makes them more comprehensible.
MartinV doesn't appear to be a clone or disguised Davison. He's currently a "regular" at www.evcforum.net. Having engaged Davison on that forum a few years back, I can say that Martin has a very different approach. JAD unfortunately was apparently incapable of making more than two posts without devolving into insults and name-calling. Martin, although he appears about as uninformed as you can get, at least is able to avoid overt insults.
Ah! So that was what all those barely legible rants were. I'm kind of new, so I'm glad to find out, it was annoying.
JuJu, I think it's pretty clear by now that Martin isn't Davison. You probably missed the exchanges between Martin and David M. in which Martin demonstrated, to David's satisfaction, his fluency in Slovak. I believe David is Czech, and I trust his judgement.
My hypothesis explaining Martin's apparently variable command of English is that his more fluent posts were actually pastes. That could easily be wrong. I am not familiar with the threads referred to.
Quick nitpick: There is no such language as "Slavic" although there are quite a few Slavic languages, all descended from something I believe was called Proto-Slavic. If you meant that his broken English was broken in a Slavic kind of way, I can't disagree. :-)
I haven't had time to listen to the interview yet, but John has visited me at the blog he inspired me to create. As long as he sticks to talking about his (crazy) ideas, it's cool.
I really don't think posting whole pages of Origin of Species at his blog is cool, though. Come on, folks. (I can't even open the thing anymore.)
Not quite. VMartin is fluent in Czech. I am not -- I was bilingual with German and Serbocr... BCSM :-] when I was 2, but then my dad found a job in Paris and came home only once every 6 weeks, so I forgot the whole language; the only Slavic language I know something serious about is Russian (4 years at school). Still, being a geek, I have a lot of theoretical knowledge about a lot of languages, and Czech is quite easy to recognize; I can't tell if VMartin's grammar was flawless, or if a small proportion of the words was actually Slovak or whatever, but the language of his post clearly was good Czech.
(Incidentally, neither the letter ć nor the sound it represents nor the surname ending -ić occurs in Czech.)
That sounds plausible.
Well, if I may pick the Wolbachia bacteria inside those nits, "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy"... I'm not sure if, if measured by mutual intelligibility, any two Slavic languages are really farther apart than the most divergent dialects of what is usually called German. :o) But that belongs to politics and history.
(In the unlikely case anyone got confused, I should mention VMartin claimed to be Czech, not Slovak, and kept telling us how some apparently famous Czech professors had rejected evolution. And BCSM is supposed to mean "Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian-Montenegrin"; that's the most politically correct name currently available.)
Zoinks! This guy was on the faculty at UVM when I was an undergrad. I never heard of him, but then again, 1) I was mostly a math-and-physics type, not a life-sciencer, 2) he has a nondescript name, and 3) he may not have been riding a Crank Factor of 9.73/10 at that point. I'd like to think he's more doddering than simply out of his tits. He sounds exactly like my grandfather did after he, a man with no use for religion until he was well into his 80's, lost his squash and was wooed to a Baptist Church by one of his equally senescent Masonic Lodge poobahs. Every visit to him afterward became the setting for a painfully childish rant about "not coming from apes" and the like.
"Even the most obscure things to the public, like the non-evolution of the bacterial flagellum and other "irreducible complexity" schemes by proponents of "intelligent design" have been proven wrong already, and they keep pounding on that crap."
You've been offered an open platform to make a case, I don't see why anybody would turn that down frankly. The interviews are fair and any of the participants are pretty much free to make the case anyway they like. I'm not sure what could be more reasonably asked for.
And actually your comment above is erroneous. I've already had critics on for interviews that think the questions themselves posed by ID advocates are interesting even if on some level misguided and they think that asking the questions is reasonable.
Jason
"Rennie isn't much better - he's one of these 'philosophy trumps evidence' types."
I'm not sure where you derive this conclusion from. Perhaps you are one of the "disagreeing with me means denying the evidence" types.
"Yeah - what is ReMine's 'expertise'? Self promotion? Arrogance?"
He has some interesting ideas and he is happy to provide an interview.
David,
Thanks for the further clarification. It seems we have each misunderstood each others' origins to some extent. ;-)
Ah, very interesting, but impossible for me to comment upon in any intelligent way because I know nothing about dialects of German or how divergent the most divergent may be. But please allow me to offer some anecdotal evidence, and to ask a question.
Obviously, all Slavic tongues are siblings, or cousins - a half-hour of studying Russian, Ukrainian, and Polish dictionaries will yield many common or similar words (Вишня! Wiśnia! Мороз! Mróz!) but the amount of overlap varies.
A Russian friend of mine, born and raised in St. Petersburg (ok, born in Leningrad, raised in St. Petersburg, haha) tells me he has trouble understanding Ukrainian, and he estimates the UK/RU overlap is only about 50%.
I am told that Ukrainian and Polish are somewhat more similar, despite the different alphabets. Given the politics and history, as you say, this is plausible. And I guess (but do not know) that, based on history and geographic proximity, Russian and Ukrainian are more similar than Russian and (say) Slovenian or Croatian.
So. Would you estimate that the overlap of the two most divergent German dialects is greater, or less than, fifty percent?
What "ID" proponents want is to be seen on debates with scientists. They want the illusion of debate to permeate the media. They don't have a case. There is no debate on evolution. There is debate within evolutionary theory, but they're not interested in that. There is not any more reason for a scientist to go on one of these debates than to just make an appearance on the media explaining evolution to the public. This is far better, without all the noise made by "ID" people.
I didn't say all the questions they ask aren't valid. Though many of them aren't anymore and others were never valid. It's why they ask them and what their own answers are. They already have the answer they want in their minds and then search for a question for it for which evolutionary biology has no definite answer yet. With that, you're going to pose some interesting questions eventually, but it's not like the scientists haven't asked themselves the same questions and are working on it, instead of sitting on their asses and saying: God... oops! the "Intelligent Designer" did it.
Nothing to say against this. In fact, my Russian teacher once explained in class that she regularly has that distressing experience of listening to something and thinking "But this is Russian! But I know Russian! Why don't understand anything!?!" -- and then it always turns out it's Ukrainian or Belorussian.
That said, of the German spoken in Berne I understand about half when I try hard. This is taking into account that the dialect I speak in normal situations is more closely related to the Swiss dialects than to Standard German (though less different from the latter -- which still is much), that it's likely that any word or other feature also exists either in Standard German (at least as an obscure archaism) or in my dialect or in both, and that, being a geek as mentioned, I have an idea what sound correspondences to expect. In other words, I cheat massively, and it still doesn't help a lot.
I also understand about half of spoken Flemish, though here I have to use English and French for help to get that far (Flemish, and Dutch in general, is actually more closely related to the highly divergent English than to Standard German; and it contains more French loanwords than German does).
Then there are the dialects of northern Germany (Plattdeutsch, aka Low Saxon language) that are usually considered German but are a bit more closely related to English than Dutch is... German is doubly paraphyletic ;-)
I won't hazard a guess about % of differences. That depends on whether it's % of different words, % of difference in the sound system (that is large!), % of both together ( = of recognizably shared words), and/or % of difference in grammar; I can't put numbers to any of these.
David,
Fascinating. I am often struck by the similarities between English and Dutch (and by how fluency in one grants no comprehension of the other, LOL).
It does not surprise me to hear you say that (it was a terribly simplistic way to discuss similarity) but I thought it was worth asking, if only to get your opinion on the question. :-)
I do appreciate you taking the time to converse with me about this subject, which interests me beyond the scope of my knowledge of it. Вы очень добрый, спасибо.
Fluency in German (including rare and archaic words), plus some English, plus a few clues about the sound shifts that have made German into what it is, plus some knowledge about the most important idiosyncracies of Dutch orthography, are enough for almost reading Dutch. (I've never tried a long text, though.) Understanding spoken Dutch, as mentioned, is another matter...
Ну, пожалуйста! :-)
"What "ID" proponents want is to be seen on debates with scientists. They want the illusion of debate to permeate the media. They don't have a case."
Claim that if you like, but don't in the next breath whine about the lack of proper understanding when a chance to make the case is offered on a silver platter in a forum that pro-ID people will hear it.
Actually there seems to be one - consisting of himself. He explained at length on Good Math, Bad Math how his goal was to be banned from as many blogs as possible. IIRC the successes included Richard Dawkins Forum - and now GMBM.
It seems Davison has a persecution complex. Perhaps it grew on him after he stopped doing competent research, as a means to form an 'explanation' why it all went awry. He acts so deranged that I wouldn't put such a visible selfdelusion past him.
I find the analogy between his theory "now evolution stopped" (by magical means, apparently) and his problem "now science and career stopped" (not so magically, perhaps) rather humorous. So he has that at least.
Not quite. VMartin is fluent in Czech. I am not -- I was bilingual with German and Serbocr... BCSM :-] when I was 2, but then my dad found a job in Paris and came home only once every 6 weeks, so I forgot the whole language; the only Slavic language I know something serious about is Russian (4 years at school). Still, being a geek, I have a lot of theoretical knowledge about a lot of languages, and Czech is quite easy to recognize; I can't tell if VMartin's grammar was flawless, or if a small proportion of the words was actually Slovak or whatever, but the language of his post clearly was good Czech.
(Incidentally, neither the letter ć nor the sound it represents nor the surname ending -ić occurs in Czech.)
That sounds plausible.
Well, if I may pick the Wolbachia bacteria inside those nits, "a language is a dialect with an army and a navy"... I'm not sure if, if measured by mutual intelligibility, any two Slavic languages are really farther apart than the most divergent dialects of what is usually called German. :o) But that belongs to politics and history.
(In the unlikely case anyone got confused, I should mention VMartin claimed to be Czech, not Slovak, and kept telling us how some apparently famous Czech professors had rejected evolution. And BCSM is supposed to mean "Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian-Montenegrin"; that's the most politically correct name currently available.)
Nothing to say against this. In fact, my Russian teacher once explained in class that she regularly has that distressing experience of listening to something and thinking "But this is Russian! But I know Russian! Why don't understand anything!?!" -- and then it always turns out it's Ukrainian or Belorussian.
That said, of the German spoken in Berne I understand about half when I try hard. This is taking into account that the dialect I speak in normal situations is more closely related to the Swiss dialects than to Standard German (though less different from the latter -- which still is much), that it's likely that any word or other feature also exists either in Standard German (at least as an obscure archaism) or in my dialect or in both, and that, being a geek as mentioned, I have an idea what sound correspondences to expect. In other words, I cheat massively, and it still doesn't help a lot.
I also understand about half of spoken Flemish, though here I have to use English and French for help to get that far (Flemish, and Dutch in general, is actually more closely related to the highly divergent English than to Standard German; and it contains more French loanwords than German does).
Then there are the dialects of northern Germany (Plattdeutsch, aka Low Saxon language) that are usually considered German but are a bit more closely related to English than Dutch is... German is doubly paraphyletic ;-)
I won't hazard a guess about % of differences. That depends on whether it's % of different words, % of difference in the sound system (that is large!), % of both together ( = of recognizably shared words), and/or % of difference in grammar; I can't put numbers to any of these.
Fluency in German (including rare and archaic words), plus some English, plus a few clues about the sound shifts that have made German into what it is, plus some knowledge about the most important idiosyncracies of Dutch orthography, are enough for almost reading Dutch. (I've never tried a long text, though.) Understanding spoken Dutch, as mentioned, is another matter...
Ну, пожалуйста! :-)