Degaussed Moral Compass Alert: John West on Dembski Using “Internet Video”

None other than DI honcho John West has appeared to make some statements. I get the definite flavor of squink from perusing West’s missive.

Tu quoque, anyone?

Now that the internet Darwinists have discovered the glories of copyright, may we hope they will begin to police their own supporters?

The old step away from the perp move:

In the present case, Discovery Institute played no role whatever in the use, alteration, or dissemination of any animation clip from Harvard that our esteemed colleague may have included in some of his lectures. When we first learned several weeks ago that someone had concerns about Dr. Dembski’s occasional use of this particular clip, we contacted Dr. Dembski directly, and he told us that he had stopped using the material as soon as these concerns had been raised with him.

Why do I have the feeling that if this went to court, we’d find out that the DI would have to step away from several more fellows?

More tu quoque:

What I find difficult to take seriously are the recent histrionics by members of the Darwinist internet posse. If would take them more seriously if they applied their concerns a tad more consistently. For example, some of the very Darwinists who are now browbeating Dr. Dembski also posted on their blogs video from his lecture, presumably without his permission.

One doesn’t need the permission of a speaker giving a public lecture to post your own video of the talk. [Commenter Zachriel notes an implicit copyright for speakers, but that fair use allows the publication of excerpts, as is the case here. –WRE] Journalists also get privileges for use of media in the public interest, which bringing to light illegal activity certainly represents. (There remains the issue of whether the video represented someone else’s copyright, but that isn’t the legal argument West invoked.)

And then the grand whopper:

What is apparent from all of this is just how bare the Darwinists’ cupboard must be these days. Every time they try to shift the evolution-ID debate away from the scientific evidence—whether it be by fake reenactments of the Dover trial a la PBS, or through overblown controversies such as this one—they expose the weakness of their position. After all, if they had the evidence on their side, they would be arguing it. Since they don’t, they try to change the subject.

Uh, John, I’m not Darwin-only, I’m science-only. We in the pro-science side of this have delivered on criticism concerning the scientific evidence. I haven’t noticed much in the way of substantive response from IDC advocates to critiques such as “Why Intelligent Design Fails” and “Scientists Confront Intelligent Design and Creationism”. There’s oodles of criticism that IDC advocates like to pretend never was written, or which they airily dismiss without dealing with the arguments contained therein. We in the pro-science side of the argument choose to also highlight the apparently highly morally corrosive nature of antievolution activism. This is in addition to, not in lieu of, the already copious criticism we’ve made of the anti-science antievolution position on its dubious-to-absent merits.

It seems like the only time we can get IDC advocates to stay on topic is when they are being deposed and cross-examined. Speaking of which, there were a number of times that Judge Jones used the phrase, “unrebutted testimony”, in his decision. Want to count up how many times it was used in relation to the defense experts as opposed to the plaintiffs’ experts? This seems to be a simple case of projection. Are you sure that you want to go down that road?

(OK, it was four times, all of them refer to plaintiffs’ experts, three of them refer to Dr. Padian, and once for Dr. Miller. The DI Fellows testifying, Michael Behe and Scott Minnich, scored big goose eggs on that metric.)

Back to the moral compass. The deployment of the tu quoque fallacy is a surefire sign that the person deploying it is a moral relativist. West seems to think that something is less of a moral problem if it only occurs “occasionally”. And, of course, that whole last paragraph of West’s falls under the “bearing false witness” category.

Are these the folks that citizens want “renewing” our culture? I don’t think so.