Re: A critique of the BBC aquatic ape programme and the transcript.


JAE wrote:
> Algis Kuliukas wrote:
> > JAE wrote:
> > > Algis Kuliukas wrote:
> >
> > > > The civil thing to do is to not to escalate the war of words. The civil
> > > > thing to do is not to over react to criticisms. You do neither.
> > >
> > > I react poorly to people who compare me to Nazis.
>
> You are ending the conversation, it appears, because you've been caught
> with your pants around your ankles presenting things falsely. Yes,
> it's embarrassing for you that you can't turn your illusions of me to
> Stalinists into a reference to Soviets. Yes, it's embarrassing for you
> that while you try to claim the upper hand, you compared me to Nazis.
> It was a ***-headed thing for you to do, very, very low and I suspect
> deliberate and it makes me think that you're both a poor scientist and
> have a very nasty streak that you pretend that you don't have.
> Accusing me of escalating things because I called you out when you
> denied you'd tried to make me into a monster and I've pointed out where
> you did it and now running and hiding makes me think you're not just a
> liar, but one of a very cowardly nature. Things like this happen, but
> you're seemingly pretending like it didn't, like you can by ending the
> conversation hide that you distorted the truth and can somehow erase
> viscious dehumanizing slights of the sort that you've scorned.
>
> You are becoming a champion loser else you're living in a fantasy
> world. Own up to it or remain as much a coward as you are a fraud of a
> scientist.

No, Jason. I'm ending the conversation because I can see no point in
discussing things with people who are intent on intrepeting fair
criticisms as a "viscious dehumanizing slights", when they are the ones
who've been doing most of the attacking. I'm sick of trying to
communicate with people who are determined to interpet portrayals of
their views as "lies" when they're the ones doing most of the
misrepresentating.

My quip asking where you had done your degree, suggesting that it might
have been in Stalinist Moscow, was meant as a tongue-in-cheek piss take
of your ridiculously picky response to my use of the word "surely."
(You suggested that I would be thrown out of the department for such
shoddiness if you were in charge.) Any sensible, balanced, person with
a sense of humour reading that posting can see that it was in no way a
comparison of you with Stalin himself. That's just a ridiculous
suggestion.

I also stand by my comment that calling someone "a sub-human piece of
***" (what you wrote about Marc Verhaegen) was the sort of thing a
Nazi would write. It *is* the sort of thing a Nazi would write. But
even this is not suggesting that you *are* a Nazi, is it? It was an
attempt to shame you - because it was you who wrote that, Jason, a
really "vicious dehumanizing slight" - into apologising for it. How
naive that was! - to think you might *apologise* for something. Instead
you decided to go on the attack against me too, suggesting that I was
comparing you with mass murderers.

If you were to accept that you went too far in your initial statements,
I would agree that I went too far in mentioning 'Stalin' and 'Nazis'.
How about that?
No? Well, forget it then. If not, then you've clearly no intention of
debating this in a civil, rational way. It doesn't insipress much
confidence in your self-righteous presumption to the high ground of
scientific objectivity either.

As for the rest of it, yet another long lecture about how I'm a crap
scientist - fine. You're probably right. I'm must be a *really* crap
scientist. So crap, I see that humans swim better than chimps and
wonder if it might be the result of some selection in our lineage since
the divergence - just like selection is taken in almost every other
such observation in the animal world as the 'null hypothesis'. So crap
that I see the significance that only apes and some large primates tend
to wade bipedally at depths where practically no other animal ever
does. So crap that I when I hear about a plausible idea that might
explain this and a lot more besides I decide to go back into academia
to persue it and to actually try to do some science on it, because
almost no-one else seems to have been interested enough to do so in the
previous 45 years.

Algis Kuliukas

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