Sunday, March 23, 2008

Ignorant, dishonest fuckwit Denyse O'Leary: Sunday morning edition.


God Almighty, but the dumbassitude runneth over at Denyse's place this morning. Asks the perpetually retarded Denyse:

But why does PZ Myers NEED to see the Expelled film?

But he doesn't, Denyse -- he doesn't need to see the movie, he merely chose to see it. It was a decision he made of his own free will -- to voluntarily go with friends and family to view a movie that was playing in a nearby theatre. How you got "need" out of that is beyond me, as is most of the ignorant rubbish you publish.

Ah, but here's where Denyse drops any pretense to objectivity and turns into a dishonest hack:

I don;t know what to think, but this comes to mind. If PZ can trash The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul without reading it, ...

Say what? Is that what PZ did? I know ... let's go to the videotape, shall we?

The Spiritual Brain

Category: Books • Kooks • Neurobiology
Posted on: October 2, 2007 8:00 PM, by PZ Myers


I tried. I really, honestly, sincerely tried. I've been struggling with this book, The Spiritual Brain: A Neuroscientist's Case for the Existence of the Soul(amzn/b&n/abe/pwll), by Mario Beauregard and Denyse O'Leary, for the past week and a half, and I've finally decided it's not worth the effort. It's just about completely unreadable.

The writing is aggravating. It is constantly broken up with strings of quotes — 3, 4, 5, or 6 at a time — that are just plopped out there to speak for themselves, and often the authors don't even bother to address the points brought up in the quotes. It's like, presto, John Eccles said it! Or Steven Weinberg said it! Or some random guy on the internet said it! It begins to wear on the reader, and you start to assume you can just skip over the stupid quotes, and then they refer to something in one that you need to know to understand what the heck they're talking about. You just can't trust that it's only filler, even though it is 95% of the time.

Take your time and read the whole thing, during which it becomes painfully clear that PZ did read the book -- or as much of it as he could stomach before giving up, after which he made it perfectly and abundantly clear that that's precisely what he did.

As a Catholic, Denyse, I would have thought you'd take that "not bearing false witness" directive a bit more seriously. I'm guessing someone's going to burn in hell for all eternity, and it's not PZ.

WHOOPSIE ... Apparently, someone clued Denyse in to the fact that she was talking crap, as we read in her comments section:

Denyse said...

... I am informed that he read half of The Spiritual Brain before starting to trash it...

Lovely, Denyse ... so the original libel stays in the blog post, but the mealy-mouthed correction can be found only by perusing the comments. Typical Denyse classlessness. I really have to stop checking in over there -- I can feel myself getting stupider just reading her stuff.

2 comments:

Ti-Guy said...

Myers provided enough evidence to explain why Denyse's book was impossible to finish. And frankly, it's the same issue with most of the rightwingers....they can't write because the can't think.

You'll spend far, far more time explaining why that is, and that's an investment of time and mental energy that wildly exceeds any possible benefit that could come from reading their works.

Randall said...

Why did PZ need to see Expelled? He didn't. Why did he want to? Because he's in it!

Not hard work, is it, Denyse?