Just the usual censorship of the anti-science faction

This is what showed up after I posted at Expelled‘s blog:

Glen Davidson Says: Your comment is awaiting moderation.

November 3rd, 2008 at 12:41 pm
If a theory claims to be able to explain some phenomenon but does not generate even an attempt at an explanation, then it should be banished. Despite comparing sequences, molecular evolution has never addressed the question of how complex structures came to be. In effect, the theory of Darwinian molecular evolution has not published, and so it should perish.

http://www.arn.org/docs/behe/mb_idfrombiochemistry.htm

Yes, it’s the prominent IDist Behe who wants to banish evolution.

Of course he’s wrong about evolution’s explanatory ability, while ID has none whatsoever. By Behe’s standard, ID definitely deserves banishment, although I would not go that far.

To be sure, an idea like ID that never has–and never could–address the origin of complex structures has no business being called science.

Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/2kxyc7

At the time of this writing, a much later comment than mine has appeared, while mine is nowhere to be seen.

They’ve never really caught onto the irony of expelling comments for their stated views, although they are not as quick to do so as Dembski’s blog, Uncommon Descent, is. 

Now it is not certain that they will not at some point publish my comment.  Even if they do, though, it’s still suppression, since people tend to read the most recent comments, and not to see comments which have magically appeared among the “older comments.”  They have played that game with past comments of mine.

At this moment, the comments on that blogpost are heavily in favor of Expelled, a fact that may owe much to rank censorship and hypocrisy on their part.  The people behind Expelled have always had the faults that they project onto science and science supporters, and this is just one more example of same.

It is lamentable that the too-frequent lack of openness in science is not discussed in various venues, and is instead trivialized by these liars and hypocrites.  There are problems with “authorities” in science (perhaps none that are not inevitable–humans have limits) dominating the conversation.  Naturally, this has nothing to do with the fact that IDists are called the pseudoscientists and would-be censors of science that they in fact are.

A mongolian wild butt is faster than a reindeer

Here it is, a rather baffling claim when you don’t know what caused this particular sequence of words to appear on the web:

A Mongolian wild butt can run 8 mph faster than a reindeer.

Source

Readers of New Scientist and readers of certain blogs may know that one or more web service companies decided that “ass” is an unacceptable word, and set their servers to replace “ass” with “butt” wherever it appeared in posts and in websites. 

It’s kind of a Beavis and Butthead joke gone wild.  One imagines Butthead saying that he has to go to “assembly,” and Beavis chortling that Butthead said “ass,” then he tells Butthead that he’s going the “buttembly”. 

If you Google “buttembly”, you’ll find a number of sites laughing at the replacement of “ass” in words like “assembly” with “butt.”  Yet there are even more serious sites that have exactly that replacement, so that at one site you read about the “Chrysler buttembly plant”.  There are people writing about their “clbuttic cars,” and “mbuttive” objects.

I just had to find a case where “ass” was totally legitimate and the only proper word to use, so I looked up “mongolian wild butt” to see if the nanny filter “corrected” the proper name, “Mongolian wild ass.”  There was only the one, however it appears legitimate.

Now, of course, most nanny filters are applied more intelligently than that one was.  Nevertheless, a number of these sorts of errors have been made by righteous censors (google “consbreastution”), revealing still another reason not to censor the web.  Issues like these are actually the least reason to do so, while misrepresenting what people write is a rather more important reason, as are many others.