Deception and delusion as evidence for refutation/A ghost of posts future

The Panda's Thumb notes an interesting bit of self-delusion (and/or attempt at propagandizing) by the Thomas More Law Center--the organization doing the legal work for the PA folk trying to weasel ID into the public school science curriculum. Nice little note:

It’s actually a quite extraordinary bit of self-delusion, especially considering the last sentence in the TMLC press release (“The ACLU lawsuit will continue with a trial expected in early summer.”). I think it highlights the fact that propaganda can have two messages: the official message, with technically accurate (well, sometimes) text, and the emotional message for the public, which is the message that the innocent reader gets. Put a snappy title on a press release, exude confidence, and declare victory, and, don’t you know it, people conclude that you’ve won!

This kind of thing is actually quite common in creationist/ID-land, in only slightly less extreme form. I can’t count the number of times where the Discovery Institute or another creationist group has put out a press release, the right-wing echo chamber bounces it around for a few days, and the result that emerges is the emotional message being portrayed as the actual facts on the ground. In rare cases, enough of a din gets created that someone from a respectable news outlet will repeat the message, at which point the Discovery Institute will quote it in the next press release! The peppered moth case is perhaps the most massive example of this engineered disconnect between discourse and reality.

-- from This just in: Plaintiffs give up in Dover, in The Panda's Thumb

On my list of posts and/or essays to someday do is a more lengthy argument on the justification for arguing generally from the observed poor quality of argument for a position to the reasonable conclusion it can be dismissed, in cases in which any positive evidence is sorely lacking.

Which is to say: you might be arguing a position which, from the point of view of pure epistemology is non-disprovable by any empirical test (which, incidentally, also probably makes your claim uniquely sterile in terms of utility for anyone interested in its consequences for the world they themselves actually inhabit, though I digress, and, I suppose, I did say I'm not writing this essay yet, so I'll drop that for now)--but if every time you open your mouth, we note your arguments are terribly flawed, and at a level at which we may reasonably conclude you are a deeply deluded and/or shamelessly deceptive individual, it becomes quite sensible to dismiss you and your claims quite without any epistemologically rigourous refutation.

One metaphor I expect to employ would go a bit like this: you're walking along the beach, and a shifty sorta character says, suddenly, excitedly, 'Look--a purple elephant floating over the ocean...'

For some reason (say you haven't had your coffee yet), you look.

And you see no such elephant. And when you turn around, you find the shifty character has swiped your wallet, and is running with it along the beach...

Now, from the point of view of pure epistemology, you could, I suppose, argue: 'that elephant could have been there... I can't prove otherwise'...

But frankly, I'd have to argue, you'd be an idiot even to give them this much slack at this point. No, the appropriate response is to make the positive assertion that the shifty one is a liar, pursue him down the beach, pound the hell out of him, and take your wallet back. And assure anyone else, that when the putz claims to see an elephant, it really isn't in anyone's interest actually to give them the benefit of the doubt and look.

So much of the rhetoric of the religious and the superstitious (really only one category, mind you) is of that character: shifty, deceptive, transparently an outright con, possibly one revealing some form of self-delusion on the part of the person employing it. I submit the prevaricators at the Thomas More Center as one more example, for your consideration, for now. The full essay, I might get to a little later this year.