FWIW, in every instance I can recall where a FReeper has posted a guest editorial written by a "Discovery" Institute fellow since the Dover case was decided last month, they have inevitably left off the end of the editorial where it gives the author's affiliation. This is roughly the third or fourth time I've seen this in the past month.As to whether this failure to include the author's association is a deliberate deception, or an honest oversight, I cannot say. But the fact that posters of these sorts of editorials by DI flaks are batting a thousand in the "ommission department" does start to raise an eyebrow.
That said, I may need to revise my remarks. There are two possibilities: either the people posting these DI op-eds on FR are leaving off the affiliation of the author intentionally, or they are doing it accidentally.
If it is accidental, it is the identical to leaving off the final paragraph of an article when it gets posted. I'm starting my ninth year on FR, and I dare say it is a rare experience to see an article posted in which the last paragraph is inadvertently left out. I feel safe in saying it occurs less one in a hundred articles posted on FR, probably closer to 1 in a thousand, I would imagine. We'll come back to that momentarily.
If it is intentional, there are two possibilities:
1) the poster thought the association of the author wasn't important, so much so that they deliberately left off the information, which in every case appears at the very end of the article. Quite literally, it requires the poster use care to be sure he DOES NOT include it when highlighting the article to copy it into the FR posting form.
2) the poster deliberately left off the the author's association with the "Discovery" Institute in order to be deceptive.
I find intentional case #1 to be highly unlikely; keep in mind that every instance I've seen of an op-ed piece authored by a DI-associated writer posted on FR since the Dover judgement (four, as best as I can recall), the posters ALL decided for some reason to leave out the author's association with the "Discovery" Institute. Did ALL of them somehow independently conclude this information wasn't worth keeping in the article? That's seems a huge stretch.
Which leaves us with either it was an act of intentional deception on the part of the poster, or it was an inadvertent oversight. But if it was an inadvertent oversight we are talking about an event that is equivalent to inadvertnently leaving off the last paragraph of an article when posting it to FR, which as per my previous comments I estimate to occur in something like 1 in a 1000 posts. But since we have about four cases of such articles being posted in the past month we need to examine the probability of four such independent events taking place by chance (I know the anti-Evos will embrace this calculation, since they so thoroughly relish using probabalistic arguments so often against the Theory of Evolution). So that's (10-3)4, or roughly 10-12; that's one chance in a trillion that four such articles were posted with the author's affiliation being left out due to inadvertent oversight.
And that forces me, gentle reader, to conclude that I CAN say without reasonable doubt, that the posters of those four articles were acting with malice aforethought when they left off the author's affiliation when posting the four op-ed articles written by DI-associated writers.
Oh, and lest someone critisize me for not bothering to see exactly how many such articles have been posted in the past month, let me say I tried, but it seems the posters in EVERY instance ALSO coincidentally failed to use the words "DISCOVERY INSTITUTE" in the KEYWORD list when the posted the articles -- NOT A SINGLE ONE SHOWED UP WHEN I TRIED TO SEARCH FOR THEM USING "DISCOVERYINSTITUTE" as a keyword.
RWP, you might want to consider this affair as fodder for you "fib report".... after all, mendacity by ommission is still mendacious.
Greater and greater numbers of scientists are joining the ID movement, which is why we keep referring to the same three year after year.Yes, every week or so you see yet another writer from the Discovery Institute making the case for ID.
The most preposterous notion that H. sapiens has ever dreamed up is that the Lord God of Creation, Shaper and Ruler of all the Universes, wants the saccharine adoration of His creatures, can be swayed by their prayers, and becomes petulant if He does not receive this flattery. Yet this absurd fantasy, without a shred of evidence to bolster it, pays all the expenses of the oldest, largest, and least productive industry in all history. - RAH