[Update: it’s gone now. Amazing how much it bothered me that Zeke’s image was featured on that pile of mendacity they call a website.]
A guest poster at Anthony Watts’ harebrained climate denial site didn’t even ask permission before stealing Carl’s painting of myself and Zeke and the sloth.
My annoyance is only slightly tempered by amusement at the poster’s assertion that Joshua trees are cacti. Who knew the alleged existence of monocots was part of the Anthropogenic Global Warming conspiracy?
Wow, you came out swinging pretty hard there! (harebrained, denial, conservative, stealing, annoyance, conspiracy, wingnuts, climate). I might be miffed as well if I was in your position, but do you really find it necessary to inflate the alarm to all quarters?
I visit a great number of environmental and science sites and the award-winning “Best Science Blog” on the internet is one of the most balanced, reasonable sites around. If you have been injured, I am certain they will make it right. But all that name calling is probably beneath you.
I also had a dog named Zeke who I believe was the greatest dog ever, and who I still miss. Sounds like you had a great Zeke as well.
Juan;
I do appreciate your humane approach. Glad to hear about your Zeke. They are treasures, those Zekes.
Less important matters:
Watt’s site spreads lies in an attempt to push an ideology that will actually cause immense harm to the people, organisms, and landscapes I care about. The fact that they were able to stuff the ballot box to win an internet poll doesn’t change that.
And in fact, though a site moderator did take the image down rather quickly, the poster continued to dig himself into a hole by insisting that he was actually doing Carl Buell a favor by stealing his work, and that that favor was magnified by his failing to give direct credit to the artist, and that I have now injured Carl by limiting all this free publicity. As it turns out there is a legal term for giving a creative artist free publicity by publishing that artist’s work without permission. That legal term is “theft.”
As for name-calling: aside from “harebrained,” which turned out to have been offensive to the rabbit sitting here, and “wingnut,” which was a bit of a subjective call on my part, I intended all the other words you list as objective descriptions, not insults.
Oh, maybe “pile of mendacity” wasn’t completely, clinically objective. But it was toned down from what I originally wrote.
Pretty plain you are not a reader of WUWT, Chris… Sorry about the loss of your dog.
Maybe you’d like, just for the sake of accuracy, to list the lies that upset you so much. Or, like the rest of the climate change brigade, are you not open to honest debate?
Thanks, Pete. It’s been four years so it’s not quite an open wound anymore.
Sevad, No. I did not wish to engage with people at WUWT. I was brought into an exchange against my will due to a momentary lapse on WUWT’s part. I don’t need the traffic from WUWT or the headaches that go along with it. I consider WUWT’s general point of view odious, and while I expressed my disdain publicly out of distress that my image had been used, I don’t wish to engage with the site or those who frequent it.
I don’t waste my time debating with Scientologists or homeopaths or chemtrails advocates either. I’m not about to waste my time debating with climate change denialists. Climate change denialism has been roundly and thoroughly debunked, and I don’t indulge trolls, even sincere ones.
This site is not a forum for climate denialists to spread untruths, even if they believe them to be true. They have the rest of the internet for that. My time is too valuable to me to use it trying to persuade people who manifestly refuse to consider, say, the consensus of peer-reviewed science.
Anyone wishing to continue this aspect of the conversation further would do well to consider this site’s comment policy.
Comments about dogs and how cool they are, on the other hand, are always on topic here.
Phew! Glad I got permission that time from you and Carl.
In the comments, the author of the piece maintains that saying the Joshua Tree is a cactus is OK because he was just trying to be humorous. Yep, not knowing what you’re talking about is often humorous, as I’ve demonstrated myself more than once.
And that’s why Sevad’s “honest debate” is so funny, in a “you’re killing me here” kind of way.
Peter! How the hell are you?
Oh, it occurs to me to offer http://www.realclimate.org/ as a resource for anyone who is honestly wondering about climate science.
If you haven’t taken a moment to review the comment policy here, I highly recommend it. It might not work everywhere, but the internet would be a vastly better place if more people were this thoughtful in their online interactions.
Oh, how far we’ve all come since the “Property is Theft” days, eh? ;)
Hey, speaking of theft, if you remember Yeast West fondly, go over and lecture that doofus who’s trying to put everything from “Uprisings” on-line. He seems to believe that it came into public domain when the businesses failed, and that pisses me off.
Brooke: ha!
I hadn’t heard about the recipe theft. Have a link?
And I promise not to download the carrot-herb bread recipe if you send me one. But oh my coyote, do I miss that.
I’m with you, Chris, as you know. There some flat-earth people out there still. They haven’t even heard of the Age of Reason. Glad you got your art back from those yo-yos. It is a waste of time to chat with those people. In my classes, I head those goofballs off the pass by stating up front and several times during the semester: Proof is material, comprehensible, can be written and does not violate the laws of known physics. Anything outside of that is mysticism and not on point in class. I teach world civilization and from time to time, anthropology. You wouldn’t believe…oh yes, you would.
Yes, Jack, I would. And predictably, my comment that the deniers’ own brand of flat-earthism is not welcome here has been interpreted by those flat-earthers as a request for them to post more of what I said isn’t welcome here.
Such is the way with all religious proselytizers, I guess.
In any event, none of it will see the light of day here. That way I get a slightly more bullshit-free blog, and they can pat their own backs and say they’re being censored by the Climate Change Cult. It’s really a win-win situation. We like those.
In the meantime, I apologize to all my NON-idiot commenters for the temporary comment moderation.
I’ve got to remember to bookmark this site for everything Cactus ... oh and that author at WUWT is about as much a conservative as you are ... and he appears to have a cleaner mouth, at least in print ... the belief that only conservatives can be Holocaust/Climate Change deniers is really quite an interesting tell about a persons open mindedness ...
Fair point, Jeff, as – though actuarially speaking, “conservative” is still the way to bet for a climate change denier – it’s far from universal. And lefties have their own conspiracies they fall prey to, from chemtrails and EMFs to 9/11 “truth” ism.
As for the cleaner mouth thing, you can hide a hell of a lot of incivility behind polite language. I make no apologies for manifest impatience with that crap. And if there’s anything my half a century on the planet has taught me, it’s that there are some people who absolutely refuse to learn anything new.
As to whether I’m one of those people, that’s your call. If you stick around, and given your approach in the above comment you’re welcome to, you may decide in my favor. Or you may not. Your opinion is up to you.
Thanks for the kind words.