Talk:Denyse O'Leary

"dissent of dissent"
"dissent of dissent" - what, exactly, did you mean by that? Genghis   18:25, 13 August 2008 (EDT)
 * O'Leary shut off blog comments because she didn't want visitors to her site to see people disagreeing with her. Hence dissent of O'learys purported dissent from darwinism. 24.36.227.74 18:29, 13 August 2008 (EDT)
 * The phrase is a bit clumsy, Tm. 18:30, 13 August 2008 (EDT)


 * "a friend is pestering me to sue for defamation." Sorry? wTF is defamatory about this? It's rather kind, in a "don't mock the mentally retarded" sort of way. 06:47, 29 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Meh, Canada's laws on defamation are pretty "plaintif" friendly. tmtoulouse 07:00, 29 June 2009 (UTC)
 * This is pretty much on the level of all Andy's law suits against us. They use the word sue in the hope of getting us to remove it, but they don't follow through with even an official request to remove the material because they would just get laughed at by us, never mind a court. 07:06, 29 June 2009 (UTC)
 * The issue is that the standard in Canada is that material "lowers the reputation of an individual in the eyes of the public." There is case law that even discounts a "justification" or "truth" defense. Though, my understanding is Ontario as a province a truth defense would still hold. But "common law" systems often of very free speech unfriendly defamation laws. This is more an intellectual exercise in why someone might think they could get away with it. I am not particularly worried about a lawsuit. tmtoulouse 07:09, 29 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Well she can't sue us then, this article probably raises her ever so slightly in the eyes of the public given where she is now. 07:14, 29 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Nice one, 22/7 give or take a few thousandths. Nice one. 08:22, 29 June 2009 (UTC)
 * They've got no reason to sue us. Let's face it, if someone wants to genuinely find out about Denyse O'Leary they're gonna go to Wikipedia, and apart from that, people rip the shit out of everyone else all the time, so if she thinks this is offensive she should watch Frankie Boyle Live. (Or just have a conversation with Ace). 15:52, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

Did O'Leary really teach a University course?
RationalWiki says that someone let O'Leary teach a course on the campus of Toronto University. Maybe so, but was it a University authorized course? Her blog (follow your footnote) states the course was taught at 100 St. Joseph's Street. A business named FLM Languages (www.flmlanguages.com) is at 100 St. Joseph's street, which appears to be on the campus. However, I wonder if O'Leary taught at a commercial or otherwise non-university affiliated place at the same address. It's possible somebody affiliated with the University has low enough standards to invite her give a course, but I kind of doubt it. &mdash; Unsigned, by: 144.92.16.248 / talk / contribs 11:16, 11 March 2010 (UTC)

Eternal Einstein's Universe
Dear Denyse, Since science is necessarily a never ending story as it relies only on removing from itself, often by chance, the things that ain't true, I discovered by chance that the Big Bang ain't true. Unfortunatey it ruins the story presented in your book "By Design or by Chance?". It turns out that so called "cosmological redshift", which was considered by some astronomers to be the evidence that the universe is expanding, which LeMaitre used as the "evidence" that the universe was "created", is caused by simple relativistic coupling between space and time.

It turned out that curvature of space is coupled to time dilation the way that both form a "flat" 4D Minkowski spacetime, similarly to empty, "flat" spacetime. Of course space is not empty, not even flat, and so it acts on the time "bending it" accordingly (causing redshift) that it looks to us as "accelerating expansion of space" observed independently by Supernova Cosmology Project. Early cosmologists overlooked this fact. I noticed it only after I manged to figure out with primitive Newtonian calculus that the universe must be "stationary". Later it got sure support from the principle of conservation of 4-momentum. If energy can't be made from nothing the universe can't be expamding.

So you Denyse, should correct it in the next issue of your book. The universe is eternal as Einstein assumed it anyway, even inventing his "cosmological constant" to stabilize his equation. Einstein didn't like his "cosmological constant" considering it ugly. He even called it "the biggest blunder of my life", yet he didn't know how to get rid of it. Finally he said "if you are out to describe the truth leave the elegance to the tailor" and left the gravitation stabilized by his "constant" since he wasn't buying the creationists story about the "Big Bang". As it turned out he was right.

Now that "cosmological constant" is not needed any more since spacetime turned out to be stable you may change the title to "Evolution in Eternal Einstein's Universe". If you never heard the story that I just told you, you may blame your fellow creationist gravity physicists who didn't like it to be known. Maybe for the reason of not understanding the general relativity? JimJast (talk) 00:13, 26 February 2011 (UTC)


 * Wow. Just wow.  00:19, 26 February 2011 (UTC)
 * Whee! Can I haz this to add to my Time cube-esque collection (actually it's the first but everything's gotta start somewhere) 01:00, 26 February 2011 (UTC) TerrySmall.png [[Image:Toast s.png|alt=Toast|text-bottom|20px|link=User talk:SusanG]]

This article is a joke
I almost deleted it outright, then I realized I was on rationalwiki and not wikipedia. How is anyone going to take anything here seriously when all you do is throw around ad hominems?


 * dear Anonymous (if that IS your real name): An ad hominem is (according to Wikipedia) an attempt to negate the truth of a claim by pointing out a negative characteristic or belief of the person supporting it. This article is not arguing for/against anything, it is simply a short, snarky biography of someone regarded here as a crank. Hence there are no ad hominems involved. Nor are we criticising ID on the basis of O'Leary's flakiness (that WOULD be an ad hominem argument). ID is ludicrous enough on its own merits without need to resort to logical fallacies. Voxhumana (talk) 01:39, 13 June 2012 (UTC)

Feeding the kitty
This ? Anna Livia (talk) 18:06, 23 October 2017 (UTC)

The Discovery Institute, and how it tries to hide its link with “Mind Matters” through sub-organisations, but O’Leary ties it all together
Are these websites (Mind Matters, MM; and Evolution News and Voices, ENV) appropriate to add to the list “her blogs”? (Or maybe they should have their own articles instead, as a cursory search didn’t show them having any atm?)

Almost all of the actual content seems to come from her, Egner, or a few other pals who all big-up Dembski. Additionally, she crossposts all of her content published to the aforementioned sites onto “Uncommon Descent“ (as well as crossposting many of her Discovery Institute colleagues’ pieces) with much lower editorial standards (suggesting even, perhaps, that they’re her original submissions which were cleaned-up by DI’s editors?). I’m pretty sure she’s responsible for most of the pseudonymous “News” byline posts too, just by the authorial style (which also make one, presumably written by Egner really stand out, as for all his flaws he at least writes better).

The latter part is especially troubling, as on “Mind Matters” the tone and visual-design is much more akin to other popular science publications, and they avoid ALL discussion of creationism, preferring to focus on “human exceptionalism” expressed through a lens of caring about animal welfare in science, and mind-body duality (though usually only directly expressed as “the mind is immaterial”, preferring instead to focus on AI subjects (with varying degrees of success) as a contrasting matter against human intelligence).

While ENV has many of the same correspondents, who say in this different location that materialism as a whole is bad, the soul has been “empirically observed”, that animals are always below humans and thus are always moral to use however humans wish, and so on, much more directly showing the Christian side of their views, and undermining some of the conceits of motivation they express in their MM pieces. Gone is any pretence of caring about AI, neurology, psychology, and so forth — they’re all just about how evolution isn’t real.

I bring it up this way because I stumbled-into a MM article (about Brian Cox, algorithmically recommended to me due to my interest in physics) and that article itself seemed… okay, though with some strange asides about unrelated topics which gave me pause.

Then I saw O’Leary’s book titles and thought, “hmm, does she even believe in evolution?” (as she does seemingly invoke it in some of her MM articles) “Well, being Christian or wanting to combine faith and science don’t necessarily make one anti-science…”, so I clicked through to a linked article about dolphin research which was presented pretty much entirely about concerns for animal welfare, and she’s written a lot of similar articles about bonobo communication research too.

But in one of the pieces on MM, she ended-up linking to one of her pieces on UD instead, and, well, seeing the header and all the comments quoting the Bible and Shakespeare to “disprove” evolution made me go “ah, right, she is one of those after all “, which prompted me to check what you lot had to say about her after I read some of the nonsense for entertainment for a few hours.

In fact comparing at her version of that Cox article on UD and MM, half of it is missing on UD, where she also references paragraphs she didn’t keep in, and even some of the paragraphs which seem intact have stranger grammar and wording choices. So I wonder if the MM editors tidied it up and added-in extra quotes, extra analysis, etc. Or, possibly even worse, if she was capable of writing the marginally better version but then deliberately made it worse for the sake of UD’s audience? Either way, she certainly didn’t just cut-out the middle and leave the edges, the deletions are interleaved and even some seemingly-intact paragraphs have a sentence or two missing. She’s more bullish about Cox apparently seeing the light about Earth’s specials and how that meshes with her worldview in the UD version (really he just said Earth MAY be the only place with intelligent life), while the MM version just reacts like “strange, most estimates of intelligent life are higher” (though she leaves that part in the UD version too).

So it seems to me that MM is an attempt to trojan-horse the DI (through its obfuscated intelligence “research” institute) into more mainstream science communication media. They remove any and all discussion of theology in the articles themselves, seem generally to support evolution and adaptation as fact (even invoking them explicitly sometimes about an animal’s natural environment being what they adapted to), seem to care mostly about generic science and tech taken at face value, etc.

It was only when I found it strange that authors were plugging their own work instead of their coworkers’, and for all the articles I saw to be written by a trio of people, and then noticed those same groups of people popping up in these other websites, that I actually started looking into who these names are. Which not a lot of people bother with on the whole when they’re just skimming articles.

Of course after that it was plainly obvious that the weird, slightly off parts of the articles were actually the point — the ideas I was skeptical about, saying out loud “that’s a false binary”, “that’s a false dichotomy”, “that’s a bad analogy”, “wait, you’re calling for evidence in one article and then another obliquely dismisses “materialism and naturalism”? Isn’t that inconsistent?”, etc etc as I was reading — THOSE were the bitter pills which I was meant to swallow uncritically with the “syrup” of the rest of it seemingly respecting the science.

I also notice O’Leary isn’t listed on your article about the DI, despite having written for them since 2013 on ENV and still contributing to MM and ENV just a few days ago. Should that be changed as well? She’s been getting paid by them for 8 years now to rehash old articles.

(I had considered just writing some of this up in a direct edit to the main article, but I’m new to RW, so I figured I should ask how appropriate these are for this page or if they should be elsewhere.)

152.37.119.226 (talk) 09:44, 31 October 2021 (UTC)