"Crazy Ed" Brayton again

I fully expected that Darwinist critics of the Discovery Institute report charging Judge Jones with parroting the ACLU were not going to respond to Casey Luskin's latest defense of the report because they don't have a leg to stand on, but I was wrong -- Ed Brayton has finally responded, and inevitably Ed's response is full of crap. In a post titled Luskin Flogs a Dead Horse, Crazy Ed says,

I questioned the validity of the analogs you claimed between the cases you cited and the Kitzmiller ruling. Every single case you cite involves judges accepting one side's proposed findings of fact and conclusions of law wholesale -- that is, they adopted them and merely signed their name to them.

Which is exactly what Jones did in Kitzmiller -- the ID-as-science section of his opinion adopted the plaintiffs' proposed findings wholesale and he merely signed his name to them. He changed the wording around a little but the ideas remained the same.

In one case that you cite, the judge did this without even considering arguments from the other side.

There is no evidence that Jones considered the defendants' arguments when he wrote the ID-as-science section of the Kitzmiller opinion.

What your "study" leaves out is that the judge did not accept nearly half of the proposed findings;

So maybe when Ed was in school, he copied a paper from a book and when he was caught he tried to defend himself by saying, "but I didn't copy the whole book."

. . . .that alone means he exercised independent judgment on the validity of each finding of fact distinct from the others and that alone distinguishes it from the cases you cite.

That he did not copy some of the plaintiffs' proposed findings is not evidence that he exercised independent judgment on the plaintiffs' proposed findings that he did copy. And whether or not he "exercised" independent judgment is irrelevant -- what matters is whether he expressed independent judgment.

Analogical reasoning is only valid if the two things being compared are similar; in this case they are not.

Ed, if you had a mind, you would be completely out of it here. In the sense here, "analogical" by definition refers to a comparison between things that are partly dissimilar. The applicable definitions of "analogy" in Merriam-Webster's online dictionary are as follows: 2 a : resemblance in some particulars between things otherwise unlike . . . . b : comparison based on such resemblance." (emphasis added) Of course, it can sometimes be shown that one or more dissimilarities between two court cases make an analogy invalid, but you did not try to show that -- you only argued that an "analogy" between two court cases is automatically invalid if the cases are not virtually identical (it wouldn't even be an "analogy" if the two cases are virtually identical). Also, analogy is one of the foundations of the evolution theory that you love -- in evolution theory, analogy is called "homology."

They aren't even close.

They don't need to be close.

Ed tries to make his ideas look good by censoring comments and commenters that disagree with him. Some of the commenters on his blog are toadies who feel that they need to apologize for disagreeing with him -- for example, a comment on Ed's blog strokes his ego by saying,

Ed: I too have the highest respect for you, but I hope you will rethink some of what you have written.