Hmmm. As a person who’s spent a good deal of time trying to get her head on straight, I’ve done plenty of introspection, spent way too much time self-flagellating, and come a long way in self-improvement (but still have a ways to go, no question!) What brought this into the forefront of my brain this morning was this post on Pharyngula about Bill Dembski asking his lawyer to make the mean people go away. Specifically, he’s been caught using a video about evolution that was produced by Harvard in his Intelligent Design presentations – by dubbing over the soundtrack with ID-friendly language and eliminating the credits so his fraudulent use would be harder to detect. Dembski has a history of doing things that turn out to be illegal, embarrassing, or both, then being surprised at the negative consequences. He is a public figure because he has made himself so, but he never seems to expect anyone to see through his pseudonyms and make it public that he was behind the fart video, or the public posting of peoples’ addresses for the purpose of harassment, or fan messages to himself on various review sites. He also hasn’t glommed onto the fact that anything that goes on the internet easily becomes public, and that goes for the letters he’s been ccing to other parties who are less than sympathetic towards him. So I said:

I’ve always lived with the attitude that you shouldn’t say anything you’d be embarrassed to say in public, or to the face of a person you say it about. That goes even more for anything written or sent over the internet. Never, ever assume that it won’t be passed along somehow, or that you’ll never be held accountable for it. (I also believe that there’s nothing wrong with apologizing, or admitting you were wrong, so that helps.)

Unfortunately for Dembski, he regularly says and does things without giving weight to the potential consequences, and never apologizes when he’s called on it. His lawyer, no matter how well-trained or well-connected, can’t protect him from himself. Better that he should be a little more contemplative than outspoken, but it’s hard to teach an old dog new tricks.

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