Bravo to the Man from Jupiter

April 29th, 2008 EmmaPeel

The Florida House of Representatives voted yesterday to protect the right of high school teachers to teach their students Discovery Institute’s talking points, er, I mean “the growing scientific controversy over evolution”. It was almost a straight party line vote, with the Republicans voting 71-2 in favor of gibberish.

Two Republicans voted in favor of sanity & reason. And one of these, former majority whip Carl Domino, (R)-Jupiter, wasn’t afraid to speak up against the science-deniers…

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“Stand up for your civilization, man!”

April 28th, 2008 RWA

       I was hoping for a full-fledged assault on EXPELLED by National Review’s resident evolution aficiondo John Derbyshire, and while NR itself may have disappointed me, the Derb sure didn’t. He has a great takedown in today’s National Review Online, arguing that creationism is not just anti-science; it’s anti-civilization. It’s a point we’ve made here before (here and here)  but Derbyshire expresses this better than we ever could.  Science, argues Derb, is one of the great glories of Western civilization, whose ideas led directly to the American experiment, and anyone who calls themself a conservative should be as ready and able to defend it as much as any other of our great institutions. I strongly urge you to read the whole beautiful thing, but I’ll still give you the final paragraph, to give you an idea of what it all leads up to:

Which other of our civilizational achievements would you like to sneer at? What else from what Waugh called “the work of centuries” would you like to “abandon … for sentimental qualms”? You call yourself a conservative? Feugh!

For shame, Ben Stein, for shame. Stand up for your civilization, man! and all its glories. The barbarians are at the gate, as they always have been. Come man the defenses with us, leaving the liars and fools to their lies and folly.

      Bravo, Derb, bravo!

UPDATE: Derb responds to his critics, and says what’s on a lot of our minds:

A mature scientific theory is as much a glory of our civilization as is a cathedral or a university; and it is uniquely of ours. Other civilizations had temples, universities, systems of government, literature, philosophy; but only we of the West came up with scientific method, and the whole world owes the innumerable fruits of that method to us.

I am a huge fan of Western civilization. Thus, when people — well-educated people, who ought to set an example for the general — sneer at and spit on these majestic creations of the human intellect, I get mad. They are taking sides with barbarism. They ought to be ashamed of themselves. Ben Stein ought to be ashamed of himself. And no, I won’t sit through his wretched movie.

And the applause never ends! 

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ERV Delisted by Google. [Update: Blog Removed by Google]

April 25th, 2008 midwifetoad

ERV seems to have been delisted by Google. Folks at Panda’s Thumb seem to think this has happened before.

Update: 4/28/2008. The ERV Blog has been removed by Google/ WTF?

Generally this happens because someone has hacked the site and inserted links to porn and such. Stay tuned.

ERV was following the Yoko Ono copyright suit. Here’s a link that has the full text.

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Expelling Creationism from…Conservatism?

April 25th, 2008 RWA

I was looking forward to reading John Derbyshire’s review EXPELLED for National Review. He’s already taken down the trailer and misleading web campaign superbly (read here for direct links and commentary by DCers), but alas, NR decided instead to give priority to two doofuses, David Klinghoffer and Dave Berg (I’m not going to link directly to them and make you waste your time; instead, read The Sensuous Curmudgeon’s witty take on them). Fortunately, both Derb and Jonah Goldberg (more reservedly) let it be known that they don’t share Klinghoffer or Berg’s views…but then Goldberg decided to share some real, real, REAL stupid mail he had gotten from people who do agree with them. In fit of pique, I wrote back, and Goldberg was kind enough to print my reply (I’m the third response down), but he did chastize me gently for “beating up” on his other correspondants.

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Stein: The Stone of Fate

April 22nd, 2008 RWA

DCers Quark2005 and orionblamblam cooked up this appropriate MSTing of EXPELLED, so thank them for it. Hopefully, most people will only watch this “documentary” when Mike Nelson does a RiffTrack of it (even though Joel is still better).

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Hell Freezes Over At Uncommon Descent

April 21st, 2008 midwifetoad

Despite the snarky title, this is not a cynical post. Something important happened at Bill Dembski’s blog, Uncommon Descent. It is tempting to make fun of the actors in this drama, but I choose not to. I view this as a positive development.

Dave Scot is a much maligned member of Dembski’s inner circle. He can usually be counted on to say things that professional biologists consider laughable. But today he is looking pretty good. He begins:

If there’s any real case to be made for Darwin and the holocaust it’s the opposite of what’s messaged in Expelled. The holocaust resulted from a failure to heed Darwin’s warning that eugenics could only be practiced by sacrificing the noblest part of our nature, the very part and only part that separates us from other animals. Those responsible for the holocaust, beginning with the eugenics movement in America, were the true animals. Those opposed were nobler than the animals.

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Natural hybridization of genus Moonbatus

April 20th, 2008 RWA

Abstract: We have found through field studies that interbreeding between M.dianectis and M.deanitis has resulted in a new species, M.dumbassis.  This new species is primarily distinguished by its mating call, a painful, nasal drawl, in contrast to the hysterical, obnoxious laugh of dianectis and loud, frightening  yell of deanitis which are characteristic of those species. Although the homozygous species of Moonbatus are both known to be prone to aggressive behavior and species-specific forms of mental instability, this new heterozygous variation is highly susceptible to severe neurophysiologicial deficency, and is believed to be a primary host for the prion that causes the affliction known as cretardation (aka Coulter-Limbaugh Syndrome). For this reason, culling of the entire hybrid species in order to prevent further brain damage to the human population is recommended.

Figure 1(a):

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COCO FOR CREATIONISM!!!!

April 19th, 2008 RWA

Much of the negativity towards EXPELLED focuses not just on the dishonesty of the filmmakers in their manipulation of the facts (which par for the course for documentaries nowadays), but the reprehensible way in which they try to make the connection between Darwin and Hitler, between true science and pseudoscience. As Russell Seitz (again!) notes, they’re being dishonest there as well. One of Stein’s interview subjects is Polish politician and ID advocate Maciej Giertych, who asserts the lineage of Darwin to Hitler. Well, Giertych’s own lineage leads to Nazism as well: his son Roman is leader of a group with neo-Nazi sympathies which has held illegal rallies in Poland. Now you might be saying “C’mon, it’s not fair to indict a father for his child’s sins”. In this case, however, li’l Giertych is learning from Big Daddy. A quick glance at Maciej’s Wikipedia page reveals a history of anti-Semitic agitiation and large-f Fascist sympathies over the course of his time in office, and long before then, he collaborated with the Communist government. And totalitarian sympathies are just the tip of the Giertych iceberg: he also thinks dinosaurs lived alongside humans and Neanderthals still live today. 

Whoa, whole lotta hypocrisy going on. Stein & co kept making these dubious connections between Nazism and their opponents, when it turns out their allies are the real thing. Even more eregrious is the way EXPELLED’s defenders try to justify the dishonesty of the filmmaker’s tactics, saying that they should have “Googled Ben Stein + evolution” before consenting to be interviewed. Well, the filmmakers should have also Googled Giertych, in which case they would have found out that he’s nuttier than the outhouse at Jimmy Carter’s peanut farm. But do they really care? An ad for EXPELLED I saw in a local alternative newspaper featured glowing praise by WhirledNutsDaily head honcho Joseph Farah, who thinks dinosaurs were the dragons of legend and pterodactyls still live today. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot? Do they really want people loonier than the Canadian dollar to endorse their movie? I guess so.

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Ben’s science is bunk, his movie is junk…

April 18th, 2008 RWA

Hope you thought this ditty was nice.

If you agree, thank Russell Seitz

Ben Stein likely can’t

See the flaws in his rant

And Seitz is equally adamant!

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Did Ben Stein run over Rupert Murdoch’s Dog?

April 17th, 2008 RWA

I’m only asking, because not long after Fox News movie critic Roger Friedman’s pan of Expelled,  NY Post film critic Kyle Smith hurls another rotten tomato at it. The highest-profile critic to review the film so far, Smith is less scathing than Friedman, and starts out giving the film too much benefit of the doubt, but totally comes around at the end:

Religion, the combination of philosophy and myth handed down to us, is blind to science. Science ought to return the favor. In a long, greasy detour, Stein shows that the Nazis were Darwinists. So what? They also liked skiing. Having Nazi fans doesn’t make Darwin wrong.

There is no “should” in the theory of evolution. Eugenics is a philosophy, not a science, even if Darwin indulged in it. Religion is normative, all about that “should.” It does belong behind that wall, separated from the search for fact.

Other than that the Nazis were most certainly not Darwinists and that Darwin’s only personal connection to eugenics was being a cousin to Francis Galton, Smith gets it right here.  Science is science, religion is religion, and never the twain shall meet. Smith manages to penetrate the either/or fallacy employed by the Expelled filmmakers at least as well as Richard Dawkins did. Maybe even better, since Dawkins made the mistake of taking what many of us perceived as a cheap shot against those who disagreed with his politics.

And speaking of rotten tomatoes…9%, Benjy, and dropping like a rock. Hope you’re still getting residuals every time The Mask and Richie Rich play on TBS.

UPDATE: 8% and dropping like a pigeon. Stein’s career somehow survived after making North and Frankenstein General Hospital, but I don’t see how he’ll survive this one.

 UPDATE #2: Well, it’s back to 9%, but still, just two fresh reviews, and one of them is from Christianity Today, and it’s more a mixed review than a positive one. It’s a lot like how most of the positive reviews for Lions for Lambs came from moonbat sites like Counterpunch.

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