Saturday, March 29th, 2008
Khan, I’m laughing at the “superior intellect.”*
When it rains, it pours. The incompetent boobs promoting Expelled still haven’t figured out how to make the hermetic seal on their propaganda machine impermeable. They tried to have a teleconference with sympathetic members of the news media to plead their case spin the latest lie about the expulsion of Dr. Myers from a pre-release screening of the movie. Myers gets wind of it, and in a feat of social engineering worthy of Johnathan James or Adrian Lamo, called in on the non-interactive line early enough to catch the super-secret double-probation password to get on the interactive line. Once he did that… well, I’ll let him tell the story:
Then I listened along quietly until I could take no more.
They repeated the usual lies (the Minneapolis event was a private screening [which was publicly linked on the web, where any idiot could get to it]; their blog was #1 on blogpulse [near as I can tell, it wasn’t—it was my exposure of their hypocrisy that was #1]; they didn’t lie to get interviews [totally bogus], etc.). They made amusing contradictions. Walt Ruloff first claims that the genesis of the movie was in 2006, when he claims to have started investigating biotechnology and discovered that there are “questions that can’t be asked” and that people were suppressing information that called Darwinism into doubt — note, though, that he never stated what those unnameable questions are. A moment later Mark Mathis comes on to say that the subject of the film was a work in progress, that they hadn’t settled anything, and that the name wasn’t even decided upon. Come on, they registered expelledthemovie.com in early 2007, well before they asked us to be interviewed.
They threw out a bunch of softball questions to Ben Stein: “How can you be so intelligent and question Darwinism?”, I kid you not.
One good question got through on email: KMOX radio contested the claim that there was no distortion of the interviews of Dawkins and Myers because they surrounded the interviews with film clips of Nazis — I think it’s obvious how they were trying to bias the discussion, and I was floored by Stein’s reply. He wanted more goose-stepping Nazis all over the place.
This was all a great deal to stomach, but I restrained myself. [Bolding mine - Ed.] Then Mathis really started to lie: he said that all anybody ever blogged about was distractions, and several times he claimed that we never addressed the content of the movie. Let’s set aside the rank hypocrisy of expelling the people interviewed in the movie from screenings so we couldn’t see it; it’s simply not true. We have blogged extensively on the ridiculous premise at the heart of the movie, that the Holocaust was a consequence of evolutionary theory.
*snip*
So I interrupted. I said, in essence, hang on — you guys are spinning out a lot of lies here, you should be called on it. I gave a quick gloss on it, and said that, for instance, anti-semitism has a long history in Germany that preceded Darwin, and that they ought to look up the word “pogrom”. There was some mad rustling and flustering about on the other side of the phone some complaints, etc., and then one of them asked me to do the honorable thing and hang up…so I said yes, I would do the honorable thing and hang up while they continued the dishonorable thing and continued to lie.
Naturally, the IDiots had a much less charitable take on the incident:
And … Myers apparently somehow got into the press conference itself! - “under false pretences” according to the moderator. He was told to be quiet, and he rung off (to the best of my knowledge). He told the media to phone HIM instead.
*snip*
Strangely, while he was in the telemeeting, Myers insisted that Darwinism had nothing to do with Nazi Germany. Of course, historically, Darwin was an enormous influence on the Nazis because his Descent of Man appeared to put racism on a scientific footing. That does not mean (and the Expelled [Notice how Denyse O’Leary, the author of the post, continues to link to the movie’s web site every time she types the word “Expelled.” One would think that she would’ve gotten the memo about Google’s changes to its search engine algorithms to minimize “Google Bombing.” At the very least, she could just take a basic course on how search engines work. - Ed.] guys made clear that they did not think it means) that today’s Darwinists have anything to do with Nazism. But it is a historical fact that Darwin was one of the Nazis’ heroes, as historian Richard Weikart painstakingly shows.
Uh, Denyse? Deny it all you want, but the subtext of your propaganda film practically screams “Darwin’s theory was necessary and sufficient for Hitler’s rise to power, therefore evolution must be banned from all science classes immediately!” But more than being just a bad historical analogy, it represents the worst form of ad hominem attack on proponents of evolution — the Poisoning The Well fallacy. If that’s the best the neo-creationists have got, then that’s both contemptible and pathetic.
Worse, O’Leary repeats the lie that Myers was somehow outraged or upset at his expulsion. Far from it. P.Z. could barely contain his mirth at the blatant hypocrisy exhibited by Mathis and company. And he’s been laughing ever since — hence the title of my post. Denyse, Dr. Myers is laughing at the “superior morals.”
And speaking of inappropriate historical analogies, let’s look at the comments section of O’Leary’s post:
I think the man has truly lost it. I guess it was to be expected that many in the scientific community would go off the deep end over this flick.
Just pray he doesn’t actually use his steel-toed boots and brass knuckles on us…
This does not reflect well on the state of PZ Myer’s [sic] mental health.
Here is an audio of the fiasco:
http://www.skepchick.org/pzexpelled.mp3
PZ’s laugh toward the beginning has a ring of dementia to it, IMHO…lol
I found it at:
http://skepchick.org/blog/?p=1190
FtK
03/28/2008
9:42 pm
Gee, where have I heard this sort of rhetoric before? Oh, I know!
In the Soviet Union, psychiatry was used for punitive purposes. Psychiatric hospitals were often used by the authorities as prisons in order to isolate political prisoners from the rest of society, discredit their ideas, and break them physically and mentally; as such they were considered a form of torture. The official explanation was that “no sane person would declaim against Soviet government and Communism”.
Just like no sane person would declaim against “Intelligent Design,” eh? So tell me, Denyse, DaveScot, Bill, Mike, Duane, Kent, Ken: when the revolution comes, am I going to be shipped off to a mental institution in Siberia Anchorage for harboring the heretical thought that curling up in a fetal position and constantly mumbling “Goddidit” is an insufficient explanation for the origin and diversity of life on this planet? Inquiring minds want to know.
Oh, and about Uncommon Descent’s mission statement:
Hence, ID needs to be vigorously developed forcefully indoctrinated into children as a scientific, intellectual, and cultural project.
I fixed your typo.
* Via.
