Notes from Evil Bender

There’s a preview for the upcoming Futurama DVD on Youtube:

Enjoy!

[tip o' the goteed robot to the Bad Astronomer]

Shakesville:

“It’s all tied to sovereignty, which we respect whether it’s on the ground or in the air.” - U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates on why the U.S. won’t be airdropping any humanitarian aid to Myanmar anytime soon.

I’m sure the irony here needs no elaboration. Hang on to it as an easy refutation of wingnuts’ foreign policy claims.

And the winner is Phyllis Schlafly. Schlafly, who will soon be receiving an honorary degree from Washington University for her hatred of women hatred of gay people intolerance poor argumentation role in the conservative movement, is, as will likely come as a surprise to none of you, an ardent anti-science loon.

It seems Schlafly is eager to defend Ben “The holocaust is all Darwin’s fault” Stein and his crappy movie Expelled. Let’s see what Schlafly has to say:

Ben Stein is known to many as an actor on Comedy Central. But the funniest part about his recent movie “Expelled” is not any clever lines spoken by Stein but the hysterical way liberals are trying to discourage people from seeing it.

I won’t bother reminding Ms Schlafly that “hysterical” has its roots in misogyny, seeing as that seems to be her intention in using the word. This wouldn’t be the first time that Schlafly has attacked women for being women and liberals for being womanly. And it’s never going to be clear which liberals want people not to see Expelled. Scientists and science supporters are rightly pointing out all the lies and inaccuracies in the film, but if anyone seems hell-bent on keeping people away, it must be those mean “liberal” reviewers who seem to be anything but fond of the film.

Schlafly continues:

Stein’s critics fail to refute effectively anything in “Expelled”; they just use epithets to ridicule it and hope they can make it go away. However, it won’t go away; even Scientific American, which labeled the movie “shameful,” concedes that it cannot be ignored.

As was the case in the essay that caused this award to be named after Schlafly, she’s incapable of providing any evidence to support her claims. She doesn’t demonstrate–or even hint at–which arguments have gone unrefuted, but since the film’s two arguments are “ID is being discriminated against” and “Darwin caused the holocaust,” it’s safe to say that one need look no further than expelledexposed.com to see that Expelled has been thoroughly refuted.

The movie is about how scientists who dare to criticize Darwinism or discuss the contrary theory called intelligent design are expelled, fired, denied tenure, blacklisted and bitterly denounced. Academic freedom doesn’t extend to this issue.

The message of Stein’s critics comes through loud and clear. They don’t want anybody to challenge Darwinian orthodoxy or suggest that intelligent design might be an explanation of the origin of life.

We’re going to some throughly dishonest examples of this so-called mistreatment of ID proponents in this essay. If there is so much oppression of ID, one might wonder why ID proponents can’t find anything damning to put forward, and instead must lie and misrepresent facts to make their case.

And of course, the reason ID isn’t taken seriously is no Vast Darwinist Conspiracy, it’s that it isn’t science. It makes no meaningful predictions, it advances our knowledge not a bit. It is a science stopper, which proclaims loudly and repeatedly wherever there is an unanswered question “God did it!” But Schlafly doesn’t want us to notice that. She’s too busy making unsubstantiated claims about Liberal Oppression.

She continues:

Stein, who serves as his own narrator in the movie, is very deadpan about it all. He doesn’t try to convince the audience that Darwinism is a fraud, or that God created the world, or even that some unidentified intelligent design might have started life on Earth.

Stein merely shows the intolerance of the universities, the government, the courts, the grant-making foundations and the media, and their determination to suppress any mention of intelligent design.

Apparently Schlafly thinks there is a difference between “the government” and “the courts.” And I can’t help but find hilarious her treating all of these entities as a monolithic block determined to silence ID. As with every good conspiracy, most anyone is a part of it, and all groups are thought to operate in complete unity.

And apparently Schlafly is unaware of the irony in arguing that ID isn’t being treated fairly while admitting that Expelled doesn’t even attempt to demonstrate ID is a credible idea. You see, Ms Schlafly, in science and in the academy in general, ideas aren’t given credence just because they exist–they have to be supported. If ID actually made predictions, and if those predictions turned out to be useful and true (indeed, if ID was anything but a god-of-the-gaps argument), it would be welcomed by scientists in the same way other once-controversial ideas–like evolutionary theory–have been. But instead of actually doing the science, Stein and Schlafly want to run a PR campaign. And this explains exactly why they’re not taken seriously by mean old “liberal” scientists.

The only question posed by the movie is why, oh why, is there such a deliberate, consistent, widespread, vindictive effort to silence all criticism of dogmatic Darwinism or discussion of alternate theories of the origin of life? Stein interviews scientists who were blacklisted, denied grants and ostracized in the academic community because they dared to write or speak the forbidden words.

Notice that she’s still very vague. Now, she’s just recapping Stein, so some of that can be forgiven, but if she really wants us to believe there is a Vast Darwinist Conspiracy out there, she’s going to have to do better than this. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Liberals are particularly upset because the movie identifies Darwinism, rather than evolution, as the sacred word that must be isolated from criticism. But that semantic choice makes good sense because Darwinism is easily defined by Darwin’s own writings, whereas the word evolution is subject to different and even contrary definitions.

Since this is Schlafly, no definition of Darwinism, “easily defined” though it may be, is forthcoming. Neither is an example of the “different and even contrary definitions” or evolution. This defense of Expelled is laughable: Darwinism isn’t what is being taught, largely because Darwin didn’t know about such important things as genes. That’s why we have evolutionary theory, with the neo-Darwinian synthesis. Someone with even cursory knowledge of the topic would know that, so it’s clear that Schlafly is less than credible here.

The truly funny part of the movie is Stein’s interview with Richard Dawkins, whose best-selling book “The God Delusion” (Mariner Books) established this Englishman as the world’s premier atheist. Dawkins is a leading advocate of the theory that all life evolved from a single beginning in an ancient mud puddle, perhaps after being struck by lightning.

Putting aside the issue of evolving, how did life begin in the first place? Under Stein’s questioning, Dawkins finally said it is possible that life might have evolved on Earth after the arrival of a more highly developed being from another planet.

Aren’t aliens from outer space the stuff of science fiction? And how was the other-planet alien created? According to Dawkins, life must have just spontaneously evolved on another planet, of course without God.

So after just saying this movie is about “Darwinism,” Schlafly has moved on to complaining about the origin of life, something that most certainly is not part of evolutionary theory or “Darwinism.” But by conflating the two, Schlafly ably demonstrates her own lack of knowledge on her subject matter.

Stein spent two years traveling the world to gather material for this movie. He interviewed scores of scientists and academics who say they were retaliated against because of questioning Darwin’s theories.

Stein interviewed Dr. Richard Sternberg, a biologist who lost his position at the prestigious Smithsonian Institution after he published a peer-reviewed article that mentioned intelligent design. Other academics who said they were victims of the anti-intelligent design campus police included astrobiologist Guillermo Gonzalez, denied tenure at Iowa State University, and Caroline Crocker, who lost her professorship at George Mason University.

This would be very damning if it were true, but Sternberg never worked for the Smithsonian and didn’t lose his position there; Gonzalez was denied tenure not because he liked ID but because of serious problems with his time at Iowa State, including a lack of publications, grant money, and grad student work; and Crocker was not fired, though her contract was not renewed–something that is common with non-tenure track positions such as the one she held.

Simply put, none of these people were fired or oppressed due to their support of ID. Sternberg faced nothing harsher than criticism for sneaking an insufficiently-vetted paper into a journal, Gonzalez simply didn’t live up to the scholarly demands of his department, and Crocker was not fired. Hardly a Vast Darwinist Conspiracy after all.

But, undaunted by the facts, Schlafly presses on:

Stein dares to include some filming at the death camps in Nazi Germany as a backdrop for interviews that explain Darwin’s considerable influence on Adolf Hitler and his well-known atrocities. The Darwin-Hitler connection was not a Stein discovery; Darwin’s influence on Hitler’s political worldview, and Hitler’s rejection of the sacredness of human life, is acknowledged in standard biographies of Hitler.

Naturally, she provides no examples or support for her claim. But it turns out that Darwin wasn’t a “considerable influence” on Hitler, and that Hitler used a jumble of whatever he could find–often radically misused–to justify his evil. He relied heavily upon Christian doctrine and anti-semitism that traced back to Martin Luther and beyond; blaming Darwin for the holocaust makes no more sense than blaming the Apostle Paul.

Stein also addresses how Darwin’s theories influenced one of the U.S.’s most embarrassing periods, the eugenics fad of the early 20th century. Thousands of Americans were legally sterilized as physically or mentally unfit.

“Embarrassing” is certainly an understated word choice for Schlafly, especially given the criticism above. The tragedy of such policies were well-known, and they relied not on Darwin, but on a radical misuse of his work: social Darwinism, a theory which Darwin’s writings show he would have found represensible.

And, of course, none of these criticisms mean a thing anyway. They’re not true, but even if they were, they would not demonstrate any flaw in evolutionary theory, any more than relativity is to blame for Truman using the Bomb.

Mandatory sterilization based on Darwin’s theories was even approved by the U.S. Supreme Court, with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes writing his famous line, “Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” Stein also reminds us that Margaret Sanger was a eugenicist who wanted to eliminate the races she believed were inferior.

Oh! A non sequitor and a shot at Planned Parenthood. How deeply relevant. Schlafly is merely demonstrating that she doesn’t really want to get at the facts–she just wants to preach to the choir. Her readers hate Planned Parenthood, and so won’t stop to question what Sanger has to do with “Darwinism.”

Stein’s message is that the attack on freedom of inquiry is anti-science, anti-American and anti-the whole concept of learning. His dramatization should force the public, and maybe even academia, to address this extraordinary intolerance of diversity.

Given that Schlafly’s lies and distortions continue her routine attacks on education, science and rationality, this claim is ironic in the extreme. And for someone who is so routinely intolerant as Schlafly to make such a claim is nothing short of hilarious.

Diversity is not threatened when ID is correctly identified as “not science.” There is no Vast Darwinist Conspiracy to silence ID, and neither Schlafly or Stein have provided a single credible reason to believe otherwise. What they have done is defend ignorance by assaulting knowledge, and defend pseudo-science by calling it fact. Schlafly lacks evidence, lies, and misrepresents with almost every word she writes. And for this meaningless and dishonest string of distortions, she wins the 2nd Phyllis Schlafly Wouldn’t Pass Freshmen Composition Award.

Most of my readers are probably already aware of recent events at Smith College, where a particularly odious speaker was shouted down by protesters. An email to Pam explains what happened:

The Smith College Republicans sponsored a speaking event featuring Ryan Sorba, author of the upcoming book The Born Gay Hoax.  After about twenty minutes he was forced to abandon his speech after protesters forced their way into the room and drowned him out.

For other commentary on the matter, see Positive Liberty, Dispatches from the Culture Wars, and Shakesville. A quick summary: some bloggers have applauded the protesters for their actions, and others have suggested such actions are counterproductive and dangerously anti-free speech.

I’m most inclined to agree with Pam’s own take:

I haven’t been in this thread since I posted it, and it’s interesting to see the steelcage match going on in here. I personally think that shouting down someone like Sorba isn’t particularly useful; I’d rather hear the speech and rip on it after the fact, simply because you’ll get the ex-gay crowd making statements about free speech and suppression of their beliefs. After all, we wouldn’t have that completely unhinged speech of Sorba’s from Cali if he had been shouted down.

I’ll share my own similar reasons for objecting to this protest below the fold (danger: my comments may well anger some readers):

(more…)

Via Stranger Fruit, I learn about an interesting book meme: “106 Books of Pretension,” which is really “the top 106 books most often marked as ‘unread’ by LibraryThing’s users.” I don’t think these books, as a group, are particularly pretentious.  There is a surprisingly wide range represented, though I’m disappointed at the lack of poetry. Anyway, I’m not as well read in fiction as I should be, and I’m particularly poorly read in non-fiction, but here goes. Books I’ve read are in italics, books I began and never finished are struck through:

(more…)

I’ve been swamped with end-of-the-semester craziness, so I’m behind on my blogging, but I couldn’t resist pointing you to Tony Zircle: he’s seeking the Republican nomination for Congress in Indiana. While this wouldn’t ordinarily be newsworthy, he recently appeared on K.O.’s Worst Person in the World segment for appearing at a neo-nazi event, and now he’s defending himself. His website is full of what one Sadly, No! commenter hilariously dubbed right-wing political Dada. A few examples of his particular brand of batshit crazy:

I’ve been getting a flood of e-mails and phone calls, some of which include death threats, about my attempt to raise awareness of how the great porn dragon inspires Jews into pornography and prostitution and then, like the snake he is, turns the public against the Jews. [...]

Unfortunately, those Web sites are just a small fraction of evidence you can find on a Google search of combinations of “Jews” “pornography” “sex slavery” “Israel” and “prostitution.”  Let’s save our Jewish brothers and sisters from this tyrant king porn dragon before we get to another world-wide pogrom after a war with Iran or some other conflict and after the Jews get blamed again.

Some other gems:

As a former prosecutor who has served in Elkhart, Lake and St. Joseph Counties as a drug dealing prosecutor, I can speak with some degree of first hand experience here: Drugs lead to about half or more of all crime.

And

The Great Porn Jihad War Tax: Prolific Porn Mule Serial Woman-Womb Slaughterers

The Nazis murdered on a previously unprecedented scale; however, the efficiency of the porn industry’s womanslaughtering is rapidly becoming its rival. If we had accurate metrics to calculate the current porn slaughter of what is very often busty blond white “Christian” women, who often dangle a cross below their necks, we might be able to argue that one of the most efficient contemporary international genocidal operations abounds in this particular white flesh market. The Internet is full of info about white slave trafficking of Eastern European and Russian women. The trade even caused Amnesty International to protest Israel’s mass prostitution rings a couple of years ago because many white women were being enslaved there where, unbelieveably, it wasn’t even illegal to own prostitute slaves there as of a few years ago.

And that doesn’t even touch his hilariously horrifying statements on his forums. So a challenge for my readers: what is the most hilariously batshit crazy statement on Zirkle’s website? The best submission will win the internet, or at least my virtual applause.

I’ve recently finished reading God’s Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question–Why We Suffer by Bart D. Ehrman. Central to Ehrman’s argument is that too many of us have disappointingly shallow responses to the problem of theodicy, the branch of theology that attempts to defend God against the problem of evil. We either attribute evil to free will and call it a day, or perhaps do not consider it at all. Furthermore, Ehrman argues that theologians careful treatises on this subject gloss over the true scope and emotional impact of evil, and that their bloodless responses cannot address the full scope of the problem.

Ehrman was on my mind when I stumbled across this explanation of “natural evil”–that is, evil not caused by humans, but by our natural world.

Where was God during the terrible tsunami of 2004 that killed over 150,000 people in Southeast Asia? People like Martin Kettle say that religious people cannot explain this tragedy.¹ Kettle asks the question, “What God sanctions an earthquake?” He seems baffled to find an answer based upon a religious worldview, in which a God of love is said to preside over the universe. The answer is surprising simple, but lost to those whose worldview precludes integration of earth sciences principles taught in elementary school with the existence of God.

What could we find in the natural sciences that could explain how God would allow the deaths of 150,000 people? Well, I’ll give Rich Deem, the piece’s offer, credit: he actually does try to bring some science into this question, and at least he isn’t a Young Earth Creationist. But his attempt does not reflect well on his understanding of the monumental problems posed by the problem of evil.

(more…)

When trying to “defend marriage” against the evils of people who love each other, Fundies often tout the idea that marriage is a “sacred institution,” one that is meant to mirror God’s relationship to humanity. And many people genuinely believe that. But the leaders of the Religious Right exploit well-intentioned intentions on this subject, as with so many others, for political gain. Take for example the case of “Marriage Savers,” a group dedicated to the proposition that marriage should be a trap, not a blessed union of souls:

Basing its implied equation of liberal divorce laws with unjust war, McManus justifies the term “Unilateral Divorce” because “in four out of five cases, one spouse did not want the divorce, but had no choice.” In a press release announcing the new Reform Divorce website, McManus argued that one spouse’s freedom to divorce the other without permission was the reason behind America’s high divorce rate.

McManus and his group would have us return to the days when spouses conspired to feign infidelity to end their marriages. Aside from the expected “What About the Mens!!1!” pandering, this is telling: they’re actually arguing that people should be forced to stay in marriages until their spouses let them leave.  This is not a winning argument for the Right, especially since many of their politicians depend on no-fault divorce. But it does illuminate nicely what they really want: that marriage be a trap that people–and especially women–can’t escape.

Given that cynical view, it’s particularly ironic that they’re so freaked out by gay marriage.

Over at Uncommon Descent, Richard Weikart is bragging about the “meticulous detail” in his book about how Darwinism is responsible for the Holocaust. But in typical Creationist fashion, he can’t even get through a summary of his points without blatant dishonesty. Writes Weikart

3. Darwin and other Darwinists recognized that if morality was the product of mindless evolution, then there is no objective, fixed morality and thus no objective human rights. Darwin stated in his Autobiography that one “can have for his rule of life, as far as I can see, only to follow those impulses and instincts which are the strongest or which seem to him the best ones.”

Before I address Weikart’s shameless dishonesty, I should reiterate that the moral implications of evolutionary biology, not to mention Darwin’s own views on morality, are absolutely irrelevant to the question of whether evolution is true. Even if the Creationists were right–and they’re not–about Darwin’s supposed influence on Hitler, that would not change the fact of evolution one bit. And so their honesty is, at best, nothing more than “some people misuse facts; therefore facts are bad.”

But that point aside, they’re hideously wrong about their connection, engaged in Jonah Goldberg-style cherrypicking to create a false impression. And not content with that, they’re also deliberately distorting Darwin’s words to try to paint him (falsely) as a moral relativist. Sure, Weikart’s quotation of Darwin does make it seem that Darwin doesn’t believe in morality, but a quick look at that passage in context tells us Darwin’s real position:

A man who has no assured and ever present belief in the existence of a personal God or of a future existence with retribution and reward, can have for his rule of life, as far as I can see, only to follow those impulses and instincts which are the strongest or which seem to him the best ones. A dog acts in this manner, but he does so blindly. A man, on the other hand, looks forwards and backwards, and compares his various feelings, desires and recollections. He then finds, in accordance with the verdict of all the wisest men that the highest satisfaction is derived from following certain impulses, namely the social instincts. If he acts for the good of others, he will receive the approbation of his fellow men and gain the love of those with whom he lives; and this latter gain undoubtedly is the highest pleasure on this earth. By degrees it will become intolerable to him to obey his sensuous passions rather than his higher impulses, which when rendered habitual may be almost called instincts. His reason may occasionally tell him to act in opposition to the opinion of others, whose approbation he will then not receive; but he will still have the solid satisfaction of knowing that he has followed his innermost guide or conscience.

Darwin’s suggestion that human morality rests on a combination of rationality and social sanction. That is a far cry from Weikart’s claim that Darwin is a denier of “objective human rights.” Darwin just saw as the objective basis of morality human rationality and experience, not the edicts of a strangely silent God.

Weikart would no doubt argue that this is still “subjective” in a sense, and might have a point, if he were really concerned with how to best define a moral code. But he isn’t–he’s trying desperately to make it appear that Darwin rejected the idea that we could know right from wrong. He’s implying–though cleverly avoiding stating–that Darwin was the dreaded moral relativist, when the passage in question indicates the opposite: that Darwin thought humans were all guided by a common moral compass; he definitely did not believe that all moral codes were equally valid, which is the claim of moral relativism.

So Weikart is a dishonest, quote-mining scumbag. I just wish it still surprised me when Creationists were revealed as such.

[For more on Expelled and Creationists lies about the Holocaust, check out Expelled Exposed.]

…comes from our old pal Rand at A Form of Sound Words:

“No,” I told the young man, “you and I are not talking the same language my friend. You see, you’re trying to make the world a better place through carnal means such as being sweet to your neighbour, picking up trash, and promoting some sort of benevolent socialism. That totally isn’t what I’m about. I’m not trying to make this fallen world a better place… it will never be a good place… that is, not until the Lord Jesus Christ returns. Then, and only then will the Earth get cleaned up, men will live in peace with their neighbours, and the Lord will rule over all in righteousness. What I’m about tonight? I’m preaching the Gospel of Life so that God’s sheep could be saved out of the ways of this evil and perverse world.”(emphasis added)

And that, my friends, is why I worry about those who believe life is toil and death the reward. It’s why we see Fundies pushing for “support” of Israel–in order to hasten the return of Jesus, not to make people’s lives better. Those who believe the world is evil and corrupt and beyond help have little reason to make it a better place.

(Note: there are plenty of Christians, including evangelical Christians, who believe, as I do, that such an outlook is foolish and dangerous. I’m not talking about them. But I think the dangers of fundamentalist thinking on this issue is perfectly clear.)