Yup. That means you are part of the atheist conspiracy that is trying to eliminate all Godliness and goodness from this country. I don’t recall seeing you at the meetings, though.
Wow. I forgot Agassi was in Duran Duran.
I saw it today (don’t worry, I didn’t pay for it. Stop-Loss sold an extra ticket today). It was torture, but I didn’t want anyone to be able to say I was condemning it without having seen it.
It’s every bit as bad as it’s reported to be. The heavy-handed Godwinization (the intercutting of stock Nazi footage as allegedly persecuted IDists whine about how people think their ideas are stupid and don’t want to subscribe to their newsletters) is the worst aspect…no, the sleazy, unrelenting dishonesty is the worst aspect …no, the jaw-dropping scientific ignorance is the worst aspect…no, Stein’s manipulation of the language and subject matter (especially his constant use of the word “Darwinism,” which he presents as some kind of unifying, atheistic ideology) is the worst part.
Man, I guess it’s ALL shit. Even the technical aspects like the sound and the editing are shit.
There is a scene near the end where Stein is trying to grill Richard Dawkins (who was asked to be in the film under fals pretenses) and Dawkins (after being asked to disavow any belief in a litany of every god Stein can think of) ultimately gets around to saying that ID is hypothetically possible if aliens did it, but that the aliens themselves would have had to arisen by natural processes. Dawkins does not present this as anything he actually believes or sees evidence for, he’s only talking about hypothetical possibilities, but Stein dives on this in a voice over as if he’s scored some kind of giant victory. He intones, incredulously in the voiceover, “so Richard Dawkins believes in the possibility of Intelligent Design, but only for certain kinds of designers.”
Stein then tries to ridicule Dawkins for giving credence to a “science fiction” hypothesis (in spite of the fact that Dawkins never once intimates that alien designers are anything he actually believes are plausible), but won’t give any credence to supernatural gods. Stein actually seems to think he’s making some kind of valid point with this.
By the way, there were only three other people in the theater I saw it in.
The bastion of American modern conservatism, The National Review, gives Expelled a glowing review.
Conservatives are also fond of the American Spectator, who exclaim:
Human Events, “Leading the Conservative Movement Since 1944” also loves it:
Fun for the entire family!
That’s a very liberal question. Another might be, “Why should anybody take these guys seriously?”
According to the movie, I believe that makes you a Nazi.
Shit, I have to attend meetings now? 
I could accept the atheist viewpoint, but I’m not all that committed to it. The concept of a divine power doesn’t really offend me all that much, either. But, what I lack in decisiveness I make up for with tolerance.
Actually, it’s not so much tolerance as it is non-judgmentalism. I’m firmly in the whatever-floats-your-boat camp. Just don’t pawn off your* extremism on me.
- The generalized ‘your’, not ‘your’ specifically.
Hmmm, that kind of complicates things. I’m not all that nationalistic of a sort at all.
Best description of Ben Stein I’ve seen lately.
I am actually frightened by all this. As I stated in my last post all the major conservatives and their national journals support this nonsense, they are completely divorced from the physical reality of the natural world. How can we have important leaders of our country fall so completely for ideas so discredited? Is conservatism now a religious movement?
The good news is that nature does not care, the world doses not respond to the political beliefs of the misinformed. The bad news is people are going to make wrong decisions with faulty world views, they think the world has to run by the standards of their own personal beliefs, they are forcing the laws of nature to conform to an ideology. It is ironic, the communists did this with lysenkoism. Only disaster can come of this in the long run.
Is the United States truly in decline, I think so. Where are the smart conservatives who will denounce this irrationality?
I wouldn’t say they’re completely divorced from physical reality. After all, they do concur with and rely on the fact that that bombs continue to obey the law of gravity.
It’s quite telling to me that many of the criticisms of evolution, like the National Review excerpt above, conflate evolution with the initial creation of life (which the theory of evolution says nothing about). These people haven’t even bothered to understand even the basic dictionary definition of evolution.
Conservatism already was a religious movement. It just wasn’t tied to a particular sect of Christianity.
Conservatism has always been tied to a Judeo-Christian value system, and if not the direct promotion of Christianity as the preferred religion of the state, then certainly the promotion of Christianity as the basis of law.
You’re looking at it wrong. Most of them probably know that they’re wrong. It isn’t that they’ve fallen for anything, it’s that they don’t agree with it. They are trying to make their own reality, and are doing everything possible to get as many people to go along with it. They know that if they repeat something often enough, or put it into a false dichotomy (real patriots think X), or appeal to emotion, or any of a dozen other techniques, they can get people to believe.
Just look at the neo-cons selling of the Iraq war. How many of those same techniques did you see there?
I’m not sure that I agree with this statement. The American Spectator is simply a Right Wing response to any number of far Left college tabloids that hardly qualifies as a voice of Conservatism. Human Events is simply an older and stodgier version of the same thing. They have minimal circulations and (aside from TAS’s flirtation as a scandal rag expending gallons of ink to treat the Clinton White House the way that The National Inquirer treats Hollywood), I don’t recall any conservatives paying much attention to it.
The National Review is a bit more problematic, in that it actually does provide a “voice” for the Right, but we’re still looking at a movie review by a Jay Leno staffer, not an editorial by one of TNR’s staff writers or visiting pundits. (Although I suspect that Dave Berg’s idiocy still caused Buckley to spin madly in his grave.)
Has Krauthammer or another esteemed Right-wing nutjob weighed in? Or are we really seeing the fringe of the fringe, here?
You can dismiss the other ones, but given the National Review’s mission, I think it’s safe to say that if it chooses to publish something it doesn’t think it’s that far off its own view.
It’s not like a newspaper, where editorials may or may not represent the views of the publishers, and so on; the whole point of NR is to represent the views of the publishers.
Rigid political ideology is virtually indistinguishable from religious dogma.
The grand-daddy of all anti-evolutionists, William Jennings Bryan, was a dyed-in-the-wool liberal.
That was before the political right tried to co-opt and monopolize religion, though. It’s not true that conservatives have “always” politicized religion as Really Not All That Bright is claiming, but they sure are doing it now.
…or the basic dictionary definitions of theory or science.
And the man who gets lionized for painting Bryan as a backwoods hick fantabulist, H.L. Mencken, generally held political opinions that would make the average Democrat of today feel faint.