You may have heard about the move Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed which apparently exposes the vast conspiracy of the scientific establishment to keep "Intelligent Design" from being taught in science classes alongside Evolution. This is sort of like the Yankees making a movie bemoaning the NFL's conspiracy to keep them out of the Superbowl. They're playing different games, and Ben Stein really should know better. But then, even Fox News thinks he's gone a little loopy for co-writing this thing.A lot of the other contributors to the film at least have the excuse of having been lied to by the producers, producers who then banned some (but not all) of those same people from a pre-screening of the film. (Come on, you filmed the guy and didn't expect him to try and see the movie? WTF you smoking?)Worse for ID proponents, the film commits a classic blunder and wastes little time in invoking Godwin's Law. . .From Fox News:
The whole idea of Stein, a Jew, jumping on the intelligent design bandwagon of the theory of evolution begetting the Nazis is so distasteful you wonder what in — sorry — God’s name — he was thinking when he got into this.
The alleged association between Darwinism and Nazism is harped on for what seems like hours, and it is quite simply an outrage [...] Stein has no talent for comedy [but] his attempt to do tragedy is even worse. He visits Dachau and, when informed by the guide that lots of Jews had been killed there, he buries his face in his hands as though this is the first time he has heard of it. Obviously it was not his intention, but I thought his rotten acting was an insult to the memory of the victims.
Wo hoo! I won Scalzi’s LOLCreation contest with the following entry:
I just got an e-mail from fellow Hamster Astrid remarking on my clipmarked post from Meme Therapy that I mentioned earlier. She brought up Immanuel Kant and the Categorical Imperative which is, in fact, a pretty good way of building a moral philosophy without recourse to God or religion. . .But, I thought I'd mention, it still ain't science. . . Kant's imperative is a philosophical first principle, like the Libertarian Non-Aggression Axiom, the Axioms of Euclid's Geometry, or the Ten Commandments. In other words, it is something that must be accepted as revealed truth because there's no objective way to determine its validity. All you can do is evaluate its consistency.
Jose, over at Meme Therapy just quizzed me for one of their "Brain Parades". One of the questions he asked me, and subsequent browsing of the site, ignited a pet peeve of mine:
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