Expelled from "Expelled"

stereoroid

Expelled is a new US documentary, claiming that proponents of "Intelligent Design" are being unfairly repressed, because most public schools don't allow them to teach their crud in class.

Anyway, before a screening yesterday, one of the interviewees in the film, PZ Myers (an evolutionary biologist) was recognised by one of the producers, and... expelled. The producer called Security and had him removed from the cinema, not for doing anything, but because he doesn't agree with the message of the film. His account is here, and a follow-up post here.

There's a twist in the tale: he was at the screening with another person who had also been interviewed for the film, and who is certainly more famous... but he was not recognised, and saw the film without any hassle. Be sure to swallow your tea before you get to that part.

Sapien

Snatching defeat from the jaws of... well, another defeat.

adamd164

Absolutely brilliant! Everyone was signed in, so not only did the IDiots not recognize the face of one of the world's best known proponents of evolution, they didn't even look twice at the name!:D

Galvasean

Can't wait to read

Dawkins'

review of the film. :pac:

Well the ID people will never convert us if they don't let us watch their movie.

fatmammycat

Pz's wife and daughter went in along with Dawkins, but the Id crowd are spinning it as hard as they can that PZ wasn't invited. Even though their initial website page invited people and made them promise to show up-as long as they didn't try film and gave identification. What a shower of numbskulls.

lostexpectation

can anyone find a listing of viewings

to see if they are doing any in ireland,

Sapien

lostexpectation wrote: »

can anyone find a listing of viewings

to see if they are doing any in ireland,

I can't imagine so. This is little more than a clumsy skirmish in the American culture war, novel only in that it's playing out in Hollywood.

Who the hell is this Ben Stein person anyway? Is he not just that drone-toned, bespectacled actor they get to play psychiatrists and college professors in bad movies? Is he supposed to have some credentials or credibility or aptness to the ID debate?

lostexpectation

Sapien wrote: »

I can't imagine so. This is little more than a clumsy skirmish in the American culture war, novel only in that it's playing out in Hollywood.

well i thought the same as you, but answers in genesis creationist people were here last week so.. why not this film.

robindch

Sapien wrote: »

Who the hell is this Ben Stein person anyway? Is he not just that drone-toned, bespectacled actor they get to play psychiatrists and college professors in bad movies? Is he supposed to have some credentials or credibility or aptness to the ID debate?

Stein makes a lot of money by pretending to be something he's not. I'd have said he's just the man for a creo-flick.

Zillah

Oh Jesus Christ (not an act of worship].

I just happened to be standing directly in line behind Dawkins' academic colleague. Management of the movie theatre saw a man apparently hustling and bothering several invited attendees, apparently trying to disrupt the viewing or sneak in.

How the fuck could someone behave in a fashion that could be interpreted as both disrupting events and sneaking in? These people are retarded.

adamd164

Myers actually applied for tickets online through the right avenues, as they invited people to do. Then he gets there and is thrown out. The IDiots like to make it look as though he's the one kicking up a fuss.

Sir Digby Chicken Caesar

I'l be watching this in 15 minutes... cannot wait

the trailer made it look fantastic

hope they use the confused dawkins clip

adamd164

How are you managing that? Do tell.

Sir Digby Chicken Caesar

if you google for it i'm sure you'll find a torrent of information

--edit

****ing fakes
if I want to sign up to a porn site, I don't need a worthless torrent to convince me

adamd164

edit -- damn. meh, i can wait!

stereoroid

Sapien wrote: »

Who the hell is this Ben Stein person anyway?

He's a lawyer with an economics background, who became a speechwriter for Richard Nixon. Then he went in to acting and writing, appearing in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, as - you guessed it - the boring teacher. He's now one of the hosts of VH1's "America's Most Smartest Model" - he's the one who's not a model.

In other words, he had some serious academic credentials - top of his Law class at Yale - but seems to be having more fun outside the intelligentsia. :rolleyes:

Sir Digby Chicken Caesar

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOAQ0kuHzgw

ben stein on the o'reilly factor talking about the movie

I love the term 'secular pinheads'.

can we change the name of the forum ?

Dades

Mordeth wrote: »

I love the term 'secular pinheads'.

can we change the name of the forum ?

Fill in the pink form 3:16 in triplicate, and submit it.
We'll see what we can do.

adamd164

http://youtube.com/watch?v=c39jYgsvUOY

Myers and Dawkins discuss it (clip from upcoming Discussions With Richard Dawkins Pt. 2)

adamd164

"Lying For Jesus?" by Richard Dawkins

eoin5

Dawkins wrote:

Josh (Timonen) drew attention to the digraceful victimization of scientists espousing the Stork Theory of reproduction, by hardline members of the 'Sex Theory' establishment.

Nice.

Zombrex

Mordeth wrote: »

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOAQ0kuHzgw

ben stein on the o'reilly factor talking about the movie

I love the term 'secular pinheads'.

can we change the name of the forum ?

Darwinism doesn't say how life began ... it says may be life began by lightning striking a mud puddle ..

I think we have found out what JC does in the real world

Galvasean

eoin5 wrote: »

Dawkins wrote:

Josh (Timonen) drew attention to the digraceful victimization of scientists espousing the Stork Theory of reproduction, by hardline members of the 'Sex Theory' establishment.

Nice.

Pretty much puts things into perspective, might repost that in a certain uber-thread.

adamd164

Overview of Expelled: http://richarddawkins.net/article,2400,Expelled-Overview,Josh-Timonen-RichardDawkinsnet

Sir Digby Chicken Caesar

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8942534214376464713&q=expelled+no+intelligence+allowed+duration%3Amedium&total=29&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=4


this is just..... beautiful.




http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4609561480192587449&q=expelled+no+intelligence+allowed&total=93&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=1


this one's slightly more.... intellectual

Dades

Mordeth wrote: »

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=8942534214376464713&q=expelled+no+intelligence+allowed+duration%3Amedium&total=29&start=0&num=10&so=0&type=search&plindex=4


this is just..... beautiful.

That is just awful.

Intelligent Design my arse - just frickin' say you want to teach religion. And Pat Robertson sounds completely clueless, and simply panders.

Sir Digby Chicken Caesar

damnit dades, darwinism doesn't explain gravity!

Dades

Ah yes - intelligent falling!

robindch

Mordeth wrote: »

darwinism doesn't explain gravity!

But intelligent design does -- it sucks.

adamd164

Dades wrote: »

That is just awful.

Intelligent Design my arse - just frickin' say you want to teach religion. And Pat Robertson sounds completely clueless, and simply panders.

Looks like he's dying in the seat for most of it. I know Stein's boring, but still.

adamd164

"Darwinism leads to social Darwinism... the only people who count are the master race."

Good grief.

Akrasia

Mordeth wrote: »

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cOAQ0kuHzgw

ben stein on the o'reilly factor talking about the movie

I love the term 'secular pinheads'.

can we change the name of the forum ?

I have to say, that was an absolute master class in propaganda. And it was only made possible by the presence of a 'fair and balanced' presenter.

How could they fit so much lies and misinformation into 4 minutes is very impressive (darwin certainly did not believe in god, and nobody believes life began on earth when lightning struck mud)

This kind of deceptive salesman ship would not be permitted on the home shopping network, but unfortunately, there is nothing legally wrong at all about a U.S. media outlet deliberately lying.

HemmingSay

Not only did they make a mess of the pre-screenings, they've also hit some legal trouble.

In support of the argument that cells are too complex to have evolved, they used a re-dubbed animation originally created for Harvard biology students without the owners permission.

Article on the original animation

Open letter from the copyright holders

Arstechnica article about ID/Ben Stein/Expelled

With such incompetence, it's scary how much sway these people have.

adamd164

Sex theorists beware....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ThQQuHtzHM

pH

More trouble for expelled, after trying hard to equate evolution with the Nazis and the holocaust, they have apparently included a contribution from a rabid Polish anti-Semite on the ID side.
http://scienceblogs.com/strangerfruit/2008/04/expelled_now_with_added_antise.php

Also more trouble in the form of possible unlicensed music (Imagine) in the film
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/04/the_sleaze_is_growing.php

Sir Digby Chicken Caesar

argh
I want to see this bloody movie

robindch

Mordeth wrote: »

I want to see this bloody movie

I reckon it's going to set a new world record for the trip from cinema, to dvd to peer-sharing networks. On this side of the pond anyway. I give it a month before it can be downloaded. Perhaps less if they can get their ongoing legal problems sorted out.

Oh, what a tangled web they weave...

.

adamd164

Opening weekend stats. It opened in 1,052 screens, taking in $3,153,000 thus far. This ranks it 9th overall; representing about $2,997 per theatre. Good or bad? It's early to say: it was given an extremely wide, highly publicised and well-funded release for a documentary. With such poor reviews, however, it should find it difficult to build momentum. Next weekend will probably be decisive for it.

robindch

adamd164 wrote: »

With such poor reviews

"Poor" hardly begins to describe some of the more recent reviews. Here's one from the IMDb, which reads like it could have been written by some of our more militant posters:

tmakem wrote:

See this movie if you want to sit through a sickening display of calculated deceit. After lying to the principal scientific participants who appear in the film about the film's intentions, the filmmakers juxtaposition the scientist's out of context statements with scenes of Nazi and Stalinist butchery. They disingenuously claim that they are not saying Darwin *caused* Nazism, (oh no, we wouldn't say that!) while cutting to the above atrocities during the interview of every pro-evolution speaker. Note to the film's producers: Evolution supporters aren't as dumb as cretards and IDiots; you can fool the later very easily, but the former can see through the lie.

Every case of alleged *persecution* in this film is nonsense. Sternberg wasn't fired; he was already scheduled to quit as an editor of the journal the next issue after the one where he inserted the ID rant. He inserted the paper by Meyer by completely ignoring the normal protocol of the journal; no other editors reviewed it before publication, even though there were a number of experts in Cambrian era paleontology on staff. He was never kept from the specimen collections, and he was given another position right after this episode; he was not shut out from work at all. Gonzalez didn't get tenure because he brought in almost no grant money while at the University, had no grad students finish their work, and published almost no new, original work. 3 other people in the same department (out of 12 who were up for tenure) in the last ten year also had their tenure rejected. It's not that unusual. And so on. IDiots want to be seen as martyrs; instead they appear as whiny little babies.

If you go to this film expecting to see a scientific case being made for ID, you will be sorely disappointed. They never explain just WHY ID should be taken seriously as science, only that it's *unfair* to not let them into classrooms and universities. They use disgusting guilt by association arguments and other logical fallacies in an attempt to distract the viewer from the fact (a fact that Philip Johnson has recently admitted) that ID has no scientific program of discovery, and nothing that rises to a scientific theory to challenge the last 150 years of scientific study.

On a final note, Stein should be particularly ashamed. He uses the memories of the millions who died during the Holocaust in such a cheap, crass, anti-intellectual way. As he is Jewish, this whoring himself out in such a low manner is particularly galling. He's essentially crapped on the memories of the dead; how he sleeps at night is anybody's guess. I couldn't if I had done what he's done. Then again, I actually have a conscience.

Meanwhile, Wikipedia contains a massive, distinctly uncomplimentary, 17,500 word entry here.

adamd164

Ben Stein served...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihYq2dGa29M

aguaclara

that video is class

digressing slightly, here's the id article by stephen c meyer, one of the creationists featured in the film:

http://tinyurl.com/6xd8y


also, for anyone who's interested, here's a critique (by an actual scientist) of a book by meyer and friends arguing that the controversy (sic) around darwinism ought to be taught in public schools.

http://icb.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/content/full/44/6/510

Galvasean

adamd164 wrote: »

Sex theorists beware....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ThQQuHtzHM

Wow, really puts it into perspective.