Sean Carroll on politicians and critics

While reading about the fight about how to fight Expelled, I came across a piece by Sean Carroll (prof here in Madison, gave a good introduction to Dawkins) titled Politicans and Critics. Honestly, I've sometimes felt things along those lines, and that they might be just to get the politicians and critics to ignore each other as much as humanly possible. However, the idealistic part of me wants to believe that the politicians can also be critics. Thoughts?

Expelled continues to get kicked around

By Ed Babinski, Chris Heard, and Ed Brayton.

The straightforward trash-nonsense strategy continues to work beautifully in this case.

Friday link bomb

A friend recently alerted me to this excellent essay on why journalism sucks. Said friend is going into radio.

At Vjack's place, we find Shelley the Republican is still fooling people/ S'ok, man, everyone falls for her!

The internet was sent into a flurry this week over a hoax. I'm glad it was a hoax, but I must confess to thinking: I wish I could think of shit that crazy. Also, I have no idea whether this is a hoax.

Greta Christina has an admirable post on lack of evidence backing up (some) pro-gay rhetoric.

Ed Brayton and Michael Shermer recently published very valuable criticisms of the new Expelled movie. The Discovery Institute has responded. There's at least one counter-response out there somewhere, but it's not worth the trouble of linking to, as the DI response seems to be based on the assumption that their readers aren't actually reading the criticisms of Expelled.

Also on the Expelled front, there's some debate about whether the makers of Expelled are going to lose their profits to lawsuits over copyright infringement. Brian Flemming, who knows the movie business pretty well, says yes:

Fair-use exceptions are possible*, but if the Expelled producers simply used "Imagine" and "All These Things That I've Done" to underscore the emotion of the film's images, which appears to be the case, well, that's not fair use. It's just...use. That's how all movies use music. Fair-use exceptions have to be, you know, exceptional.

Russell Blackford takes up the opposite position, in spite of his general dislike of Expelled. Personally, I suspect the argument might sort of work if they had explicitily said "this is how atheists think! They sing this song at their atheist summer camp!" But it sounds like they didn't do that, and their usage definitely falls under "underscore the emotion of the film's images."

Oh, and one last thing: Viva la Google bomb!:
Expelled
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Go philosophy, or something!

Will Wilkinson posts a graph that should depress philosophy majors, and then explains why actually we should be happy. Meanwhile, Lester Hunt has a vaguely similar discussion.

Oh, and Chris...

A message for Chris Mooney: I'm pretty sure PZ's "call them out on their lies and stupidity" approach is working for fighting Expelled. Via Andrew Sullivan, even Fox News is signing on to that line.

Other bad publicity can be found from Chris Heard, Scientific American, and Michael Shermer (last two via PZ).

Lee Strobel takes questions

It's organized by The Friendly Atheist, though many of the questions (including my own) aren't so friendly.

Will Wilkinson on immigration

Libertarian Will Wilkinson has been doing some really good posts defending free immigration. I've been puzzled by why the Republicans have been anti-immigration and the Democrats pro-immigration. Immigration boils down to economics. From our point of view, it's a question of cheap labor for consumers vs. higher wages for workers. You'd expect the free-trade folks to be pro-immigration, with the anti-globalization folks being anti-immigration. The moral considerations Wilkinson brings up are also worth considering, of course.

More framing

You can get more of the framing controversy from PZ here, Nisbet here, and Mooney here and here. You can see I've gotten down in the comment threads, and have tried to get more creative in my responses. Feel free to join in if you like.

Getting in the news

Hey everybody, the campus atheist group that I'm involved with got covered in one of the student papers!

Not that you care.

Monday night linkage

Austin Cline has a very nice post on the Dalai Lama. There goes another sacred cow.

Via Barefoot Bum, I learn about a new Google bomb:

Expelled
Expelled, the movie
Ben Stein
Intelligent Design

Via Corrente, I've found a interesting summary of ten technologies futurists are excited about. I have to say I expect 8, 6, 5, and 4 to become huge within my lifetime, and would expand 8 to "molecular biology in general." Those things collectively should transform society. But I'm skeptical about the rest. Thoughts?

PZ Myers is still a badass.

But I don't think PZ gets the award for biggest badass of the moment. You see, four days ago Dutch politician Geert Wilders put up the following short film on Liveleak:



One day after that, Liveleak took it down citing security concerns, but put a defiant message in its place, declaring the incident a sad day for freedom of speech. The Liveleak version of the film was gone, but it had already been made available elsewhere. Then, Liveleak put it back up after beefing up the security measures for their staff. Though the film is worth watching especially for an idea of what modern Islam might look like from a European standpoint, having the film removed due to death threats but not stopped was the real coup. Muslims are cementing their reputation as people who will kill you if you accuse them of being violent.

Consider this an open thread.

A retraction

Last year, I attacked a paper by David Chalmers because I thought it was a silly paper and found it shocking that such a thing could be published as serious academic work. I would like to retract that statement. While the paper is definitely sily, I do not think it is much sillier than other things that get published in philosophy, and it is much shorter than these other things. The shortness is good in and of itself, but it also makes the silliness obvious, and I figure if you're going to be silly, it is important not to pretend you're doing something serious.

The Feminists

Philosophical Fortnights has some shots of a bizarre book cover from 1971. Make of it what you will.

More Scientology

Via Ed Brayton, a great overview of the Scientology protests.

What do you do with a BA Ph.D. in English?

This will be useful to me one day.

Scientology

Ron Brown recently asked if he was the only atheist blogger blogging about Scientology. When he e-mailed me about it, I frankly told him that I didn't have much to say on the subject, that they aren't a force in my city, etc. However, I do believe very much in publicly standing up to them, which is why I'm taking time out to check out the excellent stuff on Scientology at Ron's blog. Start on the first page and start scrolling: you'll see cool videos of anti-Scientology protests, and some videos that expose the religion's disturbing tactics more effectively than I've seen before.

Reading Obama's book

Vastleft, a blogger who's mirrored my lack of enthusiasm for Barack Obama, has decided to give him a fair shake by reading The Audacity of Hope and commenting, bit by bit. It'll be a sort of online book club. I was toying with the idea of joining in, forgot to borrow a copy from my brother over spring break, and then found myself a bit early for a train at a train station right next to a Boarders Books. So I got my $15 paperback copy, and I'll be contributing my thoughts in the comments over there. I'll post links as Vastleft does his posts.

A milestone

Click this link

And this one

Friday linkage post

The fact that today is Friday has nothing to do with the fact that I'm doing a massive linkage post. Really, I just accumulated a bunch of links I wanted to post. But here it goes:

Okay, PZ Myers is, as Greta Christina says, the winner of the internet today. Or, as I would say, the badass motherfucker of the moment in the entire atheist community. Or perhaps, as PZ himself says, he is merely mighty. Why? Because he went to a creationist movie screening and got kicked out, while Richard Dawkins was let in. Go PZ! Follow those two links for all I know, and watch PZ's blog for more.

This wouldn't normally go in a post labled "linkage," but I missed linking to the latest Carnival of the Godless.

Greta Christina is talking about the future of the atheist movement. I was going to add something equally profound to the discussion, but didn't find the time.

According to a post by Hemant Mehta, James Randi spoke at Illinois University, and there was a really creepy incident with a Christian getting up and telling everyone how God let him get away with a hit-and-run. Surprisingly, it takes awhile for someone in that thread to notice something wrong with the guy beyond evangelism/hogging the microphone. I take it as proof that "repenting" of your sins doesn't entail taking responsibility for them, and may well be the antithesis of it.

Mind Hacks and TIME magazine give us a helpful reminder that authenticity is everything, and once you can fake that, you've got it made.

Finally, I recently got a kick out of an xkcd strip pedestrian enough for me to understand, but obscure enough for me to feel good about the fact that even some of my smart friends won't get it.

More persecution paranoia

The Ebon Muse keeps track of it, leading with a quote from James Dobson. Not news, but worth keeping a finger on.

Subjectivism and negative attacks

Richard Chappell has a good post on the subject. I was going to work this into some post or another on some other subject, but really, it's applicable to a lot of the stuff I write about here.