Typical DI tactics

The discussion page for the Wikipedia article on the Discovery Institute has a couple of interesting flags up on it:

Wikipedia logo The subject of this article, Discovery Institute, has edited Wikipedia as
User:216.163.84.151 (talk • contribs).
Wikipedia logo The subject of this article, Discovery Institute, has edited Wikipedia as
Truthologist (talk • contribs).

What it all means is that somebody at the Discovery Institute, using the pseudonym “Truthologist” (hah! Irony strikes again!) has been busily revising the entry describing the Discovery Institute. Since Casey Luskin has previously put Wikipedia “on notice”, it’s not surprising that they’d sneak around to try and make changes, but it certainly is pathetic.

They’re trying to turn me into an Anglophile

It’s always good to see foreign governments promoting sensible motions like this:

That this House shares the concerns of the British Centre for Science Education that the literature being sent to every school in the United Kingdom by the creationist religious group Truth in Science is full of scientific mistakes and fails to disclose the group’s creationist beliefs and objectives; and urges all schools to treat this literature with extreme caution.

[links added by me.]

The BCSE is a good new group organized to combat the slowly growing creationist movement in the UK, while Truth In Science is one of those ironically named theopseudoscientific outfits that recently got some attention because it mailed a “resource pack” of two DVDs (source of one is the Discovery Institute, and Focus in the Family for the other) and creationist literature to every school and college science department head in England—they’ve got some money!

Here in the US, I’d expect to subsequently some pandering government toad promoting some motion applauding an action like that of “Truth in Science”—it looks like the first response in the UK is to condemn it, and condemn it accurately.

Be afraid

Yesterday, I toured the Tower of London (among other things) with Larry Moran. For those of you who don’t know him, he’s one of the more ferocious combatants in the evolution-creation wars—he does not suffer fools, gladly or otherwise. He ended up in a few of my photos, in a disturbingly appropriate way.

I call this series, “Larry Moran contemplates armaments”.

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Wetterling on ID

I have confirmation from both my son (who was there) and Eva that Patty Wetterling did address the question about whether ID ought to be taught in the schools in a recent debate. Here’s what she said:

We need to teach the truth about science. Evolution is scientifically accurate. We can’t let our science curriculum to be based on religious beliefs.

Exactly right. That’s not hard to say, you know.

There were a few comments in that prior thread that were trying to argue that, since the 6th district has a conservative population, Wetterling was a bad choice to run there—that the DFL should have tried to find a conservative Democrat for a candidate.

I think that’s insane.

  • Wetterling is running a good, hard campaign. She’s putting up a fight, and she’s made it a competitive race. Why in the world should the DFL ask good, progressive candidates who are willing to work a district to step aside? She stands for our values. We ought to be pushing that, rather than looking for some proxy Democrat with Republican values to run.

  • Just curious, but when was the last time you saw Republicans arguing that they ought to be fielding moderate candidates anywhere? Far right wingnuts seem to be happily seized upon as perfect choices to forward the Republican agenda, and the arguments always seem to be about how to get money and support to their people. (Katherine Harris seems to be the rare exception. There are limits to the insanity and incompetence Republicans will endorse, which is good to see.)

  • It seems to me that putting up strong opposition to Republican extremists is exactly what we ought to be doing. Make ’em have to struggle and bleed a little to win when they put up kooks like Bachmann; better yet, make ’em lose to liberal candidates. Let the Republicans look at these races and decide that they need to field a moderate to get a lock on the district. Make them shift a little closer to the center, rather than always ceding that the Democrats must shift a little closer to the right. That’s how we win in the long run. That strategy of always forcing the races rightward and making the Democrats chase after them is how the Republicans have been winning.

One funny thing about that strategy is that it will even make some Republicans happy to see their extremist fringe kicked in the tush a few times. The voters who would switch to a conservative/moderate Democrat would probably prefer to see the nutjobs who are leading their party marginalized and replaced with centrists—and that would be a net gain for the country.

Bachmann on ID

Eva sent me a link to a wingnut’s account of a debate between some 6th Congressional District candidates: Patty Wetterling (Democrat), John Binkowski (Independent), and Michele Bachmann (Rethuglican). It’s not a very good transcription—for one thing, the wingnut’s commentary is all tangled up with the words of the candidates, making it hard to tell who said what—but there’s one part of interest. They were asked the ID question.

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Science educator/evangelist needed for hazardous duty!

Salon has an article on a new up-and-coming star of the evangelical movement: Stephen Baldwin. Stephen Frickin-Dumb-As-A-Lizard Baldwin!

For Dobson, Baldwin and young Americans the nation over who yearn for the certainty this brand of Christianity pitches, the personal is political. Absolutism reigns in the new evangelical youth movement, shining through the chaos of modernity, global terror, media bombardment and glorious moral relativism. Baldwin pitches the ultimate dumbed-down fundamentalism, offering reductive, brainless theology. “I sleep good at night because I am totally content in the knowledge that God is in control,” he writes, a conviction glittered up with the fact that it sprung from the mind of an honest-to-God celebrity.

Intentionally or accidentally, Baldwin has braided together what young Americans seem to crave most today: fame, cool and answers. Answers to the questions of who will look out for them, who will love them, who will tell them how to live. Answers from a man who called himself the son of God, and another one who calls himself Stevie B.

…and calls everyone “dude”, and uses the word “gnarly” non-ironically.

Jebus, but we are in trouble. When someone with as little charisma and intelligence as Stephen Baldwin can be popular and draw in thousands of kids for right-wing fundamentalism, that tells us that the bar is set very, very low. And when we then note that no one on the evolution side can rise to that level…well. This is bad news.

We need a scientist who is willing to snort cocaine for a couple of years, sleep willy-nilly with models and any half-naked starlet with no taste, and bash himself repeatedly over the head with blunt objects until his IQ descends to perilously low Stephen Baldwin levels, all so that we can enrapture the precious skateboarding teenager bloc. Any volunteers?

(Paulie Z? Oooh. <shudder>. I just don’t think I’m brave enough to sink that low. I fear we also need someone younger, with the stamina to cope with the kind of abuse and degradation needed for this job.)

Consider the source

The usual suspects of Intelligent Design creationism came out with a book a while ago honoring the patriarch of the movement, that sneaky rascal Phillip Johnson. They had to shop around for someone to puke up some happy blurbs about the book; Duke Cunningham demanded too much money, Charles Manson had some standards, and Roy Cohn was both gay and dead, so they had to scrape the bottom of the barrel of sleazy criminals and came up with Chuck Colson. I have no idea how much he was paid, but they didn’t get their money’s worth.

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Help FCS out

Florida Citizens for Science is asking for your contributions to a rebuttal they’re working on. The organization got an op-ed published decrying the recent ID BS at the Sundome, and the local newspapers have published a series of replies that are stupefying in their ignorance. This should be easy.

One writer simply lies:

The scientific evidence for intelligent design would fill several editions of this newspaper. The scientific evidence for macroevolution, the formation of a new species by random mutation and natural selection (Darwinism), would not fill the period at the end of this sentence. The missing links are still missing.

Wow. Simultaneously claiming that there is no evidence for evolution while Intelligent Design creationism has lots is absurd: ID is not science, and the body of ID literature is negligible. There isn’t any published research on ID; these people tend to publish extended tracts, lacking any evidence.

That was the high mark of this series of letters. Here’s one that drools out one of the oldest canards in the book:

Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution is exactly what the name implies – a theory that has yet to be proven and will never be proven.

The writer doesn’t know what the word theory means, and has no glimmering of the volume of
evidence for evolution.

Finally, the newspaper published a whole column on the subject from someone named Guy Fisher, who doesn’t have a clue and merely parrots a list of scientists endorsing the existence of a controversy about evolution. It’s rank quote mining. For instance, he quotes fragments from SJ Gould, Colin Patterson, and Eugenie Scott to give the impression that they have or had serious disagreements with evolution, tosses in some crackpottery from Fred Hoyle, and then scrapes the bottom of the barrel with some guy named Louis Boundoure, the wingnut economist Paul Craig Roberts, and the Discovery Institute. It’s all common dishonesty.

Leave a comment at Florida Citizens for Science if you want to give them more ideas. It looks to me, though, that Florida creationists are a particularly stupid breed.