One wonders how long Canadian IDiot Denyse O'Leary can continue her weepy love affair with the appalling creationist movie "Expelled" when even the more wingnutty members of National Review Online recognize it for the festering pile that it is.
I mean, seriously, when even John Derbyshire thinks it's crap, you have major problems.
MAKE UP YOUR MIND, BILL: As ti-guy points out, first-tier ID propagandist William Dembski is none too taken with John Derbyshire, but he has a curious objection:
Back last year I reported on this blog that (go here) that John Derbyshire, despite repeatedly weighing in against intelligent design online and in print, gave no evidence of understanding the topic (to say nothing of doing any first-hand reading in it).
But, Bill ... what about all those people who do understand the topic, and have done ample reading in it? Those people think it's crap, too. Why don't their opinions count?
Yes, that was a rhetorical question. They mostly are these days.
8 comments:
Derbyshire doesn't just think it's crap, he pulls back the curtain on the whole enterprise and names the Discovery Institute et. al. for what they are: just another "pressure group for religous teaching in public schools."
Boy, there sure are some cracks in that united defense.
William Dembski (Dumbski?) at Deceivin' Denyse's anti-science porn blog is none too pleased:
Below he weighs in against Ben Stein’s EXPELLED, reviewing the movie despite refusing to see it. Derbyshire’s education, it appears, consists mainly in learning to sneer while striking an erudite pose.
*rowr*
I do not like Derbyshire (he's a racist*), and there are moments in this rant that I dislike immensely, but it was nevertheless one of the most impressive smackdowns that I have ever had the pleasure of reading. No wonder Dembski is pissed.
___________
*Well, chatting with the realtor, I said that of course we wanted to be in a good school system, one with not too many black kids.
but it was nevertheless one of the most impressive smackdowns that I have ever had the pleasure of reading.
Any decently-educated high school student could have done something similar.
No one at the National Review ever does anything impressive because they are all fundamentally corrupt in some way.
Ah. Derbyshire sees it as an attack on the unique ability of Anglo-Euro civilization to be scientific. That explains everything.
The needle clawed across the record for me when he decided to say the Chinese and 'muslims' made music 'n philosophized 'n stuff, but science was just...I dunno...like Delisle rocket science, too much for their poor widdle brains. And throwing in cheap shots at Apaches while he's about it.
Okey dokey. I appreciate the infighting, but there's something ironic about defending science in the name of white supremacy. Sorta... -- Stop undermining us!! Why...without science, we'd have no zyklon-b!! --
"The needle clawed across the record for me when he decided to say the Chinese and 'muslims'"
while, at the same time, noting that our achievements are the result of a continuum. the muslim world gave us great advances in mathematics (algebra ain't a latin word), astronomy (muslim pilots were the preference among european sea venturers), medicine (they established the practice of inoculation), etc.
yes, despite the moment of clarity, derbyshire's still a conservative....
KEvron
Before we had arabic numerals (which came from the Hindus), we had good old Roman numerals. No zero and no radix positional system.
It has been suggested that this number system contributed to its stagnation and fall. The largest number was less than 4000, and the milestones marking distance to Rome within the empire never exceeded this. Plus the near impossibility of multiplication and division in Roman numerals meant endless disputes over fair division of property, capricious taxation (worse than ours!), inability to have a banking system where loans with predictable interest (based on percentages) could be made, and difficulty in building anything based on past designs (i.e. scaling up).
I'm frankly amazed that Derbyshire is ignorant of Needham's epic multi-volume Science and Civilization in China.
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