[LINK] "A Blood Libel on Our Civilization"

elfs linked to an article of John Derbyshire's at National Review Online, "A Blood Libel on Our Civilization", which reviews the highly controversial anti-evolution film Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed. The favourite paragraphs of Mr. Sternberg (and me) lie below.

When talking about the creationists to people who don’t follow these controversies closely, I have found that the hardest thing to get across is the shifty, low-cunning aspect of the whole modern creationist enterprise. Individual creationists can be very nice people, though they get nicer the further away they are from the full-time core enterprise of modern creationism at the Discovery Institute. The enterprise as a whole, however, really doesn’t smell good. You notice this when you’re around it a lot. I shall give some more examples in a minute; but what accounts for all this dishonesty and misrepresentation?

My own theory is that the creationists have been morally corrupted by the constant effort of pretending not to be what they are. What they are, as is amply documented, is a pressure group for religious teaching in public schools.

Now, there is nothing wrong with that. We are a nation of pressure groups, and one more would hardly notice. However, since parents who want their kids religiously educated already have plenty of private and parochial schools to choose from (half the kids on my street have attended parochial school), as well as the option of home schooling, now very well organized and supported (and heartily approved of by me: I just wish I knew how they find the time); and since current jurisprudence, how correctly I am not competent to say, regards tax-funded religious instruction as unconstitutional; creationists are a pressure group without hope, if they campaign openly for the thing they want.

Understanding this, the creationists took the morally fatal decision to campaign clandestinely. They overhauled creationism as “intelligent design,” roped in a handful of eccentric non-Christian cranks keen for a well-funded vehicle to help them push their own flat-earth theories, and set about presenting themselves to the public as “alternative science" engaged in a “controversy” with a closed-minded, reactionary “science establishment” fearful of new ideas. (Ignoring the fact that without a constant supply of new ideas, there would be nothing for scientists to do.) Nothing to do with religion at all!

I think this willful act of deception has corrupted creationism irredeemably. The old Biblical creationists were, in my opinion, wrong-headed, but they were mostly honest people. The “intelligent design” crowd lean more in the other direction. Hence the dishonesty and sheer nastiness, even down to plain bad manners, that you keep encountering in ID circles. It’s by no means all of them, but it’s enough to corrupt and poison the creationist enterprise, which might otherwise have added something worthwhile to our national life, if only by way of entertainment value.

The website Expelled Exposed offers a detailed takedown of the film and its claims.

The whole subject is of interest to Canadians since, sadly, creationism has also made inroads into our country. Doubtless many Canadian creationists were inspired in part by the American example, but doubtless at least as many
Écrasez les infâmes, people, écrasez les infâmes.

[BRIEF NOTE] A misogyny in miniature

I've been following, with a certain amount of horrified fascination, the commentaries of james_nicoll and annafdd upon a proposal by LJ user theferrett. This would see female attendants at a particular science fiction convention be sorted out into classes of people who are and are not sexually attractive to a particular demographic of male attendants, those women who are sexually attractive being encouraged (pressured?) to wear badges allowing male passersby to grope their breasts at will.

Yes, I know: It's not as bad as génocidaire porn, but it is very nasty. Keep in mind that comes from a guy who actually wrote and published (!) the below statement.

Unfortunately, I can't decry the process of "asking repeatedly," mainly because it's the only stimuli a lot of women respond to. Frankly, I think any woman who has to be begged fifteen times before she eventually accepts should be drug into the back alleyways and beaten, because her rampant need for a string of pleadings trains the wrong sort of men that no doesn't mean no. And then we should go beat up the men for good measure.

giandjakiss makes a good point when she dissects theferrett's arguments to reveal he seems to believe that that attractive and polite women would have no choice but to submit if the men behaved politely enough. Their supposed ability to choose would be fictive, compromised fatally by the way that the "Open Source Boob Project" is structured to empower the gropers and place the true burden of choice upon the gropes.

(As a side issue, I wonder if people like theferrett would be willing to attend a mainly gay/bi science fiction convention where straight men would be encouraged to wear buttons allowing other attendants to grope them. They'd further get bonus points if they went to Woody's, better yet the Black Eagle. Would they accept? Might this exercise perhaps reveal correlations between misogyny and homophobia? But I digress.)

Unsurprisingly, annafdd reports that a lot of women are reconsidering their participation in said fan conventions, decidedly enthusiastic calls at organizing a self-defense movement aside. Who could possibly blame them for doing so?

For that matter, who would blame people in general who were appalled by the fact that this scheme actually got seriously discussed left? Any repressive culture that allows enough space for people to challenge its norms will see challenges, and hopefully, eventually, change. Any culture that tries to emulate this repression when it's quite possible for members to defect at little to no cost risks either marginalization or collapse. It's just a pity that misogyny in the wider world can't be unmasked with similar thoroughness.

[LINK] "Quebec to destroy referendum ballots"

From The Globe and Mail, by Ingrid Peretz.

Nearly five million ballots that almost tore up a country are headed to the shredder, ending a 12-year legal saga born in the turbulent wake of the Quebec referendum.

A judge gave Quebec's elections chief the green light to destroy the warehoused ballots Wednesday, dashing the hopes of federalists who believed they could unlock the secrets of possible vote-rigging in the 1995 referendum.

To most of Quebec, the ballots are long-forgotten relics of a distant and painful political battle. But to others, they're historic pieces of evidence.

The focus is on 86,501 ballots that were marked improperly and never counted in the outcome, a No victory of 50.6 per cent.

The high rate of rejection in certain federalist ridings led the anglophone-rights group Alliance Quebec to seek the preservation of the ballots.

[. . .]

That plan was dashed in a ruling by Superior Court Justice Roger Baker. He granted a petition by Chief Electoral Officer Marcel Blanchet to dismiss Alliance Quebec's lawsuit, effectively sending 4.8 million ballots to the dustbin.

While the "overtones" of the suit were significant because they dealt with the possible breakup of the country, Judge Baker said he was ruling on a matter of procedure.

"Courts are not political forums. Courts are not here to make statements," he said from the bench.

"This is not 1995 … this is not to determine whether Quebec is staying or not in Canada," he said. The matter before him boiled down to "a procedural entanglement."

He said 13 years had elapsed since the referendum, a “potentially cataclysmic” event in Canada, and “13 years is too long” to deal with the legal request.

Lawyers for the Chief Electoral Officer said the Quebec elections law didn't permit them to make the ballots publicly accessible.

The ballots are preserved in a warehouse in Quebec City at a cost of $12,000 a year.

A spokeswoman said Mr. Blanchet would wait for the 30-day appeals process to elapse before destroying the ballots. Held in sealed boxes, they would eventually be shredded and the paper recycled.

The 1995 Québec referendum was a decidedly stressful time for Canadians. I remember watching the news coverage and feeling a knot in my stomach as I saw ridings in northern Québec return results revealing that more than two-thirds of the population voted "Oui." Northern Québec didn't set a precedent thanks to the tendency of individual voters in Montréal and western Québec to vote "Non" in sufficient numbers to counteract separatist votes.

In the end, I really can't be bothered to care. There may well have been voter fraud on the part of individual separatists, although federalists can hardly claim the moral high ground. (Alliance Quebec doesn't deserve to be very credible either, thanks to its leadership's tendency to ally with marginal political parties and its exhibition of the classic tendency of fringe groups to suffer mass defections.) Let the past be past, and hope that the transformation of Canada into something not altogether unlike the German Confederation of the mid-19th century proceeds quickly enough to placate separatists everywhere in this country.