The phenomenon was thought truly bizarre: Pikesville, Maryland has been experiencing “deafening” booms and flashes of light every so often. They even caught it on videotape. And no, it didn’t seem to be lightning, at least not in any conventional sense. Police were baffled. Meteorologists ere baffled. So baffled that residents were even willing to appeal to aliens (though only tongue in cheek) and the supernatural.
Mike Myers, comedian of Austin Powers fame, is apparently ruffling some feathers amongst Hindus with his upcoming film “The Love Guru.” I tend to be somewhat sympathetic to the concerns of religious people when films appear to ridicule or caricature their beliefs: particularly religious minorities that aren’t well understood in the U.S. to begin with. My sympathies don’t extend to complaining about the films themselves of course (religion shouldn’t be any more or less open to fair game ridicule than anything else): I can just understand the concerns about the negative cultural results.
It’s one thing to mock a culture we are all intimately familiar with: we have a solid basis of understanding that comedy can enhance or even challenge. It’s quite another thing when the only thing many people have to go on is a caricature. And while Hinduism deserves as much criticism and analysis as any cultural, religious, or political force, Hindus, as people, also deserve better understanding and acceptance as part of the bargain.
That said, what’s of particular interest to skeptics regarding this film are Myers’ comments about Deepak Chopra, who is considered by most skeptics to be the reigning king of new age, pseudoscientific woo. Myers claims that his character is based on Chopra, but also notes that Chopra is a close friend.
Myers… …says in an episode of the Sundance Channel’s “Iconoclasts” that Chopra, his longtime friend, was the inspiration for the Love Guru character.
“He is the basis of why I went down this path of a character like that, and it’s because I am interested in higher states of consciousness and I am interested in comedy,” Myers says. “The guru, he breaks down your barriers, gets you silly and gets you light so you’re in a place to receive love.”
Will Myers be poking fun at woo and alt-med in a way that skeptics can be proud of? Or will he be basically celebrating the Chopra-hype with a lighthearted endorsement of its ideas? Seems pretty ambiguous at this point, but its something to watch.
What if you held an on-message conference call to promote your movie, and everybody came?
Well, the producers of Expelled did just that, and amongst everybody was the last person they wanted to hear from: PZ Myers. Myers listened to them go on and on, but when they started claiming that no one had ever “addressed the content of the movie,” he couldn’t let that stand, and he spoke up and jumped all over them.
Now, this sort of thing isn’t quite my MO, but in this case, I’m with Myers all the way. The Expelled producers have been presenting themselves as brave truth-tellers just looking for a debate, but in reality they’ve been hiding in a tightly controlled bubble of evangelical adoration and press releases. They deserve to get called out on this hypocrisy. I’ve been trying to call them out on this cowardice for some time.
Anyone who’s been reading this blog, or nearly ANY science-friendly blog that’s covered this movie has seen countless posts addressing the claims Stein and his cohorts make in this movie. We’ve covered all of their subjects in FAR far more detail than they have. And we’ve seen almost nothing in return. It’s the standard creationist crackup: they throw out a huge list of plausible sounding but ultimately cynically false claims and then can’t be bothered to stick around and seriously defend them. Instead, they just rush on to the next venue and repeat the same stuff all over again as if no one had ever pointed out their duplicity.
Who is dodging “substance” here? Myers takes their arguments to pieces, specifically and directly. He’s certainly not nice about it, but he doesn’t dodge their claims, he cuts right into them. Their response? Not to address his points. Not to defend their arguments. Instead they spend thousands of words hinting about the “thought police” and making fun of Myers for actually spending time responding to their harmless little posts!
We’ll see how long they can keep up this little game. We’ll see how long they can keep ignoring the arguments of their critics and hopping from one right-wing think-tank ego-strokefest to another. We’re waiting.
It’s time for another survey of stuff worth reading on the internet, so let’s pretend that I’m hosting some sort of esoteric Blog Carnival. Topic? ME! (And for those readers who are getting sick of Expelled musings, good news: I’ve exiled them to the end of this post)
Anyway, let’s get this thing started with a review of the home-birth-homage film “The Business of Being Born” from someone who might know a little about the subject: family practice doc Harriet Hall. Personally, I think she’s nuts to worry about all the hospital-hate in the film. Doctors are dangerous! That’s why I’m planning on going for an “all-natural” coronary artery bypass when my time comes.
Next, Ed Darrell over at Millard Fillmore’s Bathtubpoints us towards both Cracked list of 11 Movies Saved by Historical Inaccuracy (in which we learn that Mel Gibson’s Patriot hero was, in real life, a notorious slave rapist) and Yahoo’s own similar listing of Greatest Historical Goofups (in which we learn that Mel Gibson’s Braveheart hero would have had to have sex with a three year old to make any sense). Both lists need to apologize for the ridiculousness of calling 2001: A Space Odyssey “historically” inaccurate. It’s called Science-FICTION, guys.
Over at Exploring Our Matrix, religious religion prof James F. McGrath asks “Can (the story of) Noah’s Ark Be Saved?” I’m not sure if his answer is yes or no, exactly but I’m pretty sure that whatever it is, it’s the right answer. The stories of Noah and Job cannot be reconciled any better to modern morals than they can to modern science. That doesn’t mean that we cannot learn things from them (whether believers learning about God, or even non-believers learning about believers).
It’s also worth noting that, for some unknown reason, this teensy blog is actually the or at least amongst the top results when you search for information on the film, which is pretty odd, because Ialmostneverpost aboutthedarnthing. While I’m flattered, Internet, I can’t help but think that othersciencesites should be up there instead.
Finally, as I noted over at Skepchick, what is probably one of the most crucial Google search terms in this little PR war, “expelled movie,” didn’t have a single critical, pro-science site on the all-important first page of results. But then, lo and behold, the very day after I complain about it, Phil Plait and I break into the big time! Somehow, I have gained the power to move digital mountains.
The producers of the creationist fan-flick Expelled! have lately been shopping their movie to right-wing and religious outlets all over the country: screening it mostly for the rather bizarre purpose of trying to get activists on board to promote it when it opens.
At the very same time they’ve been bloviating about free speech and the merits of open discussion, they’ve been dodging any critical press questions, inventing new ways to completely avoid addressing substantive criticisms, and doing their best to make sure that critics are kicked out of their promotional film screenings.
But now it seems like they’ve really slipped up: they apparently spent so much effort making sure that small-town scienceblogger PZ Myers would be screened out of a recent showing at the Mall of America that they completely missed none other than Richard Dawkins, coincidentally visiting from England.
When the film’s own marketing company puts something like “YOUR NAME WILL BE ON A LIST AT THE DOOR. NO TICKET IS NEEDED. IDs WILL BE CHECKED” in their rsvp confirmation emails, you know that wild stories about how Myers was trying to break into the showing “without a ticket” when in fact he had registered like everyone else under his own name, are flatly phony.
Meanwhile, the same domain-name discrepancy I noted way back when with the producer’s claims to have innocently used “Crossroads” as a “working title” for the film is getting some new scrutiny from Wes Elsberry. To re-iterate, contrary to their protestations, the producers seem to have registered the Expelled! trademark (and, obviously, decided on the extremely one-sided message that title represents) months before they solicited interviews under the name “Crossroads.” And they even seem to have invented the “Rampant Films” company name and website to advance the deception further.
Update 2: Dawkins and PZ chat about their experience:
I’m inclined at this point to think that people are making a bit too much of this. It’s stupid and, as Dawkins said, inept on the part of the producers, but in the end not exactly front page news or even a particularly solid and unambiguous PR victory. It’s just one more example in a litany of examples of the bizarre, hypocritical, and dishonest nature of this production.
Women love education; it’s the actual application they don’t particularly like. Whereas the first thought of a woman who enjoys the idea of painting is to take an art appreciation class, a similarly interested man is more likely to just pick up a paintbrush and paint something – usually a naked woman.
…
Of course, this will sound to equalitarians and their sympathizers like nothing more than male whining, but it’s nothing of the sort. Because they are the intellectual driving force of humanity, men will be fine. They will simply continue to do what they have always done and pursue the same challenges they have always pursued, focused on the realities of success rather than its superficial attributes. It is the institutions they are exiting, voluntarily and involuntarily, that will be destroyed instead. It is written that “women ruin everything”; having destroyed the liberal arts, the classics and the pseudo-sciences, it is now abundantly clear that the more rigorous sciences are next on the equalitarians’ destructive agenda. And so, in the not-too-distant future, two plus two will finally be determined to equal five if a women feels that it should, or at least it will as long as she happens to feel that way. (emphasis added)
Ah, blogging memes. I’m not a huge fan in general, but Secundum Artem has tagged me with one, and I’ll dutifully follow along. The memeceedure here is:
1. Go to page 123 of the nearest book.
2. Find the 5th sentence.
3. Write down the next 3 sentences.
The actual nearest book to me was Medicine in Cleveland and Cuyahoga County, 1810-1976, but unfortunately page 123 lacks enough full sentences and is merely an extremely dry recitation of institutions in any case. Lest you think the book is a total waste though, it does include a long and amusingly sage and serious discussion of homeopathy, as well as recounting the 1881 gynecological lectures of one Dr. Henry Justus Herrick, in which he apparently attributed women’s uterine problems to, among other things, the “overwork of the brain and excessive development of the nervous system.” You’ve come a long way, medicine!
Back when Israeli Kessnet member Nissim Ze’ev was ranting about how gays were a plague that would destroy Israel, I wondered openly just what the heck he could possibly mean: how exactly were gay people going to go about destroying the Middle East’s only functional democracy, one that’s more progressive in its legal attitudes towards gay people than even the US?
It turns out that his fellow member of the Shas party, Shlomo Benizri, has the answer: its earthquakes. Gay people cause earthquakes now. The most charming thing about his accusation (or at least how it was translated) is that he seemed to phrase it as sort of aside, as if it were just an uncontroversial fact that everyone was already aware of:
He called on lawmakers to stop “passing legislation on how to encourage homosexual activity in the state of Israel, which anyway brings about earthquakes”.
You know, it’s a bad idea, and anyway it brings about earthquakes, so there’s that, too!
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