If you’re wondering why Don McLeroy was on Colbert, here’s your answer: he’s one of the subjects of a new documentary, The Revisionaries. Note that the documentary isn’t his, he’s the king clown exposed in it…and somehow he thought that being targeted this way was a good thing, and that it was a smart move to appear on Colbert for it.
Hey, do you think that if McLeroy showed up at a theater showing the movie, he’d get expelled?
I still don’t understand why he thought it was a good idea to go on Colbert. Has Faux News not daemonised him enough to make him anathema to the fundies?
Hey, do you think that if McLeroy showed up at a theater showing the movie, he’d get expelled?
I don’t think he “gets” much of anything.
*sigh*
Only if he showed up with Dawkins.
Actually, I don’t think going on Colbert hurt him any. The people who agree with this guy’s positions are very likely the same people who don’t “get” Colbert. The satire goes flying over their heads and all they see is a perfectly reasonable conversation between two people who agree with each other.
It was the same with some of the families that were ‘featured’ in the film “What’s the matter with Kansas?”. They thought it made the famous.
@Sili:
A lot of wingnuts apparently still think Colbert is not actually playing a character. Some of them think he is just as ignorant as they are.
@d cwilson
Similar to how bigots felt about Archie Bunker.
If it’s for Jeebus, it’s an automatic plus in the eyes of many a doltish American.
That’s about all that McLeroy knows.
Glen Davidson
Can we please let them secede now?
For McLeroy, being targeted and portrayed as a clown is a good thing because that is the trademark of a good Christian: to be persecuted. Doesn’t the bible say somewhere that “blessed are the persecuted for they shall inherit hell”?
I’d like to get all snarky and make fun of Texas, but I live in Tennessee, where the “Monkey Bill” just became law and the “Don’t Say Gay” bill will probably soon become law, so….
This bummed me out even more, is what I’m trying to say. :-/
“f you’re wondering why Don McLeroy was on Colbert, here’s your answer” This is exactly the reason I visited Pharyngula today haha. PZ you are exuding telepathic powers!
“If you’re wondering why Don McLeroy was on Colbert, here’s your answer” This is exactly the reason I visited Pharyngula today haha. PZ you are exuding telepathic powers!
Wow, the universe and all of humanity are “blind purposeless nothingness” but a nasty old man with a book gives meaning to life?
*fie*
So we can all thank Mr. McLeroy for helping to dumb down the American youth. This is a very good reason to be “Bad without god.” That woman in that video said that the strategy is to get to the children. So now you have the Texas board of education trying to spread religion into our public education system. And you have organizations like the “Good News Club” using our public schools to preach religion. We have voucher programs that distribute a very large amount of tax payer money to religious organizations. These are all good reasons to be “Bad without god.”
P.Z. Myers you’re fucking awesome. Can’t wait to read the book.
@17 Totally agree: PZMYFA (no sycophant)
This past weekend I listened to the Critical Wit conversation with the film maker. Mr. McLeroy is not the only nut featured in the movie. There is also a Tea Party woman, Cynthia Dunbar, who home schooled her kids.
Oh, my word, she wrote a book:
Thor save us from this abomination.
While searching around for stuff on Ms. Dunbar, I found a very interesting bit on the whole Texas State Board of Education:
http://www.rightwingwatch.org/category/organizations/texas-state-board-of-education
I confess that I started kindergarten and graduated from high school in Texas. But none of the years in between (the Cuban Missile Crisis is why I went to kindergarten in three states, just your typical Army brat).
You know, if it wasn’t for that goddamn science, this 50 y/o wouldn’t be around to see this bullshit. Hell, I wouldn’t have even made it past three. WAY TO GO, SCIENCE!
[I have no idea what my point is, I’m going to bed now]
Chris,
I got as far a ‘foundational truths’ in your McLeroy quote when my inner voice started sounding like Sarah Palin. I must shower now despite your invocation of the Hammer god at the end.
Cheers.
It seems to be one of those situations where the dumb-fuck is so dumb he doesn’t know he’s a dumb-fuck or even understand the term “dumb-fuck”.
He wants to change the education system alright…to raise and educate a bunch of dumb-fucks like himself. Good thing the folks of Atheist Experience have a solid foothold in Texas.
I was lucky enough to go to schools in a large progressive district in Texas that was very focused on Houston’s role in the international economy which was also profoundly influenced by the Strange Demise of Jim Crow ten to twenty years earlier.
But even in the liberal Texas 70’s and 80’s, a dark force ws at work that paved the way for Barton. Never think for a moment that two people can’t make a difference. These two did more damage to Texas to any other two people in history:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mel_and_Norma_Gabler
I remember articles in the paper treating them like insane idiots in the early eighties. But they won, and by 1994 Texas became a joke state.
@23/BCSkeptic
This is what is known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Roughly, it’s when someone is so stupid they don’t know they’re stupid, so they act as if they’re smart. It’s a positive feedback loop caused by ignorance and lack of self-awareness (which is itself a kind of ignorance) feeding back into themselves.
I just got a t-shirt from cafepress that features that little line from the Treaty of Tripoli. I wore it to work in Gainesville, Florida, which is a college town. I got a couple of strange looks, and one man who read it and identified himself as a “proud atheist”.
I have to admit, though, that when I got home and was going to the local pub in the much smaller town of Alachua, I changed shirts.
There is a very real possibility of getting beaten severely by even nodding toward the secularism of the founding documents where I live.
Hell, the local public middle school has a large granite monolith standing outside the administration building engraved with Proverbs 1:7 on it: “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and instruction.”
There’s one thing in that video which even when I was brought up as Christian never quite made sense to me… this dodgy notion which seems to go unchallenged in every church up and down the land that “we’re ALL made in god’s image”.
I guess that when you’re invisible you can pretty much choose any look you like, but for god to exist he must be a male/female/black/white/asian/tall/short/fat/thin/dark haired blonde with ginger locks who is somewhere between the ages of say zero and 129 years old.
Does he just pick a new look out every morning? But hey, he’s magic, which explains why his son was born in the middle east and looks like a standard white western hippy in all the paintings.
Nah, the movie’s not called “Expelled”. He might get revised!
I watched this moron on the Colbert show and kept waiting for him to catch on that he was being made fun of. I’m afraid I am going to be waiting for a long time. What kind of a philosophy on life is “We need to challenge the experts”? The expert that this man ought to be paying attention to is named Poe.
Hi, my name is Jon. I’ve been an atheist for a number of reasons, and reading Pharyngula, as well as Greta, The Atheist Experience (and watching it too) were stuff that helped influence me from being a Christian. I live in the UK, which means I’m more free of religious insanity than US folk, although we’ve still had our fair share, especially with all the whining that happened after the current Archbishop of Canterbury decided to quit.
Anyhow, on a semi-related note, I love the website Expelled Exposed and how it ripped apart Ben Stein’s horrible doc Expelled. Going by memory alone, wasn’t this Don guy also subject to criticism from Expelled Exposed? Also, did anyone ever get around to doing a debunking of this article? http://atheismisdead.blogspot.co.uk/2009/03/expelled-exposed-exposed.html If such an article of rebuttal exists, please link me to it, otherwise can someone please tackle this?
Keep up the good work!
Jon
Sorry, that should read “number of years”, although “reasons” is perfectly valid too. :)
McLeroy is correct on one point, he is leading education in a completely new direction. Unfortunately that direction is not the one in which education lies.
Dano,
Oh really? How nice for you. I wonder if anyone else around here has qualifications? Possibly even from impressive universities? Perhaps even the best university in the world? In relevant science subjects, even?
Nahhhh, there’s no one around here like that. Let alone a reasonable number of them. With various postgrad qualifications and decades of relevant professional scientific experience. Nope. We’re just good for being patronised by undeservingly rude people who are amused by ridiculously fallacious and vacuous YouTube videos.
{Eyeroll}
Louis
It’s McLeroy’s expert opinion.
Hurr durr.
Wrong thread Louis?
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. There will always be idiots in the world. If you value education you don’t have a system of elected school boards, either at a state level or local level, whereby these idiots get into a position of power over the education of children. By all means let school boards deal with basketball hoops and leaky roofs, but curriculum should be decided by professional educators, not elected amateurs.
While speaking with Colbert, McLeroy refers to himself as a skeptic.
This coming from somebody who believes that all the world’s problems were caused by a woman who ate an apple at the behest of a talking snake.
Rev BDC,
How very dare you! I am on the right thread, it’s everyone else, including PZ, who is on the wrong one.
Harrumph.
Louis
P.S. Of course you could be right, but, I’ll never admit that in public. NEVER!
I wondered what that idiot was doing on Colbert’s show. Stephen had some amusement batting him around like a cat toy.
From that documentary’s website:
“intellectual battles” INTELLECTUAL???
*face palm*
The very idea that there are people out there that are unable to see Colbert as satire… that disturbs me to my core.
I’m guessing these are the same sort of folks who think that professional wrestling is entirely unchoreographed.
Hi to the Christians on this board. The vision of you all in this video scare me. If you’re not one of those xtians, are you doing something to trim their sails or quietly accepting their insanity?
@42 baal
Not a christian but I carry my sail trimming shears in a quick-draw holster.
Nah, ’cause he wasn’t interviewed under false pretenses.