Tune in at 9am Central to Atheists Talk — this week, it’s humanists and godless soldiers. (In case you’re wondering what a Minnesota zip code might be, you can try 56267.)
Don McLeroy is the deranged creationist dentist who was appointed to the chairmanship of the Texas State Board of Education, and who is responsible for the recent purge and intimidation of people who support good biology — he’s trouble all the way through. Take a look at his latest stunt.
The State Board of Education’s debate on new English and reading standards took another rowdy turn Friday as members approved a never-before-seen version of the lengthy document which materialized less than an hour before the board was to take a final vote.
After a wacky and terse debate on the new curriculum, the board voted 9-6 in favor of the new version, which will remain in place for the next decade and sets standards for state tests and textbooks, as well as classroom teaching.
Experts and teachers have been working on the new curriculum standards for two and a half years.
“I find it’s really wild that we can work for three years on a project and then the board is so qualified they can pull it out of their hat overnight,” said board member Pat Hardy, a Fort Worth Republican who, like other board members, received the substituted document when it was slipped under her hotel door less than an hour before their meeting was set to convene Friday morning.
Some social conservatives on the board prepared the latest version overnight.
This is similar to what our former education commissioner for Minnesota, Cheri Yecke, tried to pull — she tried to swap in a ‘minority report’ for the state science standards that was composed behind the back of the official committee … only McLeroy has outdone her by an order of magnitude or so. Why even bring in qualified educators and scientists to do the hard work of a standards committee if you’re just going to throw their work away and replace it with some hack job done by ideologues overnight? And to give it to them for review an hour before the meeting is just plain insulting.
This is for the English standards. What kind of circus are we going to see in response to the upcoming science standards?
At least one board of education member is calling for McLeroy’s ejection, although it sounds like she doesn’t expect anything to come of it. This is what we can expect of creationist conservatives: a dictatorship of the incompetent.
There’s a Wilkins/Myers conversation up on Bloggingheads. The quality of the recording is horrible, and I have to apologize — we did a little experimentation and deviated from the usual bloggingheads recording proocol, and it’s clear now that we shouldn’t have done that. I recommend not watching it, just listen, if you must.
We mammals have been beaten again. Shrimp have more sophisticated eyes than we do, with the ability to see things we can’t, and I’m feeling a bit envious.
There’s a whole site dedicated to polling visitors on one question: Do you believe in God?. Just as it is, it’s a testimonial to the worthlessness of internet polls (100% of the residents of Saint Lucia are atheists! n=1), so it seems superfluous to send the Atheist Legion in, but hey, go ahead, push this poll towards more disbelief. As a special bonus, if you come from a small country you’ll be able to wield greater unrepresentative power!
Seriously. And if you want to see the very definition of ‘clueless git’, watch this video of Andy Schlafly droning on. Would you believe he accuses wikipedia of bias, and then says that he founded Conservapædia to strengthen Christian faith?
Yeah, I know, I already had you listen to our drecky Christian radio station earlier this week, but today at 5pm Central, KKMS-AM will have the president of Minnesota Atheists, August Berkshire, online for an interview titled “Understanding and Responding to Atheist’s Beliefs”. It could be interesting, just for the experience of seeing how these clowns treat August (I already know that August will be polite to them.)
One more has joined the official academic mafia. We’ll never be able to trust her again.
Randy Olson doesn’t like you. He says some very harsh things about the science blogs readership on the Skepticality podcast — you guys are all just so darn mean to him. This is all very unfortunate, because he does have some good things to say, but he’s also taking disagreement very personally, and is seeing things only through the lens of the filmmaker,which is skewing his perspective away from some significant points, at the same time that it’s giving him some useful and interesting views.
For instance, he criticizes my response to the event in which I got kicked out of a movie theater — the problem, he says, was that I was drawing attention to an event in which I had nothing to sell, while they did, and that’s a mistake. I certainly do have something to sell: myself (which I find personally important, even if no one else does), the blog Pharyngula, and the science of evolution. I don’t have a movie, but most people don’t; it’s a case of the Olson blinders to think that the only thing that matters is your movie. I managed to sell Pharyngula quite well, and got a lasting 30-50% increase in traffic, as well as more attention from the media.
The other thing he’s missing is what we accomplished with Expelled. Again, we don’t have a competing movie to promote, so we couldn’t very well peddle a positive message about our alternative cinema experience. Instead, we had to show that Expelled was a profoundly dishonest movie on all levels; we impeached its credibility successfully. The reviews tell the story, that they all point out how wretchedly false the story of the movie was. We can’t stop people from attending the movie, but we can weaken its utility as a tool for the creationist movement.
And that’s where we won. The podcast continues to falsely claim that the movie was a success, quoting box office figures. Wrong message. This movie was a flop: it lost money. Even more significantly, it failed with its intended audience. Remember, creationism is huge in this country, and a movie that taps into that base has got an automatic edge, which is how it managed to get millions in gross receipts. However, that’s also where it failed. It did not get any momentum at all with the evangelical audience, with a steady, rapid decline in attendance from day one. This is a movie that is coasting on Christian gullibility, but is getting no traction at all. Part of it is that the movie started with no credibility, but I suspect another part of its failure was in its marketing: ads on The Daily Show sound impressive to us, but weren’t going to draw in likely attendees, and using a rock-and-roll soundtrack and the image of rebelliousness is also not going to woo the evangelical crowd. Daily Show ads would have probably been very effective for Olson’s movie, Flock of Dodos, but they were wasted effort for this one.
One thing Olson is entirely correct on is that likability is important. I have no illusions that I’m a charming fellow, but in my public talks you may have noticed that everyone complains that I don’t breathe fire or eviscerate any creationists on the podium. That’s intentional — going all Lewis Black only works when you’ve got an audience that already agrees with you. However, the other essential component of a successful media strategy has got to be strength. Haven’t we learned that yet from years of watching Republican political tactics? They don’t win on just presenting perspectives agreeable to their electorate, but by being vicious bastards who won’t compromise. Olson is telling us to be like Jimmy Carter, and ignoring the fact that the environment right now is dominated by the likes of Dick Cheney, unlikable thug. Even worse is that he’s forgetting that it was Carter vs. Reagan, who was both likable and put up a good illusion of strength.
What we really need is someone who is fiercely likable, someone who can be admired while they’re fighting for science. I fear that what everyone else is calling for is the scientist as friendly, unchallenging wimp who will make the public feel safe and able to go on believing whatever nonsense they want … when what we really need is someone to shake up the bogosity of the general public’s delusions.
