National Review flames the hell out of Ben Stein

[Ender]

Wow

Worth reading overall, and here is a teaser paragraph.

And now here is Ben Stein, sneering and scoffing at Darwin, a man who spent decades observing and pondering the natural world — that world Stein glimpses through the window of his automobile now and then, when he’s not chattering into his cell phone. Stein claims to be doing it in the name of an alternative theory of the origin of species: Yet no such alternative theory has ever been presented, nor is one presented in the movie, nor even hinted at. There is only a gaggle of fools and fraudsters, gaping and pointing like Apaches on seeing their first locomotive: “Look! It moves! There must be a ghost inside making it move!”

I think this is the nastiest bit of writing I've seen on the topic, and look at the source.

[Darmalus]

I found it delightful. It has planted the seeds for a possible world for my hapless players to visit.

[Darth Wong]

Well, considering the source, I think the only reason for the vitriol is all of the wanking over the superiority of western civilization. Especially since this article has to compete with other articles from the same source which praise Stein's idiocy.

He doesn't really show what's wrong with the logic of Stein's argument so much as equate it to the thinking of brown-skinned savages, as if that association alone is enough to demonstrate the weaknesses of the argument. At least he mentions the NCSE.

[Phillip Hone]

I liked how it was attacking Ben Stein, but that was pretty much it. A lot of it was just generic National Review crap.

I turned over some possibilities, but decisively rejected them all. The first thing that came to mind was Saudi money. Half of the evils and absurdities in our society seem to have a Saudi prince behind them somewhere, and the Wahhabists are, like all fundamentalist Muslims, committed creationists.

"You see, it's all part of a conspiracy by filthy Je... Muslims to corrupt our society with their filthy Je... Muslim money". Thankfully, he rules this theory out, but only because Stein is rich.

[Darth Wong]

Filthy rich fundie asshole John Templeton funds a lot of ID propaganda (he even has the unmitigated gall to claim that he does more for society than practical charities like the Gates Foundation or the United Way, because he attends to its "spiritual" needs).

He might have had a hand in this too. I don't know what the production budget is, but they spent a lot of money on promotion: something the article writer neglects to mention.

PS. Mongoose, I saw your ghetto-edit and I turned it into a real edit.

[Kanastrous]

Promotion at a national scale, being where the *real* money gets spent.

[Superman]

Every major critic I've read has made it pretty clear that this "movie" is a flaming piece of shit. It seems that nobody is buying into this garbage except for the conservative fundie crowd who would end up seeing it anyway.

[Phillip Hone]

Now that I think about it, the arguments used in the article actually might be very useful in the battle to keep evolution in the school system. If the average American redneck could be convinced that by attacking evolution he's actually supporting the Muslim terrorists and inferior non-western savages of the world, that would pretty much be the political death of creationism and intelligent design. I doubt that something like that could actually work on a large scale, but it would probably be more effective than convincing the rednecks to change their minds using logic.

[TithonusSyndrome]

No dice. This would involve getting them to accept that their breed of tribal bullshit is no more defensible than the prevailing Mideast breed of tribal bullshit, and we all know that just ain't what the bible sez.

[Anguirus]

There is only a gaggle of fools and fraudsters, gaping and pointing like Apaches on seeing their first locomotive: “Look! It moves! There must be a ghost inside making it move!”

I'm all for the blasting of Ben Stein, but seeing a white American produce this sentence makes me think of what they'd write about Jews in a victorious, post-holocaust Nazi Germany.