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Weblog of a University of Kansas ecology and evolutionary biology student, fighting for progressive politics, evolution, and endangered species.
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| Address URL | http://scienceblogs.com/tfk/ Registered: 31-Mar-2008 |
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 Send to email | Expelled and Holocaust denial in Creationism |  By Thoughts
el 24-Apr-2008 | Orac doesn't think Expelled's Nazi claims are a form of Holocaust denial. I disagree.
Orac has some good points, and "denial" may be a strong word. Orac gives the basic criteria of Holocaust denial as rejecting at least one of these statements:
1. The Holocaust was the intentional murder of European Jews by the Nazi government of Germany during World War II as a matter of state policy
2. This mass murder employed gas chambers, among other methods, as a method of killing
3. The death toll of European Jews by the end of World War II was roughly 6 million. Expelled is either silent on or in agreement with all of those. Even so, I think Orac is too kind in saying:
given the actual definition of Holocaust denial generally agreed upon by academics, I have conclude that [Caplan]'s incorrect when he asserts that the vile lies in Expelled! are a form of Holocaust denial. I can fully understand why he might want to say that, but I can't agree with it. As many lies about Darwin and the Holocaust as Ben Stein and Mark Mathis pack into the movie, they accept the basic historicity of the Holocaust He is simply wrong in continuing that sentence:
and do not show any signs of the anti-Semitism that accompanies Holocaust denial. Not when you've got David Klinghoffer defending the movie by saying that Hitler was right about the Jews. The central belief of the Holocaust's architects was that Jews were evil, and that this evil was genetic, and had to be rooted out of the German (or Aryan, if we must) lineage. In order to claim that evolution is at all relevant to the Holocaust, the producers of Expelled must believe that there really is some genetic component to Judaism, and that a selective breeding program really would have some effect on society. Of course, these claims are wrong.
The effect of the claims made in Expelled, and championed by Richard Weikart, are to remove blame from the shoulders of Hitler and other implementers of the horrific Nazi policies. And in doing so, they are nibbling away at the first of Orac's criteria. They don't deny that the Nazis did what they did, but as Disco. Inst. VP John West puts it, they were simply enforcing "a fundamental law."
But this is false, and if we weren't talking about such a serious topic, it would be pretty funny to suggest that laws of nature have to be enforced by the government:
Non Sequitur: "Laws of physics strictly enforced": Paste this image in your site, Myspace, Facebook, Ebay copy this code...
The effect of these attempts to shift blame off of the Nazis is to trivialize the Holocaust. As the ADL's Abe Foxman said about televangelist D. James Kennedy's attempt to argue for Weikart's hypothesis:
This is an outrageous and shoddy attempt by D. James Kennedy to trivialize the horrors of the Holocaust. Hitler did not need Darwin to devise his heinous plan to exterminate the Jewish people. Trivializing the Holocaust comes from either ignorance at best or, at worst, a mendacious attempt to score political points in the culture war on the backs of six million Jewish victims and others who died at the hands of the Nazis. Which nicely meshes with Orac's conclusion:
What's really going on with Expelled! is something that's gone on almost since the very end of World War II, when Soviet forces liberated Auschwitz from the East, and allied forces liberated Dachau and other camps from the West, and that is the intentional misuse of the Holocaust as a political weapon. While trivializing the Holocaust isn't one of the standard criteria of Holocaust denial, I think it should be. The Holocaust is quite possibly the most horrific event in human history. No small part of that is the fact that it was carried out in an orderly process with a shocking amount of public acceptance. To trivialize that, and make it just another political chit to cash in debate is to deny the significance of the event, though not to deny the event itself. Read the comments on this post...
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 | Thoughts From Kansas |  Blogger | Weblog of a University of Kansas ecology and evolutionary biology student, fighting for progressive politics, evolution, and endangered species.
Thoughts from Kansas You will notice that it lacks definiteness; that it lacks purpose; that it lacks coherence; that it lacks a subject to talk about; that it is loose and wabbly; that it wanders around; that |
| Expelled and Holocaust denial | | Orac doesn't think Expelled's Nazi claims are a form of Holocaust denial. I disagree.
Orac has some good points, and "denial" may be a strong word. Orac gives the basic criteria of Holocaust denial as rejecting at least one of these statements:
1. The Holocaust was the intentional murder of European Jews by the Nazi government of Germany during World War II as a ma [..] Read complete article | | Published 24-Apr-2008 by Thoughts in Creationism
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| Thoughts From Kansas | Blogger | Weblog of a University of Kansas ecology and evolutionary biology student, fighting for progressive politics, evolution, and endangered species.
Thoughts from Kansas You will notice that it lacks definiteness; that it lacks purpose; that it lacks coherence; that it lacks a subject to talk about; that it is loose and wabbly; that it wanders around; that |
| Movie Review: Expelled | | Expelled is a really, truly, awful movie. Even setting aside its errors and its Holocaust nigh-denial, it's just a badly assembled bit of cinema. It's offensive and absurd to compare the events of the Cold War to the treatment of the supposed martyrs: the folks who variously were called bad names, didn't get tenure because they didn't publish research or get grants, the one who didn' [..] Read complete article | | Published 29-Apr-2008 by Thoughts in Creationism
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| Thoughts From Kansas | Blogger | Weblog of a University of Kansas ecology and evolutionary biology student, fighting for progressive politics, evolution, and endangered species.
Thoughts from Kansas You will notice that it lacks definiteness; that it lacks purpose; that it lacks coherence; that it lacks a subject to talk about; that it is loose and wabbly; that it wanders around; that |
| ADL decries Ben Stein's Holocaust rhetoric | | It's not just the science groups who are upset with Expelled's misuse of the Holocaust for petty political advantage. The venerable Anti-Defamation League says that the anti-evolution film misappropriates the Holocaust:
New York, NY, April 29, 2008 … The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) today issued the following statement regarding the controversial film Expelled: No Intel [..] Read complete article | | Published 29-Apr-2008 by Thoughts in Culture Wars
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| Thoughts From Kansas | Blogger | Weblog of a University of Kansas ecology and evolutionary biology student, fighting for progressive politics, evolution, and endangered species.
Thoughts from Kansas You will notice that it lacks definiteness; that it lacks purpose; that it lacks coherence; that it lacks a subject to talk about; that it is loose and wabbly; that it wanders around; that |
| Thoughts From Kansas | Blogger | Weblog of a University of Kansas ecology and evolutionary biology student, fighting for progressive politics, evolution, and endangered species.
Thoughts from Kansas You will notice that it lacks definiteness; that it lacks purpose; that it lacks coherence; that it lacks a subject to talk about; that it is loose and wabbly; that it wanders around; that |
| Expelled | | I haven't written a lot here about Expelled: No Intelligence. It'll be a crappy movie, and all the PR in the world won't change that. All the whining about PZ Myers, and criticism of his desire to see the movie he's featured in won't make the movie any better. Plus, I'm helping develop NCSE's response to Expelled, and I don't want to tip our hand.
That said, I will predict t [..] Read complete article | | Published 31-Mar-2008 by Thoughts in Creationism
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| Thoughts From Kansas | Blogger | Weblog of a University of Kansas ecology and evolutionary biology student, fighting for progressive politics, evolution, and endangered species.
Thoughts from Kansas You will notice that it lacks definiteness; that it lacks purpose; that it lacks coherence; that it lacks a subject to talk about; that it is loose and wabbly; that it wanders around; that |
| Ken Miller: Expelled from Expelled for his religious views | | The more that the producers of Expelled talk, the more they demonstrate their abject idiocy. Chris Heard transcribes part of producer Mark Mathis's discussion with Scientific American:
[SciAm editor] Mirsky: Why not also include comments from somebody like Ken Miller—
Mathis: Uh—
Mirsky: who is famously religious—
Mathis: well— [Laug [..] Read complete article | | Published 10-Apr-2008 by Thoughts in Culture Wars
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| Thoughts From Kansas | Blogger | Weblog of a University of Kansas ecology and evolutionary biology student, fighting for progressive politics, evolution, and endangered species.
Thoughts from Kansas You will notice that it lacks definiteness; that it lacks purpose; that it lacks coherence; that it lacks a subject to talk about; that it is loose and wabbly; that it wanders around; that |
| Expelled steals from the dead | | Expelled apparently features "Imagine" by John Lennon , and the Lennon estate is not pleased.
But according to a lawyer for Ms. Ono, the filmmakers did not have permission to use the song [Imagine], for any amount of money.
Ms. Ono's [..] Read complete article | | Published 17-Apr-2008 by Thoughts in Culture Wars
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| Thoughts From Kansas | Blogger | Weblog of a University of Kansas ecology and evolutionary biology student, fighting for progressive politics, evolution, and endangered species.
Thoughts from Kansas You will notice that it lacks definiteness; that it lacks purpose; that it lacks coherence; that it lacks a subject to talk about; that it is loose and wabbly; that it wanders around; that |
| Thoughts From Kansas | Blogger | Weblog of a University of Kansas ecology and evolutionary biology student, fighting for progressive politics, evolution, and endangered species.
Thoughts from Kansas You will notice that it lacks definiteness; that it lacks purpose; that it lacks coherence; that it lacks a subject to talk about; that it is loose and wabbly; that it wanders around; that |
| More Expelled reviews | | Someone at the same screening of Expelled: No Intelligence that PZ Myers was tossed out of has two very contradictory things to say about the movie:
the entire audience, minus Dawkins’ posse, agreed that that the film’s main point was that Intelligent Design should be taught in conjunction with Evolution.And also:
In fact, Naz [..] Read complete article | | Published 21-Mar-2008 by Thoughts in Creationism
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| Thoughts From Kansas | Blogger | Weblog of a University of Kansas ecology and evolutionary biology student, fighting for progressive politics, evolution, and endangered species.
Thoughts from Kansas You will notice that it lacks definiteness; that it lacks purpose; that it lacks coherence; that it lacks a subject to talk about; that it is loose and wabbly; that it wanders around; that |
| Happy Earth Day |  I'm still digging out of the post-Expelled craziness. Our video about Chris Comer has gotten more views than the Expelled trailer on Youtube or the rapping Dawkins video, and traffic keeps streaming in to ExpelledExposed.com.
If you haven't done so already, there's still time to locate a stupid statement by Ben Stein (from anywhere, not the movie) and refute it as part of NCSE [..] Read complete article | | Published 22-Apr-2008 by Thoughts in Creationism
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| Thoughts From Kansas | Blogger | Weblog of a University of Kansas ecology and evolutionary biology student, fighting for progressive politics, evolution, and endangered species.
Thoughts from Kansas You will notice that it lacks definiteness; that it lacks purpose; that it lacks coherence; that it lacks a subject to talk about; that it is loose and wabbly; that it wanders around; that |
| Expelled on DVD, straight from Mumbai! | | According to a press release datelined from Mumbai, the crapfest Expelled will be distributed on DVD by Vivendi Entertainment, proud home of many classic films. If you want reruns of Swamp Thing or McHale's Navy, you always knew Vivendi Entertainment was the place to go. But did you know they've got such modern classics as:
LITTLE JJ'S ALMOST GROWN VARIETY SHOW
A [..] Read complete article | | Published 02-Jul-2008 by Thoughts in Creationism
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| Thoughts From Kansas | Blogger | Weblog of a University of Kansas ecology and evolutionary biology student, fighting for progressive politics, evolution, and endangered species.
Thoughts from Kansas You will notice that it lacks definiteness; that it lacks purpose; that it lacks coherence; that it lacks a subject to talk about; that it is loose and wabbly; that it wanders around; that |
| New NCSE video | | The video at ExpelledExposed.com highlighting Chris Comer's story was one of last week's most viewed and most discussed on YouTube. In a week, it basically tied the YouTube trailer for Expelled, and exceeded the viewership of the Dick-to-the-Dawk viral video put out by the producers of Expelled.
We don't know if the next three videos we're rolling out over the next few weeks will get t [..] Read complete article | | Published 24-Apr-2008 by Thoughts in Creationism
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Via ThinkProgress, which watches CNN so you don't have to, Holocaust-trivializer and Expelled frontman Ben Stein and conservative radio host Larry Elder discuss 9/11:
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