Calling the Kettle Black

I enjoyed reading Dan Brown’s novel, The Da Vinci Code. You might have noticed the Da Vinci quote at the top of this blog and that book was where I first read of it. Also, the background is a cropped portion of a Da Vinci sketch that I manipulated in one of those ‘photoshop’ things.

I saw the film last evening in a packed theater that must have been 90 degrees. Ugh. Could have done without that. The film was OK, I suppose. It hit the main points of the story, but almost in a mechanical and rushed way. It naturally wasn’t nearly as entertaining as the novel. As an aside, his Angels & Demons (written and published prior to TDVC) was a far better, more action-packed novel, in my view.

What a kerfuffle we’ve got here, eh? Up. In. Arms. To say the least. Wow. Y’know, I found the excitement concerning the novel to be quite charming and entertaining. Here you had people recommending it and talking about it in hushed tones to others as if it were a legitimate, scholarly refutation of core beliefs. I suppose that where intelligence, reason, logic and the scientific method won’t suffice, you’ve always got fiction.

Occam’s Razor comes to mind, once again. You know; that’s the principle, roughly stated, that says when you hear the beating of hooves, think horses, not zebras.

…when multiple competing theories have equal predictive powers,
the principle recommends selecting those that introduce the fewest
assumptions and postulate the fewest hypothetical entities.

Well, this is not a rigorous treatment of the thing, by any means, but it strikes me as rather hilarious that we have an unprovable, untestable supernatural explanation surrounding western civilization’s chief myth, employing hundreds of inter-connecting and self-reliant assumptions, countered by an admittedly fictional though natural explanation for this mythology and some cannot understand the allure. The allure is simple. Dan Brown’s explanation is better. It makes more sense. It’s more "plausible," but certainly only in a relative sense. It’s probably just as whacked as the Bible’s version, but as long as we’re believing in fairy tales, what difference does it make which version?

Here are some quotes that cracked me up, from here and here.

…the head of one group went further, calling the movie "a real, real danger" to the faith of Catholics and other Christians. ("Danger?" -ed)

…many Catholics and Christians don’t know church history to the detail
that Dan Brown gets into" in his "Da Vinci Code" novel and its film
adaptation. (So the "danger[ous]" Dan Brown knows church history, does he? -ed)

Baehr told the Washington, D.C., news conference that fiction can have a powerful impact on people… (How ironic! -ed)

films can have a particularly strong effect because darkened theaters
eliminate most distractions, giving moviegoers a "monopoly of the mind"
that can be more persuasive than books or other visual media. (…or massive cathedrals of stone and marble adorned with exotic hardwoods and tapestries, whose occupant authorities wear flowing robes? -ed)

he and his organization are also urging the public to boycott the film because it is "a fantasy passing as reality" (…and he should know. -ed)

…the big-screen adaptation of Dan Brown’s best-selling novel distorts history… (…which, you know, we’d like to keep our running monopoly on. -ed)

It deliberately presents fiction as fact. (We are against deliberately presenting fiction as fact. -ed)

…the film muddles fact and fiction… (…completely corrupting the fiction. -ed)

…upsetting people who have been Catholics all their lives who now don’t know what is true and what is lies. (What, still? -ed)

Greek authorities banned the film for viewers under 17, saying it
touched on "religious and historical questions of major importance that
a minor is not able to evaluate." (I guess the Greek Orthodox Church doesn’t ‘touch’ on "religious and historical questions of major importance." -ed)

[Monsignor Jean-Michel di Falco] Leandri said he would not call for a boycott because the movie "really
isn’t worth worrying about — it’s so far-fetched that no one will
believe it." (Obviously an authority on the "far-fetched." -ed)

So, there you have it.

(Article links: Carlos)

Staying on the Bus

So’s you can go the back of the bus…

That’s what’s all the rage, now. It’s great to be the victim of racism. The racists…they’re everywhere. Don’t miss out. Be a victim today.

Cultural Racism:
Those aspects of society that overtly and covertly
attribute value and normality to white people and Whiteness, and
devalue, stereotype, and label people of color as
“other”, different, less than, or render them
invisible. Examples of these norms include defining white skin
tones as nude or flesh colored, having a future time orientation,
emphasizing individualism as opposed to a more collective ideology,
defining one form of English as standard, and identifying only
Whites as great writers or composers.

Well, it’s been blogged all over the place, so I’m not sure who’d I’d give credit to. Call a nude white person nude: your a racist. Claim your individuality: racist. Plan your future: racist. Call proper English proper: racist. Mention a good writer or composer who happens to be white, while not also mentioning one who happens to be black, brown, red, or yellow: racist.

My god.  What it must take to bend a human mind around to the point where it ‘works’ like this.

Indeed.

Update: Samizdata has a good take with good links to other good takes.

A Convenient Lie

During a visit to the cinema last evening, I was "treated" to the trailer for the upcoming Al Gore film: An Inconvenient Truth. Knock yourselves out. If you’re unable to detect the difference between real science, and an agenda that cherry picks out-of-context material for use in post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacies, then what the hell? — you’re a moron, a scientific ignoramus, and there’s really no point in you being anything different. Just be you, and keep entertaining the rest of us.

Just Googling around, I’m amazed at all the "most important film" hoopla from people who don’t know a goddamned thing about "greenhouse" gasses, their effects, their possible causes, their possible benefits, the scale of the data, the scope of the data, the reliability of the data prior to the whole issue…and on and on.

For the 1% of you capable of getting through something that actually deals with the science scientifically, albeit completely inaccessible to sycophants like Micki Krimmel, then you could start with places like junkscience.com.