AndromedasWake and I attended a conversation between Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers yesterday. Well, we tried. But we were slightly obstructed by the protesters who forcibly entered the theatre and then hippied up the whole damn shooting match.

Protesters? Oh, yes. You may count upon it.

Members of the Education Activist Network spent about half an hour sitting on the stage and talking nonsense. I gather they’re annoyed with Dawkins for his involvement with AC Grayling’s New College for the Humanities, about which they are disgusted, I tell you.

The gist seems to be a) it costs a lot and b) we can’t afford it therefore it is c) an affront to the laws of God and Man. According to the EAN, education is a “human right”, which I don’t think really follows, but even if it is, how do you quantify exactly how MUCH education is a human right? Is it basic levels of numeracy and literacy? Or is it the kind of suave service Grayling aims to provide?

I had to wonder about these protesters, these predominately young, groomed and foppish types as they flounced around the stage. The purpose seemed mainly to have good hair and pose dramatically, rather than effect any meaningful dialogue. I don’t imagine many involved will have donated all their spare money to educational charities, or devoted their spare time to mentoring and private tutoring. They probably like bursting into rooms and then not making sense.

Let’s dismantle the notion that expensive, private education is somehow bad. Assume that I, over a period of years, create an institute to teach guitar. It takes me a lot of time, money and effort, and is done with the aid of many people. In order to recoup my losses and in order to pay for the highest standards of tutelage, the costs are high. Does anyone have the right to complain? Nope. It’s my college and I can charge what I like. No-one has the right to free or cheap guitar tuition; it’s an exchange of money for a service. Even if education is a human right, is an exceptional education a human right? Grayling et al are trying to create extraordinarily high standards of service; costs will, correspondingly, be high.

Let’s make it even simpler. You go to Greggs (a bakery chain in the UK, not sure if it’s worldwide) and a cake is cheap. Got to Les Cakery de Pierre van de Gateaux, in Richtown, and a cake is expensive. But it will be a damn nice cake. Does anyone protest the fact that some cakes are too expensive for people to afford? Hell no. If a bunch of people decide to set up a private institution to offer a service, and the service is an elite one that cannot be sustained without high fees, how is it the right of poor people to demand the abolishment of same? At least it’s an institution devoted to the dissemination of knowledge, even if everyone can’t afford it. What the EAN are actually trying to do is reduce the number of educational establishments, on the grounds that they can’t afford them even though they have no right to expect to be able to afford them.

There was a Q&A at the end, but it seemed that the remaining protesters (many having been removed by police earlier) didn’t want to rush to the microphones, which you might have thought would be their purpose. Mainly they remained in their seats and heckled rather than taking the chance to directly converse with Dawkins on the subject.

Class act, guys.

Star trek provides many clear examples of morality portrayed through the lens of science fiction. The most prominent ethical instruction which permeates many episodes is the ‘Prime Directive’ which constrains the actions of Starfleet personnel. Simply put, the Prime Directive prevents intervention into pre-warp alien societies so as not to interfere with the natural course of their cultural development.  In principle the Prime Directive is an absolute rule to be obeyed even when the inhabitants of a primitive planet are about to be wiped out. In practice, the crew sometimes engage in exceptions to prevent genocides (e.g., Patterns of Force) or stop devastating asteroid impacts (e.g., For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky). Although these violations are not without consequences for both crew and captain, the interventions are usually portrayed as the right action given the circumstances. The real-world political doctrine of non-intervention can be seen as the contemporary equivalent of the Prime Directive. Based on the principles of state sovereignty and self-determination it says that states cannot and should not interfere in the domestic affairs of others. This doctrine is also supposed to be absolute, frowning upon alliances and wars on foreign soil; it instead opts for the containment of problems within local regions. However, just like the Prime Directive, non-interventionism has been violated in recent history by several prominent countries. One clear example is the UN intervention in Kosovo which was carried out under dubious legal authority. The justification given was the prevention of a humanitarian crisis, similar to the reason in Patterns of Force. States will also rush to provide humanitarian aid in countries, like Haiti, which have been hit with natural disasters. Star Trek managed to give us a discussion of non-interventionism, covering both the reasons for it and the horrid situations that result from pursing it to the limit. All this was done in a neutral setting where the idea could be freely discussed away from any real-world political divides which hamper proper dialogue. Star Trek also gave us the moral reasons for breaking the Prime Directive long before humanitarian concerns motivated us on Earth to get involved in the domestic crises of others.

Although science-fiction regularly deals with broad, societal-scale ethics there is also a deep theme of personal morality promoted through the hero or heroine of each series. They are the ones faced with tough decisions and regularly have to balance competing interests when confronted with moral dilemmas. Because they are our heroes they usually make the decision that result in the best outcome in every situation, but sci-fi asks whether merely doing the right thing is enough. If the hero does the right thing but acts for the wrong reasons they will lose our respect and we will begin to question their ethical status.  Delenn, our heroine of Babylon 5, has to face this additional layer of complexity for her moral decisions.  In Comes the Inquisitor she enters a crucible designed to force out the motivations for her actions. Over and over the inquisitor asks who she is. Is she someone filled with pride, puffed up with her own self-importance, and desperate for the glory that will come should she save the universe from destruction? Or is she someone motivated solely by the desire to preserve life and even willing to pay the ultimate price “For one person, in the dark, where no one will ever know, or see”²? According to consequentialist moral theories, what determines the rightness of an act is the outcome alone. No consideration is given to the intentions that the actor was trying to put into practice. Babylon 5 asks whether the outcomes are enough to determine the morally of a given situation and the answers given is a resounding “No!” As is said in the episode, “If you do the right thing for the wrong reasons, the work becomes corrupt, impure, and ultimately self-destructive.”² Consider the war in Iraq, there’s no question that Saddam Hussein was a cruel and corrupt dictator and that removing him was a good thing for the Iraqi people. However, it would be hard to maintain that the political leaders at the time were acting with the intension of helping Iraq rather than for the wrong reasons which included political and strategic gain. These intensions corrupted the entire exercise and, quite rightly, leave a foul taste in many a mouth. This example shows that a person who performs a kind deed for another solely because of a selfish benefit is not truly acting in an altruistic manner. Without the right intentions, the moral actor is not really moral at all. Furthermore, good intentions are more likely to lead to good outcomes, while the cases of bad intentions leading to good outcomes are rare.  Promoting good intentions as morally necessary is one way to improve the consequences of our ethical decision making in the real world.

Speaking of wartime conflict, science-fiction offers a way to discuss the morality of war without getting bogged down in the politics of more local events. We Earthers have a saying: in war, all things are permitted. This statement is explored and taken to its logical conclusion in Battlestar Galactica. In this alternate reality, humanity has built an army of advanced robots and employed them as slaves to perform the menial work necessary to keep a civilisation running. But the Cylons became something greater than their original design and have reached the point where they think and feel so much like their human counterparts it is difficult to tell them apart. The Cylons then turn on their former masters, determined to conquer all humankind. As the show progresses and most of the human military is destroyed, the remaining resistance turns to increasingly brutal acts in order to prevent the Cylons from achieving a complete victory. If the Cylons were merely mindless robots, the actions of the humans would not be morally questionable but because the Cylons share many of the same properties as humans the tactics used by the resistance are open to scrutiny. Even in the context of war, some lines should not be crossed. In the episode Flesh and Bone, a Cylon operative convinces the crew that he has planted a nuclear bomb aboard one of their ships. In this clear case of a ‘ticking bomb’ the interrogation turns to torture in order to learn its location. The bomb scenario is brought up ad nausem in the debates on torture and is usually seen as a trump card. However, Battlestar Galactica highlights a big problem with its use because, as it turns out, there is no bomb and the torture was ultimately pointless. The problem with all ticking bomb scenarios is that, in a real-life situation, the interrogator cannot know that there is a bomb, that the bomber will give up its whereabouts, or that the bomb can actually be stopped. It might be said that the Cylon should not have lied about the existence of the bomb in the first place and so the torture was justified, but this literally makes torture the punishment for lying, a completely unacceptable situation. The second wartime issue conveyed to us by Battlestar Galactica is that of suicide bombing civilian targets in the name of resisting occupation. In the episode rightly called Occupation, members of the human resistance start suicide bombing Cylon and, more controversially, Cylon-friendly human targets. Most people would consider any such act to be morally abominable but set in an alternate universe with humanity on the brink of extinction, Battlestar Galatica manages to make us sympathise with the beleaguered resistance and perhaps even elicits some approval for their actions. Although, by itself, the episode is not enough to change our minds on the tactic of suicide bombing, it is enough to give us pause when we hear of similar instances on this planet and ask ourselves whether we would do the same if under occupation by foreign forces.

We have now seen how science fiction can enlighten us on issues as broad ranging as non-interventionism, intention/consequence approaches to ethics, and the morality of war. By removing the cultural and political barriers that exist in everyday life, science fiction allows for an unprejudiced discussion of moral dilemmas. The fantastic tales provide a narrative that lets us approach ethics in an indirect manner but, as I’ve shown, the results are very much applicable in the terrestrial world. Science fiction is a moral thought experiment performed at the cosmic scale. Ultimately, science fiction gives us an external standard and a common frame of reference to draw upon when faced with our own ethical decisions. If you’ve never considered the problematic aspects of the Prime Directive, never understood why the Vorlons require pure intentions, or never felt pity for a robot in agony then you haven’t grasped the full range of ethical lessons that science fiction has to offer. Without an appreciation of scifi, how can you be moral?

1. Gene Roddenberry (paraphrase).
2. Comes the inquisitor,  J. Michael Straczynski

However, you develop an unfair bias of a newspaper when you peruse it mainly to find new nonsense to write about in your blog. You ignore all rational articles about politics\current affairs\crossbows to the face and concentrate only on articles that guarantee a spout of vitriol frothy enough to incur a transparent sense of self-righteousness. And as a result, your perception is that the chosen paper exists only to print stories about religion, druids and the supernatural. Unfair, since the Metro regularly dishes out reasonably informative articles about modern science and astronomy.

My last fodder was about druids fixing roads, and it’s hard to have sympathy for a publication that will indulge itself with such asinine balls. But almost the next day, indeed it could have been the next day, the Metro printed this. Our very own Phil Plait, who I have happily if briefly met (and who disillusioned me slightly by expressing a certain reserve for District 9, damn it Phil when will you see that guys in alien power armour are the next Casablanca) blogged about a photo of a lunar rock that had rolled into a crater. The Metro picked this up and wrote the small piece to which I just linked.

They could have taken Phil’s approach, which was “OMFG space is awesome and beautiful”. And they sort of did. But they also titled the article “Proof that golf-playing God shot a hole-in-one on the Moon?”

Facedesk.

Why, why would you do this? What manner of journalist would take a story about a lunar event of some rarity and make it into terrifyingly inept pun-based  pseudoscience? Am I only this annoyed because I loathe religion? No, I don’t think I am. The image itself deserved a tone of joyous solemnity (and sure, Phil played with a few golfing metaphors himself before getting into the science of it; I imagine the Metro stole the idea.) But that wouldn’t have been enough to make a prominent article; only invoking God could elevate the story into something worthy of News. Not content with printing stories about supernatural druidical assholery, they feel the need to take stories of astronomical wonder and create supernatural assholery. ” . . . this picture suggests that the Almighty could have had a round or two on the grey course – and even scored a hole-in-one.” What? You can almost hear the satisfied smirk as it drips off the journo’s face and congeals in the folds of his Armani tie.

You were so close to redeeming yourself, Metro. Now I hate you hate you hate you.

Print news, fine. Even if that means factually reporting on nonsense, fine. But taking science and jokingly inserting God? I will end you. With sticks.

How to make an Avogadro Slammer

You will need:

A Martini Glass

A Cocktail Shaker

A Large Jug (the bigger the better)

A Pipette

Ingredients

1 part Gin

1 part Vodka

1 part Dry Vermouth

Tonic Water

A Lemon

A Lime

Green Olives

Red Cherries

Ice

500,000 Gallons of Water

Instructions

1. Use the pipette to place one drop of each spirit into a large jug full of water.
   
2. Stir gently.
   
3. Use the pipette to place one drop of the mixture into the cocktail shaker along with some crushed ice.
   
4. Strike the cocktail shaker forcefully until thoroughly shaken.
   
5. Pour the contents of the cocktail shaker into a fresh jug of water.
   
6. Stir gently.
   
7. Repeat steps 3 to 6 until not a single molecule of the original spirits remain.
   
8. Place one drop of the final mixture in a chilled Martini glass and serve with tonic water, a slice of lemon, a slice of lime, two olives and a cherry.

WARNING: Due to the way in which it is made the Avogadro Slammer in an extremely potent drink. The League of Reason accepts no responsibility should you become intoxicated or hospitalised as the result of drinking one. Side effects can include liver damage and long term brain damage. Please drink responsibly. Do not drive a vehicle for at least a month after consuming a Avogadro Slammer and give up operating heavy machinery all together.

While I had anticipated support and thanks from my fellow rationalists, I was surprised to see support from creationists too. It seems that FVH is a common ground for both sides: rationalists can use it as a resource for material to debunk (though, sadly, I have yet to see it used this way), and creationists have a source of entertainment.

So why do I spend my time and hard drive space on the opponents to rationality, freethinking, and science? The answer is simple: as long as FundieVideoHell exists, they cannot (or rather, shouldn’t) claim they are being censored by us. Well, at least they cannot claim all atheists are censoring them.

Now, I have, so far, done this entirely on my own resources. I enjoy finding out what is new and happening from the other side. But when I came across the brochure for the “2010 Creation Supercamp,” which is only a few hours drive away, I realized something. Something that deeply frightened me: I wanted to go to this conference. I want to film creationist conferences. But I also don’t want to be an e-begger like VenomFangX.

So I was wondering, should I start a PayPal so that I can take donations from those who are willing to support FundieVideoHell? And would you (the lucky readers) be able to spread the word about FVH? I think there may be creationists out there who would help support the spread of their message, both by word-of-mouth and monetarily.

So, I’m not making comparisons to Raging Bull (1980) or Taxi Driver (1976). Good movies. But there’s no comparison. It’s not even worth trying and it’s not fair.

Shutter Island (2010) is – and now I regret mentioning Hitchcock – a psychological thriller. But, the experience isn’t thrilling and the psychology isn’t a maze of insanity and delusion that we need to keep us from checking our iPhones for more than two hours. It’s more like a long commute. We know where we’re going; we know how to get there; we don’t really want to go.

The central power of the psychological thriller is that we, as viewers, aren’t afforded with our ordinary omniscience. As we ponder whether the protagonist is actually insane, we realize that we can’t possibly answer the question based purely on the evidence – all the evidence we encounter could be part of the insanity. We have to just endure not knowing and enjoy the complexity of the puzzle. And, ultimately, it all reveals itself and we laugh a little. And, it turns out, we’re not insane.

But, Shuttle Island takes the potency of psychological thriller and forfeits it within about twenty minutes. And, so, without revealing it now – I promise you: you’ll know whether the protagonist is crazy or not pretty quickly. And then, once you’ve figured it out, you can leave the theater.

Leonardo DiCaprio is certainly a fine actor, let me add. I hated him for years. So very cute, adorning the lockers of every teenage girl in my middle school. I suppose I thought of him as competition. But, I suppose I can forgive him. It’s not like the competition was down to him and me.

2/5 stars. Competent acting. But, the rules of the thriller are broken to the point of boredom.

Monotheism vs Polytheism

One of the central themes of the show so far seems to be monotheism vs polytheism. The world(s) of Caprica are generally polytheistic, based loosely around the Greek Olympic gods, with the various planets having patron gods as well as specific gods governing specific aspects of life. There is however a growing sect, apparently popular amongst the young, of monotheistic believes who are portrayed as an interesting mix of wide-eyed youths seeking a more meaningful life, fundamentalist purity police and religious terrorists. So far this group is definitely being portrayed as the bad guys, an idea that was summed up nicely when one character stated his fear of anyone who followed the commands of one all powerful god who was always right and could never be questioned. This got me thinking.

Does monotheism, with its idea of a single, all-powerful, all-knowing god who can not be questioned, lead more naturally to violent and negative outcomes, as portrayed in the series, than does polytheism, with it’s multiple much more human like gods each with their own foibles and eccentricities?

Leaving atheism completely out of the equation does monotheism or polytheism, and the various things these belief systems entail, more accurately reflect the reality of the world around us? And, given the answer to this question, does this help to explain the rise of monotheism over the last few centuries?

Life After Death

Maybe the more interesting idea raised by the show was that of life after death by way of technology. The question was raised that if it were possible to somehow create a synthetic copy of yourself, completely with all of your memories, emotions, points of view etc, would that be you? What if this copy was somehow kept completely up to date so that, should you die suddenly, there would be a continuation of what makes you “you”, would you have survived your own death? My feeling on this is that, no, it would not be you but rather a copy of you, as I can’t help but think that what makes you “you” is more than just your memories etc. However if does raise an interesting thought experiment, an answer to which I am still not sure of.

Imagine you have a car that you love.

Over the years variously things go wrong with this car. It gets a flat tire, so you change it. A head light blows, so you change it. The engine conks out, so you change it. But you still think of it as your car, and more importantly as the same car. Over the many years you have it you end up changing every single part of the car so that the car you have now has not a single original part found on the car when you first bought it. And yet again you no doubt still think of it as the same car.

Now apply this to yourself.

We all know the story that every cell in your body is replaced over a 7 year period. Now while this isn’t exactly true let’s run with it and take it a bit further. Imagine a point in the future where you can do to yourself what you did to that car. When your kidneys start to go you just replace them with synthetic ones. Same for your liver, then your lungs and heart. Eventually you replace all of your internal organs, save your brain, with synthetic ones. Then you start on your bones, your muscles, your nerves etc. Bit by bit you replace every part of your body but in such a way that there is always a continuation of “you”. Finally just your brain is left of your original body, but now you start upgrading this as well. You replace your motor cortex with a synthetic one that works better with your synthetic body. You change out your visual cortex to get better use out of your new eyes. Bit by bit you change every part of your brain until one day you swap out the last natural part of you and become a fully synthetic human.

Ultimately is this any different from creating a fully synthetic copy of yourself and just transferring your memories across? The end result is the same. All the biological aspects that made up your body no longer exist and yet there has been a continuity of your memories, thoughts etc. Does it make a difference that the change takes place gradually rather than all at once? Once your body is fully synthetic can it actually be said that “you” are still alive? Assuming this process of replacing broken parts could go on indefinitely would this mean you have cheated death, or did you die years ago and something else now exists in your place?

Some things for you to chew over. I look forward to reading your thoughts on these issues.

The Omen(1976) was good. The Exorcist (1973). The Prophecy(1995).

Legion(2010), for the record, is certainly not a shameful entry into the genre, but it’s certainly not going to be the standard by any stretch of the imagination. It involves a supposed second “flood,” but this one, carried out by angels. An extermination of the human race. Unlike Noah, there is no family earmarked for repopulating the planet and this second destruction of the earth also coincides with the birth of child. This child, incidentally, makes no sense. Is he the second coming? Why would God destroy the earth moments before the second coming? Seems bizarre.

There are far less cool angel scenes and a lot of the violence is just trite, ordinary zombie-like violence. The whole world is being destroyed and our vision is limited to a few small miles of desert boredom – unsatisfying.

The movie does, however, make one interesting stab at Christian fundamentalism, whether they realize it not. The main good guy in the movie is the Archangel Michael and he has been ordered by God to lead the extermination of mankind and kill the child… whoever the child really is. Michael searches his conscience and refuses the order, instead joining the humans and protecting the child. You would have gotten that from the trailer so don’t be too mad!

Gabriel, the equally bronzed archangel who takes over after Michael’s departure, is less sensitive to sympathy but argues that following orders is what really matters. Obviously, sympathy wins over blind obedience in the end, but certain parallels to the story of Abraham and Isaac and the Nazis, of course, are somewhat transparent. Sometimes I can understand Abraham’s decisions; sometimes I can’t. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t kill Isaac, but would that be because I had placed sympathy over obedience as an act of courage or because generally I was scared shitless.

For my part, I’m glad that somewhere in cinema “God told me to do it” isn’t a good reason.

Twenty games were scrutinised to see if the conflicts they portrayed and what players can do in the virtual theatres of war were subject to the same limits as in the real world.

“The practically complete absence of rules or sanctions is… astonishing,” said the study.

…

The games were analysed to see “whether certain scenes and acts committed by players would constitute violations of international law if they were real, rather than virtual”.

Unsurprisingly they found that many games violated the rules of war with reckless abandon. But what exactly is the problem with this and what do they want games designers to do about it?

It said games were sending an “erroneous” message that conflicts were waged without limits or that anything was acceptable in counter-terrorism operations.

“This is especially problematic in view of today’s reality,” said the study.

In particular, it said, few games it studied reflected the fact that those who “violate international humanitarian law end up as war criminals, not as winners”.

The authors said they did not wish to make games less violent, instead, they wrote: “[We] call upon game producers to consequently and creatively incorporate rules of international humanitarian law and human rights into their games.”

Ok seriously, we are talking about computer games here right? The games they looked at included Far Cry 2, Metal Gear Solid and 24: The Game. Does anyone think that these games have anything to do with reality? Do they really think that playing a game like Army of Two will cause people to go out and commit real life war crimes? Just as playing Doom doesn’t cause people to go on a homicidal rampage, playing war games doesn’t turn you into Hitler or Stalin. Computer games are a form of escapism and as such should, first and foremost, be entertaining and fun. Sometimes after a hard day at work there is nothing more relaxing than loading up your favourite game and taking out your frustration on a few innocent civilians. This doesn’t mean for a second that I would ever do the same thing in real life and no matter how realistic the blood spatter or how convincing the cries of pain I, and the vast majority of games, are intelligent enough to remember that it is, at the end of the day, only a game.

This just strikes me as yet another pop at gamers from a group of people who neither understand them nor the games they play.

You’re not protected by law, as many people seem to think – but police do tend to steer clear, so as long as you don’t try to wash the colour off a black man or anything similarly importunate you’re probably ok.

I visited briefly a few weeks ago, and noticed that most speakers ignored dissent. Hardly surprising, but there was something distressing about watching a guy on a stepladder spouting nonsense whilst onlookers literally tugged at his sleeves in an attempt to elicit acknowledgement.

I told a friend about this, and he told his friend, and because his friend is all about freedom of speech we decided to redress the balance somewhat. The practical upshot is that I ended up at Speaker’s Corner last Sunday, with a sign, querulously demanding enquiry and questioning on the principle that no-one else would invite such a thing. And bits of it got filmed. And we’re going to edit it into a proper thing.

It was a slightly stressful and entirely awesome experience. I got many dozens of people crowded round, maybe up to a 100 or more, and non-stop questioning for maybe 3 hours. All the old chestnuts came up, along with some new ones that forced me to answer more carefully – it’s certainly not as if I instantly refuted everything, although that was the trend. Sadly, without a formalised debate system, I got overwhelmed from time to time – maybe half a dozen believers all firing questions and not allowing me to respond. But it was all rigorous stuff, and the kind of thing that’s useful to submit yourself to. I’ve debated many people online and a couple in person, but never thrown open my intellectual legs in such a manner before.

The best conversations came from people who partially agreed (My sign read “I’m atheist. There’s no proof for God. And I don’t dodge questions. Go on, ask”). Fundamentalists weren’t interested in arguments, so I had a lady saying she took the bible literally despite the contradictions. A few good eggs took my side entirely, which is fun but somewhat unsatisfying. But a lot of people saw my point but also couldn’t see how the complexity of life existed without God, for example, and those discussions were the best.

Even better, literally seconds after I’d set up a group of people arrived bearing a sign saying “Ask an atheist”. Good people. They had cakes. I didn’t have any, but cake was there, and that’s all that matters.

And the most common question . . . ”Can you prove God doesn’t exist?” You can only imagine the fun I had with that.

If all goes well, I’ll have a video made of the day pretty soon. I wasn’t confident about my performance initially, but from the outside I apparently handled myself well. Can’t wait to see how it comes out.

I also liked the simple but effective way they told the story. The story focused on a mother with three boys, the oldest of which suffered from autism that she believed was a direct result of vaccination. Every time she brought this up she was politely, sympathetically but directly told that this was not the case, that all the evidence showed that there was no link between autism and vaccination. Each time this happened she would come back one of the typical anti-vaccination replies. A mother just knows these things. You can’t be sure that vaccination didn’t cause his autism. He was vaccinated and the light immediately went out in his eyes. All powerful arguments to be sure but all anecdotal and unsupported by any evidence.

Anyway the reason she is at the doctors is because her middle son is sick and it quickly becomes evident that he has measles. It is also revealed that neither the middle or the youngest son have been vaccinated due to the mothers conviction that vaccination is what caused her oldest son’s autism. The doctors pled with her to let them vaccinate the youngest son but she won’t let them. After all, she says, measles isn’t that bad, it’s a childhood disease that kids get to toughen up their immune system. Nothing to worry about. Well, as I am sure you can guess, this quickly proves not to be the case and the sick child is rushed to hospital, but still the mother will not let the doctors vaccinate her youngest son.

The middle son gets sicker and sicker and the mother begs the doctors to help him while still resolutely refusing to let them protect her youngest child. The middle son starts to convulse and almost stops breathing but the doctors bring him back and then, in desperation, one of the characters rushes out and vaccinates the youngest son. The mother goes crazy, screaming at the doctors, accusing them of assault, telling them that they are over-reacting and have given her son autism. She threatens to sue but before she can say anything more an alarm goes off and a code blue is sounded. He middle son’s heart has stopped beating. The doctors rush to save him but despite working on him for almost half an hour he dies.

There is a very powerful scene after this with the mother and the doctor sitting in the hallway outside the now dead son’s room. The mother, tears running down her face, announces that she can’t believe this happened, that she thought measles was just like getting a cold. The doctor says nothing; he doesn’t need to as the point is all too painfully clear. Measles is a killer and the very best weapon we have against it is vaccination. Yes there are reasons to be cautious, some people can react badly to vaccines, but they do not cause autism and your “mommy instinct” is no match for years of well-researched medical science.

Private Practice may be a little relationship focused and soap operary at times but I was very impressed with how they handled this episode. It is all too common on TV and in the news for them to take either the “balanced” approach of making it seem like both sides have equally valid arguments or to squarely side with the anti-vaccination movement. It is refreshing to see the topic handled in a way that is entertaining, educational and solidly based upon carefully researched scientific evidence. I just wish it were only a story.

His posts range from misrepresenting concepts of evolution to discussing the “missing link” and dredging up the critically flawed, and really very silly Grand Canyon argument.

Oh, and don’t expect to be able to correct him. This is, after all, a creationist blog. We all know that free speech, open criticism and scientific citations are kryptonite to the Hovind clan, and commenters are widely known to be the minions of Satan himself.

The Overlord, PZ, has already blogged about this, so for my contribution, I thought I’d give you guys a little motivator to throw around the tubes. It wasn’t hard to find inspiration, because even when he was attempting to honestly represent the scientific method with a picture of “how it’s supposed to work”, Eric’s rotting brain said no.

Downfall of dprjones

Hopefully, YouTube will see the error of it’s ways. If it fails to prevent these situations arising and continues to allow censorship to become a valid form of argument, it will fade into obscurity due to a lack of relevancy.

DJ

This film is balls to the wall winrar, culminating in a terrifying [censored] in which Scotty amputates [censored] [censored], plugging the leaking [censored] and so saving the ship. The scene in which Kirk [censored] for about fifteen minutes, before [censored] for a further five, is superlative. Special mention must be made of Kenneth Branagh, who [censored] every living thing in the movie.

Some surprises as well. Spock and Sulu smashing each other round the head and chest with office chairs; Chekhov’s wincing “toilet incident”; someone shouting “KHAN!!!” every few minutes; Nathan Fillion in a surprise cross-universe cameo as Mal Reynolds (although he [censored] after less than two minutes of screen time). And, of course, the blisteringly fast-paced trolley race which leaves a bewildered McCoy bleeding from his [censored], [censored] and partially severed [censored].

I heartily recommend this film to everyone. Where else are you going to see [censored], [censored], [censored] and – best of all – inter-species [censored]?

imdb
Rotten Tomatoes

Believe the hype.