Re: Submission from Barrett Brown (Vanity Fair, Skeptic, The Onion etc.)
Subject: Re: Submission from Barrett Brown (Vanity Fair, Skeptic, The Onion etc.)
From: Barrett Brown <barriticus@gmail.com>
Date: 8/11/09, 04:40
To: coates@trueslant.com
Actually, just realized I'll be hanging out in Manhattan quite a bit this week as I've got a friend coming in town tomorrow, so I should be able to come by the office whenever you'd like. Let me know what time would work.
Are you still interested in having me join True/Slant? If so, let me know when you get a moment, as I've got a piece going up onHuffington Post at some point over the next couple of days and the editor wants a bio including a URL for my other work, and I'd like to use the True/Slant contributor page/blog, assuming you still want to go ahead with that.
Sure, I'd be interested in joining up; I'm pretty much web-homeless at the moment. What does that entail, exactly? I really like your name, by the way.
Allison Kilkenny gave me your contact info and said you might be accepting queries at the moment, so I wanted to get in touch. I currently write for Vanity Fair, The Onion, Skeptic, and a few other outlets, and my other work has appeared in dozens of other publications including The Huffington Post and National Lampoon. My first book, Flock of Dodos: Behind Modern Creationism, Intelligent Design, and the Easter Bunny was released in 2007 (Matt Taibbi did a back-cover blurb on it); my next book, which deals with the incompetence of mainstream centrist columnists like Thomas Friedman, will be released nexy year. I also serve as director of communications for Enlighten the Vote (formerly GAMPAC), a PAC that assists atheist candidates for office, among other things. I've appeared on Fox Newsand other, less crazy outlets.
Off the bat, I wanted to see if you might be interested in an allegedly humorous piece I just wrote regarding William Dembski, the de facto leader of the intelligent design movement, and what he's been up to in the years since the 2005 Dover Trial, which ruled that ID cannot be considered to be actual science. I've pasted the piece below. Let me know if you have any use for it or if you'd like to receive some other queries from me down the line.
Thanks,
Barrett Brown Brooklyn, NY 512-560-2302
The Further Adventures of William Dembski and His Merry Band of Theocratic Weirdos
Back in the dark days before ubiquitous internet, disinformation was
sustainable. When you were told that Marilyn Manson is actually Paul
from The Wonder Years,
it would have been difficult to prove otherwise; one would have had to
find someone's old VHS tape on which they'd recorded one of the
episodes, check the credits to figure out what that actor's name was,
and then find someone's copy of Antichrist Superstar and look for the same name on the liner notes. And it was unlikely that you would find old Wonder Years episodes and Marilyn Manson albums in the same place. It was easier to just half-believe that Paul was Marilyn Manson.
Life is different now, if less interesting. Consider William Dembski,
the mathematician and theologian who rose to the top of the
nascent intelligent design pack in the late '90s after claiming to have
proven
that certain aspects of biology can be attributable only to the
intervention of one or more intelligent
entities. As for who or what those entities might be, Dembski is
coy when addressing a potentially secular audience, claiming that there
"are many possibilities." Among these
possibilities, we may determine, is that Dembski is lying; in a 1999
interview with the Christian magazine Touchstone, Dembski stated unambiguously
that "[i]ntelligent design is just the Logos theology of John's Gospel
restated in the idiom of information theory." With ID being
increasingly under attack as theology clothed in science, Dembski has
since
been more hesitant in giving due credit to either John or the Logos.
Bits of information are no longer compartmentalized like so many
scattered VHS tapes and gothic rock album liner notes, which is why
Dembski and company can't get away with trying to portray ID as a
scientific theory with no religious intent while having already
admitted that same religious intent to sympathetic Biblical
literalists. But that crowd doesn't seem to understand this fundamental
aspect of the internet, that Google waits in watch of dishonesty. And
thus it is that Dembski's blog Uncommon Descent is among the
most interesting things that the internet has to offer. More
importantly, it provides us with a sense of how the leaders of the ID
movement would run things if they were ever to run anything other than
a blog.
Dembski began blogging in 2005, perhaps as a means
of procrastination; 2005 was also the last year in which he and his
movement colleagues bothered to put out a new issue of their own scientific journal,
although their lack of output hasn't stopped them from criticizing
mainstream journals for declining to publish their work, non-existent
though it may be. Some choice moments in the years since:
* In conjunction with his friends at the
pro-ID Discovery Institute, Dembski decided to commission a Flash animation ridiculing Judge John Jones,
the Bush-appointed churchgoer who, despite being a Bush-appointed
churchgoer, ruled in the 2005 Dover Trial (known more formerly as Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District
and even more formally as something longer and more formal) that
intelligent design could not be taught in public school science
classes. The animation consisted of Judge Jones represented
as a puppet with his strings being held by various proponents of
evolution; aside from being depicted as unusually flatulent, poor Judge
Jones was also shown to be reading aloud from his court opinion in a
high-pitched voice (Dembski's, it turned out, but sped up to make it
sound sillier). The point of all of this, as The Discovery Institute explained,
was that Jones had supposedly cribbed some 90 percent of his
decision from findings presented by the ACLU, and that this was a very
unusual and terrible thing for Jones to have done. On the contrary,
judges commonly
incorporate the findings of the winning party into their final opinion,
either in whole or in part, and Jones' own written opinion actually
incorporated far less than 90 percent of the findings in question. For
his
part, Dembski agreed to reduce the number of fart noises in the animation if Jones would agree to contribute his own voice. Jones does not appear to have accepted the offer.
*
One of Dembski's hand-picked blog co-moderators, Dave Springer, once
received an e-mail to the effect that the ACLU was about to sue the
Marine Corps in order to stop Marines
from praying; outraged, Springer posted it on his blog in order that his readers could join him in being affronted.
After
all, the e-mail had told him to. "Please send this to people you know
so everyone will know how stupid
the ACLU is Getting [sic] in trying to remove GOD from everything and
every
place in America," the bright-red text exhorted, above pictures of
praying Marines. "Right on!" Dembski added in the comments. It was then
pointed out by other readers that the e-mail was a three-year-old hoax;
the ACLU spokesperson
named therein did not actually exist, and neither did the ACLU's
complaint. Springer was unfazed by the revelation. "To everyone whos
pointed out that the ACLU story is a fabrication
according to snopes.com - thats hardly the point," he explained. "The
pictures of
Marines praying are real." Dembski himself had no further comment.
* Dembski has spent much time and energy pointing out that Charles
Darwin made several racist statements back in the 19th century, even
going so far as to call for a boycott of the British ten-pound note
due to Darwin's picture being displayed thereupon. Incidentally,
Dembski has spent most of the past decade working at universities
within the fold of the Southern Baptist Convention, which was founded
in the 19th century for the sole purpose of defending slavery.
* Springer, the aforementioned aficionado of e-mail forwards, once noted
that he stopped reading an article by a critic of intelligent design
because it contained a cartoon depicting the famous Black Knight
routine from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. "Anyone who needs
to resort to Monty Python in a scientific argument can be safely
ignored as not having any legs to stand on," he announced. Springer can
be forgiven for not being aware that Dembski himself has referenced Monty Python in the context of a scientific argument more than once. Somewhat more inexplicable is that Springer himself has done the exact same thing, making
reference to the very same Monty Python routine and doing so in the
very same context as did the article he was criticizing - twice. I mean, come on.
* Upon being told that University of Texas Professor Eric Pianka had
given a speech in which he'd supposedly asserted that the world would
be better off if most of humanity was killed via a global contagion,
Dembski announced on his blog
that he had just reported Pianka to the Department of Homeland Security
out of concern that the elderly biologist was planning to somehow
contribute to the destruction of humanity. The FBI interviewed Pianka
but took no further action, having perhaps determined that the
recipient of the 2006 Distinguished Texas Scientist award was not
actually planning on killing off the majority of the world's
population.
* Seriously, it was the exact same Monty Python routine.
As much as he puts into his blog, his professorships, and his voice
acting, Dembski is still as prolific an author as ever. His latest effort,
set for release later this year, takes on the wave of pro-atheist books
that have seen publication over the past couple of years. Among the
pundits whom he'll be countering is Christopher Hitchens, contributing editor at Vanity Fair and author of God is Not Great. If you happen to spot Hitchens drinking, it's probably just to calm his nerves.