Rust

Today in class, we talked about religious beliefs.  I used to have beliefs (like the belief that religion is stupid), but now I don't.  I felt like chiming in at times, but I was afraid I might mess something up with the flow of things. Actually, I did chime in a few times.  It was a decent class, I feel like it really came together when we started talking about how our class exists as a group, and how the group is different from other class groups and how our group really seems to get along really well.  I was going to stay for Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed, but I was way behind on a project for my photography class, and I had just seen Expelled a couple of weeks before, so I wasn't really missing out.

I enjoyed Expelled much more than I had expected I would.  I found that the director, Nathan Frankowski, did a good job at making many of the claims in the film appear to be accurate, and he gets even bigger props for making it entertaining as well.

I had been wanting to see Expelled for a while, my interest stemming from the pleasure I have had from watching a Michael Moore film and learning the techniques he uses to create a truly convincing piece of propaganda.  The reason I took so long to get around to watching Expelled is that I was quite sure that the logic in the film would be entirely lacking.  When I did get around to watching it, the first thing I noticed was that Stein makes claims with little backing evidence.  The fact that the evidence was left out of the narrative led me to believe that it was being left out because it either didn't help their case or went against it completely.  After researching Richard Sternberg, I found that the latter was the case. Read "For the Record" here and a detailed breakdown of this part of the movie here.

What separates Nathan Frankowski from Michael Moore is that Michael Moore spins things his way with the heavy use of montage, letting viewers assume things without actually telling us, while Frankowski simply presents us with straight up lies to get his point across.  But, as I said before, the film is still entertaining, and I maintain that films are meant to be entertaining, which is why Expelled still holds up as a decent film in my book.

The down side of the way this film is compiled is that the issue they are dealing with seems to be an issue they created themselves.  If there really is a problem with people being dealt with the way they claim in the film, we don't know who they are and don't know that it is really a problem.  If it really was an issue, why wouldn't the filmmakers talk to the people who are really being discriminated against.  If there are people being treated like this, then they should get to have a voice, but the lack of evidence in the film leads me to believe that this issue does not exist, at least not on the scale it appears to be in the movie.

If we are trying to examine the points the film is trying to make, I would only disagree with one of them.  That point is the connection made between the Holocaust and Darwinism.  I won't go into that issue because I've already written too much on the subject on this movie, and I feel most people would be able to see pretty easily the problems with this argument.

A good day to yous.