…and this is a 
There is such a thing as bad satire
Category: Creationism
Posted on: September 23, 2008 10:12 PM, by PZ Myers
Roger Ebert has revealed the purpose behind the peculiar creationist Q&A he posted the other day. I had suggested it was either poorly done satire or his site had been hacked. Ebert has now confessed that it was poorly done satire.
He didn't say it was poorly done, of course. He says he was trying to show that people have lost their ability to detect satire, that we're unable to sense the 'invisible quotation marks' that surround such exercises, in the absence of overt declarations that it is satirical.
To sense the irony, you have to sense the invisible quotation marks. I suspect quotation marks may be growing imperceptible to us. We may be leaving an age of irony and entering an age of credulity. In a time of shortened attention spans and instant gratification, trained by web surfing and movies with an average shot length of seconds, we absorb rather than contemplate. We want to gobble all the food on the plate, instead of considering each bite. We accept rather than select.
There is a little truth to that — one of the things I really deplore about internet communications, for instance, is the use of those ghastly little smilies. It's an admission of an inability to communicate — the words are insufficient, so crude labels are required. It's a symptom of a lack of trust in the readers perceptivity.
But I also think Ebert is fundamentally wrong. He's trying to place the fault on the reader, and I think there's a serious flaw in his thinking there. One indicator of his error is that he compares what he had done to Swift's A Modest Proposal.
Were there invisible quotation marks about my Creationism article? Of course there were. How could you be expected to see them? In a sense, I didn't want you to. I wrote it straight. The quotation marks would have been supplied by the instincts of the ironic reader. The classic model is Jonathan Swift's famous essay, "A Modest Proposal." I remember Miss Seward at Urbana High School, telling us to read it in class and note the exact word at which Swift's actual purpose became clear. None of us had ever heard of it, and she didn't use a giveaway word like "satire." Yet not a single person in the class concluded that Swift was seriously proposing that the starving Irish eat their babies. We all got it.
Correct. We got it, because no one anywhere else was seriously proposing cannibalism. It was shocking, unbelievable, and there were plenty of clues, as Ebert explains, that the proponent of such an odious plan could not be serious.
But Ebert is no Jonathan Swift. Imagine if, in 1729, there had been a number of letters to the editor by various authors proposing that Irish children be exterminated and eaten. Imagine that laws of that nature were being seriously debated in Parliament, and that one of the parties had made it a part of their platform. While the laws were being regularly defeated, opponents still had to stand up and seriously debate why it was unethical to eat babies. Imagine that a candidate for prime minister actually solemnly suggested that we ought to at least consider the merits of eating Irish children.
In that context, Swift's essay would have fallen flat as a cowflop dropped from the Tower of London. His efforts to use straight-faced absurdity and hyperbole and satire to expose the lesser injustices of the time would not have succeeded at all. The invisible quotation marks would be undetectable, because there would have been a substantial background of equivalent proposals given in absolute seriousness.
That's Ebert's mistake. He presented a plain statement of creationist beliefs with satirical intent, but that intent cannot possibly be seen in a world where millions say exactly the same things with sincerity. Does Ken Ham have invisible quotation marks around the AiG Statement of Faith? No. Was the Wedge Document an amusing practical joke by the Discovery Institute? No. Is Sarah Palin pulling the entire nation's leg when she attends her speaking-in-tongues, young-earth-creationist, End-Times-worshipping church? I wish.
Irony is dying, but it's not because evolutionists have lost their ability to sense it, or have become too shallow and unwilling to think deeply. It's because we're dealing every day with other people who proffer 'modest proposals' that are ludicrous and absurd and unbelievable, yet people do believe in them. I knew enough about Roger Ebert to trust that he hadn't written it in seriousness, but I'm afraid it was still poorly done. He seems not to have noticed that there are elements of the culture at large that have surpassed the obvious inanity of his essay, and that tossing out one more modest proposal among a multitude would have nothing to make it stand out as illustrative and noticeable.
Ebert is clearly smart enough to understand the correct scientific idea of evolution. His exercise, though, reveals that he's really out of touch on the nature of creationist belief — he seems to think it is sufficient to state it to see the fallacies, without recognizing that creationists say these same things every day, and accept them as a matter of fact. He tries to credit creationists with being more canny than evolutionists, when they simply could not see anything exceptional about Ebert's statements at all.
Maybe we need to rename Poe's Law to Ebert's Fallacy.
Comments
Posted by: Quiet Desperation | September 23, 2008 10:19 PM
I'd say you are being too hard on him, but Ebert evaporated two hours of my life when I rented Center of The World based on his recommendation. Burn, Ebert, burn!
Posted by: Jason | September 23, 2008 10:20 PM
Haha, yeah, who is this Poe guy anyway? What did he do to get a whole internet law named after him. (Then again, its the internet, so it doesn't really matter)
Posted by: tmtoulouse | September 23, 2008 10:25 PM
This "poe guy" is Nathan Poe, from an internet forum. Check out Poe's law for its history.
Posted by: divalent | September 23, 2008 10:25 PM
Or, perhaps Ebert is just not steeped in the creationist battles and literature enough to know that (unlike most of the regular readers here) what he wrote was so close to what the creationist really believe. It's a core concern for many here, but I doubt it is for him.
And it is even less likely that the average American is aware of the specific claims of the hard YEC "background". So while it may not have worked for you, it's very likely that it did for a majority of his readers.
Posted by: clinteas | September 23, 2008 10:27 PM
I thought the same thing yesterday when I read his post,but you said it much better,PZ.
These Creationist claims may look like satire to a Martian coming to visit who is exposed to the insanity for the first time,but to anyone who is familiar with these people,this was just a statement of common creo claims,and not satire at all.
Then again,there is a reason there is such a thing as Poe's Law,and certainly this :
//We may be leaving an age of irony and entering an age of credulity//
is something we can see right here on Pharyngula every day.But it has to do with people's increasing lack of education and knowledge,and their religious delusions.
Posted by: Kome | September 23, 2008 10:27 PM
Meh. This doesn't strike me as anything more than a type of Sokal Affair that happened to show that we're as capable of being just as human, which in part means being flawed and sometimes taking things a little too seriously, as anyone/everyone else.
C'mon people. Most of you noticed there were satirical elements to the page. The moose bit alone was enough. But many of us kept carrying on about it, and now it's time to eat a little crow. It doesn't mean we're more gullible than creationists, it just means we're human. Sometimes that means being made to look a little foolish. Own up to it, laugh it off, and go on with life.
Posted by: Kel | September 23, 2008 10:28 PM
Surely it wasn't that badly done, that bit about Neanderthal Man was the giveaway - for me at least. But you are right PZ, the reason it's not so obvious is that there are loons who preach this material on a daily basis. When the Tyrannosaurus frolicked gayly through the garden of eden eating only plants is considered a staple of their beliefs, there's no way to up the ante in order to satirise it.
Posted by: PZ Myers | September 23, 2008 10:33 PM
The moose was not sufficient, I'm afraid. Read about PYGMIES + DWARFS to see what I mean -- the moose bit was unimaginative and petty compared to what real creationists actually say.
But like I said, I didn't think Ebert had suddenly become a creationist. The choices were that he'd been hacked or that he'd tried some unconvincing satire.
Posted by: scooter | September 23, 2008 10:33 PM
I think you are correct in giving Ebert a C- on his satire paper. It doesn't deviate far enough from the Creo mainstream to be ridicule the intended victim.
Ebert's parody was fairly mainstream, not as weird as Ken Ham or Hovind and downright rational compared to VenomFangX.
HOWEVER, as a practical joke, I give him an A, I'm still laughing. He sure got the wheels spinnin over here
BWAHAHAHAHAAAAAA Go Roger
over and out
Posted by: Escuerd | September 23, 2008 10:43 PM
I wonder whether there's a tendency for sarcasm to be less detectable to the scientifically minded. It is for me (though I'm conscious of it, and was pretty certain that what Ebert wrote was satire).
At my university (where everyone primarily studies math, science or engineering), all admitted students must take a preliminary writing exam before they can take humanities courses. When I was admitted, there were several articles provided, and we had to choose some subset of them to rebut or to support.
I chose to rebut the one I found most egregiously wrong. It was written by a professor ostensibly extolling the virtues of running a school like a business that was merely selling a product. Of course, it was satire, and the reason it fooled me was much like the one you cite. I knew people who would explicitly made arguments of the same form. I didn't discover it was satire until a few months later when a professor who'd been among those reviewing it revealed in passing that somewhere between one third and one half of the freshman class had written on this essay without seeing the sarcasm.
I wouldn't be surprised to discover that scientists tend to be more forthright, and to expect more forthrightness in their communications than people in general, though I have no data to determine whether this is actually the case.
Posted by: travc | September 23, 2008 10:44 PM
Seriously good point about our being in contact with so many insane people that Poe's law is getting more and more generally applicable.
Emoticons serve a very useful purpose though. So you can take your dislike of smilies and shove it you old fart :p
Posted by: Grumpy | September 23, 2008 10:45 PM
...the moose bit was unimaginative and petty compared to what real creationists actually say.
The moose bit was about on par with "the banana fits perfectly in the human hand." As it is, the punchline was the only Ebert-esque line in the whole piece, which made me doubt it was a third-party spoof.
Posted by: PZ Myers | September 23, 2008 10:46 PM
Another irritation: Ebert dismisses the evolutionist response by claiming that many of us were claiming he had converted to creationism. We had 131 comments on the subject here: not one made that claim. Most saw it as satire. A large minority thought it was a hack.
100% failed to see it as a sign that Ebert was actually a creationist. I think he was setting up a straw man there.
Posted by: Kome | September 23, 2008 10:49 PM
Ok, perhaps the moose joke wasn't enough. Either way, I think this is just one of those times where we collectively roll our eyes and then take a moment to just relax. This piece by Ebert basically says that creationists views are so nonsensical that posting them straight up should be a clue not to take the person espousing them seriously.
Yes, we're all exasperated when the creationist goon squad tries to turn every instance of a science teacher actually teaching science to his/her class into a federal case. Of course we're all sick and tired of the super-religious nuts in this country trying to destroy solid, honest education in favor of superstitious barbarism. But Ebert just publicly said that creationists beliefs are too absurd to take seriously. Isn't that what we want? More people to stand up and say, "These beliefs are stupid! How could anyone be this ignorant?"
Don't get me wrong. I don't think it was particularly good satire, but I don't think it was particularly bad either. Of course, I am perhaps a little too laid back about a lot of things so I may be in error.
Posted by: charley | September 23, 2008 10:50 PM
Two reasons this fails as satire for me: 1) The object of his satire is more ridiculous than the satire itself, 2) The war on science is getting too successful to be funny. For an example of both, here's a photo blog of young earth creationist raft trip through the Grand Canyon.
http://deltackett.com
(scroll down)
It would be funnier if this guy wasn't funded by Focus on the Family and blanketing the world with slickly produced anti-science classes and DVD's.
Posted by: Kel | September 23, 2008 10:51 PM
Maybe. Maybe though it's just society in general; we are now exposed to more batshit insane ideas than ever before at a faster rate than ever before. Instant global communication and a sensationalist media have affected our ability to detect satire. Subtlety seems to be the concept that is dying; irony is still alive and well - provided you make it obvious. :PPosted by: chuko | September 23, 2008 11:03 PM
Another thing that bugs me about this is that his argument depends on one knowing something about him. Kirk Cameron could've written the same thing in all seriousness. I guess PZ did, but I wouldn't've been able to tell you Roger Ebert's stance on evolution, or even his general political and religious leanings.
Posted by: Macron | September 23, 2008 11:07 PM
Ebert should look up FSM if he wants to see creationist satire.
Posted by: Mus | September 23, 2008 11:08 PM
PZ on emoticons:It's a symptom of a lack of trust in the readers perceptivity.
Sorry, PZ, but you're wrong :-P. Emoticons are a couple of different things.
1) They are an admission that humans express a whole plethora of different subtle things with expressions. A :) can mean any number of a very large array of things
2) They are the simplest and most efficient way to communicate certain things. For example, those three little characters, the :-P above, completely change the meaning of the whole post. By typing :-P, I am communicating a lot of things which would require dozens of words to fully express, and I am doing so in a very efficient way.
3) They convey certain things which you COULD express with words, but which would lose their meaning or which would become tiring had they been written in words. The "I'm joking, I hope you do not think I am an arrogant fool by saying you are wrong like that" meaning embedded in the :-P above would simply sound stupid had I actually written it instead of having used the emoticon.
4) They convey certain things which you can't really express with words very well. Sometimes words ARE insufficient and crude. They may have a certain denotation, but some word's connotations simply cannot replace an actual facial expression. Of course, neither can smileys, but they come a little closer. Words can SOMETIMES lack the human aspect to them.
Using smileys IS a form of communication, just like using words is. Thinking of smileys as a type of word is not at all far from the truth, because both are meant to do the same thing. Using both is not always easy, and well-used smileys can be just as useful and effective as using words (assuming the words are also well-used of course).
Posted by: chuko | September 23, 2008 11:10 PM
You could say that irony (and subtlety, and humor) depend on shared context. On the internet, we have less shared context because we're communicating with a more diverse cross-section of people, necessitating more direct communication.
I don't think that we're becoming less subtle or less sophisticated in our reading comprehension due to the internet; we're just having to adjust ourselves to our audience in a slightly different way than has been necessary before.
Posted by: Brian X | September 23, 2008 11:16 PM
I thought I'd typed this in the previous thread, but evidently not. My benchmark for bad satire has to be the song "My Humps" by the Black Eyed Peas -- intended as a satire of misogynistic and materialistic hip-hop, its deeply unsexy depictions of sex and somewhat forced slang combined with Fergie's pathetically lightweight delivery made it the song that took the formerly hip Peas and relegated them to the side show. (How Fergie has a solo career after that fiasco, I'll never know.)
It's one of the few songs I've ever heard where the most devastating possible commentary was itself, or more accurately Alanis Morrissette's dead-serious, word-for-word cover (video and all). The Alanis version was quite possibly one of the funniest singles released at any time in 1997.
Posted by: Brian X | September 23, 2008 11:17 PM
Yeah, let's try that again. One of the funniest singles of 2007. In 1997 she was probably recording Supposed Former Infatuation Junkie and getting naked on a subway train with Stephane Sednaoui.
Posted by: Rey Fox | September 23, 2008 11:19 PM
There was a piece I read on MSNBC, I think, about how Sarah Palin might be better qualified for the Supreme Court than the executive branch of the government. There were a couple things that could have served as flags that the article was satire, but it was hard to tell. I was wishing like hell that it was satire, but even if it was, I knew that most of the people who read it would not pick up on the satire and would wither think the author had lost his/her mind, or else would actually agree with the author (which would be too scary to contemplate).
There very much IS such a thing as being too subtle. A large part of it is knowing your audience, and the trouble with the internet is that anyone could be your audience with very little effort.
And of course, as is one of my big pet peeves, the "it was a joke" defense is NOT bulletproof.
Posted by: zaardvark | September 23, 2008 11:36 PM
:|
:O
:D!
Posted by: Benjamin Geiger | September 23, 2008 11:36 PM
PZ's been tweeting up a storm. For instance:
I responded:
and PZ replied:
I would continue on Twitter, but my response won't fit into 140 characters.
My interpretation is along the lines of other posters here: apparently, Ebert thought the creationist bit was self-satirizing. (It really should be.) Creationists don't make their points as obvious to the general public as they do here. Sorta like Republicans: they don't come out and say what they're about, because they know they'd sound like a bunch of morons. Ebert just said it explicitly and got the "what the crap are you on?" response the creationists should be getting.
P.S. In my Toastmasters meeting tonight, there was a speech titled "Yes, There Is a God". Among other fallacies, it included Hoyle's 747 and Pascal's Wager, along with the old "some would dismiss it as coincidence, but" bit. It took every ounce of my self-restraint to deliver the speech I had planned instead of an impromptu rebuttal; the speech was a rebuttal of sorts to my last two speeches.
P.P.S. PZ acknowledged me personally! By name! *squee*
P.P.P.S. Could someone convince Sb to change their comment code to not change entities into their respective characters on preview? < becomes
Posted by: Benjamin Geiger | September 23, 2008 11:39 PM
Continued after the blogging software ate my previous:
... < becomes <, and preview-then-post posts something different than previewed. It's annoying.
Posted by: CalGeorge | September 23, 2008 11:48 PM
Ebert on The Passion of the Christ:
"Gibson has communicated his idea with a singleminded urgency. Many will disagree. Some will agree, but be horrified by the graphic treatment. I myself am no longer religious in the sense that a long-ago altar boy thought he should be, but I can respond to the power of belief whether I agree or not, and when I find it in a film, I must respect it."
http://www.adherents.com/people/pe/Roger_Ebert.html
Many movie reviews are an insult to the intelligence. I expected better from a movie reviewer like Ebert.
Posted by: llewelly | September 23, 2008 11:53 PM
If it weren't for the preponderance people who seriously believe in the coconut-eating T-Rex, PYGMIES+DWARVES, a 6000-yr-old earth, and so forth, I think most of us would have found Ebert's satire to be quite funny. It failed only because reality is even crazier.
Posted by: Benjamin Geiger | September 23, 2008 11:55 PM
CalGeorge: I disagree. Ebert is making a reasonable point there. Just because it's unadorned bullshit doesn't mean it's not powerful unadorned bullshit. Even though the movie is almost entirely false, if you believe the falsehood, it's incredibly powerful.
Ebert knew his audience for that review. He knew that holy rollers would see it and not care what anyone said, and that antitheists would avoid it like an ebola-ridden warthog. The majority of the remainder are "Sunday morning Christians". He had to put himself in those shoes, and he did so fairly well.
Posted by: robotaholic | September 23, 2008 11:59 PM
she can go to any church she wants to-or not go to...what's your problem?Posted by: Benjamin Geiger | September 23, 2008 11:59 PM
llewelly: That's basically my point. Most people don't interact with the six-thousand-year-old-earth crowd as often as we do here. Few would realize how common they are. Unless you're dressed differently or speak a different language, people tend to assume you're a "Sunday morning Christian".
Posted by: john | September 23, 2008 11:59 PM
Ebert wan't as clear in his satire as Swift was. It brings to mind a quote from Red Dwarf..."almost Swiftian in its rapier like sutelty."
Posted by: I am so wise | September 24, 2008 12:02 AM
"In a time of shortened attention spans and instant gratification, trained by web surfing and movies with an average shot length of seconds, we absorb rather than contemplate. We want to gobble all the food on the plate, instead of considering each bite. We accept rather than select."
Is there any evidence of this? This sounds like BS nostalgia, like Ebert is pining for a time that exist only in the heads of him and his fellow Republicans.
Posted by: Max | September 24, 2008 12:04 AM
I'm sorry PZ, but you're way off on this. For those who read carefully it was clearly satire (there were dead give-aways in the text). This reminds me of the Dawkins rap situation where a disturbingly large number of people could not see which side was being mocked, Poe's law notwithstanding. Just because you didn't get it doesn't mean it was a bad joke.
Posted by: daveb | September 24, 2008 12:04 AM
While the debate rages over whether Ebert's moose question was discernably tongue-in-cheek (it was), did anyone notice the very first line of his Q&A?
"Questions and answers on Creationism, which should be discussed in schools as an alternative to the theory of evolution:"
That's sarcasm. It's really, really obvious sarcasm. I don't think anyone should feel badly if they missed it, but it's interesting that so many people did. Ebert may have a point about missing the invisible quotation marks.
Posted by: Patricia | September 24, 2008 12:05 AM
Aw, come on PZ! Don't be such a grumpy lovable fuzzball. Emoticons are fun. So are *rolls eyes*, *jazz hands*, *SMOOCH*, etc. not everyone is a Balzac or Cervantes. And what about wOO+? A day without boobies would be a poor day indeed.
Posted by: Geral | September 24, 2008 12:12 AM
I agree with PZ on this one. In an ideal world or maybe even in a university setting, all of us would instantly recognize the satire. This, however, is the internet and not an ideal world.
We've all heard outrageous claims in person and on the internet, and so nothing surprises me any more.
Ebert came off old fashioned on this one. I don't think he gets it.
Posted by: Norman Doering | September 24, 2008 12:24 AM
PZ said:
And that's what killed satire. If we didn't know those things were real we'd find them amusingly crazy.
I ran into the same problem when I thought Tristan J. Shuddery was for real:
http://normdoering.blogspot.com/2007/07/blogospheres-most-pathetic-excuse-for.html
Posted by: AlanWCan | September 24, 2008 12:33 AM
Funny you should mention that; I though the same thing but the other way around. it needs to be posted on some creationist sites, maybe put forward in some meetings or whatever the hell they have and see if they accept it. My guess is that it wouldn't raise a blip on AiG or uncommon stupidity.Posted by: HP | September 24, 2008 12:33 AM
I place Roger Ebert in the same category as Christopher Hitchens -- an absolutely brilliant writer, seemingly on the side of reason, who is none the less a thoroughly crappy thinker.
Have you ever read Ebert's "classic" review of I Spit on Your Grave? Have you ever seen the film? Not only doesn't he "get" creationism, he doesn't get cinema.
Posted by: Dahan | September 24, 2008 12:41 AM
One of the things I believe as an educator is that when there is a problem with communication, the blame almost always rests with the person who is the communicator. If you are trying to impart wisdom, or knowledge, or trying to make a point, you are responsible for making sure that your audience gets what you're saying.
I'm, reminded of Julia Sweeney's comment on Christ "Stop preaching in parables. Even your staff doesn't get them."
Seems like Roger failed and is trying to ignore this fact.
Posted by: Dave M | September 24, 2008 12:51 AM
Sorry PZ and anyone else who didn't catch it right away, but the fault DOES lie with you. GOOD satire like "A Modest Proposal" is delivered 100% dead pan and in a manner that is almost believable.
You fell for it because you didn't pay attention, you didn't realize that Ebert had JUST ripped Palin apart recently in an editorial. You didn't realize that Ebert has been noted in the past as an atheist.
Sorry PZ, in this case, you are wrong.
Posted by: Feynmaniac | September 24, 2008 12:52 AM
Really? No one who criticized Ebert's satire and has made use of 'thumbs down' yet?
Posted by: Dave M | September 24, 2008 12:56 AM
Oh and if you want to quibble over the quality of the satire, no obviously it's not as good as Swift.
But for it to be more tongue in cheek and less deadpan would have meant it would become parody and not satire. You have to consider the source.
Posted by: danny salamander | September 24, 2008 1:10 AM
yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaawn.
Posted by: windy | September 24, 2008 1:12 AM
I agree with you. It's a bit like a Randy Olson movie ;) <- self-conscious meta-smiley
I think much of this discussion on bad/good satire is missing the point a bit - if a mainstream figure like Ebert tries his hand at mocking creationism, I think we semi-pros should try to offer more constructive criticism than "boo, your satire was bad". Keep at it, Roger!
Posted by: BMcP | September 24, 2008 1:14 AM
It's an admission of an inability to communicate -- the words are insufficient, so crude labels are required.
I feel the same way with people writing posts peppered with four letter words (Crude words though instead of crude labels). I see such language as the writer's inability to get their point across without having to fall back upon crude slang to express themselves.
Posted by: Jams | September 24, 2008 1:17 AM
Nothing exceeds the raw power of satire to flop.
Posted by: Dahan | September 24, 2008 1:17 AM
Dave M,
Sorry, gotta disagree. Please see post 41. I'm an artist/designer. I know a bit about communicating you ideas to others. I read and hear a lot of bullshit from bad artists, designers, and writers who say things like "Oh, they just don't get it because they aren't educated enough in this."
Well, yeah. That's true, but it doesn't take away from a very basic fact. You didn't take your audience into consideration and now there's confusion and uncertainty. Who's fault is that? Yep, it's at your feet.
In this case, Ebert blew it. That's fine, we all do. Not even the great PZ does a good job of communicating to us his intentions and beliefs sometimes. Ebert needs to have the balls to go ahead and say "Yeah, I didn't pull that off very well." That's what the best do. That's when you know your admiration is probably justified. Anything else smacks of an ego that needs to get slapped back in place.
Posted by: RamblinDude | September 24, 2008 1:19 AM
After reading Ebert's explanation, I, too, feel annoyed. Sorry Roger, but in the context of the times the "satire"... heh... wasn't very effective.
He's right, of course, that the problem is "growing credulity." Yes, that is exactly the problem, but he's targeting the wrong people with the failing, which is exactly why he doesn't understand why his attempt was lame. (And I see he admits he didn't know of Poe's Law...which is ironic.)
However, did he serve a useful purpose in writing it? I don't know. He's famous enough that the intertubes are buzzing with it, and he has admitted he's on the side of science.
Perhaps, at least, he will gain a better understanding of the problem and do a better job next time.
Posted by: Alan | September 24, 2008 1:21 AM
Gotta agree with PZ here -- in order to function as satire, a work must take an idea and carry it to extremes in order to mock the proponents of the original idea. The idea contained in Ebert's satire, on the other hand, barely scratched the surface of what creationists and other fundies believe.
I'm reminded of the recent controversial New Yorker cover which depicted Barack Obama as a muslim radical and Michele Obama as a gun-toting Black Panther. The satire defense failed there too because understanding that the piece was meant satirically required the reader to make assumptions about the New Yorker's politics. No one would have batted an eye had that cartoon been circulated among conservative websites or even been a cover for the National Review or appeared in the Washington Times, because those sources were already saying much worse things about the Obamas.
Posted by: Sigmund | September 24, 2008 1:22 AM
Compared to real creationist thinking - involving a coconut eating vegetarian Tyrannosaurus who played with Adam and Eves children a few thousand years ago - Eberts effort looked practically reasonable. While I enjoy shades of subtlety in writing satirizing creationists directly is one of those tasks requiring a more sledgehammer approach.
I forgave him all, however, when I read his moving words on 'La Dolce Vita' in the previous essay.
Posted by: Numad | September 24, 2008 1:32 AM
Pulling out Swift when defending the satirical intent of a piece (when the intent isn't apparent, no matter if it was actually there or not) seems to be very common.
Posted by: bill the big rockin drummer | September 24, 2008 1:56 AM
I didn't catch the satire for the same reason as PZ but i feel that this is a good thing. He probably lured in a bunch of ass hat creationists, got them goin' thinking he was a fellow whack nut, and then sucker punched them with the joke. while it may have been bad satire for the reason PZ mentioned(To close to the real nutters) I think its a great practical joke. He has been around for a while and is basically making a living dispensing opinion and for him to say he is a believer in this fallacy, and then pull back and say just joking i'm not an idiot is great. I Laughed good and hard imagining the reaction of YEC, how many post's do you think were made pointing to this. they were probably sittinng around all happy about their new champion and now they are probably demanding his head i a sack( no thats not right they probably would be asking for a punishment found in the bible, and i don't remember any heads in a sack in the bible)
Posted by: Mr Doubt(hell)fire | September 24, 2008 2:04 AM
I think the best self-parody ever is Phil Phillips and his 'Turmoil in the Toybox'. When you can see him talking with Gary Greenwald about how Scooby Doo and Voltron have occultic influences with a deadly serious face, without a single smile, you really, really have to work at getting more insane than them.
My favorite non-profit satire is Blogs 4 Brownback. I still want to find out who was behind that, even though it started to become crude once Brownback dropped out. The concept alone is absolutely brilliant. (Calvinists 4 Conservatism, the continuation, has its good moments and its bad.)
For a terrible satire, I suggest that you go to liberalsmustdie.com. The person just generally acts like a complete redneck, and the website doesn't really seem to point out any absurdities in anyone.
Posted by: Tony Sidaway | September 24, 2008 2:18 AM
Sorry PZ, I think that's bollocks. Ebert's piece was perfectly obvious satire. Take this:" At that moment they were of various ages and in varying degrees of health. Some individuals died an instant later, others within seconds, minutes or hours."
And if that doesn't work for you, this: "Since living species were obviously not created through an evolutionary process, every surviving land-based mammal species (about 5,400) had both ancestors on the Arc."
I think it's a bad idea to hang around arguing with creationists for many reasons: they don't know the meaning of words like "evidence", "theory", and "scientific", they will try to convert you to their weird cults, and so on.
But there's a much more important reason than that: they're terribly dull company and if you hang around with them long you will lose your sense of humor.
Posted by: Gregory Kusnick | September 24, 2008 2:52 AM
#34:
Just because you did get it doesn't mean it was a good one.
My reaction was: probably satire, but so what? What point is he trying to make that couldn't be made much better by pointing to actual, sincerely meant creationist inanity? Why bother to satirize when the real thing is so mind-bogglingly absurd?
Posted by: s.k.graham | September 24, 2008 2:54 AM
I'm a rare (maybe one-time before) commentor... but PZ, this just struck me with the SIWOTI bug or should that be PZIWOTI:
"one of the things I really deplore about internet communications, for instance, is the use of those ghastly little smilies. It's an admission of an inability to communicate -- the words are insufficient, so crude labels are required. It's a symptom of a lack of trust in the readers perceptivity."
Precisely the problem is that words, quite often, are not sufficient, and for many obvious reasons, not the least of which is that every nuclear family, practically every individual, constitutes a micro-culture with it's own idioms and nuances of meaning that will not be understood by others. A tremendous amount of meaning is conveyed through normal speech non-verbally, and while very skillfully crafted prose may manage to convey much of that nonverbal tone, ordinary internet communications are not a medium for skillfully crafted prose. We should not confuse emails, text chat, or blogs with the books, periodicals or personal handwritten letters of decades past. Internet communication is much closer to actual speech both in its sense of immediacy and casual nature, but it obviously lacks the non-verbals of tone, facial expression and so forth which conventionally accompany face-to-face dialog. Hence we inventive humans have begun crafting new languages which are derived from, but are already far from identical to, written languages past -- languages which have their own new rules and symbols which convey both verbal and non-verbal meaning.
What you call a "crude label" is, in fact, a highly compact, efficient form of symbolic communication.
Can you discern whether or I am smiling as I type this sentence?
Precisely. Just how seriously do I take myself at this moment? How seriously do I expect to be taken?
Have at ye, sir, and take that! And that! And that.
And now, having driven home my point, may I leave you with this absolutely requisite yet spitefully redundant ;-)
Posted by: Rey Fox | September 24, 2008 2:55 AM
"Take this:" At that moment they were of various ages and in varying degrees of health. Some individuals died an instant later, others within seconds, minutes or hours."
And if that doesn't work for you, this: "Since living species were obviously not created through an evolutionary process, every surviving land-based mammal species (about 5,400) had both ancestors on the Arc."
Both of those are WELL within the range of insanity proposed by creationists of all stripes.
Posted by: Azkyroth | September 24, 2008 3:04 AM
Just for the sake of argument, is it possible that some people might genuinely have difficulty interpreting the emotional state behind written or even spoken statements through no fault of their own?
Posted by: bastion | September 24, 2008 3:18 AM
At #42 Dave M. wrote:
Sorry PZ and anyone else who didn't catch it right away, but the fault DOES lie with you. GOOD satire like "A Modest Proposal" is delivered 100% dead pan and in a manner that is almost believable.
You fell for it because you didn't pay attention, you didn't realize that Ebert had JUST ripped Palin apart recently in an editorial. You didn't realize that Ebert has been noted in the past as an atheist.
So, we're supposed to research a writer's past articles and his religious beliefs in order to figure out whether something he's written is supposed to be funny or not?
Wouldn't it be better for both the reader and the writer--to avoid possible misunderstandings--if the writer simply made his intentions clearer?
Posted by: negentropyeater | September 24, 2008 3:20 AM
These film critics are really incredible ! They think so highly of themselves, their judgement is unfailible.
But does Mr Ebert even realise that compared to Jonathan Swift, he is nothing else, than an intellectual dwarf ?
Posted by: woodstein312 | September 24, 2008 3:20 AM
Okay, it was a bad -- really bad -- joke.
And PZ, while I can agree it was a poorly executed joke, my question for you is this:
Well, don't you think you might have been a little hard on Ebert?
Okay, fine, like I said, bad joke, poor attempt at satire, whatever you want to call it. But are we really going to chastise everyone, real creationists aside, for poor humour? (And by the way, I am very happy this turned out to be a bad gag.)
I mean, look, I've told a few bad jokes in my life too. And, sure, that opens me up to being ridiculed but.. wow, you really took Ebert to task here. I just wonder if you took it further than it needed to go.
Posted by: Lago | September 24, 2008 3:26 AM
I am going to paraphrase everything PZ wrote above. Here:
If you are in a nuthouse, you shouldn't always suspect the guy claiming he is "Napoleon," is joking,
because, more often that not...
Posted by: Azkyroth | September 24, 2008 3:34 AM
Whereas I see such concerns as evidence of nothing better to worry about and/or pig-ignorance of history.
Or of the keen realization that the use of "fucking" is a constant reminder of what their tight-wound didactic prudery prevents them from ever attaining.
Posted by: negentropyeater | September 24, 2008 3:47 AM
woodstein312,
Did you actually READ Ebert's essay ?
If it only had been poor humour, fine, but he writes :
Which means that instead of recognizing that he had written a very poor satire, he accuses an entire web community of credulity and lack of sense of irony, which I think is a bit over the top ! Plus, as PZ noted, he's pulling a strawman when most people on this site didn't fall for it.
So he deserves to be criticized, not for his bad satire, but for his response.
Posted by: BobC | September 24, 2008 3:59 AM
Ebert's satire may have been or may not have been poorly done. Who cares? I thank Ebert for being on the side of science.
This is a bit off-topic but it's about creationists. I'm quite sick of the breathtaking stupidity of creationists and their never ending attempts to destroy science education. I am suggesting that creationists who try to dumb down science education with their ignorance and their sky fairy magic be told they are traitors. They should be told they are no better than the 9/11 Muslim terrorists, and they should be told they belong in prison for treason. Of course they won't be put in prison, but they need to be told that's where they belong if they keep attacking America's education. If enough people keep reminding creationists they are traitors, just maybe they will learn to keep their stupidity out of public school science classrooms.
Posted by: woodstein312 | September 24, 2008 4:04 AM
Yes, I did actually READ -- and let me tell you, I love it when folks use caps to stress something. It just makes me have that much more respect for them -- the essay. Have you considered the idea that maybe he has a point, albeit a poorly expressed and poorly executed one?
Take a breath, step back and think about it for a second.
Posted by: negentropyeater | September 24, 2008 4:13 AM
woodstein312,
but your comment didn't defend the idea that he "had a point". You were just asking why chastise Ebert for a bad joke. So, which point then ?
Posted by: negentropyeater | September 24, 2008 4:27 AM
And BTW, no, I don't think he has a point, his creationist piece could have been interpreted as (and has been interpreted as) :
. a bad joke
. poor satire
. a hack
. an unlikely conversion
So what ?
Posted by: Muffin | September 24, 2008 4:29 AM
"It's an admission of an inability to communicate -- the words are insufficient, so crude labels are required. It's a symptom of a lack of trust in the readers perceptivity."
No, it's not that. Rather, it's an admission - no, an acknowledgement - that there is more to communication than just words. When I talk to someone face to face, there is a lot more to that communication than what we're saying; there's body language, facial expressions and all that. In a text-only medium, all that doesn't exist, and smileys (or whatever you want to call them) are basically just a way to remedy that; a crude one, admittedly, but the best and most practical way anyone's come up with so far.
They can be overused, of course, but in casual, informal conversations, especially ones where you do not have a lot of time to refine your writing, they're extremely useful.
Posted by: Cujo359 | September 24, 2008 4:39 AM
Short version of this article: There's no difference between Ebert's article and what the real religious fanatics write all the time. That is certainly true.
For instance, I'm sure that at least a dozen people have written what I just did, but I'm not satirizing them - I'm agreeing with them.
In Ebert's defense, it's pretty tough to satirize something as daft as Creationism.
Posted by: SEF | September 24, 2008 4:59 AM
Has that assertion been tested on actual creationists? Were any creationists (ideally a large sample of them) exposed to the test material and did they respond with anything substantially different from enthusiastic nodding, emphatic "amen"s or shouted "hallelujah, you tell 'em brother"s?Meanwhile, as has already been mentioned several times, the people here (ie science-based, reality-based people with some experience of what's actually out there) mostly did recognise the satire but thought it was poorly executed or in poor taste. Ebert would have had to ramp it up much more right at the very end in order to come anywhere near exceeding (in a satirical way) the level of stupidity which is absolutely normal for real creationists in the real world. He didn't significantly touch on their dishonesty component.
Posted by: raven | September 24, 2008 5:01 AM
Slightly OT but relevant:
I've been saying for a while that there is a backlash against the Death Cults. These are nihilists who can only bring death and destruction, forces of darkness, chaos, and entropy.
Their latest victim is the US economy which is imploding. As it turns out, most Americans don't want to end up sitting on a rubble heap, gutting a rat for dinner, while chanting Jesus loves us. While some pea brained psycho fundie xian points a rifle at their head and tells them to smile.
So far, see how it goes. That fact that McCain and his Death Cult wacko VP are polling over 20% indicates that something is drastically wrong with the USA. Hard to say if we will step back from the edge of the Abyss or just jump in. Chanting Jesus loves us, of course.
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