Sticking It To The Stick
Sorry, I just can't help myself -- here's a link to a brilliant takedown of the skinny hate whore by Jerry Coyne, a Department of Ecology and Evolution prof at the University of Chicago.
What's annoying about Coulter (note: there's more than one thing!) is that she insistently demands evidence for evolution (none of which she'll ever accept), but requires not a shred of evidence for her "alternative hypothesis." She repeatedly assures us that God exists (not just any God -- the Christian God), that there is only one God (she's no Hindu, folks), that we are made in the image of said God, that the Christian Bible, like Antonin Scalia's Constitution, "is not a 'living' document" (that is, not susceptible to changing interpretation; so does she think that Genesis is literally true?), and that God just might have used evolution as part of His plan. What makes her so sure about all this? And how does she know that the Supreme Being, even if It exists, goes by the name of Yahweh, rather than Allah, Wotan, Zeus, or Mabel? If Coulter just knows these things by faith alone, she should say so, and then tell us why she's so sure that what Parsees or Zunis just know is wrong. I, for one, am not prepared to believe that Ann Coulter is made in God's image without seeing some proof.Moreover, if evolution is wrong, why is it the central paradigm of biology? According to Coulter, it's all a big con game. In smoky back rooms at annual meetings, evolutionists plot ways to jam Darwin down America's throat, knowing that even though it is scientifically incorrect, Darwinism (Coulter says) "lets them off the hook morally. Do whatever you feel like doing -- screw your secretary, kill Grandma, abort your defective child -- Darwin says it will benefit humanity!"
Unfortunately for Coulter (but fortunately for humanity), science doesn't work this way. Scientists gain fame and high reputation not for propping up their personal prejudices, but for finding out facts about nature. And if evolution really were wrong, the renegade scientist who disproved it -- and showed that generations of his predecessors were misled -- would reach the top of the scientific ladder in one leap, gaining fame and riches. All it would take to trash Darwinism is a simple demonstration that humans and dinosaurs lived at the same time, or that our closest genetic relative is the rabbit. There is no cabal, no back-room conspiracy. Instead, the empirical evidence for evolution just keeps piling up, year after year.
...If Coulter were right, evolutionists would be the most beastly people on earth, not to be trusted in the vicinity of a goat. But I've been around biologists all of my adult life, and I can tell you that they're a lot more civil than, say, Coulter. It's a simple fact that you don't need the Bible -- or even religion -- to be moral. Buddhists, Hindus, and Jews, who don't follow the New Testament, usually behave responsibly despite this problem; and atheists and agnostics derive morality from non-biblical philosophy. In fact, one of the most ethical people I know is Coulter's version of the Antichrist: the atheistic biologist Richard Dawkins (more about that below). Dawkins would never say -- as Coulter does -- that Cindy Sheehan doesn't look good in shorts, that Al Franken resembles a monkey, or that 9/11 widows enjoyed the deaths of their husbands. Isn't there something in the Bible about doing unto others?
The mistake of equating Darwinism with a code of behavior leads Coulter into her most idiotic accusation: that the Holocaust and numberless murders of Stalin can be laid at Darwin's door. "From Marx to Hitler, the men responsible for the greatest mass murders of the twentieth century were avid Darwinists." Anyone who is religious should be very careful about saying something like this, because, throughout history, more killings have been done in the name of religion than of anything else. What's going on in the Middle East, and what happened in Serbia and Northern Ireland? What was the Inquisition about, and the Crusades, and the slaughter following the partition of India? Religion, of course -- or rather, religiously inspired killing. (Come to think of it, the reason Hitler singled out the Jews is that Christians regarded them for centuries as the killers of Christ. And I don't remember any mention of Darwinism in the Moscow Doctors' Trial.) If Darwin is guilty of genocide, then so are God, Jesus, Brahma, Martin Luther, and countless popes.
As Coulter well knows, the misuse of an idea for evil purposes does not mean that idea is wrong. In fact, she accuses liberals of making this very error: She attacks them for worrying that the message of racial inequality conveyed by the book The Bell Curve could promote genocide: "Only liberals could interpret a statement that people have varying IQs as a call to start killing people." Back at you, Ann: Only conservatives could interpret a statement that species evolved as a call to start killing people.
Coulter clearly knows better. I conclude that the trash-talking blonde bit is just a shtick (admittedly, a clever one) calculated to make her rich and famous. (Look at her website, where she whines regularly that she is not getting enough notice.) Her hyper-conservativism seems no more grounded than her faith. She has claimed that the Bible is her favorite book, she is rumored to go to church, and on the cover of Godless you see a cross dangling tantalizingly in her décolletage. But could anybody who absorbed the Sermon on the Mount write, as she does of Richard Dawkins, "I defy any of my coreligionists to tell me they do not laugh at the idea of Dawkins burning in hell"? Well, I wouldn't want Coulter to roast (there's not much meat there anyway), but I wish she'd shut up and learn something about evolution. Her case for ID involves the same stupid arguments that fundamentalists have made for a hundred years. They're about as convincing as the blonde hair that gets her so much attention. By their roots shall ye know them.
I love the way she offends people. Tenured professors at Chicago most of all.
Crid at August 15, 2006 2:20 AM
Seriously, Amy... "Skinny hate whore"?
Crid at August 15, 2006 2:21 AM
Maybe Ann is just mad because she can't evolve. Imagine, being stuck, the cranky and crooked link, surrounded by the possibility of having a rational mind, but unable to make that long monkey armed leap.
sonja at August 15, 2006 4:14 AM
You're right Crid, it was wrong to attack her for her looks. I shouldn't have called her skinny. As for "hate whore," I'm rather pleased with that part. She trades hate for money. If she simpy traded sex for money, I could respect her, maybe even like her.
PS Sonja said it so perfectly.
Amy Alkon at August 15, 2006 4:46 AM
"I love the way she offends people. Tenured professors at Chicago most of all."
But, Crid, don't you prefer people who offend by telling the truth, not a bunch of distortions and bald-faced lied?
Amy Alkon at August 15, 2006 4:51 AM
Amy, have you seen this cartoon?
http://www.uclick.com/feature/06/08/11/nq060811.gif
deja pseu at August 15, 2006 8:58 AM
> not a bunch of distortions and
> bald-faced lies
Windy City academics don't seem less fond of those techniques than other people.
Listen, I just don't think about Ann Coulter. I don't read her stuff and don't seek out her broadcast interviews. When I see a picture of her in a magazine I try to look down her blouse or up her skirt; if I can't see anything, the page turns... And she *ceases to exist*.
People who worry about this woman want to worry about her. She has no discernable fan base (unlike Michael Moore). Specifically: There's no crew of thoughtful conservatives who read and love her. But there's a big squadron of liberals standing by with bared teeth, erections, clenched fists and furious eyes who screech & boil at the mention of her name. Without them, she's nothing.
So I think she's playing chess at a higher level than most of her critics. It's a mechanical victory, one nourished more by Barnum than by Machiavelli. Her haters theoretically understand that they're looking at a polemicist. But she makes the forest so attractive that they forget about the trees. She has a nice little career stroking emotional reactions from liberals... Who, I will believe until my dying day, take emotions a little too seriously anyway.
Do we have time to ramble here?
A few months ago she was in one of her little dustups, and Kaus was defending her to Wright on Bloggingheads TV. Wright, the man who can't smile with warmth, was really upset. He was busting out one of his seven-sentence parries... And as always, he had to backtrack with more supporting clauses for each sentence. So two minutes later it was a rickety, foamy, 19-sentence contraption, and his eyes were flashing with hatred. He was almost drooling. Kaus was stunned.
It wasn't even overkill. It never is when people are talking about Ann. She has a gift for violating beliefs that liberals have never bothered to verbalize. These are always very precious things in their loving liberal hearts, and you can tell in the moment that she captures their attention that they'd always assumed that everyone else carries these beliefs too. They're surprised when she disavows them without shame. In that moment, nothing in the world means more to them than proving that they're right and Coulter's wrong.
Lawyers, professors, and other brilliant wordsmiths have given huge slices of their working lives to proving that 'This time, that woman has gone too far!' But she's unelected and essentially powerless. It's ironic that people have to mock her looks.
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The cartoon is repellent. It presumes without evidence that the lefties are right and she's wrong. Preaching to the choir like this is why Democrats lose elections. What exactly are we talking about here?
http://tinyurl.com/ca2y3
Be sure and click the third photo for a bigger version, and look at their eyes through the grating.
Crid at August 15, 2006 11:00 AM
Crid,
That cartoon was semi-humorous....but this is classic...
http://sightspeed.blogspot.com/2006/06/ann-coulter-loves-your-pain.html
Rob at August 15, 2006 11:18 AM
I think that Man Hands is about the worst 'Ambassador for Christ' that there could be.
Russputin at August 15, 2006 2:06 PM
She has no discernable fan base (unlike Michael Moore)
Who buys her books, then? Surely not liberals. I've seen T-shirts for sale on right-wing sites with her face and that quote about killing leaders and converting them to Christianity. I've never seen a T-shirt with Michael Moore on it unless it was to bash him.
There's no crew of thoughtful conservatives who read and love her.
What gives you the idea that contemporary conservativism is thoughtful? Surely not the current bunch in power.
LYT at August 15, 2006 3:41 PM
Criticize her looks and everything else all you care to. There is no attack levelled against her that could possibly be sufficiently vicious.
The Ann Coulter mentality -- fueling the all-out war between the two parties -- is the last thing we need now. We saw the damage it did during Clinton's terms. Republicans so determined to bring impeachment proceedings from a non-issue, that we all paid the price. Clinton was the most pro-active anti-terrorism president in our nation's history. And he would have done more if the Repugnicans could have put aside their partisan hate and tried to work with him instead of stonewalling him at every opportunity.
(Crid, I still don't care what you think.)
After the OKC bombing, Republicans opposed Clinton's request for increased wiretap authority for intelligence agencies. Quoth the Gingrich: "When you have an agency that turns 900 personnel files over to people like Craig Livingstone... it's very hard to justify giving the agency more power." (Gingrich was referring to Filegate, one of about a billion Fox-hyped hostile investigations against the President that yielded nothing and fizzled.)
When Clinton requested additional funding for counterterrorism measures in September 1996, Republicans opposed all of it. Quoth Orrin Hatch (this would be same imbecile who blabbed all over the airwaves on 9-11 that bin Laden was behind the attacks, thereby alerting bin Laden; thanks, Orrin, you fucking idiot): "The administration would be wise to utilize the resources Congress has already provided before it requests additional funding."
Then, along came 9/11/2001...
So, in the name of partisanship, we have two warring factions in our government who are doing their best to oppose each other and we're paying the price. Personally, I'd love to give them all the heave ho (some of them, such as Kennedy, really belong in prison, not in the Senate), but unfortunately, they're all we have right now.
Patrick at August 16, 2006 3:22 PM
"I love the way she offends people. Tenured professors at Chicago most of all."
But I'd blow Cass Sunstein in a hot second. I like them sexy law profs.
Lena at August 16, 2006 10:28 PM
"I've seen T-shirts for sale on right-wing sites with her face and that quote about killing leaders and converting them to Christianity. I've never seen a T-shirt with Michael Moore on it unless it was to bash him."
Why is that such a damned surprise? The quote is not only one of action instead of excuses, it is affirmative of anything which would end the perpetual handwringing of people who worry that the USA might actually mean something, anywhere, to anyone. A lot of people are mad that they are continually told they can't do anything about issues that bother them - by the same people who show them the issues exist. Moore is serious when he lies about people and claims "documentary" status. It's easy to see Ann's job is that of just plain flaming people. It should be EASY to see the entertainment value in that!
And Patrick, I sure hope you didn't buy the "harmless sexual peccadillo" argument about the weaselly pervert; just because the whole country went, "Oooh! A SEX scandal!!" doesn't mean that was the issue with him. Where is John Huang?
Radwaste at August 17, 2006 3:18 PM
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