In this particular case, they make ridiculous attacks to which real scientists have to respond, thus making scientists (and anyone who purports that 'intelligent design' is a valid theory is NOT a scientist) look defensive. In the public eye (in America) if you look defensive, it must be because there's something wrong with you and you NEED to be defensive.

It'd just be wonderful if someone were to point out the simple fact that while evolution remains a theory (rather than a law) because it's nearly impossible to test, Intelligent Design will never be more than a hypothesis, because there will never be a single scrap of evidence that the 'designer' exists, whereas adaptation and beneficial mutations are things that we see in incremental changes all the time.

Let's look at this for a moment. IDers look at the diversity of life and posit the existence of a designer based on that complexity - but the only 'proof' they have of its existence is the complexity of life itself. There is no corroborating evidence, no proof of any invisible creatures creating new lifeforms at any given time, no nothing. Intelligent design wouldn't be accepted as a middle-school science project by a teacher who actually understands what science is. You make a hypothesis, then you test it. The fossil record shows smooth transitions between many species, but if you want to show that ID is valid, then we'll do this:

We'll take a small population of animals who aren't quite ideally-suited to their environment and watch them to see if they change. Then, alongside that, we'll have the same environment with nothing living in it, and we'll see if some invisible entity creates some in there, OK? And if that second one works, then evolution will be proven wrong. Let's give that one a try, shall we?

We can leave that experiment as an exhibit in the creationist museum next to the display showing that the fossils left behind after the great flood were neatly collated by the floodwaters into 'violent' and 'nonviolent' sections.

"Plants and animals are distributed in different strata based not on the time of their formation, but on where the flood waters moved them before receding."

Science? Even a theory? No. Not even close.

So what they'll do now is they'll try to just get people to doubt evolution. Which is fine. That's healthy. I doubt they'd enjoy it if those same crowds then turned that sort of analytical thought to their alternatives, but of course, that'll never happen. All they really want is to give the idiots who agree with the notion that ID is valid an excuse to call their beliefs 'science'.

It's pathetic.

There can (and if the strike extends for long enough, WILL) be an argument made that this sort of thing hurts more than it helps, and that realistically, the amount of work put in by your average writer of, say, a game show is quite small compared to that of, say, a construction worker, the benefits disproportionally large, and the entire strike boils down to infantile bickering of minutia.

It's even my first instinct.

However, regardless of what I feel about what a writer does, or how some really HORRIBLE ones must make more than they're worth (did the writers for Full House get paid at all? I rest my case.) nevertheless, they're being treated unfairly - and that's all this is about, in the end. Producers are making money off someone's work without compensating them for it. How is this even REMOTELY OK with anyone? If you don't like the results of the strike, don't blame the writers, blame the producers. And when you miss that show you like, and you watch a webcast of it, think that if the producers were willing to share just a fraction of what they got for that commercial that ran before it started, this strike wouldn't be happening at all.

An oversimplification, perhaps, but no more so than blaming this entire debacle on petulance.

I've heard nothing about the movie, just clicked on it because I saw the headline and thought, "Huh, if that's a good review, I might see where that's playing." It semi-interested me, but one sentence just stopped me short.

"They come upon one of the defining institutions of Southern living: a lynching."

Amazing, isn't it, that I lived in the South for almost 30 years and never actually saw one? According to Mr. O'Hehir, that must make me some sort of statistical abnormality. I NEVER got invited to the lynchings. And I lived right next to LYNCHBURG (seriously true, but pun definitely intended). According to this school of thought, we might as well start saying in inner-city communities that gang rapes and robberies are cultural events - even though they are, of course, deviations from the norm propagated by stupid people . . . just like lynchings.

"White people have affirmative action, too -- and predictably, it works a lot better than the black version."

No. There is a version of affirmative action (relatives, 'children of alumni' scholarships, things of that nature) that generally benefit certain individuals who generally happen to be white. The other 99% of the white population get no boost from that. So I disagree.