EXPELLED: The punchlines wont stop coming

Abbie! It's not nice to say that the producers of EXPELLED are lying sacks of shit! Lying sacks of shit everywhere should be offended by that association!

My own psychic abilities are telling me that if anyone still really cared about EXPELLED anymore, the producers would say that the uniform poll results were caused by "a computer glitch" or "technical error" which has since been corrected. But, since no one actually cares, I doubt it will even come to that.

Hmmm....let's see how the Number ONE!!!! documentary of 2008 is doing so far....

1Fahrenheit 9/11: $119,194,771
2March of the Penguins: $77,437,223
3Sicko: $24,540,079
4An Inconvenient Truth: $24,146,161
5Bowling for Columbine: $21,576,018
6Madonna: Truth or Dare: $15,012,935
7Winged Migration: $11,689,053
8Super Size Me: $11,536,423
9Religulous: $9,068,325
10Mad Hot Ballroom: $8,117,961
11Hoop Dreams: $7,830,611
12Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed: $7,720,487

Didn't that Religulous film come out in '08? Oops....

Aww, that's cute, make up the data as you go!

Religulous beat Expelled in just 16 days...
Religulous Versus Expelled

Abbie, I love you. Will you join me and my wife in a futuristic/progressive triad relationship?

How the hell do you notice this stuff?

I must be psychic, too: as soon as I saw mention of the poll I knew the results would be fixed. I'm actually surprised they had NO as high as it is ...

They are lying sacks of shit who have rigged their own poll.

Oh, sorry, was that rhetorical? :D

Looking at
view-source:http://www.expelledthemovie.com/poll.xml
in Google Chrome shows
[poll]
[question/]
[answer votes="4" barColor="#66CC33"]Yes[/answer]
[answer votes="1" barColor="#66CC33"]No[/answer]
[answer votes="2" barColor="#66CC33"]Maybe[/answer]
[/poll]

This poll has been up for a while. I voted, lessee, three days ago? Four? Seems to me the margin was closer, and showing an increasing number of "No" votes.

I can confidently say that at the time I predicted that the poll results would be finessed by Steinophiles before you can say "anti-American militant atheist." 'Course, I can't prove it. Actually, I had mostly forgotten all about it till now. Thanks for the reminder.

"Do you think Darwin's theories are OUTDATED? Yes, No, Maybe"

Lessee ...

Pangenesis ... Yes.
Natural selection ... No.
Gradualism ... Maybe.

No matter what answer the producers rig the numbers to, they can't help but be partly right ... which is a great improvement on their batting average.

I wonder if they'll leave that poll up for a good long time, and I'm willing to say that those results will never change in the slightest.

What a bunch of dishonest pieces of worm shit. Really, I'd say it's pathetic, but these are malicious sons-of-bitches who have no conscience, no morals, and no integrity whatsoever.

Great catch, Abbie.

Luv n hugs n stuff!

I didnt figure this out! The Coolest People on the Internet(TM) found it! They know everything. They see everything. Im just pulicizin it ;)

Oooh! You should seriously send it to James Randi! Wouldn't that be fun? ;-)

... Or teh "Myth busters"! :-)

"Do you think Darwin's theories are OUTDATED?"

Wow, that's a dumb question on the face of it. There's a whole lot Darwin didn't know at the time, lacking as he did perfect foresight and a time machine, but of course "Darwin's theories" is going to mean a different thing to the evolution crowd as it is to the creation/ID crowd, which will consider all evolutionary theories to be "Darwin's theories".

Gah, now I see they're starting to greenlight comments again! As if I need another hobby resumed :)

I noticed this a little while ago. I think its an attempt to get anti-Creationists to buy the dvd just because its cover is so hilariously stupid. I doubt its an error.

Yep, I got exactly the same results. You know, we should assume as much from the get-go with these folks. We could always test your working hypothesis with a classic PZ Poll-Crash(TM). If his ranks of readers can't move it, it is fake.

Wow. That is just pathetic. What else can you say? Utterly pathetic.

"I LOVE PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE. BEST MOVIE EVER! FOUR STARS" - Ed Wood

I was a bit dismayed when I saw ads for Expelled on BBC America, but then I remember that this was the same channel that aired ads for Kinoki footpads.

Just wrote my vote : still at 50-25-25...

Wow, that is disappointing. My opinion of Expelled was pretty low but frankly I didn't expect them to rig a poll that way (incidentally, confirmed Abbie's claim).

Although on the topic of massive ID/creationist failures I can't resist making a gratuitous plug for my latest blog entry wherein the Texas "teach the controversy" proponents say explicitly that they want taught the opinions of "creationists" (not even bothering saying ID):

http://religionsetspolitics.blogspot.com/2008/10/don-mcleroy-jenkins-ep…

I like the one banner ad that takes you to an "ID answers" page:

http://www.intelligentdesignanswers.com

Interestingly they have a couple Dawkins books right up at top.

I should point out that the link uses their amazon associates ID. If you do follow and then happen to buy something, remember they'll get some coin thrown their way. Nice to see they're not above making some money off a Dawkins book.

Has it occured to anyone else that Ben Stein probably has the world's most fitting initials?

I have tried to watch Expelled, but the line-up of douchebags made it too unbearable. Ben Stein and his comrades are pissing in the fountain of knowledge. Appearently there is no limit to how much the creationists/IDiots are willing to lie and distort in order to brainwash people into believing that ID is even a candidate for explaining life. If these people are allowed to control American schools scientific literacy will plummet to a sad lowpoint.

As far as I could see no one on the ID-side in the documentary even understood the theory they want to overturn. Hardly suprising, seeing that not only are their religious beliefs (for most of them at least) dependent on ID, but their fame and recognition are as well. If they understood how all the evidence points to evolution they probably couldn't live with themselves. So they close their minds instead.

However, I would have loved to see the uncut interviews with the science proponents. Not that I count on Mathis (?) and Stein releasing them.

I like how Dembski at UD is complaning about people "gaming" the reviews of expelled over at Amazon. I love how they complain about being excluded from the sciences by the Darwinist cultural elitests...then when they try to sell ID to the populance at large...it gets ripped even more.

Brian

Did anyone notice the animated ad for Expelled merch in the upper right corner? According to that, Berlinski is going to be doing Expelled: The Book. Great: all the vacuity of Expelled combined with all the smug pomposity and tortured prose of David Berlinski. Guaranteed to be the bestselling book of whatever genre in some year.

I commented on the rigged poll on the expelled blog. My comment is currently undergoing moderation. Will it get through? Wait and see!

"I commented on the rigged poll on the expelled blog. My comment is currently undergoing moderation. Will it get through? Wait and see!"

Possible. It's not UD so maybe. At some point I should check out the comments/flame war? over at Amazon about Expelled.

Brian

Also note from John F's comment that dinosaur descendants also deftly defeated the Darwin defamers. What a delicious irony.

"Do you think Darwin's theories are OUTDATED? Yes, No, Maybe"

...but Darwin's work is outdated. What do they think biologists have been doing for the past century? Having "We're Right!" parties?

They don't need to rig it. Everyone should ne voting 'Yes' anyway.

Yeah, Magpie, that is the pedantically correct answer, but that's not what they mean by it, and most people will probably take their meaning: the Modern Theory of Evolution is outdated. The anti-evolution crowd equates that with what Darwin actually thought and wrote about, which they either aren't familiar with or pretend not to be so they can do stuff like create rigged and disingenuous polls.

Of course. But that's my point, really: Our Side generally thinks about their answers, and probably would have had to vote for the Yes side (or, probably, wouldn't have voted at all in such a weasel-word poll). Just saying it was a bit pointless to rig it, since the wording meant it was a heads-I-win, tails-you-lose situation.

Educated people had to vote yes, ignorant nuts would vote yes, the difference in is interpretation. Well done them for crafting the question. Gold star for cunning dishonesty.

Just makes the blatant vote rigging all the stupider.

Looks like they've fiddled with it now.

Yes 62%
No 26%
Maybe 12%

refreshing to

Yes 63%
No 26%
Maybe 11%

<code>
<poll>

<question/>

<answer votes="72" barColor="#66CC33">Yes</answer>

<answer votes="30" barColor="#66CC33">No</answer>

<answer votes="13" barColor="#66CC33">Maybe</answer>

</poll>
</code>

Forgot to put at the top of #34:

They just re-rigged the poll.

I probed about in their .swf file with a decompiler and found they're using a piece of Flash/XML/PHP called DesignersPoll to operate that poll (this). DesignersPoll stores the results in an XML file on the server; this would be the poll.xml file that Thomas and Tophe have pointed out is extremely suspect. The 4/1/2 "voting" split in the earlier file gives us the 57%/14%/29% results of earler, and the 72/30/13 must give us the results it's currently displaying.

I'd be charitable enough to go by that old "malice/incompetence" adage and say the initial problem was merely an oversight; they put a few votes in as test data but failed to give the polling software permission to write to the XML file on their server (explaining the unchanging results), but the fact that they have clearly stepped in and manually changed the number of votes stored in poll.xml while still not fixing the problem that prevents the poll actually tallying real votes raises a big red flag in the "malice" column for me. Duplicitous through-and-through.

@MPG: I just came to same conclusion myself a minute or so ago, though by different means, and posted about it at here at AtBC

@Thomas S. Howard: Intriguing - I wasn't aware of that second XML file stored on the monarchdigimedia.com server. That may explain the strange poll refresh behaviour, and the one on monarchdigimedia.com is changing in response to votes exactly as one would expect. The XML file on expelledthemovie.com remains stubbornly static though - clearly the poll is still set up to talk to monarchdigimedia.com's server to record the results, though that doesn't explain how the XML file on expelledthemovie.com can change too (I suspect manual intervention there still).

It's been re-rigged once again to 56-36-8

I don't know about that Andrew. The poll shows 53 - 40 - 7 on my computer. I think they may have fixed it. This, of course, means that it time to ask PZ Myers to have his readers swarm the poll. :P

Is it time to ask them to remove the No 1 documentary in 2008 story?

I tried and got 55/38/7 so it is either working or they have a randomizer working

My comment was blocked from the blog. It probably for the better for my own sake now that they've fixed the poll. It seems like it could've been an accident anyway.

Well, they still have 72/30/13 as their numbers...

I tried to comment on their rigged poll last week but of course was censored. Below is my attempt at another post, but I'm sure this won't make it either.

Rigged poll (with new numbers!) and censored comments - and you bitch about other people supposedly censoring your side of the discussion? Do you even believe in ID or are you just whoring for them?

It's important to remember that ID is in no way religious when you're looking at that ad in the bottom right corner of the website...

To get off the poll for a moment - and admitedly a couple of you have - I get annoyed at both sides of the party by ignoring or sidestepping the valid evidence of the other side. Too many people assume creation (ie it was all made in an instant) or evolution (ie everything developed from one simple instance of life) are the only two possibilities in a quest that has an infinite number of potential explanations. Intelligent design wouldn't disprove evolution any more than evolution would disprove intelligent design. The only real argument is between those those want Genesis chapters 1-2 in the bible to be read literally and those who refuse the possibility of any kind of God.