education

Christian "Science"

Dana Hunter1 Comment

I’m sorry. I know this is probably going to make you wince, or possibly land in the hospital with a severe overdose of stupidity, but this is just too funny to pass up.

The Association of Christian Schools International is trying to sue the snot out of the University of California because U of C doesn’t think the “science” classes taught by some Christian schools are quite up to snuff, and therefore refuse to award credit for those classes. Ed Brayton has the brief filed by attorneys made famous by the Kitzmiller trial, and highlights a possible reason U of C is being such a big meanie:

This brief deals primarily with the science classes that were rejected, classes that used one of two books: Biology for Christian Schools and Biology: God’s Living Creation. These books are both virulently anti-science, teaching that anything that contradicts a literal interpretation of the Bible must be false.

Beginning with the first page of its introduction, the third edition of Biology for Christian Schools makes absolutely clear that its perspective on the nature of science is irreconcilably at odds with that of the NAS and the scientific community in general. From the outset, the textbook instructs the student that everything in the Bible is literally true and that, therefore, any scientific observations or conclusions that conflict with the Bible are necessarily false “no matter how many scientific facts may appear to back them.”…Similar statements appear throughout the textbook, drumming home the message that, with respect to any “fact” contained in the Bible, empirical evidence is irrelevant. See, e.g., id. at 197 (“Because God is the source of all truth, all accurate scientific knowledge will fit into th[e Bible’s] outline. Anything that contradicts God’s Word is in error or has been misunderstood.”); id. at 201 (“God’s Word is the only true measuring stick of scientific accuracy.”); id. at 204 (“All scientific facts and the interpretation of those facts, therefore, must fit into the model prescribed by the Word of God. A scientific ‘fact’ that does not fit into the worldview outlined in the Bible either is in error (and therefore not really a fact) or is being misinterpreted.”); id. at 251 (“[T]he Bible is the source of all truth, and everything, not just science, must be evaluated based on Scripture. If a hypothesis or scientific model seems to make sense and all of the evidence points to an answer that is contrary to the Bible, then the evidence, not the Bible, must be reevaluated and the conclusions changed.”).

Easy extra credit to any commentors who can hazard a guess as to why these “science” classes might be considered unacceptable to a university system that takes science seriously.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I must go seek medical attention for the side I just split…

Christian "Science"
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The Necessity of Knowledge

Dana Hunter3 Comments

It’s cliché time at the cantina, my darlings, because I want to talk about a simple truth: knowledge is power.

In observing politics and religion, you soon notice a distinct abundance of stupidity. And I call it stupidity, not ignorance, because refusing knowledge is stupid. Everyone at times refuses knowledge, but some people raise it to an art form. It’s a constant in their lives. They can’t be bothered to think.

I thought of it watching the teabaggers get manipulated by the corporate lobbyists. These people were tools, and they were too stupid to realize it. It’s not that they were ignorant of what was going on – the information was out there in abundance. They had it in their own hands.

There’s a tradition in religion and conservatism that says, “Don’t question authority. Trust received pronouncements.” Therefore, you get people who can be told that Obama’s leading the country into socialism. They know this not because they’ve seen evidence, not because they know what socialism is, but because they’ve been told Obama’s a socialist, socialism is bad, and therefore Obama is bad:


A little bit of knowledge would’ve gone a long way, there. Knowing what these social programs are, how they can work, and why being a selfish stupid git isn’t the best survival strategy would completely disarm GOP attacks.

If people bothered to gain a bit of knowledge, they wouldn’t be snookered by Newtie’s latest “green coal” blabbering. They wouldn’t elect ignorant fools like Michele Bachmann and John Boehner who don’t know the difference between necessary and toxic levels of carbon dioxide, and exactly which greenhouse gas it is that cows emit. Note to Boehner: it’s not CO2.

A little bit of knowledge combined with an ocean of ignorance is a dangerous thing. Michele Bachmann’s statement that carbon dioxide is a vital part of life on earth may sound persuasive if all you know is that CO2 is what plants eat. If you didn’t know other things, such as what happens when too much of a good thing gets into the atmosphere, then you’d think she had a good point. Alas, too many ignorant and willfully stupid people do. And so the planet boils.

Speaking of global warming, Sen. James Inhofe has “a list of 700 prominent scientists who oppose global warming.” Wow! With that many scientists saying global warming doesn’t exist, there must really be doubts, right? Here’s where knowledge gives us the power to resist fake science, though, because knowing who those “scientists” are changes everything:

Like the Discovery Institute’s similar list involving evolution, there are some real laughers on the list. Like this one:

One of the listed prominent scientists is Chris Allen, who holds no college degree, believes in creationism and belongs to a Southern Baptist church.

Allen is a weatherman at the FOX-affiliated TV station in Bowling Green, Ky.

[snip]

The list also includes a retired professor with no training in climate science who says that the earth “couldn’t be more than 10,000 years old.” And these names were listed as “prominent scientists” in an actual Senate report.

Outrageous fucktards can get away with this shit only because people don’t know any better. They haven’t bothered to learn. They don’t know how to verify claims. They don’t know how to think critically. If all of us had knowledge and knew how to apply it, the Senate wouldn’t be disgraced by idiots like Inhofe, because they wouldn’t get voted in there in the first place.

Given enough knowledge, people wouldn’t fall prey to vitamin pushers. They wouldn’t get taken in by fake medicine. And they sure as shit wouldn’t get snookered by priests trying to use science to shore up their homophobia. No wonder the powerful religious, political and corporate interests hate knowledge so.

Knowledge is necessary to keep us from falling prey. Knowledge is our power. I suggest that as Elitist Bastards, we teach a lot more folks how to use it.

The Necessity of Knowledge

Prescribing the Disease as the Cure

Dana Hunter

Leave it to the uber-religious fuckwits to come up with genius ideas like this:

I had to laugh at the absurd assumptions behind this headline from the American Family Association’s OneNewsNow:

afaheadline.jpg

STDs have gone up, therefore we need more abstinence-only sex ed. Never mind that study after study has shown that kids who get abstinence-only sex ed are less likely to use condoms when they have sex.

You know why I love Ed Brayton? Because he’s merciless with the statistics:

Let’s look just at the state of Texas, which leads the nation in abstinence-only sex ed. 94% of all Texas school districts teach abstinence-only sex ed, with only 3% teaching abstinence-plus (abstinence plus condoms and other forms of birth control).

The result? Texas teenagers also are among the nation’s leaders in unprotected sex.

Fifty-sex percent of high school students in Texas report having used condoms at last intercourse. Only three states have lower rates of condom use among students.

We already know that Texas has one of the highest rates of teen pregnancy in the nation, despite 94% of them being taught abstinence-only. It’s certainly no surprise that they also have an extraordinarily high rate of STD infections:

Young people ages 15-24 comprised twenty percent of Texas’ new HIV cases in 2006.

Texas’ youth, especially young women, are at risk for STIs:

  • Youth ages 15-24 experienced 73 percent of the total number of Chlamydia cases in Texas in 2006.
  • Youth ages 15-24 experienced 61 percent of the total number of Gonorrhea cases in Texas in 2006.
  • For all youth in this age range, young women were most at risk for STIs, experiencing 83 percent of Chlamydia infections and 60 percent of gonorrhea infections.

So much for that argument.

I think it’s time we turn the tables. Anti-choicers like to shove pictures of discarded fetal tissue in people’s faces. Why not take a page from their book and start parading around outside their churches with blown-up photos of the effects of STDs? We can ask them why they’re ruining kids’ lives.

Here’s just a few pics to get us started:

AIDS:

Advanced Kaposi’s sarcoma with marked lymphostatic oedema in a patient’s face.

(© J.H. Frenkel, Univ. Frankfurt)


Syphillis:

Lesions

Courtesy of the Sexual Health Guide blog


Chlamydia –

“A wicked case of crotch rot“

This is what they sentence kids to when the only advice they give is “Don’t have sex.”

Prescribing the Disease as the Cure

Satanists Everywhere!

Dana Hunter2 Comments

Delusional people would be a lot more fun if they weren’t getting elected to school boards and other public offices.

Texas has a shining example of greater wingnuttia. Observe:

To show you just how ridiculous Texas Board of Education chairman Don McLeroy is, take a look at this report from the Texas Freedom Network on a book he recently endorsed.

[snip]

Dr. McLeroy – noting his position as board chair – recently wrote a glowing recommendation of Sowing Atheism: The National Academy of Sciences’ Sinister Scheme to Teach Our Children They’re Descended from Reptiles by Robert Bowie Johnson, Jr. (The new book is self-published.)

I’m sure it is. After all, most Christian publishing houses want to retain at least one small scrap of credibility. John Pieret was kind enough to skim the screed so we don’t have to. Here’s what Don McLeroy is so very excited about:

You can download Sowing Atheism here. As the blurb at the download site says:

Robert Bowie Johnson, Jr., who holds a general science degree from West Point, wrote SOWING ATHEISM in response to the book published by the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in January of this year, Science, Evolution, and Creationism. The NAS sent its book to educators, school boards, and science teachers throughout the United States, falsely affirming that molecules-to-man evolution is a “fact” when in reality it does not even meet the minimum conditions for a valid theory.

Science, Evolution, and Creationism was the NAS’s attempt to address the relationship between science and religion that has been criticized by some atheists for being too conciliatory to the latter. Be that as it may, if this “report” (more of a marketing ploy, I suspect) is true, it says much about the nature of McLeroy’s position on the Texas science standards and his claim that he isn’t seeking to have religion taught in the state’s public schools. If he has recommended the book, it may well bear on any court challenge later on. Some quotes from Johnson’s book:

[T]he NAS hierarchy, in order to bolster and “prove” its atheism, has constructed a closed, sacrosanct, counterfeit philosophy of science which completely eliminates the valid God hypothesis, along with any possibility of bringing it up again. (p. 12)

Science, Evolution, and Creationism is anything but an appeal to open-minded readers to use their powers of discernment to carefully consider the evidence. It is a cleverly disguised all-out, direct attack on the authority of the Word of God, and on all other challenges to their philosophical and religious dogma of evo-atheism (evolutionist atheism). (p. 13)

It continues, as far as a very quick skim reveals, in the same vein for another hundred pages or more. Included are the usual creationist talking points: the elitism of scientists, argumentums ad populum, and presuppositionalism.

Now, people with a tenuous grip on reality would realize that recommending such a book might be somewhat akin to wearing a billboard, complete with glowing neon lettering and a blaring loudspeaker, proclaiming “Frothing Fundie Freak! Too stupid to even be an IDiot!” But McLeroy isn’t one of those people:

You can see McLeroy’s glowing recommendation here.

In the current culture war over science education and the teaching of evolution, Bob Johnson’s Sowing Atheism provides a unique and insightful perspective. In critiquing the National Academy of Science’s (NAS) missionary evolution tract–Science, Evolution and Creationism, 2008, he identifies their theft of true science by their intentional neglect of other valid scientific possibilities. Then, using NAS’s own statements, he demonstrates that the great “process” of evolution–natural selection–is nothing more than a figure of speech. These chapters alone are worth the reading of this book.

Next he shows how the NAS attempts to seduce the unwitting reader by providing scanty empirical evidence but presented with great intellectual bullying–both secular and religious. He actually embarrasses the NAS with a long list of their quotes where they make the obvious claim that evolutionists believe in evolution. He then shines light on the Clergy Letter Project, again showing the obvious–theistic evolutionists believe in evolution.

I’m not even sure what that last bit is supposed to mean. It’s somehow a bad thing that advocates for evolution believe in evolution? It is, of course, precious how he defines as “scanty” the massive edifice of evidence which has convinced the overwhelming majority of scientists that evolution is a fact. By his standards, of course, the evidence is scanty – as it is bound to be when you rely solely upon the scribblings of ancient goat herders.

All of this, however, is merely a sampling of the stupid supreme McLeroy’s serving up. This is the intellectual caliber of the man whose book he so enthusiastically endorses:

The Texas Freedom Network blog has more on the guy whose book Don McLeroy endorsed. He appears to be a real wingnut’s wingnut. This is from a press release the guy sent out last fall:

In a series of essays published at www.solvinglight.com/blog/, author Robert Bowie Johnson Jr. presents evidence that Barack Obama is directly linked to Satanic teachings through his close association with Oprah Winfrey, who parrots and relentlessly promotes, worldwide, the anti-Christian doctrine of her guru, Eckhart Tolle.

This calls for a very special Dramatic Chipmunk moment:

That’s right. Oprah Winfrey is a big ol’ satanist!

It’s a very sad, paranoid, utterly pathetic life these people lead. They see Satan everywhere. Especially in mushy-gushy woo-woo sorts like Eckhart Tolle, who apparantly is in cahoots with Winfrey to satanize the whole wide world.

This is the sort of shit that keeps them awake at night. And they’re overheating their brains trying to figure out a way to get it into our classrooms. Methinks it is time to take more interest in schoolboard elections.

Brethren, let us parody:

Satanists Everywhere!

So, Texas. How's That Abstinence-Only Education Going For Ya?

Dana Hunter

Ooo, not too good:

The official seal of Texas features six flags to signify six national identities Texans have known. But a report just issued by the Austin-based Texas Freedom Network Education Fund suggests that a seventh flag may need to be added. They call Texas the “flagship state for the abstinence movement.” But of course identity has consequences and the study Just Say Don’t Know: Sexuality Education in Texas Public Schools reveals a flag of ignorance flapping smartly in the breeze over the state legislature that has made abstinence only the “preferred” method of teaching about human sexuality since 1995.

Noting that Texas has among the highest teen pregnancy rates in the country, the study also reports that the state spends “approximately $1 billion annually for the costs of teen childbearing.” What’s more, the report underscores authoritative data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that found “young Texans to be “well above national averages on virtually every published statistic involving sexual risk-taking behaviors” and that this may be “one of the most pressing public health issues facing our state.” [emphasis emphatically added]

My goodness me, what a shock: telling teens not to have sex and trying to use oogedy-boogedy lies to scare them away from the hanky-panky doesn’t work.

Look. Most of us would prefer kids don’t have sex while they’re still kids. There’s nothing wrong with encouraging them to wait until they’re a bit more mature before they do the deed.

However. There’s the ideal, and then there’s Mr. Reality. Mr. Reality sez, when hormones are barreling down on a person like a two-million ton freight train, our ideal scenario ends up squashed into molecules on the tracks.

I know there are some ultra-conservative parents out there who are fine with the idea of their kids getting punished for their sins by contracting STDs and bearing babies far too young. There’s a lot more conservative parents out there who believe it’s always those other kids having all the icky sex, but their darling angel never would, and so doesn’t need to know about disgusting and immoral things like condomns and the pill. Some of them, remarkably, even continue to display this attitude as their daughter’s belly swells and their son’s penis sprouts interesting lesions. I know this because I witnessed it at my high school.

Those parents are a lost cause. They’ll never comprehend reality, and even if the could, they’d refuse to face it. That doesn’t mean their kids and others have to suffer.

It’s time to strike abstinence-only from the curriculum. If Obama needs to save a few bucks, he can start by slashing the funding to those programs. I do believe that’s coming – he’s talked a lot about basing things on science and fact, and in this case, the science and facts have both marched abstinence-only education outside and beaten it to within an inch of its life.

We can’t just sit back and snigger at Texas, though. Sure, it’s got its comuppance, but those are kids who suffer the consequences. And, just in case you needed a little enlightened self-interest, consider this:

When it comes to Texas, size always matters, and it is worth noting that national textbook publishers have resorted to self-censorship to accommodate the Texas market, making Texas everyone’s problem.

The whole article’s worth a read. And you might want to keep that report handy the next time your local school board debates the kind of sex ed they want for your district.

When it comes to abstinence-only education, an old anti-drug slogan is particularly apt: “Just say no!”

So, Texas. How's That Abstinence-Only Education Going For Ya?

Taking Care of Their Own

Dana Hunter

Here is a study in how Republicons protect their own. Ed Brayton informs us that a panel of the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Michigan has overturned a trial court ruling and allowed a student’s lawsuit against his school for failing to prevent egregious, systemic bullying to come to trial. At the end, we get this gem:

Stutzky noted that this ruling comes close on the heels of the failure of a bill in the Michigan legislature, Matt’s Safe School Law, that would have required schools to have programs to deal with bullying:

Bullying that is not dealt with comprehensively and systemically will always increase rather than staying at the level it’s at. The state legislature had an opportunity to deal with this on a statewide basis and failed. The reality is that a lot of schools do not have any kind of specific policy dealing with bullying. And like with any other type of serious situation, we need good legislation to provide greater safety and a means for dealing with it when it does happen. We need this legislation passed so that the state stands up and recognizes that this is a serious problem and we need to address this.

That bill was named for Matt Epling, a young man from East Lansing who took his own life in 2002 after serious hazing from classmates. As the Lansing State Journal reported on Sunday, the bill had broad bipartisan support but was prevented from getting a vote in the state Senate by Majority Leader Alan Cropsey (R-Dewitt).

Apparently, State Sen. Cropsey was afraid some future Cons may be sissyfied by being forced to treat their classmates like human beings. Heaven forfend these promising young Cons be turned into mushy moderates or – even worse – liberals, by an enlightened school policy.

Seriously, though, I wonder if anyone’s ever done a study on the proportion of school bullies who become Republicons. I imagine the number’s disproportionately high.

Taking Care of Their Own

Linux Wars: The Teacher Strikes Back, Gets Paddled

jacob8 Comments

I know quite a few of you adore Linux, so when Canadian Cynic linked to this, I knew I had to share. Hope you’ve had your blood pressure medication today:

This blog is momentarily interrupted to bring you a snippet of recently received email.

“…observed one of my students with a group of other children gathered around his laptop. Upon looking at his computer, I saw he was giving a demonstration of some sort. The student was showing the ability of the laptop and handing out Linux disks. After confiscating the disks I called a confrence with the student and that is how I came to discover you and your organization. Mr. Starks, I am sure you strongly believe in what you are doing but I cannot either support your efforts or allow them to happen in my classroom. At this point, I am not sure what you are doing is legal. No software is free and spreading that misconception is harmful. These children look up to adults for guidance and discipline. I will research this as time allows and I want to assure you, if you are doing anything illegal, I will pursue charges as the law allows. Mr. Starks, I along with many others tried Linux during college and I assure you, the claims you make are grossly over-stated and hinge on falsehoods. I admire your attempts in getting computers in the hands of disadvantaged people but putting linux on these machines is holding our kids back.

This is a world where Windows runs on virtually every computer and putting on a carnival show for an operating system is not helping these children at all. I am sure if you contacted Microsoft, they would be more than happy to supply you with copies of an older verison of Windows and that way, your computers would actually be of service to those receiving them…”

Karen xxxxxxxxx
xxxxxxxxx Middle School
AISD

Hmmmm….

I suppose I should, before anything else, thank you. You have given me the opportunity to show others just what a battle we face in what we do. “We” being those who advocate, support and use Free Open Source Software and Linux in particular.

If you find my following words terse or less than cordial, take a breath and prepare yourself…what I have to say to you are soft strokes to your hair in comparison to what you are about to experience.

Head on over and enjoy the spanking. I’m just going to sit back here and enjoy the entertaining mental image of young geeks dealing open source software from street corners.

Linux Wars: The Teacher Strikes Back, Gets Paddled

I Am Civically Literate Enough to Write This Blog

jacob11 Comments


I am nearly 100% qualified to opine on political and governmental issues. Ha!

And no, I didn’t cheat and Google the answers. If I had, I wouldn’t have missed bloody Question #7. Go see if you do better.

This is an interesting little project the ISI’s got. Their official survey – the one people can’t cheat on – shows that 71% of Americans fail the test. The average score for regular citizens is 49%. For people who held public office, it’s 44%. That’s just pathetic.

Here’s a finding that shows a dramatic confusion about religion in this country:

Seventy-nine percent of those who have been elected to government office do not know the Bill of Rights expressly prohibits establishing an official religion for the U.S.

Only 24% of college graduates know the First Amendment prohibits establishing an official religion for the United States.

I think we need to get to edumicating people.

At least we know without taking the test that we’re likely smarter than average:

The civic knowledge gained from engaging in frequent conversations about public affairs, reading about current events and history, and participating in more involved civic activities is greater than the gain from a bachelor’s degree alone.

And people wonder why I didn’t opt for crushing student loan debt…

I Am Civically Literate Enough to Write This Blog

Bet You Never Thought of Mathematics as Emotional Before

jacob2 Comments

Efrique, whose couch I may someday temporarily have to beg as it’s located far away from McCain, has a glorious post up exploring the emotions elicited by mathematics.

Before I got older and wiser, I used to see mathematicians as cold, passionless logic machines. I couldn’t conceive of an emotional connection to all of those rigid numbers. It took a lot of reading in science before I realized that math can do exactly what Efrique describes:

A really clever manipulation (I can’t help but think of them as “tricks”) or an inspired substitution that makes a difficult problem easy can produce a tingling sensation up the back of my neck and head. A particularly beautiful piece of mathematics can, on occasion, move me almost to tears.

Then there’s joy and delight. On occasion I have had the fortune to look at some neat, if modest, just-derived result and wonder if perhaps I am the first to have ever seen it (it is, obviously, rarely the case that I am – it is not unusual to find that my result has been tucked away in some mathematical corner for many decades … on one occasion I found I had been beaten by Gauss – but the thrill of discovery is there all the same).

Mathematics can be intensely emotional. I’ve read mathematicians talking about math with the same passion and thrill that I experience at discovering a tremendously well-written sentence. When I understood enough physics, I finally caught of echo of the excitement and awe E = mc 2 elicits. It truly is dramatic, and beautiful.

I think that’s what’s missing from so much science and math education: emotion. Grammar suffers from the same disease to a lesser degree. We get so caught up in teaching kids the foundations that we forget to keep them excited about the edifice that could eventually arise.

If you’re learning by rote and told there’s only one possible right answer, you’re not likely to understand that strong, rewarding emotion is possible. When I tutored English, I invariably discovered that all the joy’d been sucked out of it for the struggling students. They were so beaten down by rules they couldn’t feel a damned thing. That had killed their motivation to master those rules to the point where the rules vanished and the beauty began. I’d usually spend a few sessions pumping them up: English is easy, it’s exciting, it’s really really awesome!! Once they could feel, they could punctuate. And when they could do that, I’d show them how to transcend the rules, which really got ’em going.

We need something like that with science and math. We need teachers who can make it seem simplicity itself, too exciting to stop even when it’s tough, and so dramatic that you’re determined to keep slogging right through to the breathtaking vistas at the top. We need drama. We need passion. We need blood, sweat, toil and tears. We need, in a word, to make it emotional.

Rationally emotional, o’ course. Let’s don’t get carried away. But you can be utterly rational and beside yourself with emotion at the same time. The two states aren’t mutually exclusive. Ask Efrique.

When people understand that, I don’t think they’ll see science and math as esoteric arts for emotionless experts anymore.

Bet You Never Thought of Mathematics as Emotional Before

The American Electorate: "I'm Voting for Stupid"

jacob13 Comments

American anti-intellectualism could end up destroying this country within the next decade.

Our decades-long assault on intellect is turning us into a backwater. Just consider these results from a Programme for International Student Assessment study: the United States ranked nearly dead last in math, smack in the middle of the below average column. Search for our educational rankings, and you’ll find article after article talking about our failing grades. We’re becoming a nation of idiots.

Something tells me the neocons are rather counting on that.

Consider this series of columns by John Dean, former Nixon lawyer turned enthusiastic Republican basher. Dean first analyzes Obama’s speech on race and comes to some depressing conclusions, revealed right there in the title: “Barack Obama’s Smart Speech “A More Perfect Union”: Did It Reveal Him To Be Too Intellectual To Be President?”

Computers have made it rather simple to determine the intelligence or grade level of a speech by measuring it with the Flesch-Kincaid test, which is found on the Tools/Options menu of Microsoft Word. This widely-employed measurement device determines the degree of difficulty of the written (and spoken) word.

Enterprising linguists and others have applied the test to a wide variety of material. For instance, the folks at youDictionary have tested the inaugural addresses of presidents. They discovered that no president since Woodrow Wilson has come close to delivering speeches pitched at a 12th grade level. Bush II’s first inaugural address was at a 7.5 grade level, which ranked him near Eisenhower’s second address (7.5), Nixon’s first (7.6), LBJ’s only (7.0), and FDR’s fourth (8.1). Clinton’s two addresses, by contrast, scored at the 9th grade level (9.4 and 8.8 respectively).

I tested Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” speech and it scores at a 10.5 grade level, which by current standards is in the stratosphere. But maybe he was being too smart to win the presidency.


This, Dean says, is because “Republicans have spent the past half century dumbing-down the American presidency, for it has helped them win the White House .” Apparently, Republicans think it’s a fantastic idea to have only the finest dumbasses in charge of the nuclear weapons.

Obama’s ranking on this scale was one of the things that convinced me to vote for him. I’m sick to death of people talking to Americans like they’re nothing but a bunch of rubes and utter morons. All evidence to the contrary, it would be nice to have a president who believes we can think our way out of a brown paper bag. One of the secrets of creating smart people is to actually expect people to be smart.

Intelligence, however, is anathema to the neocons, because five minutes’ critical thought can blow enormous holes in their “reasoning.” I point you to eight years of miserably failed Bush policies and the overwhelming evidence that McCain’s policies are merely more of the same. Magical thinking abounds in Republican circles. We can still win in Iraq if we stay there 100 years. The tax fairy will pay for all the tax cuts and dramatically increased spending. Drilling for more oil in our pristine national wild areas will lower the price of gas practically instantly. I could go on, but you’ve got the picture: pick at the shiny gold coating Republican policies, and what you find underneath is bullshit.

But this is fine with them. Republicans still have a chance at winning, because Obama’s smart and the electorate wants dumb. Consider Dean’s further evidence on this point:

In recent years, Democrats have nominated presidential candidates who are far more intelligent that their Republican counterparts. Common sense might suggest that high intelligence is necessary to be president,
and conclude that we should applaud such nominations. Election politics, unfortunately, usually punishes the more intelligent nominee.


He points out that the only Democrats to win in the last several decades have been Jimmy Carter (who was super-smart but whose Southern drawl makes him sound like a goober) and Bill Clinton (who played down his smarts, also spoke with a twang, and chased skirts for good measure). When it comes to electing a president, Americans seem to have an irresistible impulse to pull the level for the dumbest-seeming bastard they can find.

If this is truly what elections come down to in this country, Obama has absolutely no chance at the White House. He’s not only smart, he doesn’t hide it. And, horror of horrors, he expects Americans to be smart, too.

I’m afraid this may be too much for a nation of terminal under-achievers to handle.

So is Dean. And he’s got studies to back his pessimism:

Dr. Drew Westen, a clinical and political psychologist who teaches at Emery University, has literally looked inside the mind of partisan voters with MRI scanning equipment, and confirmed that emotions dominate our voting decisions. Westen writes about our emotionally-driven democracy in his recent book, The Political Brain: The Role of Emotions In Deciding the Fate of the Nation (Public Affairs, 2007), and his findings are not good news for Democrats, unless they change their ways.

Westen and his colleagues found “[t]he political brain is an emotional brain. It is not a dispassionate calculating machine, objectively searching for the right facts, figures, and policies to make a
reasoned decision.” Democrats, however, like to appeal to reason. While this resonates with many key elements of the Democratic Party, it simply does not work across the board with all voters.

In short, voters are going to react to McCain and Obama in the general election this fall with their hearts, not their heads.

If that’s the case, we are so fucked.

This country can’t afford another four years of stupid. Dean has some faint hope
that the last eight years of utterly spectacular dumbfuckery has jolted the American electorate enough to realize that voting for the person who seems closest to you in general ignorance is the wrong thing to do. So do I. And yet both of us realize that many of our fellow countrymen are going to go for the man who throws a good barbecue rather than the man who has the intelligence to make the tough decisions and start picking up the shattered fragments of our nation. So what if McCain wants to keep us in a hideously unpopular war for a century, can’t tell the difference between a Sunni and a Shi’ite even if they’re wearing badges, and whose economic policy is guaranteed to bankrupt the nation? He doesn’t talk above the understanding of the average dropout, and his dry rub is to die for.

We just might.

America has to wise up. Somehow, we have to convince our fellow citizens to stop treating elections as popularity contests and start treating them as job interviews. The presidency is the most important job in America: it’s vital it doesn’t go to the dumbest candidate. We need a super-intelligent person in the White House, someone capable of running a complicated, dangerous, and threatened country. We need someone in charge who can think his way out of a brown paper bag.

The problem is, even if we end up with such a man, I’m afraid the below-average idiots who treat elections as an extension of American Idol are going to end up forcing him to tack stupid. We’re beyond a left-leaning politician having to tack right: if what John Dean and his sources are saying is correct, America will accept a left-leaner as long as he’s stupid enough not to threaten their fragile egos. They’ll forgive any number of idiotic mistakes – they’ve proven that time and time again over the last eight years – but they’ll never forgive a man for being smarter than they are.

That’s why we need to work hard to create a smarter America, my darlings. Intelligence needs to be prized again. Americans need to be encouraged to excel in academics, value smarts over personality, and above all learn how the fucking well think again.

This country is not going to survive as a superpower, or even a power, if it doesn’t get smart. If Bush’s idiotic antics have made our electorate realize that, then it’ll be the only good thing he’s ever done.

Let’s don’t vote for stupid this time, okay, America?

The American Electorate: "I'm Voting for Stupid"