Remember that poll we crashed over the weekend? Apparently, whoever is administering that web page went to work today, approved a bunch of new suck-up comments, and deleted it. Heh.
You can still view the poll at polldaddy: 98% (418,948) said ID shouldn’t be taught in schools, 2% (8,901) asked what ID is, and less than 1% (902) think it should be taught. Good work running up the score, gang!
Matt Taibbi went off on a three day Christian retreat, and discovered how ridiculous they are…but he also discover the deep emotional, anti-intellectual pull of these kinds of events.
By the end of the weekend I realized how quaint was the mere suggestion that Christians of this type should learn to “be rational” or “set aside your religion” about such things as the Iraq War or other policy matters. Once you’ve made a journey like this — once you’ve gone this far — you are beyond suggestible. It’s not merely the informational indoctrination, the constant belittling of homosexuals and atheists and Muslims and pacifists, etc., that’s the issue. It’s that once you’ve gotten to this place, you’ve left behind the mental process that a person would need to form an independent opinion about such things. You make this journey precisely to experience the ecstasy of beating to the same big gristly heart with a roomful of like-minded folks. Once you reach that place with them, you’re thinking with muscles, not neurons.
By the end of that weekend, Phil Fortenberry could have told us that John Kerry was a demon with clawed feet, and not one person would have so much as blinked. Because none of that politics stuff matters anyway, once you’ve gotten this far. All that matters is being full of the Lord and empty of demons. And since everything that is not of God is demonic, asking these people to be objective about anything else is just absurd. There is no “anything else.” All alternative points of view are nonstarters. There is this “our thing,” a sort of Cosa Nostra of the soul, and then there are the fires of Hell. And that’s all.
Insulating yourself against the taint of all religion is a kind of psychological, informational hygiene. Abandon all rigor and requirement for reality-based evidence for one’s ideas, and you open the door wide for the kind of conditioning in dogma modern religion promotes.
It’s criminal to ruin the brains of children.
He definitely has some talent, though. Should I adopt his rhetorical style for my classes?
Same as the old ERV, only in fancy new digs.
What fresh horror could drive the American Family Association to call out the troops? Evil, repulsive soap operas.
Procter & Gamble has resumed using explicit, open-mouth homosexual kissing in their soap opera, “As the World Turns.”
So stop buying soap and shampoo, Christians! If you aren’t dingy, greasy, and stinky, we’ll know you’re an advocate of boys kissing.
Helpfully, AFA includes a link to the “repulsive” video, so if you’re a good Christian you can also watch these two attractive young men being affectionate with one another. You can watch it over and over. You can watch it until those strange, funny feelings drive you to embrace Jesus.
So you’re pining away for ERV, hoping either that her site will be restored or that she’ll bring her new site up quickly. Don’t sit there weeping and wailing, she’ll be back online soon enough. Cheer up and laugh! Here are a few links to help you out.
Conservapædia discusses “professor values” (this one is not intentionally humorous, but it still gets the job done.)
You feel better already.
My fellow academics, have you ever noticed that when our science students have problems with writing, we send them off to get tutorials from the people who know better, over in the English department? Our campus has a writing room where students can get advice from experts before they hand in their work to the science nerds. Unfortunately, there is no reciprocal arrangement: when English majors write about science, almost any claptrap can pass muster, we science nerds don’t provide remedial science education, and they don’t send their students to us to get their assertions vetted. This leads to distressing situations, like this account of a student who wrote a paper on evolution for a history class. The history TA marked up her paper with painfully stupid comments about the science of evolution. What can be done about this sort of thing?
Well, my first thought was that the next time I get a set of term papers (next week! Oh, no!) I’m going to grade them by insisting that “it’s” always gets an apostrophe, verb tenses are irrelevant and changing them frequently spices up a paper, and that anything written before the date of the author’s birth is old timey history and doesn’t need a citation, since they make it all up anyway. Sentences optional are. Speeeling ireluhvent. We is always at war with humanities and social sciences.
But no! Let’s acknowledge that both sides of the campus divide have essential contributions to make to one another! This is a case where Science ought to put on its best lab coat and stomp on over to History and set them straight, while recognizing that it would be a good thing for History (and Philosophy and English and Art usw) have grounds to tromp over and assail us over our philistine ways. Silence is the worst approach we could take.
Which actually makes this a nice segue into my announcement for the Café Scientifique, which represents an attempt to bridge the two cultures. It’s our last Café of the year, and we’ve got a couple of people from those buildings on the other side of the campus mall to join us in talking about how to communicate science. I’m really looking forward to this one; it’s not too late for the rest of you to book a flight and rent a car and make the trip on out to Morris for a splendid evening.
Consuming information: Translating science for the rest of us
Barbara Burke (Speech) and Tisha Turk (English)
“Consuming information: Translating science for the rest of us” describes and explains the journalistic practices that occur when research about science topics gets translated into headlines and news stories. By examining recent news stories about the dangers of coffee consumption, we illustrate the progress of information from an article in the American Journal of Ob/Gyn to a ten-second spot TV or a two-inch news story in a daily paper. Drink up while we discuss coffee research findings!
So, for that history TA who is ignorant of evolution, I’d say that one response ought to be that the science disciplines at that university make a routine effort to offer introductory lectures and discussions on core topics in the field, aimed at a general audience. I’d also like to see more explanations for us geeks on basics in other disciplines — if someone offered an evening “Idiot’s Guide to Post-modernism”, or similar grossly misunderstood topic, I’d go.
As always, the answer is more speech. Talk and share ideas.
Edmondson is one of the creators of the “Beware the Believers” video, and this interview continues the pattern—he’s intriguingly ambiguous.
Lots of you have noticed that the ERV blog is currently inaccessible. Abbie can’t get to it either, and something is very, very wrong — either a random glitch or some peckerwood reported her site to the powers-that-be at google and a kneejerk pulled the plug. She is going to be trying to get it reinstated, so be patient for a little while. I’ll let you all know if any news develops.
A reader reminded me of a good corrective to the awful little man who claims that science leads to killing people: a dose of Jacob Bronowski.
“When people believe that they have absolute knowledge, with no test in reality, this is how they behave. This is what men do when they aspire to the knowledge of gods.”
My students in introductory biology will be watching this whole episode next week — I wish there were a way we could spare the time to have them watch the whole series … which, come to think of it, would make for an excellent framework to discuss the history of science.
