EAllusion wrote:Tarkski -
The typical end game for the these kind of claims is twofold.
The first goal is to achieve increased acceptance of and class time for views that are popular among conservatives that mainstream academia tends to view as fringe or pseudoscientific.
Yet more clear evidence that you are, for the most part, contemptuously ignorant of what the conservative movement is, its history, and its core ideas. Creationism interests a small sub-set of conservatives, primarily the Protestant fundamentalists, who themselves have never defined the movement.
You generally see this in the guise of arguments for equal time for various views in the name of intellectual diversity and academic freedom. Notably, it’s impossible to give every possible view equal time.
No one is actually asking for "equal time" for any and all views. They are asking that professors stop using their lecterns as pulpits for their own ideological views, stop teaching controversial subjects as if the answers have already been settled (
always in the Left's favor), stop teaching isolated, questionable, controversial theories/revisionist interpretations of historical/social phenomena as settled fact/truth (i.e., women's studies, African American studies, Afrocentrism, multiculturalism, Native American studies, queer theory, post-colonial theory, critical theory, cultural studies, Marxism (various schools), postmodernism etc.) and clearly and fairly provide students with both or alternative sides representing the major, salient arguments of longstanding questions of the human condition. This is what the Left has essentially banished from American academia, from the community college level through the Ivy League, and also what they so desperately want to preserve
They really are only after equal time for views they favor, not anything you can find some academic somewhere arguing – especially not fringe views more popular on the left.
Read the ABOR. Its not about "equal time" but about intellectual and academic heterodoxy and an atmosphere of open inquiry as an antidote to the intellectual Stalinism that has characterized the academy for roughly thirty years and come to define a body of entire departments that, more often than not, come to dominate and suffocate the campus intellectual climate.
Likewise, the hope is to prevent people who hold those views from being judged professionally incompetent and thus impacting their careers.
Keep the self-indulgent fantasies coming, EA. The more you post, the closer we get to your true core.
The two big issues for the right is creationism and climate change skepticism, but there’s a whole host of lesser status views out there that come with that package.
Dangerous or catastrophic anthropogenic global warming remains ensconced within mainstream academia, notwithstanding is grossly pseudoscientific nature, because of the endless streams of government research grant money flowing to those who do the right kind of research leading to the right results which imply certain kinds of government policy and which support and sustain certain ideological visions.
The rest can be understood to be a feature of the overwhelming groupthink and intellectual conformity that defines the humanities and social sciences, but which has bled beyond these departments into "climate science," making that discipline (there isn't any such thing as "climate science," per se, but a body of overlapping disciplines and sub-disciplines all having relevance to the study of climate, including the core discipline, climatology, and other earth sciences that study climate as a direct corollary of their core focus, such as geology) an embarrassment to a large segment of the rest of the scientific community (and to anyone who values both the integrity of science and the value of critical, analytical thought).
EA Mythology: "The two big issues for the right is creationism and climate change skepticism, but there’s a whole host of lesser status views out there that come with that package."
Reality: The major issues for the vast majority of those in the conservative intellectual movement, as well as a substantial majority of the conservative grassroots, can fairly be decocted as:
1. Gross, ideologically biased revisionist interpretations of American/Western history
2. Non-teaching or highly politicized teaching of economics.
3. Gross bias and hostility to America, patriotism, and the core values/ideas of the Founding.
4. Ideology taught and studied as settled truth or as the only serious theoretical framework within which to approach a subject.
5. Entire departments (the various "studies" disciplines) given over to the promulgation of sectarian ideological doctrines as academic study.
Creationism (
not ID, per se) is a fundamentalist preoccupation, though not centered solely in that sub-group of evangelicals. AGW is a political question of concern to the entire conservative/libertarian movement, and is not a primary focus of the serious reform needed in higher ed per se (except in the sense that the grant money machine needs to be brought to heel).
Poor EA is simply too far out to sea on all of this, and to ignorant of the conservative movement and its core ideas and goals to really be a relevant contributor to a debate such as this.
The second goal, which is more uncommon and crazy than the first (though Droopy clearly is into it), is to fold everything into a grand leftwing desire to subjugate the population and render most everyone into serfs dependent on a totalitarian government overclass.
As our "libertarian" rushes to the defense of the Left once again, fantastically ignorant of history and as apparently, bereft of a substantive understanding of leftism as he is of conservatism, one can only gape (no wonder DCP gave up bothering to discuss anything with him long years ago).
Universities, what with them being run by this amorphous group of people known as “the left” then become a propaganda tool in advancing this dark purpose.
It was Todd Gitlin himself who admitted that, "we squandered the politics — but won the textbooks."
They're not all that "amorphous," and I don't think any conservative of intellectual standing has ever made that assertion. They're are concentrated in certain departments and intellectual pursuits, and even though people on the Left far outnumber those on the Right, in academia generally (because of the now legendary and well documented discrimination in hiring, tenure, and hounding out of the classroom for various crimes against the canons of political correctness, which even more moderate liberals (i.e., Lawrence Summers) cannot long avoid if they don't watch their ideological manners in public), across a number of humanities and social science departments throughout American academe, they are
utterly dominant.
Creationism isn't taught because its crackpotville, but rather because keeping it away is part of a leftwing plot to advance atheism and destroy the Christian nuclear family that stands in opposition to government subjugation.
How many strawmen can you joust with, E., before you enter the arena of ideas as a serious participant?
Climate change is a leftist political plot to justify regulation of economic behavior and increase government control, possibly "one-world" government control.
That's undeniable true, as a concerted study of what a large number of the environmental movement's intellectuals, activists, and politicized scientists across the Western world have actually been saying for many years, in their own books, monographs, symposiums, conferences, position papers, and...uh...emails, and even more so by a sustained critique of the policies they desire to impose, nationally and, through U.N. mediated treaty obligations, across national borders and enforced by central government authority, either within national borders or, through transnational initiatives such as the long sought for global tax.
Pointing this out is the first step to dismantling this road to totalitarianism. This folds right back into introducing fringe and pseudoscientific views conservatives are more inclined to be infatuated with.
Again, your cartoon understanding of any ideas and beliefs other than your own render you a bit too easy to dismiss, E.
Keep up the good work.