Academia, leftists, hip hop

[Guest]

Like I said, this is what we are doing to the best of our ability already.

You're either a bit delusional or being knowingly deceptive. All the evidence points drastically in the other direction, and has since at least the mid-eighties.

(By thew way I found the idea of being drunk on grant money pretty hilarious. Professors get next to none of it.

You'd better do some extensive reading on the nature of contemporary "climate science," its funding sources and the major entities that have done most of the propagandizing and data fudging (NASA, NOAA, NAS, IPCC, HADCRUT etc., and many other government agencies funded by the taxpayer and under political control) and the manner in which they have all been exposed for what they have been doing for a very long time.

This is one of the major differences between the Right and the Left; for the Left, "education" is a funnel that moves everything in every subject toward predigested, preconceived conclusions that are understood and desperately hoped to be the way the world really is. For conservatives, education is a search for truth; it is the perennial search for an understanding of the true, the good, the just, and the beautiful. Everything to the Left is ideological. For conservatives, ideology and politics are peripheral and, ideally, should be a tertiary aspect of human life.

As an example, we just had a speaker here who goes in for this vector gravity variable speed of light nonsense. He was treated with great dignity and respect and people engaged him on the details of his assertions.

That's fine, Tarski. Now, what are the political/policy implications of the vector gravity variable speed of light question being answered one way or another? Why would politicians, bureaucrats, the U.N., European Union, countless NGOs, and the environmental movement be interested in it? Why should the world's fossil fuel industry be dismantled because of it?

Here is the problem for you: Once some kind of semi-stable state of equilibrium (including a policy of reasonable self reflection and openness) is achieved as a result of the iterated process you describe, that reasonable equilibrium will appear to those that remain at the extremes or remain unconvinced by an emerging (and most likely moderate) consensus as something entirely different. There will always be those that resent any shift from their initial intellectual state--they knew they were right all along and only agreed on principles of discussion and criticism in the belief that they would be vindicated. They had no intention of reconsidering tightly held beliefs.

And here's your problem: science is not done by consensus, but by following the evidence where it leads, and by a body of observational, empirical, quantifiable data that can be verified/replicated by independent observers. DAGW fails all of these miserably, and, in point of fact, was never intended as anything but a circumvention of the traditional scientific method, which is why the entire edifice has been built upon computer model outputs (and, increasingly, model output compared with other model output) and not empirical field science.

These are the rigid ideologues. For example, Jesus Christ himself could never correct someone like Rush Limbaugh--his talk-radio conservatism is a pile of axioms (muddled axioms) that cannot be questioned. They have testimonies, so to speak, and have already chosen a center point around which their world moves.
They (you!) will still see a lack of balance in the academy exactly because they are out of balance themselves.

My perception of the pc dominated academy is exactly the same, so, in other words, both of us cannot be correct here.

In other words, we just can't win because for a large number of holdouts, no conclusions but their own forgone conclusions could signal anything but irrationality and "leftism".

The happy state of affairs for conservatives/libertarians (the more philosophical acute among them, in any case) is that we won all the intellectual arguments long ago. The Left has come to dominate the academy, news media, foundations, K-12 etc. not because their arguments or beliefs are sound, but through the hegemonic (what Gramsci called counter-hegemonic) blocs they have been able to create over time within these institutions. They achieved cultural dominance by congregating in and colonizing the major institutions of society that generate, control, and interpret information - ideas.

That's the genius of the Gramscian/Alinskian model of the "long march through the institutions."

An example might be those that just won't give up on creationism.

I really wish the EV's and some other religious conservatives would give up on it myself. There have been, and are, serious criticisms which can be leveled at Darwinian theory and, more importantly, what it has been used to claim about the human condition and the human being himself (Darwinism) and its extension into highly speculative realms of ultimate origins, which have come from both theistic and overtly secular sources (Eddington, Jeans, Whitehead, Hoyle, Denton, and many others) without retreating into Protestant fundamentalist hyperliteralism.

No amount of evidence will do. They become experts in minutia, self generated folklore, conspiracy theories, fringe science, misread science etc.

Sounds like virtually the entire Western Left since Marx, to me (with a few exceptions, to be sure).

Your move now is to accuse us in the academy...

Neither I, Horowitz, nor any other serious conservative has ever attacked "the academy." We have attacked the critiqued the Left for its subversion, debasement, corruption, and intellectual dismantling of key departments and disciplines within the academy - a fundamental difference.

So I am afraid that doing exactly what your little ABOR document recommends would (indeed already does) leave you unsatisfied.

Here's the crux of the matter: conservatives believe in freedom, ordered, individual liberty, and the rule of law. The Left does not (which is not to say that the Left dose not love law). The Left is defined by the concept and idea of collectivism and authoritarian control of virtually all aspects of the human condition (across a spectrum from various forms of democratic socialism to a thorough utopian totalitarianism, the tendencies and assumptions of the first leading, unless restrained or muted in some way, inevitably to the second, if allowed to fully mature). Conservatives also believe, as a group, in eternal verities; in the "permanent things" as Russel Kirk described them. The Left does not. The Left believes only in the human and what humans perceive from their position, with the numerous other frogs around them, at the bottom of the well (and hence, "humanism") and the values, ideals, axioms, meanings and theoretic visions human beings create for themselves within their own minds in the godless, random, mechanistic, accidental universe they inhabit.

No two kinds of minds could be father apart, and hence, the "culture war."

[_EAllusion]

When I say creationism, I am including intelligent-design creationism in my comments. Especially that, actually. I also have in mind the sort of people who bring up arguments by Hoyle, Denton, etc. They are incompetent boobs (re: evolutionary biology) that we can't incorporate into academic disciplines without importing terrible arguments as our new standard of "intellectual diversity."

[_Droopy]

How many strawmen can you joust with, E.

That's a near verbatim quote from you Droopy. Maybe it was one of your other personalities taking its turn.

I don't have any other personalities here. Well, there was the disembodied "Carl Sagan" about six years ago, but he got stale rather quickly.

There was, also around the same time, "Coggins," but Droopy much better symbolizes some of my, uh...personological ideals (in exaggerated, surreal form), and so became the permanent handle.

And now, back to your regularly scheduled superciliousness.

[_Droopy]

When I say creationism, I am including intelligent-design creationism in my comments. Especially that, actually.

There is no such thing as "intelligent design creationism" outside creationism proper, and "creationism" is uniquely (indeed, solely, for most purposes) associated with Protestant fundamentalism. Properly educated and intellectually perspicacious people would understand that, E.

I actually suspect that, for you, any religious belief in "creation" (i.e., that a God created, generated, organized, constructed, tuned, calibrated etc., the cosmos and all things in it, in sundry and various ways) fall under the umbrella of "creationism."

Its a shallow circumvention, E.

[_EAllusion]

There is no such thing as "intelligent design creationism" outside creationism proper, and "creationism" is uniquely (indeed, solely, for most purposes) associated with Protestant fundamentalism.

Intelligent Design was a purposeful relabeling of the "scientific creationist" movement. It took off in response to Edwards vs. Aguillard that ruled creationism unconstitutional to teach in public schools. Most early ID figures called themselves creationists and their arguments creationism prior to this change. All major ID arguments are prefigured or, more often, exist entirely intact in the creationist literature. Famously, the first and for a long time only ID textbook involved a creationist textbook that simply replaced the word "creationism" and its cousins with "intelligent design" and its cousins while keeping the content of the arguments the exact same. Among its authors included Charles Thaxton, the person who coined "intelligent design" in its modern sense, and Micheal Behe, arguably ID's most famous advocate.

ID clearly is a species of creationism. On the flipside, there is an extensive effort on the part of IDists trying to retroactively claim that creationism only refers to a specific brand of young earth creationism to dissociate from the term's stigma and its legal problems. This is contradicted by the body of "scientific creationist" literature that isn't YEC and by a extensive paper trail of IDists trying to relabel that material as ID.

Barbara Forrest's expert testimony at the infamous Dover trial gives a good summary overview of the evolution of creationism into ID if anyone is curious to see a more detailed argument.

http://ncse.com/files/pub/legal/kitzmil ... port_P.pdf

Properly educated and intellectually perspicacious people would understand that, E.

Does that include the world's leading expert on the history of creationism who wrote the widely regarded definitive text on the subject?

http://www.amazon.com/Creationists-Scie ... 0674023390

I actually suspect that, for you, any religious belief in "creation" (i.e., that a God created, generated, organized, constructed, tuned, calibrated etc., the cosmos and all things in it, in sundry and various ways) fall under the umbrella of "creationism."

Creationism is the belief that life or some aspect of it was designed and there is compelling scientific evidence of this, with arguments often involving anti-evolution reasoning.

[_Droopy]

Intelligent Design was a purposeful relabeling of the "scientific creationist" movement.

Pure nonsense. This is nothing more than your subjective, self-derived interpretation of the matter, not its history.

It took off in response to Edwards vs. Aguillard that ruled creationism unconstitutional to teach in public schools. Most early ID figures called themselves creationists and their arguments creationism prior to this change. All major ID arguments are prefigured or, more often, exist entirely intact in the creationist literature.

Let me educate you, E. That which is now called "intelligent design" took off at the latest at Cambridge in the 1930s among some of the most eminent secularist minds in modern science and philosophy, and it existed alongside Protestant fundamentalist creationism then just as it does now. It also existed among some of the best minds in the New Physics in the early 20th century, and I can't think of one of them who was, in any sense, a theist, in any sense of that term as normally used.

Secondly, many (like LDS) among the traditionally religious do not accept fundamentalist hyperliteral interpretations of scripture, not their young earth ideas. ID, in various forms, runs from secular atheist/agnostic to fundamentalist young earthers, but they are not derived from one another except to the degree that fundamentalist creationism has absorbed and deployed some of the insights and arguments from the secular and non-fundamentalist intellectuals and scientists who have come before them.

Its interesting to see you have to make up as you go along the arguments necessary for you to poison the well sufficiently so you never really have to adduce any substantive arguments at all.

Among its authors included Charles Thaxton, the person who coined "intelligent design" in its modern sense, and Micheal Behe, arguably ID's most famous advocate.

Behe is a Roman Catholic, not a Protestant fundamentalist literalist, is not a young earth proponent, accepts the idea of common descent, and that evolution actually occurred. He also believes that God is the agency behind all of these phenomena, activating, structuring, controlling, and mediating them. He is not a "creationist" in any way like the way in which you are using the term (conservative Southern Baptist etc.)

Now that you've gone as far as you can go on a wing and a prayer, what else do you have?

Creationism is the belief that life or some aspect of it was designed and their is compelling scientific evidence of this, with arguments often involving anti-evolution reasoning.

Blah, blah, blah...and blah.

Creationism is the belief that God created the world, out of nothing, in six literal 24 hour days, and that each creature in the biosphere was a specially created being placed, on successive days, on earth, without any evolutionary development present, and that the earth is roughly 6,000 years old.

Intelligent design is a term that can be applied to a fairly broad range of arguments that state that purely blind, undirected, unmediated, random chance events cannot explain either the presence or diversity of life on earth. Belief in the reality of evolutionary change, common descent, and a 5.4 billion year-old earth are not necessarily affected by such a standpoint.

[_Tarski]

For conservatives, education is a search for truth; it is the perennial search for an understanding of the true, the good, the just, and the beautiful. Everything to the Left is ideological. For conservatives, ideology and politics are peripheral and, ideally, should be a tertiary aspect of human life.

If anything I would say that you have this exactly backwards--stunningly so.

For example, I would say that my whole life has been motivated predominantly by exactly one thing; the desire to know the truth. This is what academics is all about--at least for many of us who have little interest in being administrators. It is why people spend close to ten years in school learning enough to contribute to the highly competative stratosphere of modern scientific research. They know, and have known since they were young, that by going into basic research they are giving up any hope of living the financial good life compared to what it would be if they went into industry. (A good mathematican friend of mine just retired with a salary of 23K per year! That's a crime.)
This is especially true in pure mathematics, theoretical physics and even more so in philosophy (and I suppose you think people who pursue philosophy do not care about the truth at all).
By comparison we have conservative hero (a maker, not a taker) Donald Trump.
Even if I avoid mentioning baffoons like Trump, I can still point out how ridiculous it is to say that the self professed John Galt types (investment bankers, CEOs) are the ones who pursue truth. Where is the truth value in a hostile buy out or in a good ad campaign for soft drinks and sports cars?
From where I stand, the conservative movement is about profit and power--not truth.

While a great number of the highest level philosophers, mathematicans and physicists and of course social scientists are on the left compared to you, typical bankers, CEOs, advertisment executives (not to mention arrogant profiteers like Trump) sure seem to be largely conservatives.

So why is conservatism about the truth again?

That seems utterly laughable -at least when justaposed with the idiotic statemtent that non-conservative are not truth seekers.

In my mind even Jazz musicians are more seekers of truth than the pizza magnates and oil excecutives.

The left, according to you, even has the majority of publishing top philosophers and scientists.
The higher you get in terms of major contribution the more it seems to slide that way (again judged by where you think the center is).

And on there right??---Here we instinctively think of business, investment banking, profit, aggressive advertising, and avoidance of taxes (are those concerns of truth seeker types? Are these guys the modern Platos?).

Finally, how serious can someone like you be about the truth when without any empirical evidence and without a shred of plausibiliy they would believe in Kolob, the garden of Eden, Demonic possession and seer stones?

[_Analytics]

No, that isn’t correct.

Employers basically have two choices. First, they can hire based solely upon the merits of the applicants. This approach doesn’t care whether or not the process results in a diverse mix of hires. If this process doesn’t result in a diverse mix and a diverse mix is desired, employers have the second choice and take action to foster diversity. By definition, such programs are “affirmative action.”

If a college created an “office of racial diversity” that was tasked with “fostering the growth of racial diversity” at a college, that would be an affirmative action program. Likewise with Horowitz’s proposed “office of intellectual diversity.”

You clearly are wholly "out of the loop" on the relevant literature and critique here, which has developed over the last three decades... Suffice it to say, academia needs intellectual diversity in the very same way CBS, NBC, CNN, ABC, and NPR need it, because in any substantive way in many departments, among a really substantial number of colleges and universities, from the second tier state schools, to the top tier state schools, to the Ivy League, it doesn't exist in any meaningful way....

The fact that you are think Horowitz's affirmative action program is needed doesn't negate the fact that an affirmative action program is precisely what it is.

[_EAllusion]

This is nothing more than your subjective, self-derived interpretation of the matter, not its history.

It's pretty ballsy to label it "self-derived" when I specifically linked a famous court brief that effectively killed that iteration of the ID movement's legal ambitions then linked a definitive text on the history of creationism agreeing with me. You wouldn't even need to crack open the book as its very title signals the point.

Here's another Forrest document from the Dover trial:

http://www.creationismstrojanhorse.com/ ... cestry.pdf

Not only does it show a clear tracing of keystone creation science, then scientific creationist, then intelligent design, arguments it contains this fun quote:

Scientific creationism, which in its modern phase began in the early 1960s, is actually one of the intellectual antecedents of the intelligent design movement.

The source of that quote is Dean Keynon, Discovery Institute Fellow, co-author of Pandas, and once upon a time creationist until he started calling himself an ID advocate. It seems that even he, one of the founders of the ID movement, lacks your deep, deep education on its origin.

Let me educate you, E. That which is now called "intelligent design" took off at the latest at Cambridge in the 1930s

The term occasionally appeared in early 80's creationist literature in a sense close to its modern use, but was coined in its modern sense just prior to the publishing of Of Pandas and People at a conference called Sources of Information Content in DNA. It was a subject of discussion at the conference. The person responsible for that was Charles Thaxton, who was the lead editor on Pandas where its widespread use begins. The term is a recalling of various references to design arguments throughout the years, but "ID" as a movement employing a body of related arguments - that just happen to relabel scientific creationist ones - starts at that point.

Behe is a Roman Catholic, not a Protestant fundamentalist literalist, is not a young earth proponent, accepts the idea of common descent, and that evolution actually occurred.

It's pretty dubious to say that Behe accepts common descent. His argument rests on there being unresolvable "gaps" in evolution that a designing intelligence jumps. That's the antithesis of common descent. Usually this is focused on cellular structures, but his chapter in Pandas if I recall also involves attacking the fossil record on the evolution of whales from land animals to cast doubt on their evolution sans those "jumps." Not coincidentally, whale evolution was a popular creationist argument topic in the 80's when Behe wrote that, but faded a bit after a series of important fossil discoveries.

Here's a talk origins article from 2001 addressing those now older arguments. It's worth reading to see how popular they once were:

http://www.talkorigins.org/features/whales/

He is not a "creationist" in any way like the way in which you are using the term (conservative Southern Baptist etc.)

Well, he did coauthor a textbook that simply took all the references to his creationist arguments and called them "ID" instead, which is the point I'm making. He is a creationist in the sense I'm using the term, as the sense I'm using it includes ID-creationists.

[_EAllusion]

Usually this is focused on cellular structures, but his chapter in Pandas if I recall also involves attacking the fossil record on the evolution of whales from land animals to cast doubt on their evolution sans those "jumps."

I looked it up. I think I'm conflating his Pandas chapter with this chapter he wrote here wherein he casts doubt on whale evolution, humorously a few months before several major fossil finds happened. Of course, whenever you fill a transitional gap between A and B, the creationist is happy to point out that that you've now got two gaps.