First, their relentless quest to undermine science in an effort to mandate their silly made-up iron-age tale of barbarity as the law of the land is about to submerge children from the sorry state of Indiana in the sewer of enforced stupidity.
Indiana Senate Passes Bill Putting Religion in Science Class
You may WANT it to be true, Beavis; you may WISH it carried the weight of fact; but no amount of insistence and chicanery and quoting of King James gobbledygook can make TRUE what is manifestly a loose compendium of man-made oral stories from an ancient, scientifically-ignorant, tribal people. Pack the juries however you like. But the facts don't give a shit about what you think of them. All you're accomplishing by calling your fictional story "science" is to condemn the children of Indiana to a profoundly flawed education, which will hang like an albatross around their necks for the rest of their lives. Good job.
But this is the world conservatives would have us live in: a world of ignorant serfs and half-citizens creating the wealth on which the very few live like kings. We've made huge steps in that direction in the past 30 years, and the right wants to continue with a vengeance. Take, for example, the path the presumptive party nominee for president has committed to treading if elected:
Romney's Concern for the Poor
Jesus. Maybe the reason the country is so polarized today is because the right is so fucking far out into wacko looney-land that compromise with any sensible person is impossible. Obama needed these smelling salts from Day One and maybe he wouldn't have given away the store to these wackos.
I hate most of the world they're trying to make, a world devoid of compassion and civics, a world without art and creativity, an Orwellian world of Darwinian cruelty and rampant inequality, and all of it fed from a gigantic propaganda machine of which Joseph Goebbels would be proud.
Count me out.
/rant
5 comments:
I haven't really talked politics on my blog in quite awhile, but it was exactly these two stories that I heard earlier today that had me wanting to rant. I should have expected that you would have been of a like mind.
Between these things and the Komen flap, I'm just about apoplectic. Then I slowly calm down and realize that the Right is overreaching. They think they have a little power and they are going to try and shove through every nutty thing they can as quickly as possible.
With the economic issues of the past couple of years, an Obama 2nd term seemed out of the question, but with the absolute farcical nature of the Republican primaries and debates, reasonable people are seeing the candidates for what they are ... petty children. And Obama seems like the only adult.
Only this group of idiots could make Ron Paul appear reasonable in comparison.
I might have imagined we would be piqued at the same things. I sent a nasty gram to Komen and needed to vent the other poisons here.
I just can't get over that these pea-brained control freaks have half the country nodding along with their American Taliban thinking. I keep coming back to this. We're supposed to be an educated, civilized country, yet we're more backward and draconian than most of the rest of the world. Just look at this frickin' nominating circus! What a menagerie of third-rate wackos and losers! We have become a laughingstock. With a huge nuclear arsenal. God.
I second your point of view.
I don't understand why anyone thinks it makes sense to try to inject their favorite fables into a science curriculum. That makes about as much sense as if the state board of education stipulated the science content that should be included in the religion classes in churches.
Our math and science education is already in a sorry enough state without watering the content down and confusing the students with non-science.
Other recent news illustrates where this lack of judgement leads. Apple was taken to task for not creating more manufacturing jobs here in the US. Apple execs tried to explain that they have not moved their manufacturing to China solely due to the lower labor costs, but also because of the higher quality labor. It has become very difficult to find the talent they need here in the US. According to an article in the NYT, the factories that manufacture the iPhone employ 200,000 assembly line workers, and to oversee those workers and the manufacturing process they also employ 8,700 industrial engineers. It was estimated that it would take as long as 9 months to find and hire that many engineers in the US. In China it took 15 days. We think we lead the world in having an educated workforce, but we are rapidly falling behind, and making the schools worse by forcing them to teach BS isn't doing anything to help.
Interesting Apple stuff. You just have to feel bad for the poor kids in Indiana who are having every door out of their dark ages hellhole barred by the paranoid folks who fear the undoing that will follow from fact-based reasoning.
Sam Harris has an interesting essay out now trying to get non-religious folks to understand just what is involved in a believer trying to face up to the rise of atheism. He makes the analogy that all of us love the comfort of a fire in a fireplace but it almost certainly one of the least healthy things we can do for ourselves and our communities. It's an interesting read, though the consequences of these things are not equivalent: a person having to give up their religion will feel like they're in a terrifying, anarchic free-fall.
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