Tech artist. Dad. Horror snob. Blogging since 1999.
What’s to prevent individual teachers from discussing homosexual issues now?
I get it. You don’t like gay people. You don’t know any gay people. It’s not that big a deal, in real life.
The fact remains that if I like a girl I have the right to marry her, without any “seperate but equal” rejiggering. How could I, as a decent person, deny that right to someone else?
(Question 1 is a Maine ballot initiative to outlaw gay marriage.)
The day’s favorite American euphemism for deliberate class stratification, “good schools,” is back, this time from Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times. This one is doubly insidious because liberals are still comfortable saying it aloud. I bitchslapped Kristof’s fellow white-flight New Yorker Malcolm Gladwell when he took this same call up a year ago, and since nothing’s changed, I’ll refer you to my post from that time, Malcolm Gladwell’s Good Teacher/Bad Teacher Delusion.
Snip:
Don’t blame students; don’t blame parents; don’t blame underfunded schools; don’t blame distending class sizes, don’t blame school funding being tied to local property taxes; don’t blame artificial testing requirements devouring classroom time; don’t blame required special education skewing dollar-per-student vs. results numbers wildly below magnet and parochial schools; don’t blame the flight of your upper-middle class into homogenous neighborhoods.
A discussion swirled up this week on 3 Quarks Daily over an item about scientists Sean Carroll and Carl Zimmer withdrawing from BloggingHeads.tv after the site began including intelligent design creationists in its Science Saturday segments. The discussion was generally supportive of the scientists’ decision not to support a platform that equates science with religion, with the exception of laudably non-anonymous Luke Lea of BornAgainDemocrats.com. My thoughts were as follows:
The scientific method can be applied to the study of anything that can be defined. It can’t be applied to concepts whose definitions are constantly shifted around for the purpose of preventing science from examining them. We need to bear in mind the difference between a concept and a word game.
To present Intelligent Design uncritically — and especially to give it equal time — does a disservice to the public by equating it with science. I’m reminded of Dara O’Brian’s skit about giving equal time to people who don’t believe in outer space when NASA launches a satellite. Unless the Intelligent Design hypothesis can evolve into a falsifiable theory, it’ll remain what it always has been — a belief, comforting in its simplicity, but of precisely one cent less real world value than a lucky penny.
Mr. Lea responds, “Space toast: Space is an empirical concept, design isn’t.”
Luke: “Design” indicates a specific set of actions in 4-dimensional space. When I cut a board to size, I have designed it. When I measure once and cut wrong (sadly common), is the board still designed? What about if I find a use for it later? Indeed what if I find a board on the pile that’s just the right size to begin with; is it “designed” for the purpose? While we’re at is, how come trees are soft enough to be cut with metal blades, but hard enough to hold up an entire building?
It’s a fun word game, but it’s meaningless. The appeal of Intelligent Design creationism hinges on the common meaning of the word “design,” but its philosophical assertions hinge on an invented cosmic special definition of the same word.
Design is a perfectly empirical concept, when one settles on a specific definition. It’s only when ID’s assertions come under attack that its proponents get “intelligent” and begin playing a definitional shell game.
And just to sate my own curiosity, is toast an empirical concept too?
Courtesy of Rep. Barney Frank:
At the bookstore, I’m always amused that not one of the many people who ask for Ayn Rand’s books seem to have investigated how to pronounce her name. America has just come out of the largest-scale test of Randism since Hoover, with similar results. Hers is the Golden Age comic book of political philosophies: a glimpse into a shiny world without moral grayscales. It’s fun, at a certain age, but most of us grow out of it.
For those who simply can’t stomach complex political philosophies, this is a very frightening time, and its reflected in book sales. “How much is Common Sense?” a customer asked the other day, holding up a copy of Glenn Beck’s book. “It’s right there on the back, sir,” replied my manager.
Score:
Persuant to the British Transport Police’s recent set of remarkably paranoid posters, three remixes:
From Quentin and Jessica D. via the Cute Overload blog.