Tuesday, February 22, 2005
Comments left at Panda's Thumb
Comment #17418
Posted by arbitraryaardvark on February 22, 2005 10:23 AM
“Justice Thomas explained in his opinion in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, 536 U.S. 639 (2002), a very strict disestablishmentarian reading of the Fourteenth Amendment causes some very serious conundrums as far as the limits of state authority are concerned”
I’m unclear here. Are you for or against the position held by Thomas and the antidisestablishmentarianists*? In the interests of devil’s advocacy, I’m going to disagree with you. So if you are a proantidisestablismentarianist, I’d be an antiproantidisestalishmentarianist, otherwise an antiantiantidisestablishmentarianista**.
1,3,7-trimethylxanthine brings out my sesquipedalian tendencies.
*29
*37
Comment #17422
Posted by arbitraryaardvark on February 22, 2005 10:58 AM
About dogma:
I have not seen or read the textbooks the non-forbidden stickers were stuck to.
But I can draw on my experiences as a former public school student.
What I’m wondering is do the texts teach evolution as received wisdom, or as a testable replicable theory students can validate for themselves?
In 9th grade we had a class called “chem-phys” in which physics and then chemistry were taught by the scientific method. Starting with gallileo and the speed of falling objects, we went through Hook’s Law and Boyle’s Law and Cole’s Law with experiments that demonstrated that they worked.
But by 10th grade biology and senior year economics, we had gotten away from this use of scientific method and critial thinking, and were just supposed to learn by rote the received wisdom. The authority was the teacher, and behind the teacher was the principal, and behind the principal was the government, and the government was allpresent, allknowing, and allgood, but a jealous government, saying, thou shall have no other governments before me.
I did not learn until college that evolution is testable and readily verifiable, and that biologial evolution is a subset of the general role of evolution as a key component of systems theory. I also learned that they Keynesian macroeconomics fed to us as dogma in high school was unsound -
it wasn’t after all that I was too stupid to understand economics, it was that they’d been preaching a set of lies to support statism.
I suspect that some of the objection from the creationist camp to the social function of the teaching of evolution in public institutions, is that it is being used to support “scientific socialism” and statism. This might be a form of either violation of the establishment clause or of free exercise. It’s also bad science.
I think it is in the interest of creationists and evolutionists to oppose the teaching of evolution in a dogmatic manner, and that it is in the interests of the military-industrial-NEA complex to teach it that way, with resulting harm to society. From this perspective, the alliances shift, and forces that are currently bitterly opposed have a common cause, if they can somehow learn to work together.
One simple way to disrupt the cooptation of evolution is to loudly and widely spread the meme that Darwin got his key insight from reading Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Smith shows how no central authority or intellegent design is needed to efficently manufacture something like a pencil. Darwin applied those ideas to finches in the Galapagos. The economic principle of comparative advantage results in specialization and speciation, so that from lower forms of life evolve higher ones, culminating in God’s magnificent creation, the aardvark.
Comment #17418
Posted by arbitraryaardvark on February 22, 2005 10:23 AM
“Justice Thomas explained in his opinion in Zelman v. Simmons-Harris, 536 U.S. 639 (2002), a very strict disestablishmentarian reading of the Fourteenth Amendment causes some very serious conundrums as far as the limits of state authority are concerned”
I’m unclear here. Are you for or against the position held by Thomas and the antidisestablishmentarianists*? In the interests of devil’s advocacy, I’m going to disagree with you. So if you are a proantidisestablismentarianist, I’d be an antiproantidisestalishmentarianist, otherwise an antiantiantidisestablishmentarianista**.
1,3,7-trimethylxanthine brings out my sesquipedalian tendencies.
*29
*37
Comment #17422
Posted by arbitraryaardvark on February 22, 2005 10:58 AM
About dogma:
I have not seen or read the textbooks the non-forbidden stickers were stuck to.
But I can draw on my experiences as a former public school student.
What I’m wondering is do the texts teach evolution as received wisdom, or as a testable replicable theory students can validate for themselves?
In 9th grade we had a class called “chem-phys” in which physics and then chemistry were taught by the scientific method. Starting with gallileo and the speed of falling objects, we went through Hook’s Law and Boyle’s Law and Cole’s Law with experiments that demonstrated that they worked.
But by 10th grade biology and senior year economics, we had gotten away from this use of scientific method and critial thinking, and were just supposed to learn by rote the received wisdom. The authority was the teacher, and behind the teacher was the principal, and behind the principal was the government, and the government was allpresent, allknowing, and allgood, but a jealous government, saying, thou shall have no other governments before me.
I did not learn until college that evolution is testable and readily verifiable, and that biologial evolution is a subset of the general role of evolution as a key component of systems theory. I also learned that they Keynesian macroeconomics fed to us as dogma in high school was unsound -
it wasn’t after all that I was too stupid to understand economics, it was that they’d been preaching a set of lies to support statism.
I suspect that some of the objection from the creationist camp to the social function of the teaching of evolution in public institutions, is that it is being used to support “scientific socialism” and statism. This might be a form of either violation of the establishment clause or of free exercise. It’s also bad science.
I think it is in the interest of creationists and evolutionists to oppose the teaching of evolution in a dogmatic manner, and that it is in the interests of the military-industrial-NEA complex to teach it that way, with resulting harm to society. From this perspective, the alliances shift, and forces that are currently bitterly opposed have a common cause, if they can somehow learn to work together.
One simple way to disrupt the cooptation of evolution is to loudly and widely spread the meme that Darwin got his key insight from reading Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Smith shows how no central authority or intellegent design is needed to efficently manufacture something like a pencil. Darwin applied those ideas to finches in the Galapagos. The economic principle of comparative advantage results in specialization and speciation, so that from lower forms of life evolve higher ones, culminating in God’s magnificent creation, the aardvark.
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