They are flipping out about Newt Gingrich's "vulture capitalism" criticism of Romney. The fact that they react so strongly against any sort of reflexive criticism is indicative of an ideological commitment to one's preferred economic views rather than a well-reasoned commitment to those views.
Anti-Intellectualism
January 12, 2012
January 10, 2012
NYU Student Tries To Get Professor Fired Over Current Events Assignment
NYU senior Sara Ackerman engaged in a war with college administration over her refusal to do a class assignment about the Occupy Wall Street protests.
NYU Local reports that the drama became public around 3 a.m. on Wednesday morning, when Ackerman sent out a series of bizarre emails chronicling the conflict. It began over an ethnographic assignment on Occupy Wall Street, which Ackerman said "forced" her to talk to "criminals, drug addicts, mentally ill people, and of course, the few competent, mentally stable people that stationed themselves at Zuccotti Park."
She wrote that her one visit to the protests -- with "two other young girls, who are quite attractive and thin, and don't look particularly physically fit enough to take on a potential predator, rapist, paranoid schizophrenic, etc." -- left her feeling like she had "escaped an extremely dangerous -- and even, life threatening -- situation." She refused to do the project, and requested an alternate assignment.
Ackerman's emails also singled out the class's TA for not calling on her in class, even though she left her hand up for 75 seconds on one occasion. Read the full emails at NYU Local.
Although this one sounds like an extreme case, it's not all that uncommon for students to complain that they are "forced" to learn about things against their preferred beliefs. It's completely childish. It's like complaining about your parents "forcing" you to eat your veggies.
August 07, 2011
Secular Ethics Lead to Nazism?
Conservative crossbench MP Fred Nile has introduced his private member's bill to abolish school ethics classes, arguing the course is based on a philosophy linked to Nazism and communism.
The Christian Democratic Party MP told the upper house his bill would abolish ethics classes in public schools at the end of this school year, saying that with just 2700 students enrolled, the program had been a failure.
Ethics classes were introduced by the former Labor government as an alternative for children who did not want to attend traditional scripture classes.
Advertisement: Story continues belowThe Reverend Nile provoked anger among Greens and Labor MPs when he said the "dangerous" secular humanist philosophy taught in the ethics course had led to the worst atrocities committed during World War II.
"It's relative ethics, which is the basis of secular humanism and I believe ... this is the philosophy we saw during World War II with the Nazis and with the communists," Mr Nile told the Legislative Council today.
"Situation ethics, as I see it, was followed by other regimes such as the Nazis and communists.
"Situation ethics means nothing is right and nothing is wrong ... Therefore, you can kill human beings without any embarrassment and any reservations.
"It's a very dangerous philosophy."
So, either religious ethics or fascism? Great reasonining there along with some shockingly ignorant ideas about Nazi ideology. That guy should be required to take the course and produce a well-reasoned argument to support his views on ethics or be banned.
August 04, 2011
Stephen Colbert on Birth Control
| The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
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July 27, 2011
When Muslims Attack, It's Because of Religion. When Christians Attack, It's Because of Politics
Breivik claimed that he is a Christian in various forums, but most explicitly and in greatest detail in the 1,500-page manifesto he compiled over several months and posted on the Internet.
"At the age of 15 I chose to be baptised [sic] and confirmed in the Norwegian State Church," the 32-year-old Breivik wrote. "I consider myself to be 100 percent Christian."
But he also fiercely disagrees with the politics of most Protestant churches and the Roman Catholic Church.
"Regarding my personal relationship with God, I guess I'm not an excessively religious man," he writes. "I am first and foremost a man of logic. However, I am a supporter of a monocultural Christian Europe."
Breivik fashions himself a "cultural Christian" and a modern-day crusader in a resurrected order of the medieval Knights Templar, riding out to do battle against squishy "multiculturalism" and the onslaught of "Islamization" -- and to suffer the glory of Christian martyrdom in the process.
Not surprisingly, conservative pundits who share some of Breivik's views and also consider themselves Christians quickly sought to distance themselves from Breivik by declaring, as Bill O'Reilly did on Fox News, that "Breivik is not a Christian."
"That's impossible," O'Reilly said Tuesday. "No one believing in Jesus commits mass murder. The man might have called himself a Christian on the 'net, but he is certainly not of that faith."
O'Reilly blamed the "liberal media" for "pushing the Christian angle" in order to demean Christians like himself. But O'Reilly's point was taken up by any number of commentators and religion scholars.
Mathew N. Schmalz, a professor of religious studies at the College of the Holy Cross, wrote in a Washington Post column that Breivik's vision "is a Christianity without Christ" because the attacker rejected a personal relationship with Jesus.
Writing in The Guardian, Andrew Brown wrote that "even in his saner moments (Breivik's) ideology had nothing to do with Christianity but was based on an atavistic horror of Muslims and a loathing of 'Marxists,' by which he meant anyone to the left of Genghis Khan."
Arne H. Fjeldstad, a longtime Norwegian journalist and Lutheran minister of the Church of Norway, wrote a lengthy analysis of Breivik's references to Christianity and also concluded that "his view is framed entirely by politics, with strong political and cultural opinions, which also include religious views."
"Breivik's religious position is rather distant from any Christian faith commitment," Fjeldstad wrote.
Pathetic.
July 23, 2011
Al Franken's Take Down of Focus on the Family
The facts and best arguments do not support the anti-gay marriage position. So, they just make shit up.
July 09, 2011
S.E. Cupp: Atheist, Theistic Apologist
Most of the religious skeptics that I know all have advanced degrees. They're pretty smart people, and many of them started out as religious people. But, there are clearly some pretty stupid atheists running around. Here's a clip of one on Bill Maher's Real Time.
S.E. Cupp is an atheist, as she points out. But, she's also a conservative commentator and as such she thinks the godless, liberals are just too mean to realigious people. I guess her disgreement over religion with those she defends is supposed to be evidence of her impartiality and objectivity. But, really she just repeats some of the dubious, yet popular reasoning of many theists use to avoid confronting the possibility that their views are mistaken.
First, she suggests that non-belivers, like Maher, are not in a position to understand religious beliefs because they do not ascent to their truth. Believers often adopt this argumentative strategy as a way of discounting any criticisms that the non-believer might make. They simply claim that the non-believer doesn't understand religious beliefs and therefore is not in a position to evaluate their truth/falsity. The problem with this claim is easy to see. If you must first accept a belief as true in order to properly understand it, then theists are not in a position to evaluate atheism. Obviously, the problem here is that first you have to understand what the belief actually is before you can evaluate it's truth or falisty. You don't accept the truth of a claim, then gain an understanding of its content. To do otherwise is completley backwards.
The second point is related to the first. Cupp appeals to the notion of a personal relationship with God or religious experience as the main basis and justification for religious belief. Have you ever noticed that when believers talk about their personal relationship with Jesus or God that the nature of this experience is left unspecified. They never describe the content of it in anyway that could be said to give intersubjective confirmation of their interpretation (e.g. "God told me to . . .") of their experience (i.e. their inner psychological, experience). This personal relationship and experience of God is never described in anyway that is analogous to our actual personal relationships. If you have to base your religious beliefs on some unspecified, private experience or personal relationship with God, then you do not have a very good argument for your beliefs. In fact, it's not an argument at all if they the truth of the premises cannot be intersubjectively confirmed. Our reasons and evidence have to be open to public scrutiny and evaluation.
Maher is right to mock Cupp here because she's giving credibility to a view that does not deserve credibility. Her views on religious belief, which are really just the same views that so many theists take up popularly against non-believers, rely on a radically incoherent form of epistemological subjectivism and a dubious claims about having a personal relationshp with a disembodied person.Cupp treats these popular theistic views as if they deserve intellectual respect, but they don't. So, I think Maher is basically correct to poke fun at her for suggesting that the brains of some people pick up a different channel that the brains of people that do not hold the same religious beliefs. When debating a theist, especially a conservative one, you have to understand that they are not engaged in argument to get to the truth of the matter, they are arguing to maintain their belief and to produce certain social arrangements. They aren't arguing evidentially or logically. They are arguing prudentially and ideologically. The fact that many theists adopt such dubious argumentative strategies, ones that they'd probably reject if the debate had different subject matter, in debates with non-believers is a symptom of it.
June 21, 2011
Jon Stewart on Jon Stewart on Fox News
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Fox News even selectively edits their interviews about media bias and selective editing as you can see from the unedited version. However, it looks like Stewart's claim that Fox News viewers is dubious. It's true in my personal experience with Fox viewers though. Regardless, Stewart does a good job of dismantling the dubious pretention to journalistic objectivity of Fox's "fair and balanced" slogan. They aren't fair or balanced. They tend to set up and attack a straw man of liberalism. And, their alleged balance is no more than presenting a particular slant on the news that fits the conservative worldview and that they feel is missing from mainstream media, as Wallace admits. It's more about appealing to a particular demographic than it is about presenting information for citizens to examine and think about.
June 10, 2011
Dogmatic Students Are The Problem, No "Liberal" Professors
This little study confirms what virtually faculty member already knows. Students cry bias whenever anybody challenges their ideas.
A regular theme in conservative critiques of higher education is that liberal professors discriminate against right-leaning students. Many faculty members (with studies to back them up) reject the charge. Even if faculty members may lean left, they argue, there is simply no evidence of systematic bias in how students are graded and treated.
A new study in the journal College Teaching suggests that it's possible that some students do perceive bias, but that the reasons may have to do more with their own identities than with anything taking place in the classroom. Notably, the author does not cite his findings simply to rebut the conservative critics, but to suggest that there may be classroom techniques that would lessen the perception of bias.
The study examined 148 female students and 123 male students at a land-grant university in the Southeast where political attitudes among students are fairly evenly split. The students were given two sets of questionnaires -- one on how settled and resistant to change they were (in politics and the rest of their lives) and the other on their perceptions of bias from their faculty members.
The study found that students -- even in the same classrooms -- didn't perceive bias in the same ways (or at all), and those who perceived bias were those who were resistant to changing any of their views. The finding extended to some who identified themselves as being far on the left and resistant to change, and who believed that they had some biased conservative professors. But among both left-leaning and right-leaning students who didn't score high on resistance to new ideas, there was little perception of bias.
Darren L. Linvill, the study's author and director of basic courses in the department of communication studies at Clemson University, said that while his research (including interviews with the students claiming bias) found no evidence of real bias, the findings about perception should be of concern to faculty members.
Many faculty members -- himself included, Linvill noted -- play devil's advocate to many students, expressing a range of views. This time-tested classroom technique, he said, may not work with students who arrive in class determined not to hear new ideas.
Students, especially super conservative students, tend to make charges of bias whenever their preferred ideas are challenged. So, in classes that emphasize teaching critical thinking skills and logical reasoning and where the professor plays devil's advocate in order to faciliate the development of those skills they are bound to get allegations of bias from dogmatic students.
June 09, 2011
Rick Santorum: The Idea Of Climate Change Is A Liberal Conspiracy | TPMDC
Santorum was on Rush Limbaugh's radio show Wednesday, where he was asked whether he agrees with Mitt Romney's comments from last Friday, embracing the universally accepted science of man-made climate change.
Santorum replied:
I believe the earth gets warmer and I also believe the earth gets cooler, and I think history points out that it does that and that the idea that man, through the production of CO2 -- which is a trace gas in the atmosphere, and the manmade part of that trace gas is itself a trace gas -- is somehow responsible for climate change is, I think, just patently absurd.
Santorum continued that the idea of man-made climate change may be part of a liberal conspiracy: "To me this is an opportunity for the left to create -- it's really a beautifully concocted scheme because they know that the earth is gonna cool and warm. It's been on a warming trend so they said, 'Oh, let's take advantage of that and say that we need the government to come in and regulate your life some more because it's getting warmer.'"
"It's just an excuse for more government control of your life," he added, "and I've never been for any scheme or even accepted the junk science behind the whole narrative."
via tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com
Santorum is the anti-science candidate. Conservatives think climate change, evolution, and the notion that sexual orientation is influenced by biology are all liberal hoaxes based on "junk science." But, the GOP is a "big tent" party that has room for reasonable disagreement, right? Wrong! Mitt Romney dares to deviate from GOP ideology and Rush Limbaugh declares there's no way he can win the nomination. Meanwhile . . .
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