Friday, August 05, 2005

No Dumbing Down

I'm sorry but the following quote from Matt Yglesias is one of the dumbest things I've heard from someone who otherwise seems pretty sharp.

Last but not least, nothing whatsoever of practical importance hinges on whether or not life on earth originated as a result of intelligent design. The theory is exceedingly silly pseudo-science, but it doesn't actually threaten anything. There is, moreoever, no reason to think it's especially crucial for the average citizen to have an accurate grasp of state-of-the-art biological theory. Most people don't understand quantum mechanics, general relativity, or any number of other scientific and technical topics and life goes on just fine.


I think what Matt is missing here is the true purpose behind all this Intelligent Design business is not to replace Darwinism with ID but to get he mainstream to accept this pseudoscience as fact. Getting us to accept ID in the schools as reasonable is the same as getting us to accept all their half baked ideas as valid. Abstinence Only, Right-to-Life, Same sex marriage.
This is just another of the endless attempts to "dumb down" the dialogue and muddy the intellectual discourse with bull shit. The only dialogue that they can maintain is one full of non-critical, unscientific thinking. If we let them to continue to "dumb down" the discourse we will be doing a big disservice to the world. Mustang Bobby had a another perfect example this morning with SquareBob Jesus Pants comparing stem cell research with the human experiments of the Nazis in WWII. We should be taking every opportunity to raise the bar in public discourse because if we let the christo-fascists run unchallenged they will have us all not thinking like them. So to speak.

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