Category Politics

South Dakota Republicans Are Superstitious Reactionaries

The South Dakota GOP has a
list of resolutions for 2006. It’s just a bunch of non-binding, chest-pounding, talking-point-centric rhubarb rhubarb rhubarb, but Resolution 16 caught my eye:

WHEREAS, education on species origin is a vital aspect in the understanding of nature and the purpose of human life; and,

WHEREAS, evolution is a theory that is taught in public schools as fact and at the exclusion of all other theories; and

WHEREAS, the South Dakota Republican Party believes there are other plausible theories, including creationism;

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, the South Dakota Republican Party supports efforts to expand beyond evolution the knowledge, scope, and debate in public education on the theories of species origin.

(emphasis added)

I understand that these people are reactionaries who never got over women’s suffrage, but come on! This is the 21st century! Didn’t they get the memo that says they’re supposed to call it “intelligent design” these days?

Theocrats In My Back Yard

“The ACLU has an ongoing nationwide campaign to take away the right of any citizen legislator to speak and pray according to his conscience and religious tradition,” [Indian River school] board member Reggie Helms said following that vote. “My freedom of speech is too important to compromise or risk its loss. Our court case, where we have been standing up to the ACLU, provides the opportunity for the federal court to permanently uphold my right not to be treated as a second-class citizen, or to have to move to the back of the bus.”

(Source: Newszap.com/Sussex Post.)

This isn’t happening in Alabama or Kansas, but in Delaware, practically in my back yard.

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George III vs. George W.

If you’re like most Americans, you probably haven’t read the
Declaration of Independence
in a while, if ever, so you may have forgotten that it includes a
whole laundry list of complaints about king George III of England. It
might be worth rereading some of them:

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Why Science Matters

At my last job, my commute was about an hour each way, on a typical day. At times I would amuse myself by trying to figure out how much time I could save if I drove at 70, 75, 80, 85 miles per hour. Interestingly (or depressingly) enough, it never amounted to more than ten minutes — and that was assuming that I never slowed down, never got stuck behind someone who was only doing 70. In practice, the only times I ever made those 35 miles in less than 50 minutes was when I was returning home after midnight.

It also meant that if I had a 10 o’clock meeting, I had to be on the road by 9:00 at the very latest. It was very odd, the first time I woke up at 8:45, thought that even in emergency panic mode and with the sort of ruthless optimization that only a life-long geek would concoct, there was no way I could get dressed, cleaned enough to pass for presentable, make a cup of coffee so I wouldn’t crash on the highway, and make it behind the wheel in less than 20 minutes. I realized with a Cold Equations chill that I was already late, even though the meeting wouldn’t begin for more than an hour.

There’s a saying that “what you don’t know won’t hurt you” and it’s obvious nonsense: the cancer eating away at your liver, the distracted driver coming around the blind curve on the road, the mercury in your salmon steak, all can hurt or kill you, whether you know they’re there or not, whether you believe in them or not.

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Hypothetical Question for Fundies

Let’s say someone develops a reliable test to see whether an embryo is gay[1]. Would you allow abortion in cases of likely gayness?

Variant: what if it turns out that this test can only give meaningful results in the second or third trimester? How would your answer change?

1: Personally, I doubt that a person’s sexual orientation is determined by anything as simple and binary as a “gay gene”. But it does seem plausible that homo- or heterosexuality should have a significant genetic component to it. It may be a group of alleles, or just the sequence or pattern or intensity with which various “normal” genes are expressed. But for the sake of argument, let’s say that this test can measure the likelihood that once the person reaches adolescence, he or she will be sexually attracted to members of the same sex.

Subpontibian: The Church of Ann Coulter

NewsMax has a review of Ann Coulter’s new tome, Godless: the Church of Liberalism.

I think we can now dispense with any silly ideas about Coulter being anything other than a troll who’s made a successful career by making the most outrageous statements imaginable to offend as many people as possible. What surprises me is how few people are willing to call her on it. Surely she can’t possibly believe this, can she?

(Warning: Turn off your irony-meters before proceeding. Management is not responsible for any damage done by exploding irony-meter shrapnel.)
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Dembski In Bed With Ann Coulter

Bill Dembski brags
about having been “in constant correspondence” with Ann Coulter, helping her with her latest stack of soiled paper, Godless: the Church of Liberalism. He even quotes a bit of what it’s all about:

Though liberalism rejects the idea of God and reviles people of faith, it bears all the attributes of a religion itself. In Godless: The Church of Liberalism, Ann Coulter throws open the doors of the Church of Liberalism, showing us:

  • Its sacraments (abortion)
  • Its holy writ (Roe v. Wade)
  • Its martyrs (from Soviet spy Alger Hiss to cop-killer Mumia Abu Jamal)
  • Its clergy (public school teachers)
  • Its churches (government schools, where prayer is prohibited but condoms are free)
  • Its doctrine of infallibility (as manifest in the “absolute moral authority” of such spokesmen as Cindy Sheehan and Max Cleland)
  • And its cosmology (in which mankind is an inconsequential accident)

Then, of course, there’s the liberal creation myth: Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution.

The only comment I’ll offer on this bucket of turkey offal is that if public school teachers are clergy, they should get stickers to that effect, so that they can get better parking spaces and whatnot.

Dembski quotes all of this with approbation, and never hints that he cares about Coulter’s subpontibian nature, even after “constant correspondence”. One must therefore conclude that he agrees with her.

If Dembski were actively trying to discredit Intelligent Design and bury its corpse at a crossroads with a stake through its heart, he could scarcely do better with a fusion-powered grave-digging backhoe and a dozen Buffy Summers clones.

Both Maryland Antievolution Bills Dead

So
reports
the NCSE.

QOTD

There is this unmatched fanaticism that thinks they’re doing God’s will. You cannot negotiate with it. You cannot talk to it. You cannot make a deal with it. You’ve got to ultimately stand up to it, confront it, and defeat it if you want to live free.
— Sean Hannity, This Divided State

If I didn’t know better, I’d think he was talking about radical Muslims.

Free Market Economics and Natural Selection

I’ve long thought that there are parallels between evolution by
natural selection and free market economics. In the first case,
mutations and recombination provide a variety of traits in a
population, and natural selection ruthlessly culls those less able to
survive and reproduce. In the second case, individuals come up with
lots and lots of ideas, are free to implement them, and the market
rewards those with successful ideas, and ruthlessly punishes the
unsuccessful ones.

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