I promised myself I would not do this again, but it happened anyways *sigh*.  I went back to Usneakydevilu’s blog and perused the articles there.  Bad move, I’m guessing my SIWOTI gnome needs feeding and wanted the *full* buffet style treatment.  I am aware of the  nuclear grade delusion running front and centre there, but the post on “Intellectual Rape; Liberal Teachers Invade the South to “Evolve” Students Ideology” actually made me pause and contemplate what the sound of infinite *head-desking* might sound like; I could not resist arguments this ridiculous – they need to be fisked and shared with the world.

So gentle readers, I once again unsheathe the red pen of justice and prepare to lay bare the fatuous murmurings of the delusional and hopefully satiate that damn SIWOTI gnome for awhile.  First a line by line analysis and then a summary at the end.  I realize we are waaaaay into TL;DR territory, but let me assure you hilarity ensues through the entire piece.

“Intellectual Rape; Liberal Teachers Invade the South to “Evolve” Students Ideology”

(Lets start with the title – Intellectual rape? Rape is a violent non consensual act .  So we are to believe that students somehow being violently taught something against their will a la “A Clockwork Orange“.  Or more likely, it is just tasteless hyperbole setting the stage for a whinge filled rant on the theme of religious scare mongering and projection.   Anyhow, please note the conservative anti-intellectual use of the  dog-whistle  “evolve” because it is well known that Evolutionary Theory (aka rational scientific knowledge) is just plain wrong.)

EXTRA! EXTRA! The South has been invaded.

But unlike The Civil War, this invasion is to enslave rather than to free. [my link]

(It is fascinating to watch the inversion of values take place.  Watch as rational discourse, inquisitiveness and critical thinking, the hallmarks of education are portrayed as evil evil evil bad things!)

Today, if you spend any amount of time on any high school or college campus in the South, you will find a rapidly growing number of ”teachers” from northern and western U.S. states.  These teachers are proud to say that they are from cities like New York, Boston, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco and a slew of other non southern cities.  You could say these teachers are going where the teaching jobs are and that could be true, but I’ve found that it’s not that cut and dry.  (Anecdata is at its best, but great for setting the stage for the fetid pile of BS that is about to come) 

Liberal teachers are gathering up their intellectual arms and are headed to the South to fight Christian-Conservative values and beliefs, using sneaky guerilla warfare tactics.  (What?  Those sneaky liberals hiding in the bushes and coming out to raid the good decent folk of the south, how dare they? – I think USD is referring to the idea that secular education, as opposed to religious education is based on reality as opposed to magic and that choosing rationality over mythology is a bad thing.)

There is an assertive effort to invade the South and help evolve the “slow and backward thinking” of the people of the South. (Shoddy sentence construction aside – Education tends to dispel irrational belief, and that is *good* thing.)

To inspire evolution liberals know the best way to do so is to insert liberal thought into young inexperienced minds. (Oh ho!,  USD is onto the Evil Liberal Overmind – watch out parents, rationality might slip into your educational system causing people to question their magical beliefs.)

Southern states tend to be more conservative, more religious, while less hedonistic and open to gay lifestyle, abortion and redistribution of wealth (aka less advanced and civilized).  The South gets in the way of more liberal policy and liberal leadership.  In an attempt to change voting practices of Southerners, Progressive-Liberal teachers from the North and West flock to the South to do their ”missionary work” (citation needed), they see Southerners as ignorant, poor fools (USD missed ‘religious’ in his list of adjectives, as religious usually goes hand in hand with said adjectives) in need of purging out of old values and beliefs.

I’ve listened to many liberal teachers and they all teach from the same blueprint, they all say they welcome different opinions and want to inspire thought. (Anecdata again, along with generalizing…but hey what better tools to describe “the enemy”.  Newsflash – dissent, differing opinions, debate – are hallmarks of good education practice as they encourage critical thinking and analysis.)  But these teachers are really telling students, what you have heard and have been taught all your life is wrong.  (Actually, I bet those teachers are encouraging students to think for themselves and look for evidence to base their beliefs and opinions on.  Belief in christian dogma has no rational basis;  refuting the religious brainwashing and dogmatic instructions students have been programmed with *should* be a natural consequence of education.)

What these liberal teachers are doing fits the profile of a statutory rapist where an older more superior intellectual, hoodwink an immature-feeble-minded youth into practicing ones desired action, intellectually raping young minds, throwing their beliefs on top of them.  (Ignorance is strength! – How dare you! Encourage my child to think about the world in rational way? Preposterous!   I’ve spent so many years indoctrinating him with the magic facts from my magic book and you want to undue all of my brainwashing? – False indignation aside, the contents of this paragraph are repugnant.  Educating children to think critically cannot be considered “statutory rape” of the mind.  Questioning, debating, arguing are all facets of intellectual growth and development and thus reside in the core of what teaching is about.  The entire idea behind this post seems to be based on the fear that if children become intellectually equipped to make a rational evaluation of religion they *might* reject their indoctrination and begin to think for themselves.  A scary thought indeed.)        

Sneaky Code terms being used to molest young minds are:

    • Question authority, Question what you are being told (But when you question their liberal ideas, they don’t call on you anymore) ( Oh!  *clutches pearls* Shades of the persecuted majority! – Which ‘liberal ideas’ are we talking about?  Did you make your arguments logically or did they start with such poppycock as “the bible says…” or ” jesus teaches…”  Making arguments based on fictional sources and fairy tales shouldn’t earn you any special place in an educational environment.)
    • Think outside your norms (Your views are obsolete, get new better values and beliefs)   (What? Question dogmatic belief?  Unthinkable.  But, really, basing your world view on the ramblings of semi-literate  bronze age shepherds is kinda backwards, as we are in the 21st century and have progressed and amassed knowledge far surpassing that of our ancestors.)    
    • Ask Why! Why do you believe what you believe? (The never-ending “Why”. Why is what a Liberal teacher tells you.)  (“Why” is one of the most important questions out there.  The question “why” begets curiosity, clarity and critical thinking.)
  • Acceptance. “I wanted to make my classroom a place of acceptance, of exploring new ideas and identities”. (But no acceptance of Christian conservative thought but acceptance of GLBTQI= GayLesbian…) (Persecuted majority twice in the same set of bullet points – defensive much?  If the views of christian conservative thought (oxymornic statement at best) deserve merit then they should be able to stand on their own.  Criticism should be welcomed as the arguments are sound…the problem is that many of tenets are not and thus cannot be defended rationally – cue the reliance on dogmatic belief and doctrine rather than rational,critical analysis.)

I stumbled across a blog of an Anarchist teacher and thought that’s a oxymoron if ever I seen one. How can you not want any rules or human regulations but you’re a teacher in a system of rules and regulations.  (This is actually an interesting question, but again it is clouded by closed binary thinking.  Anarchism, like most ideologies, is on a spectrum and is not easily categorized.  Clearly, having read the teachers post she is doing her best to integrate her values into the system proscribed by the school.  Creating a safe environment to explore issues and ideas is goal all teachers share (or at least they should).  We should get back to the fear and paranoia though…  )

These Northern and Western liberal teachers are invading the South with great passion.  They are on a mission to change people’s values and beliefs to fit their progressive agenda. (Citation needed – But hey, when you are a defender of the faith, who needs citations!)

Liberal teachers are intellectually raping our young students, “our kids”, we need to know this is going on and challenge these sneaky bastards on every front.  (Well, way to stick to your thesis, despite it being catastrophically wrong.  I mentioned projection at the beginning of my editorial, we’ll be getting to that soon enough.  Teaching children to be curious and to develop critical thinking skills is not “intellectual rape“, it is teaching children how to mature intellectually and begin the process of becoming a rational thinker.)

There’s nothing wrong with knowing God, there’s nothing wrong with having conservative values, and just because it’s “change” doesn’t make it good change.  (Indeed, there is nothing wrong with “knowing god”, but the key to that statement would be this: you would have to come to that decision on your own and not predicate your decision on the bullshite religious dogma you were force fed as child.  Seems reasonable, no?)

   And thus endeth the meticulous Fisking of the fractal wrongness of USD’s post.  I’d like to summarize how wrong the arguments of this post are and touch on the psychological idea of projection and how it is relevant to what was said.

The main argument of USD’s post is that ‘liberal education/values’ as delivered by liberal educators is like statutory intellectual rape of students in the Southern US.  Let me just quote USD directly so there are no questions as to what his position is:

USD – “Liberal teachers are intellectually raping our young students”

Now, as I mentioned earlier equating intellectual rape with teaching children how to learn is easily puts USD’s statement on the list of the most stupid things ever said on the internet.   Teaching children to be curious, thinking critically and ask questions are the cornerstones of rational inquiry, hence what learning fundamentally is.  So, this is an argument against learning or charitably, “liberal learning”.

It would seem that equipping children to be critically skeptical and inquisitive of the world around them would be a good thing.  It is how our societies have managed to progress through history (with a few notable exceptions…the christian Dark Ages for example) while generally improving the standards of living for select groups of people who happen to be living at the time.  Consider, would you like live before we knew about Germ Theory, or in the present with our current level of knowledge about disease and related pathology?  Many would agree that now is the better time to be alive.  It is our curiosity and dedication to skeptical inquiry as embodied by the scientific method that has allowed us to conquer many of ills that have plagued all of humanity (smallpox for instance).  Is USD arguing on the same side as the church when it was prosecuting Copernicus for challenging the assumptions of doctrine approved geocentric model?  It certainly seems that way, but I think that level of loontastic mendacity is beyond even USD.  Here is what could be going on and where the projection comes in.

Let us let USD speak for himself –

“But these teachers are really telling students, what you have heard and have been taught all your life is wrong.  What these liberal teachers are doing fits the profile of a statutory rapist where an older more superior intellectual, hoodwink an immature-feeble-minded youth into practicing ones desired action, intellectually raping young minds, throwing their beliefs on top of them.” [emphasis mine]

Rape, statutory or otherwise is an act of violence perpetrated against another without their consent.  USD is arguing that teachers are teaching their students the horrible traits of skepticism and rationality (watch closely here) that cause them in turn, to question the beliefs that they were brought up with.  And herein lies the insidious connotation of the argument.  The reason why “liberal education” is bad is because it undermines the mendacious religious propaganda that has been fed to the children when they are not in school.

Indoctrinating your children with the religious inanity that (as parents) you happen to uncritically believe in actually does begin to approach the definition of ‘intellectual rape’ because children are not born religious, but rather (cue the projection aspect) are molded by their parents and their beliefs without the child’s consent.  I’m sure, if given the choice, between the delusional inanity of religion or the the rational empiricism of the real world, children would choose the latter as they begin to grow and mature.  Santa Claus and the easter bunny are easy to cast off, but when your parents still believe in zombie jesus and will punish you for questioning their mythology, it changes the nature of the game.   As a child/teen you are not autonomous and risk ostracism and debasement because you dare to question their belief in magic; embracing rationality comes at a very high price within a religious family.

So, it would seem that the religious has once again cornered the market on delusional, retrograde argumentation.  Sadly, USD is but a spear carrier in the self-destructive orgy of anti-intellectual thought that goes on in the United States.  The projection, the absolutist mentality, the dicotomistic method of framing debate all contribute to the swirling vortex of argumentation fail.   Perhaps the most troubling though is the overall lack of honesty and charity that permeates USD’s style, along with of course, the routine construction and beating of strawmen.  And therein lies the crux of the matter, how do you change minds when one side does not/is not capable of playing by the rules?  Progress and intellectual advancement have historically defined the West, yet at the same time we have large segments of the population who actively rally against the tenets of science and rationality, the very foundations of progress.

One can only hope that rationality can prevail.