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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?)
Well, not charity in the most traditional sense of the word, but in the sense of regarding arguing with people about ideas and reaching a conclusion or at least more of a mutual understanding of what the other is saying. Inauspiciously, this rarely seems to happen on the internet, as the sectarian nature of the blogosphere and related message boards promote groupthink and a sad lack of charity for opposing ideas.
We can put it into context of the further train wreck of misplaced skepticism about the theory of evolution. My thanks to tildeb for hosting such a informative and useful blog. In the comment section of his article on “Why god’s law must be secondary” we get this gem of comment from 4amzingkids.
If humans evolved from apes or ape-like creatures, when did this happen? And which creatures were involved at that important point? With more than 5000 fossils or fossil fragments of apes, chimps, and humans allegedly showing stages of human evolution, which ape-like animal had enough human characteristics for us to say “this one has just crossed the boundary from ape to human”?
Homo habilis — it’s actually an apeThe short answer is “it never happened,” and the fossils show this.
Lets break down the argument.
1.Humans do not look like apes now.
2. At some point, if evolution is true, we must have changed from “ape” to human.
3.There have been no fossils found of this mysterious half-ape/half-man.
4.Therefore, evolution is wrong.
If, by chance, you are following the theme of this post so far, you know exactly where this is going. Not that we have not seen this before. But for the record, one should be clear. When constructing an argument about a position you do not agree with it is vitally important that you undertake your argument with the strongest version, best defended, most venerated definition of what you are arguing against. In other words, you need to argue against what the BEST version of what an opponent has to offer and not misrepresent or misinterpret what he or she is saying.
This sounds easy. In practice it is not. A great deal of care and attention is required to be charitable to others when arguing with them. The tendency is to construct a version of their position that is weaker than it is and argue against this flawed version. It is also known as constructing a straw-man argument because the arguments you are so handily demolishing are set up by you with the sole purpose of being easy to demolish. Setting up strawmen makes you look bad and rarely furthers debate as you end up arguing with yourself, rather than with the actual positions of your opponent.
Scroll up? Can you spot the strawman construction in 4amzingkids argument? Most people could find the flaw just by going to wikipedia and looking up Evolution.
“2. At some point, if evolution is true, we must have changed from “ape” to human.”
A true grey peppered moth on a tree covered in soot. Point 2 shows a distinct lack of knowledge of what evolution actually is and how it works. If one is to do only a cursory reading of the layperson’s literature about evolution it can be easily determined that Evolution is partially defined as the gradual change in species over time. So of course there is no “half and half” fossil available because one never existed because evolution does not work that way. Whoops!
It is even worse if you base your entire argument on a flawed assumption of what your opponents position actually is. The religious are famous for mischaracterizing their enemies in such fashion.
bleatmop
Mystro
The Arbourist
Dead Wild Roses 
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