Holy crap!

[shipperx]

Nice article on a 19-year-old science activist in Louisiana over on i09.

How 19-year-old activist Zack Kopplin is making life hell for Louisiana’s creationists

Kopplin, who is studying history at Rice University, had good reason to be upset after the passing of the LSEA — an insidious piece of legislation that allows teachers to bring in their own supplemental materials when discussing politically controversial topics like evolution or climate change. Soon after the act was passed, some of his teachers began to not just supplement existing texts, but to rid the classroom of established science books altogether...

The moneyquote of the article (as far as I'm concerned) is:

After a story came out about a school in the Louisiana voucher program teaching that the Loch Ness Monster was real and disproved evolution, Kopplin looked deeper into the program and found that this wasn't just one school, but at least 19 other schools, too.

So of course I had to follow the links to the article concerning what was in those 'replacement' textbooks. (Because how could I not?) There are some... uh... just read some of this stuff.

"Some scientists speculate that Noah took small or baby dinosaurs on the Ark.... are dinosaurs still alive today?" With photographs and testimonies of those who claimed to have seen one...

Also:

- "Only ten percent of Africans can read or write..."

- "the [Ku Klux] Klan in some areas of the country tried to be a means of reform, fighting the decline in morality and using the symbol of the cross..."

- "God used the 'Trail of Tears' to bring many Indians to Christ."

- the Great Depression was exaggerated by propagandists, including John Steinbeck, to advance a socialist agenda.

- Bill Clinton's 1992 presidential win was due to an imaginary economic crisis created by the media.

- "The greatest struggle of all time, the Battle of Armageddon, will occur in the Middle East when Christ returns..."

Comments

[molly_may]

That is unbelievably depressing.

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

Hmm - you can see why a lot of us in Europe think America is a rather backward country these days...

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

How nice of you. I'd think you'd go for "batshit crazy" at this point. :)

[liliaeth]

nah, that's just the tea party

[nutmeg3.livejournal.com]

Assuming there's a hell, a very special place is being reserved there just for these asswipes.

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

Also...

are dinosaurs still alive today?" With photographs and testimonies of those who claimed to have seen one...

Well yes - of course they are - we feed them in the garden every day...




It's called evolution :)

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

Lovely bird. What the heck is it? (I mean, other than a dinosaur. ;)

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

It's a wild pheasant. It used to come and have a look, every day, at what dougalsservant and I had put on the bird-table when we holidayed together in North Yorkshire.

[beer-good-foamy.livejournal.com]

...and pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space
'Cause there's bugger-all down here on Earth.

Good for Kopplin, though.

[jerusha]

*facepalm* forever.

FOREVER.

[hobbituk.livejournal.com]

Seriously? SERIOUSLY???

All the Americans on my flist are such sensible people. How can you come from such a frightening place?

[shipperx.livejournal.com]

These are not 'mainstream' people.

They are an unfortunately vocal, evangelical minority. The scary part is that they are not simply divorced from reality but divorced from the culture at large.

I read an article several years ago pointing out that there is this subculture of people who have simply sealed themselves off from the mainstream because it's become quite possible to do so. Someone can only go to 'Evangelical Christian bookstores', only watch Fox News or the Chrstian (read: Fundamentalist) Broadcast News, only send their kids to Evangelical/Fundamentalist Christian schools or home school using only Evangelical Fundamentalist Christian textbooks, and only watch Evangelical Fundamentalist Christian television networks or DVDs, etc. and they never have to interact with mainstream culture providing multiple levels of reinforcement for their world view but which not related to the mainstream.

If someone wants to hermetically seal themselves into an evangelical-fundamentalist bubble, they can... and it's not to the overall nations benefit. (Then we see well-funded astroturfs that promote it for their political (see: Tea Party) or financial (See the gun industry) benefit... which makes it worse).

We're seeing how this sort of closed loop of information caused cognitive dissonance for some during the election and that's really just the tip of the ice berg. Basically, I don't know that we are all living in the same country. Some have created their own bubble within a country and they don't want the rest of us interfering with their world view.

Still, they are a minority.

[beer-good-foamy.livejournal.com]

We're seeing how this sort of closed loop of information caused cognitive dissonance for some during the election and that's really just the tip of the ice berg. Basically, I don't know that we are all living in the same country. Some have created their own bubble within a country and they don't want the rest of us interfering with their world view.

Did you see this? The Wall Street Journal is talking about how even "poor" people will be hit by Obama's outrageous tax hikes. Their example of "poor"? A single working mom with two kids... making two hundred and sixty-thousand dollars per year. Which, to be fair, is kind of chump change if you're Rupert Murdoch...