For all practical purposes, it seems very difficult to distinguish between libertarian ideas about education and pomo relativistic nonsense about truth. Anything goes.

LOL! You’re kidding, right? The Christian Right will be “satisfied” if we merely compromise with them on a handful of issues?

Please (re)read Krugman’s introduction to his The Great Unraveling. The Right in the US is a “revolutionary power,” as Kissinger put it, and it ain’t gonna compromise.

The Nazis, for example, had eugenics – is it not science? – as a source for their official forced euthanasia policies. The Soviets too had their official science for turning rivers around and destroying environment. I’ll say: on the case by case basis.

But those aren’t merely examples of descriptive (positive) science, but rather normative conclusions based on (putatively) descriptive science.

Science can never give answers to normative questions. The closest it can come is to give evidence for putative claims as to human nature, and from there you can try to get to normative claims, though only by committing the naturalistic fallacy.

If that’s “paying twice,” what about people with no kids who have to “pay once”?

The fundamentalists seem pretty willing to attend their churches without bothering the rest of us

Yeah, sure. Aside from wanting to outlaw abortion, prevent passage of laws permitting homosexuals to marry, etc.

No.

If schools can teach “all kinds of stuff” then there is nothing they absolutely have to teach. Whatever you may want them to teach, there is some “kind of stuff” that differs.

That would be the consistent way of dealing with it (although obviously, you wouldn’t be able to make this as an authoritative universally quantified statement about astrological statements, because Popperian epistemology doesn’t really allow for that sort of thing). But in fact, most common-or-garden Popperites, with unfortunate amounts of support from the weakest bits of LoSD, tend to retreat into empirically false statements about astrology, claiming that the vague nonspecific predictions in newspaper columns are all that astrologers ever do.

that the comments are in.