by Henry Farrell on March 25, 2005
For some revealing insights as to where David Horowitz’s so-called Academic Bill of Rights is bringing us, check out Scott Jaschik’s article today in Inside Higher Ed. Dennis K. Baxley, who is one of Jeb Bush’s allies has gotten a bill based on the Bill of Rights approved by the relevant committee in the Florida House of Representatives. The reasoning behind his sponsorship?
Baxley said his own undergraduate education at Florida State University — in the 1970s — illustrated the failings of higher education: The problem was that an anthropology professor “did a tirade” in his course that evolution was correct and that creationism was not. Baxley said that students should not “get blasted” as he did for not believing in evolution.
When Florida legislators say that students need to be exposed to a ‘diverse’ set of viewpoints, they aren’t joking around. I could make the obvious sarcastic comments about requiring geographers to recognize flat earth theory as a valid point of view in the classroom and so on, but this isn’t funny – it’s rather horrifying.
Update: bad link fixed.
Update2: I should of course have linked to Ted’s earlier post on the same topic.
by Henry Farrell on March 25, 2005
This may well be something that everyone else has known for weeks or months, but I for one didn’t realize until yesterday that the new version of the Google desktop search tool can now make your Thunderbird mail folders, PDF files, and much more besides searchable. It’s really a great piece of software.
Robert Farley at Lawyers, Guns and Money asks, “Who is America’s worst blogger?”
My vote: Kim du Toit. Best known as the author of the infamous “The Pussification of the Western Male” (well-skewered by the Philosoraptor in “The duToitification of the Western Conservative”. I love the description of du Toit as “a Neanderthal crybaby”). He’s the guy who disgraced himself on the first anniversary of 9/11 with this vile essay, “Traitors Within Our Walls“, in which he throws around accusations of treason like Rip Taylor with confetti:
4. We find the manifestation of traitors in those who espouse causes other than (small “r”) republican ones: those who call themselves “progressives”, “socialists”, “communitarians”, “populists”, “globalists” and so on.
Then there’s “Let Africa Sink”:
So here’s my solution for the African fiasco: a high wall around the whole continent, all the guns and bombs in the world for everyone inside, and at the end, the last one alive should do us all a favor and kill himself.
He combines the quiet reasonableness of an Ann Coulter with the eliminationist rhetoric of Dave Neiwert’s worst nightmares. du Toit was a finalist in “The Vicious Instapundit Blogroll Contest” for this post giggling at the bruises of war protestors. I could go on and on. As I write this, his most recent post sighs that there may be a Democrat in the White House, due to Bush’s immigration policy. Shooting enthusiast du Toit concludes:
Just what we needed: Clintons in the White House, Part II. Oh, joy.
Range time.
“But who reads Kim Du Toit?” According to BlogAds, more people read Kim Du Toit than Andrew Sullivan or Hugh Hewitt. More people read Kim Du Toit than Tim Blair and Matthew Yglesias combined. There’s a big audience for this stuff.
by Kieran Healy on March 25, 2005
Based on a letter I wrote this morning and plan to send this afternoon (once I look up the right address), from now on I’d like to be known as “‘Nobel Prize-nominated”:http://mediamatters.org/items/200503220009 blogger, Kieran Healy.’ I’m up for consideration in Physics. I nominated everyone here at CT as well, except “Montagu”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/author/montagu-norman/ because prizes aren’t awarded posthumously. There aren’t enough categories for us all to win in the same year (even counting “Economics”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize#Prize_categories), but I’m sure everyone’s turn will come.