Wanker of the day

What Are the Darwinists Afraid Of? by Patrick J. Buchanan

The intelligent design issue is turning up some amazing stoopidity from some unexpected corners. I expect genuflection from the usual Bush apologists, but Pat Buchanan has not been shy about bashing Bush when they disagree. So how do we explain this?

In an editorial, "But Is It Intelligent?" The Washington Post accuses President Bush, who spoke warmly of intelligent design, of "indulging quackery." "To pretend that the existence of evolution is still an open question," sniffed the Post, "is to misunderstand the intellectual and scientific history of the past century."

The Post notwithstanding, we are not pretending. Evolution fails to answer the arguments of reason. And parents have a right not to have their children indoctrinated in an unproven belief system, one purpose of which is to destroy their faith.

A Solomonic solution. Let parents choose between having their kids spend a year in biology class cutting up those poor frogs and being indoctrinated in evolution ideology -- or a year studying the Old and New Testaments as the greatest book of Western civilization and literature, and the basis of morality and ethics. As they say, freedom of choice.

I remember being a high school student, Mr. Buchanan. And I think I have a pretty good idea of what is going to happen if students are given the option of learning complicated, fact-based rules and formulae on the one hand, and the one-size-fits-all, "because it is God's will" on the other. Learning how to think is hard. Parroting fundamentalist pabulum is easy. What the pressure of prosletyzing starts, laziness will finish. Your idea is a recipe for the further dumbing down of our already silly-stupid populace.

Yammer on about the marketplace of ideas, and the freedom to choose. The market will indeed sort this out. The folks now going to school in Bangalor and Shanghai will be happy to let your ignorant spawn choose -- between flipping burgers and cleaning the toilets in their offices, because the good jobs will go to the folks who learn how to think, and know the difference between mythos and logos.