About Me
- Russell Blackford
- Australian philosopher, literary critic, legal scholar, and professional writer. Based in Newcastle, NSW. My latest books are THE TYRANNY OF OPINION: CONFORMITY AND THE FUTURE OF LIBERALISM (2019); AT THE DAWN OF A GREAT TRANSITION: THE QUESTION OF RADICAL ENHANCEMENT (2021); and HOW WE BECAME POST-LIBERAL: THE RISE AND FALL OF TOLERATION (2024).
5 comments:
Totally unrelated, but I wonder if you've seen this video before. It has been around for a bit, and I only point you to it because of (what I consider) the multiple hilarious citizens getting duped on what country marked on a map in place of Australia starting around the 2 minute mark.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJuNgBkloFE
So this explains all the traffic I've been getting.
Thank you Russell. :D
More likely from Ophelia.
That Darrick Lim piece is excellent. The best summary since you yourself Russell laid out accomodationism a few posts ago.
Without wishing to completely combine the accomodationism debate with the "tone" debate, they do tend to go in lock step, and what I find interesting is that there's a little blogosphere inncident that seems to get left out of these potted histories. It's the case of Karl Zimmerman.
It started with this from PZ: http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/04/tennessee_twit_gets_brief_mome.php
Michael De Dora stepped in, and then it got really interesting:
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/04/witless_wanker_peddles_pablum.php,?url>
jerry sums it up, and highlights something from the comments sections that was the nail in the coffin for me and accomidationism (even though that's not what I knew it was called at the time.)
http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2010/04/15/can-we-refute-creationism-in-evolution-class/
From Coyne's link:
"@Deen: “If the biology textbook is even halfway decent, the rest of the book should have already established that the creation story couldn’t have been true anyway. How could it be problematic to point it out explicitly?”
Because it is one thing to teach biology; it is another to deny religious ideas.
and
@Deen, “Are you saying that it’s OK to teach people that the earth is 4.5 billion years old, but it’s wrong to teach them that the earth isn’t 6000 years old?”
Yes. One imparts scientific knowledge. The other denies a religious idea. One is constitutional; the other is not. There is no reason for a high school biology teacher to get into denying specific religious ideas in a high school biology class."
You can't say it's not 6000 years old, but you can say it IS 4.5 billion years old. orly?
Massimo dives in to defend de Dora here: http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/2010/04/pz-myers-is-witless-wanker-who-peddles.html
And it's the comments section that's most interesting here. As I read it all, it's Massimo and de dora placing tone and politeness above just about anything. And it leads to the above quote about the age of the earth.
Anyhoo, just thought I'd link to it, even though it's old, seems to get lost in the mix a little.
Russell, Darrick weighed in with another post offering an olive branch to the accomodatationists:
Stop callings us "dicks" and we will stop thinking of you as "lily-livered, conflict-averse surrender monkeys".
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