{"id":293,"date":"2007-06-13T09:21:00","date_gmt":"2007-06-13T13:21:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=293"},"modified":"2007-06-13T09:21:00","modified_gmt":"2007-06-13T13:21:00","slug":"a-snippet-from-the-culture-wars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=293","title":{"rendered":"A snippet from the Culture Wars"},"content":{"rendered":"

An astrophysicist’s story: I was giving a talk in Houston and I was told that there was a group of people coming who were going to make their protest by walking out when they heard the word “Evolution”. So I was very careful to use circumlocutions until I got to the evolution of Red Dwarf stars. And they didn’t know what to do. So they stayed to the end.<\/span><\/p>\n\n

This co-ordinated walkout seems to be an accepted creationist tactic. I suppose they call it dialogue. At any rate, I have heard it reported from the Bible Belt around Vancouver, as well. The really frightening thing is the growth of what Damian Thompson calls Counterknowledge<\/em> — developed, consistent, yet mendacious systems of counterfactual belief. I know it is easy, and right, to tease a neocon supporter of the Iraq war about his criticisms of other forms of counterknowledge. But that doesn’t make them less frightening. The same lecturer said “There are a lot of people who believe that there is _scientific_evidence for YEC.<\/span> I don’t know what you can do about these people.”<\/span><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

An astrophysicist’s story: I was giving a talk in Houston and I was told that there was a group of people coming who were going to make their protest by walking out when they heard the word “Evolution”. So I … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a> Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=293"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/293\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}