Comment by Doug Reardon on March 14, 2010 at 8:56pm

I empathize with your frustration!

Comment by Velogiraptor on March 14, 2010 at 9:09pm

I live in Texas and the capacity for willful ignorance in this state never once has ceased to shock me! There is something seriously wrong with people in this state. The neo-cons get people into these positions at just the wrong times and set back education a few decades. To be honest, nothing infuriates me more.

Comment by Reggie on March 15, 2010 at 1:10am

What Doug said.

Comment by Kris on March 15, 2010 at 4:38am

I went into a Christian meeting last night and punched the living shit out of those Bible-reading shits. I think I really got my point across. Religion is harmful.

Comment by Shine on March 15, 2010 at 11:57am

Having lived in central Texas for three years now, this sort of thing does not surprise me in the slightest. However, I still marvel at the presence of the Atheist Community of Austin, producers of the popular "Atheist Experience" TV show and the "Non-Prophets" radio show. (Both are available on the web as well.) Although I was never overtly interested in religious or secular organizations when I lived up north, I really do not remember any nonreligious organization of the ACA's caliber in the northeast. Do you think that the ACA's prominence is a direct result of the overwhelming religious idiocy that permeates most of Texas? I know for myself, I was not really fully driven into studying and admitting atheism until I was immersed in Texangelical idiocy.

Anyways, sorry for the derailment, but I have always been puzzled by the presence of such a strong atheist community in the heart of lonestar lunacy.

Comment by Shine on March 15, 2010 at 7:39pm

From the FoxNews article:

Schweikart says the textbooks' authors bring an inherently liberal viewpoint to their work.

“They all tend to come from New York, Boston, Washington and Philadelphia,” giving them a “drastically” different viewpoint from the rest of America, he says.

Aside from bias, there are factual errors as well.

This shit pisses me off so much. I have lost count how many references I have heard down here to the liberal elites in up north who supposedly control American academia. The worst was my English professor last fall, who began a rant with saying how happy she was that SAT scores were becoming less important as the system began to "recognize other types of intelligence." She then proceeded to spin some conspiratorial tale about the academic elitists in Boston all meeting in some secret conclave to fix standards for the rest of the country, and that this put Texas at such a disadvantage. She then said that her husband had done his master's at Boston University, so she had firsthand knowledge of this northern academic conspiracy.

Being from New England and having attended both a Massachusetts boarding school and one semester of Boston University, I had to interrupt and ask her what in the hell she was talking about. The look on her face was absolutely priceless as she had obviously never expected one of her students in the central Texan community college classroom to call her out on her bullshit. She stuttered something about how it was true, and "they" set the standards, and "they" determined "everything."

Sigh.

Comment by Velogiraptor on March 15, 2010 at 9:49pm

Brandon

What I found in the beginning of the article you linked to tells me everything I need to know. :P

" What you'll find there, he says, will tell you everything you need to know, he says."

They don't even have editors at Fixed News to correct redundant statements and repeating one's self. ;)

The Reagan test IS in fact a very interesting test. If you ask someone about Reagan, and they can't imagine why this guy who kept calling the Soviet Union evil didn't get the Nobel Peace Prize and Gorbachev did; then they are hopelessly slanted in their own world view and probably only trust Fixed News as a source. Clearly Gorbachev had nothing to do with Soviet U.S. relations right? It was all Reagan of course!
But wait, didn't Reagan train a small army in Afghanistan to drain the Soviet treasury. Didn't he make a bunch of promises to them to help rebuild their country if they helped him. Weren't they called the Mujahadeen? Didn't he ignore them when it was time to start holding up his end of the bargain? Wasn't their leader Osama Bin Laden? Didn't they then become Al Qaeda? And who was that group that hit the towers in 2001? Oh yeah, that's right. Now it's clear to me why Reagan should be canonized in textbooks across this great land for all of America's children.

Comment by Doug Reardon on March 15, 2010 at 11:35pm

The fact that the conservative right holds Reagan in the highest esteem, and thinks he's one of America's greatest presidents, just goes to show their lack of: judgement, insight, intelligence, rationality, reason-ability, sagacity, sanity, non-delusionality, reasonableness, and grip on reality.

Comment by Petra Polovina on March 30, 2010 at 7:48pm

Oh Jesus Christ...

Comment