Speaking of Stupid …

Posted on by

There’s not a lot of news to comment on right now. Maybe we should give ourselves a break and just make Thanksgiving a whole month, and not let Christmas eat into it.

Here’s another story about how right-wing whackjobs in Texas dictate what goes into everybody’s textbooks. A couple of comments.

One, speaking as one who worked in the textbook industry for years — Publishers for many years have cranked out separate “Texas editions” of their textbooks. In fact, any state that has a committee deciding what books get adopted for the state gets its own edition. Usually the differences from one edition to another are very subtle. Often most of the differences are in the teachers’ editions and not the books the children use. To save money, publishers do try to make the state and national editions as uniform as possible so that, when the books are being printed, the printers only have to change the black plate (to change the text) but not the plates that print the colors in the illustrations.

But if Texas demands become too extensive to make that work, I’m not sure what the publishers would do. The costs involved in hiring an entirely separate Texas textbook division to create Texas-salable books might cause publishers to abandon Texas, at least in some subject areas like social studies and science, even if it is a huge market. The Texas market is a crapshoot, anyway, because it sometimes happens that publishers invest a lot of money and time catering to the Texas textbook committee and still fail to get “adopted” for some capricious reason. (For the record, that has happened with California too, sometimes.)

Second, when I hear about bozos like Don McLeroy, interviewed for the article, it makes me wonder how someone that stupid can not only survive, but achieve success. As a species, we don’t seem to be selecting for intelligence very efficiently. There was a time when the early hominid McLeroys would not have survived to procreate, you know. He might have mistaken a Arctodus simus for a Megalonyx jeffersonii and try to pet it. He might have tried to walk across a tar pit. Now he wears nice suits and dictates textbook content. I fear for humanity.

6 thoughts on “Speaking of Stupid …”

  1. (Not-so) Dear Dominionist Evangelical Christian parents – aka: religious looney-tunes, and Authoritarian douche-canoe’s,
    The state’s obligation as far as education is concerned, is to give ALL of the children the best overall education possible – to allow them to be independent and productive citizens, with reasonable cognitive skills, when they grow to adulthood.

    YOUR option, or obligation, as a parent, is, if you want to, to give YOUR children the religious “education (indoctrination)” that YOU want.
    THAT, is NOT the state’s obligation!

    In America, because of the 1st Amendment, the federal and state governments are under NO obligation to teach about, or to, any religion(s), except maybe in an elective Comparative Religious Studies course – where students get exposure to other religions, and discover both the differences (different prophets and books), and the similarities (subjugation of women, and the grifting of money from the rubes, to go to the leaders of that religious institutions – aka: men).

    If YOU, as a parent feel that the education your child is receiving lacks religion – more specifically, YOUR brand of religion – the solution is to take YOUR child(ren) either to weekend and/or evening religious studies, or put YOUR child(ren) in a private school run by your religion, that is properly accredited by your state.

    The solution is NOT to make every other parent’s child(ren) have to be force-fed YOUR religious mumbo-jumbo.
    THEIR parents are responsible, if THEY want to, to educate/indoctrinate THEIR children in THEIR religious mumbo-jumbo.

    Pull YOUR children out of the public schools, I don’t care – but continue to pay the school taxes, or face prosecution – and YOU pay for YOUR children’s education in a private religious school.

    And if, after that, YOUR child(ren) can’t even stock shelves upon completion of THIER education, paid for by YOU, or even remember not to poop and pee in their pants , but can pray the hell out of a day without looking at YOUR religious book, then YOU’LL have gotten what YOU wanted.

    But sadly for the rest of us, because we’re not monomaniacal religious looney-tunes, and/or Authoritarian douche-canoe’s, but generous and caring people, we won’t abandon YOUR child(ren).
    No.
    WE’LL have to pay to support YOUR little “Moran” in one way or another, for the rest of his/her life.

  2. I’ve been trying to figure out why David Barton’s garbage angers and disgusts me to the extent that it does, and it occurred to me that it’s partly for aesthetic reasons. Real American history is endlessly fascinating, but the fairy tale Barton tells is ugly and stupid and boring.

  3. Old Don McLeroy should brush up on his American history. If he thinks we’re a Christian nation – he’s mistaken. The whole point of the formation of the United States of American and its government was to wrest the power of governance from the church and give it to the people…Where it rightly belongs. The divine right of Kings was a concept created and upheld by the church to give the illusion that the state was separated from the Christian church, while in reality the church gave validity and authority to the power of the state as a second tier means of control. So the church ultimately held all the power.

  5. Swami,
    Crouch’s death at 79 is another example of that old maxim – ‘Only the good die young.’

    Not ALWAYS true.
    But if you consider how long some of these intolerant Jesus-grifting douche-canoe’s like him, Pat Robertson, and Jerry Fallwell live…

    Wait, I just realized something!
    The fact that these intolerant Jesus-grifting douche-canoe’s are so filthy rich with lucre willingly given to them by rubes, that THAT’S why they live so long.
    So, maybe the maxim should be changed to – “Only the poor die young.”

Comments are closed.