indeed I have commented here in an attempt to combat stupidity.

While you’re about it you might try battling incoherence.

If you’re an anti-ID crusader and you only read one contribution, make it Kieran Healy’s. Erudite as always.

I thought dsquared asked the most interesting and relevant questions, cutting to the heart of the problematic (ie. to what extent is this an American phenomenon), but his use of Adorno was bloodcurdling ironic given that theorist’s contribution to the Positivismusstreit with Popper. Talk about a social constructionist war on science!

(1) fluoridation of drinking water is a major health hazard

Damn straight, Steve. I for one can longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion, and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.

a version of my comment from cat-laxity:

here is the shorter version of some of the work on science from the left pomo. rational ’scientific’ work can not be produced without an intimate relation to stupidity. in fact, rational scientific work is the after-effect of a battle with stupidity. this battle is fought along material, cultural, social, political and lastly ’scientific’ fronts. researchers don’t call it stupidity, they call it a ‘problem’. the thing is that due to the complexity and specificity of the problems, ’stupidity’ for proper academic researchers is probably smarter than than the smartest common person. it is a war against a problem not the *realisation* of ‘good science’. (it is that thinking that caused this problem in the first place.) that is the difference between rational ’scientific’ practice, which battles stupidity, and the forwarding of non-scientific theses, such as ID or creationism, in that for the latter there is no battle against stupidity (only the realisation of a transcendental ‘rationality’).

plucking terms out of the air (ID, left pomo, etc) and using then to forward an ideological- or belief-based argument is stupid. indeed I have commented here in an attempt to combat stupidity.

Much to my frustration, a number of my fellow Greens are on the anti-fluoridation bandwagon. I wonder how many of them realise that this cause was once the preserve of the far right groups, such as the League of Rights in Australia and the John Birch Society in the United States?

I suspect the problem is that the fluoride put in our water is a non-organic chemical and in fact an industrial waste product. Some Greenies have never met a man-made chemical they truly liked.

Sadly, elements in the boutique left also have exaggerated concerns about the possible side effects of vaccinations. It is a constant battle for public health officials to hose these down. The autism scare persists beside a wealth of evidence that discredits it.

As is often the case, there are just enough mavericks with appropriate qualifications on each of these bandwagons to suck in concerning numbers of gullible and ill-informed folk.

Steve Lomborg, The Skeptical Greenie

But irrationalism isn’t a monopoly of the religious right. And at least we know where they stand. The cultural constructionist left is a far more insidious enemy, hiding behind high faluting phrases.

I’m with John. The “cultural constructionist left� to the degree that they exist in any large numbers, have no power. The actions the Republican administration takes on issues such as energy and climate change have huge ramifications, and they also have the power to reshape funding for scientific research in the US.

I’d never heard of Steve Fuller. As John says, his position would not be a common one among sociologists of science.

That situation isn’t ‘the fault of Dawkins and Dennett with their aggressive atheism’ - that’s an absurd thing to say. Does Ruse seriously think that if Dawkins and Dennett didn’t exist, there would be no ‘battle over evolution in science teaching’? Does he think most of the soldiers in that battle have ever even heard of Dawkins and Dennett?

Also see a debunking of Bunting by PZ Myers here
http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2006/03/the_dawkinsdennett_boogeyman.php

http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,,1740392,00.html

The reason I have been vilified by Neo-Darwinism’s Beavis and Butthead Brigade is that I said under oath that science as it’s currently constituted is systematically biased against the development of ID, and that some kind of affirmative action (e.g. it’s being taught in high schools) would be needed for it to get a fair run for its money. At the same time, I also admitted that ID is not nearly so well evidenced as Neo-Darwinism, but I think it’s still best classified as science.

This fellow is talking out of his rear end but he knows his verbal sophistries. Calling the established theory of evolution ‘neo-Darwinism’ is of course the classical rhetorical ploy to get the luvvies all huffing and puffing about those ‘evil men’ like Richard Dawkins and EO Wilson ‘justifying patriarchy’ as the sensible leftie PZ Myers
http://crookedtimber.org/2006/03/27/if-there’s-a-war-please-direct-me-to-the-battlefield/#comment-149674

More foolishness here from the representative of the Cultural Constructionist Left as he joins hands with the Religious Right (Philip Johnson). Two sides of the same coin, both with vested interests in the theistic view of humanity.

http://crookedtimber.org/2006/03/27/if-there’s-a-war-please-direct-me-to-the-battlefield/#comment-149633

I believe that … Philip Johnson [is] right that [Neo-Darwinism] can be understood better as a strategy in a larger culture war than something compelled strictly on the basis of empirical developments in biology

Will these demons never leave us in peace?

Perhaps we need a ritual of exorcism?