I wondered recently, during an idle conversation, whatever became of that monumental media presence Rush Limbaugh. Now I know. He’s been upstaged. Check out the following quote:
“They’re almost always biologists—the “science” with the greatest preponderance of women. The distaff MIT “scientist” who fled the room in response to Larry Summers’s remarks was, of course, a biologist. While I’m sure there have been groundbreaking discoveries about the internal digestive system of the earthworm, biologists are barely even scientists anymore. They’re classifiers, list-makers, like librarians with their Dewey decimal system. Except librarians don’t claim the Dewey decimal system holds the Rosetta Stone to the universe. There were once great biologists, but the morally vacuous ones began to promote their own at the universities. It was sort of intelligently designed devolution. Like Marxists gradually dominating the comp lit department, biologists will only be given tenure today if they foreswear any doubts about the evolution pseudoscience. Consequently, “biologist” almost always means “evolutionary biologist,” which is something like an “ESP biologist.”
Can anyone, for five points, tell me who said this?
I’ll save you the trouble and credit you the points. Ann Coulter, in her latest screed “Godless”.
Rush used to combine some factoids and put a spin to it in ways that occasionally were very hard to find fault with, because he, for all his bombast, has a brain. Ms. Coulter just screams any damn thing she thinks will fuel the fires of controversy. To answer that one paragraph of destructive drivel would require a book or two and a couple of intelligent people who are well informed considerable time to undo.
But what intrigued me most was her insertion of the fact that WOMEN flock into biology, and this somehow makes the field suspect. As if women cannot do the real hard stuff. But even further, it’s somehow “natural” because women are all about biology anyway. It’s just that, well, they don’t know anymore where the proper use of that essence lies. You know…sex? Making babies?
All of which is part of the tradition handed to us by that diva of privileged bias, Phyllis Schlafly, who chides “professional” women for abandoning their natural roles to have–god help us–careers!
Every time I hear a woman under 35–often quite innocently–condemn feminism, usually by associating them with lesbians or sexless scientist types or the like, I cringe. I can now point to Ann Coulter and tell them “There lies your destiny if you don’t get your head out of your stereotypes! The blond demigogue will take away your options and you will be cheerleaders, waitresses, and mommies and nothing else!
Coulter almost makes me wish for Rush to return as champion of rightwing reactionary screeding. At least I felt there was some grasp in his nonsense.
But notice, in one paragraph–this is textbook stuff–she links moral vacuity, evolution, feminism, and science in general to cultural collapse in our society. Joseph Goebbels would have been proud to have her as a student.
It is important for people like Ann Coulter to be challenged, and challenged thoroughly and thoughtfully. It’s just that her nonsequiturs are so out of bounds that it’s difficult to know where to start. But one might begin by recognizing that she in fact speaks for no one. She is fueling her own fame. Her books sell well. She makes a lot of money. And she’ll say anything to make more. The best way to shut her down would be to ignore her. But we can’t. That doesn’t really work in this society. We have to have an answer.
And what I have noticed is the latest trend of demagogues attacking biology–especially evolutionary biology–picked up when gene therapy began to appear practical. Coulter and her ilk attack it now that something concrete is about to arise from it, which means they really do not see it as the nonsense–the non-science–they claim.
Interesting. Maybe they really believe that stuff in Genesis about the Tree of Life, and that eating thereof will makes us “as gods” and never die…
Nah. I don’t really believe she’s that smart. Clever, sure. But all her cleverness is destructive. All she does is try to make people feel bad about what they have.
