[PornoDoggy]

Hmmm.

I've found the appearance of this topic during the week of the 40th anniversary of the civil rights March on Washington very interesting.

I understand the arguements about academic freedom. They sound really, really good, and there is even some substance behind them. I am not sure that the situation is as grim within academia as you say; about the only other folks I recall making the same level of noise about it over the last five years are the creation "science" [sic] folks.

I do know this ... there are pressures on ANY academic who offers up an opinion/pursues a line of research that strays too far from conventional wisdom or contemporary theory within whatever community of science is involved. A book I read recently on the erruption of the Krakatoa volcano described the degree to which early proponents of the theory of continental drift were ostrasized. They were treated in the same way as genuine crackpots who pursued obvious dead ends or continued to defend debunked theories.

So there is nothing new here ... and when you add on to that the uses to which earlier attempts to pursue this line of thought were put, what you've got here is a perfectly understandable hesitation and skepticism of an area of research full of potential minefields - not all of which can be dismissed as merely blind observance of the rules of political correctness.

The real puzzler - I'm trying to figure out why suddenly you are posing questions to me about whether attempting to offer up certain opinions or publish certain theories should be illegal. I don't recall ever offering an opinion that anyone besides Torone/Torone AI could twist around that far. It seems quite a leap within the context of the conversation.

I'm an ACLU kind of guy who strongly believes that every Klansman should get a disabled Jewish Black lesbian lawyer whenever they need one. I was suprised over a recent controversy in Oz regarding the attempt to show a film by a British (?) filmmaker from the "Holocaust is a myth" school; an attempt that was unsuccessful because of a ruling by the film board. I'm glad we don't have that kind of governmental pressure in the U.S.

In part, I disagree with OldJeff - I think this is a line of research that is being and will be pursued. Where I agree with him 100% is "Whatever the findings, they would be bastardized by one extemist group or another (probably a lot more than one)". In an ideal world scientists wouldn't be forced to worry about that. I, for one, don't find the fact that they do a very disturbing fact.

Considering that there are people around today who have buried their head inside their internal combustion engine and question data from fields of science far more advanced in the body of accumulated knowledge, I don't find it particularly suprising, either.



Last edited by PornoDoggy at Aug 28 2003, 09:56 AM