Surfing on a Hindrocket

This guy, Hindrocket, who blogs over at the conservative mouthpiece Powerline, has published one of the dumbest blog posts I've ever seen. Seriously. And I read some dumb blogs. Remember that guy who wrote only extraordinarily obvious things? Like, "I think there's a war going on in Iraq, and that's important."

But this is dumber.

Hindrocket...Okay, before I even go into why he's a moron, what's with that name? "Hindrocket"? Remember, this guy's a staunch right-winger. The concept of a rocket nearing one's hindquarters doesn't sound very conservative to me. Maybe the blog's published by the same people who hired Jeff Gannon or JD Guckert or Alan Smithee or whatever the hell that guy's name was.

Okay, on to the article. The Artist Currently Known as Hindrocket alerts us to the news that a biology professor at Texas Tech University refuses to write letters of recommendation for students who don't believe in evolution.

This sounds reasonable enough to me. I mean, the entire point of the letter of recommendation is that this professor thinks the student would one day make a good biologist. And the professor obviously thinks (for good reason!) that a student who rejects one of the most commonly understood scientific theories wouldn't make a terrific scientist.

Not to mention that a letter of recommendation is an optional portion of the professor's job. They're under no official obligation to write a letter to each student. I've had professors refuse to write me letters of recommendation without giving any satisfactory reason at all. That's the whole point! You have to impress the professor so they take time out of their busy schedule to help you.

But, of course, Hindrocket finds the very notion that a professor would refuse to embrace the holy science of Creationism tantamount to social terrorism. In his words:

I think that Darwin's theory of macroevolution is plainly wrong, on strictly scientific grounds. So to bar a student from progressing in his career because he refuses to sign on to what is, in my view, a rather obvious fraud, which cannot withstand the mildest scrutiny, is really an outrage. It is no different from the practice in Soviet Russia of promoting only biologists who believed (or pretended to believe) in the theories of Lamarck, who argued that acquired traits could be inherited. But Darwinism is the official religion of the biological (and more generally, the scientific) establishment, and as such is rigorously enforced.

You hear that, folks? A professor insisting that a student have a basic understanding of how human life began is communist. Education is ignorance! Up is down! We're not going to invade Iran, except that we probably are!

Welcome to Bushworld.

But the insanity continues!

Unfortunately for the left, religious people in this country, as in Latin America, Africa and Asia--everywhere but western Europe--aren't going away. And to a degree that frustrates and confounds the left, they frequently aren't stupid.

I have this talk of "The Left." There is no "The Left." There's people who make sense, and there's morons who make no sense. It just so happens that almost all of the people who make sense vote the same way, and it ain't for the same guys as Hindrocket. (In fact, shockingly enough, sometimes it ain't even guys!)

But even beyond that, Hindrocket assumes that those of us on "The Left" want religious people to be stupid. I don't! I want everyone to be as smart as me, so they make decisions based on some sort of logic. Believe me, I want everyone to understand evolution. Not because I need everyone to agree with me, but because it's true and it makes common sense. The world would be a much better place for all of us if hardcore religious nuts were able to table the religious stuff and think rationally about the world. But that's not really the way it's going down, now is it?

Of course we evolved from monkeys! Look at a fucking monkey, asshat! It looks just like us! We have less hair and weirder thumbs...that's fucking it! And you ever wonder why humans have a tailbone? We don't have tails, do we? Well, maybe Hindrocket does (although that would make it more difficult to get a rocket up his behind). Could it be that, over time, the tails got smaller but the bone structure never changed? Hmmmm?