Postmodernism | counterknowledge.com http://counterknowledge.com Improve your knowledge with us! Mon, 27 May 2019 14:05:07 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.5.3 Sickening Rwanda Revisionists http://counterknowledge.com/2008/03/sickening-rwanda-revisionists/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=sickening-rwanda-revisionists Sat, 29 Mar 2008 14:05:07 +0000 http://counterknowledge.com/2008/03/sickening-rwanda-revisionists/ A Montreal based conference will tomorrow (Saturday, 29th March) play host to four “minimizers” of the 1994 Rwandan genocide. The revisionists dispute the version of events officially recognised by the UN, in which up to 1 million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were massacred over the …

The post Sickening Rwanda Revisionists first appeared on counterknowledge.com.]]> A Montreal based conference will tomorrow (Saturday, 29th March) play host to four “minimizers” of the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

The revisionists dispute the version of events officially recognised by the UN, in which up to 1 million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were massacred over the course of about 100 days.

French journalist Pierre Pean, Spanish lawyer Jordi Palou-Loverdos, Belgian journalist Peter Verlinden and Canadian author Robin Philpot are all speaking at the conference.

Pean and his publisher faced charges of racial slander and provocation in France after his 2005 book on the Rwandan genocide, entitled “Noires Fureurs, Blancs Menteurs” (Black Furies, White Liars), claimed that Tutsis organised a counter-genocide of Hutus – the international community has long accepted that Tutsis were the main target of massacres.

The Canadian Press quoted William Schabas, a human rights expert, as saying, “I believe in open debate and historical inquiry but there are facts that are so obvious that when people start denying them, it’s very similar to Holocaust denial.”

The most damning criticism of the revisionists has been from Luc-Normand Tellier, a professor at the Université du Quebec in Montréal (UQAM), who previously taught in Kigali, the Rwandan capital.

In an article reviewing Philpot’s “Ca ne s’est pas passe comme ça a Kigali” (It Did Not Happen Like That in Kigali), Tellier accuses the Canadian author of genocide denial:

Nowhere in the book did Mr Philpot show any compassion towards the 500,000 to one million victims of the Genocide. Nowhere does he look to understand why Tutsi refugees in Uganda had several times tried to come back to their country.

What scandalized me the most in Mr Philpot’s book is that each time he speaks about these Rwandan refugees, the author calls them rebels, invaders, aggressors or foreign army…

What wrong had a human group been doing to the point that one tries to liquidate it? What wrongs? What wrongs? What wrongs? Mr Philpot, answer!

In the name of these hundreds of thousands of victims, who truly died in atrocious conditions in the context of a genocide that you are trying to negate; in the name of all my former students who were killed, I summon you to answer.

Tellingly, tomorrow’s conference comes soon before the 14th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide.

If you enjoyed this post, why not subscribe to our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter? You might also consider making a donation to the Counterknowledge.com fighting fund.

Curiously the interface between scientists and the public has a fair few people who have questioned the Rwandan genocide in the past…

“A conference called by a group of well known deniers of the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda ended in chaos Saturday in the Canadian city of Montréal. Hundreds of people, many of them Rwandans living in Canada, carried placards and heckled the organisers of the conference.”

Source here: http://allafrica.com/stories/200803310587.html

I’m not clear why this is tagged “postmodernism.” Telling odious lies to cover-up or excuse atrocities is a time-honored tradition that predates “postmodern theory.” While there are liars who borrow trendy postmodern phrases to spice up their rhetoric- but that’s what liars have always done: use little-understood concepts to obscure the extent of their lies.

Anyway– I think that goes for most of the articles tagged “postmodernism” here.

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Suzuki to lift output in China

http://www.csj.org/

Asiaweek 071495

http://www.rageinteriors.com/

Asiaweek

http://www.hatejapan.com/

PAPERbasket

http://www.bagclosers.com/

I dont condone what happened in Rwanda since 1990s until now but have uever asked where did millions of hutus from northern and southern rwanda go?please all of us lost our beloved relatives in bloody chilly killing of RPF but u never called it genocide while the hutus killed by RPF are nearing 4million.please give us a break we want justice done then reconciliation otherwise.there is still war in rwanda

What’s so annoying about Rwanda is that at the time there was millions of soldiers sitting about twiddling their thumbs in garrisons around the world, many of them decent, well-trained, responsible men. Why were they not flown to the zone in question when the warning signs were heard and seen, blue berets and armbands given to them and the simple task of stopping mass-murder their number one priority? In Europe alone hundreds of thousands of military personnel were in a position to be deployed but yet again the politicos let humanity down, the corrupt, inept, self-serving, US-dominated, mealy-mouthed politicos of all description let the world down yet again. The soldiers would have went, put aside their national insignia for the insignia of the UN, deployed weapons and expertise that would have had the mass-murderers shitting themselves. But the politicos would have had to give them the green light … but they didn’t, for whatever reason of their own, they didn’t. This could have been avoided as we have the military might to swamp any area of the globe with enough weapons and personnel to deter any local tyrant or tribal conflict. Maybe the Rwandans were just too black and just way too poor to bother with … Ask Clinton what he did to help? Maybe he was too busy getting his cock sucked to care …

A Montreal based conference will tomorrow (Saturday, 29th March) play host to four “minimizers” of the 1994 Rwandan genocide.

The revisionists dispute the version of events officially recognised by the UN, in which up to 1 million Tutsis and moderate Hutus were massacred over the course of about 100 days.

French journalist Pierre Pean, Spanish lawyer Jordi Palou-Loverdos, Belgian journalist Peter Verlinden and Canadian author Robin Philpot are all speaking at the conference.

Pean and his publisher faced charges of racial slander and provocation in France after his 2005 book on the Rwandan genocide, entitled “Noires Fureurs, Blancs Menteurs” (Black Furies, White Liars), claimed that Tutsis organised a counter-genocide of Hutus – the international community has long accepted that Tutsis were the main target of massacres.

The Canadian Press quoted William Schabas, a human rights expert, as saying, “I believe in open debate and historical inquiry but there are facts that are so obvious that when people start denying them, it’s very similar to Holocaust denial.”

The most damning criticism of the revisionists has been from Luc-Normand Tellier, a professor at the Université du Quebec in Montréal (UQAM), who previously taught in Kigali, the Rwandan capital.

In an article reviewing Philpot’s “Ca ne s’est pas passe comme ça a Kigali” (It Did Not Happen Like That in Kigali), Tellier accuses the Canadian author of genocide denial:

Nowhere in the book did Mr Philpot show any compassion towards the 500,000 to one million victims of the Genocide. Nowhere does he look to understand why Tutsi refugees in Uganda had several times tried to come back to their country.

What scandalized me the most in Mr Philpot’s book is that each time he speaks about these Rwandan refugees, the author calls them rebels, invaders, aggressors or foreign army…

What wrong had a human group been doing to the point that one tries to liquidate it? What wrongs? What wrongs? What wrongs? Mr Philpot, answer!

In the name of these hundreds of thousands of victims, who truly died in atrocious conditions in the context of a genocide that you are trying to negate; in the name of all my former students who were killed, I summon you to answer.

Tellingly, tomorrow’s conference comes soon before the 14th anniversary of the Rwandan genocide.

If you enjoyed this post, why not subscribe to our RSS feed or follow us on Twitter? You might also consider making a donation to the Counterknowledge.com fighting fund.

Curiously the interface between scientists and the public has a fair few people who have questioned the Rwandan genocide in the past…

“A conference called by a group of well known deniers of the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda ended in chaos Saturday in the Canadian city of Montréal. Hundreds of people, many of them Rwandans living in Canada, carried placards and heckled the organisers of the conference.”

Source here: http://allafrica.com/stories/200803310587.html

I’m not clear why this is tagged “postmodernism.” Telling odious lies to cover-up or excuse atrocities is a time-honored tradition that predates “postmodern theory.” While there are liars who borrow trendy postmodern phrases to spice up their rhetoric- but that’s what liars have always done: use little-understood concepts to obscure the extent of their lies.

Anyway– I think that goes for most of the articles tagged “postmodernism” here.

alphecca hematonic spumescent actinocrinidae roundfish mugiloid hysteralgia scholarly

Suzuki to lift output in China

http://www.csj.org/

Asiaweek 071495

http://www.rageinteriors.com/

Asiaweek

http://www.hatejapan.com/

PAPERbasket

http://www.bagclosers.com/

I dont condone what happened in Rwanda since 1990s until now but have uever asked where did millions of hutus from northern and southern rwanda go?please all of us lost our beloved relatives in bloody chilly killing of RPF but u never called it genocide while the hutus killed by RPF are nearing 4million.please give us a break we want justice done then reconciliation otherwise.there is still war in rwanda

What’s so annoying about Rwanda is that at the time there was millions of soldiers sitting about twiddling their thumbs in garrisons around the world, many of them decent, well-trained, responsible men. Why were they not flown to the zone in question when the warning signs were heard and seen, blue berets and armbands given to them and the simple task of stopping mass-murder their number one priority? In Europe alone hundreds of thousands of military personnel were in a position to be deployed but yet again the politicos let humanity down, the corrupt, inept, self-serving, US-dominated, mealy-mouthed politicos of all description let the world down yet again. The soldiers would have went, put aside their national insignia for the insignia of the UN, deployed weapons and expertise that would have had the mass-murderers shitting themselves. But the politicos would have had to give them the green light … but they didn’t, for whatever reason of their own, they didn’t. This could have been avoided as we have the military might to swamp any area of the globe with enough weapons and personnel to deter any local tyrant or tribal conflict. Maybe the Rwandans were just too black and just way too poor to bother with … Ask Clinton what he did to help? Maybe he was too busy getting his cock sucked to care …

The post Sickening Rwanda Revisionists first appeared on counterknowledge.com.]]> 89 Holocaust denial? No, ‘Global South’ http://counterknowledge.com/2008/01/holocaust-denial-no-global-south/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=holocaust-denial-no-global-south Fri, 18 Jan 2008 14:04:36 +0000 http://counterknowledge.com/2008/01/holocaust-denial-no-global-south/ Here are a few paragraphs from Counterknowledge on Iran, Holocaust denial and a postmodern university professor: History as well as science is under assault from Muslim counterknowledge. In December 2006, the Islamic Republic of Iran organised a conference entitled “A Review of the Holocaust” in …

The post Holocaust denial? No, ‘Global South’ first appeared on counterknowledge.com.]]> Here are a few paragraphs from Counterknowledge on Iran, Holocaust denial and a postmodern university professor:

History as well as science is under assault from Muslim counterknowledge. In December 2006, the Islamic Republic of Iran organised a conference entitled “A Review of the Holocaust” in Tehran whose participants included the notorious French Holocaust revisionist Robert Faurisson and the far-Right American demagogue David Duke.

One of the attendees was Shiraz Dossa, a tenured professor of political science at St Francis Xavier University, Nova Scotia. In the June 2007 issue of the Literary Review of Canada, Dossa attacked the “illiterate Islamophobes” who had criticised him for going to the conference. Their arguments were based on two fallacies, he said. The first was that President Ahmadinejad had ever called the Holocaust a myth: instead, he had merely questioned its “mythologising and sacralising” by supporters of Israel. Presumably, Dossa had missed Ahmadinejad’s speech in the city of Zahedan in December, 2005, in which he denounced “the myth that Jews were massacred”.

Dossa continued: “The second western fallacy is that the event was a Holocaust-denial conference because of the presence of a few notorious western Christian deniers/skeptics, a couple of a neo-Nazi stripe. It was nothing of the sort. It was a Global South conference convened to devise an intellectual/political response to western-Israeli intervention in Muslim affairs. Holocaust deniers/sceptics were a fringe, a marginal few at the conference. Out of the 33 conference paper givers, 27 were not Holocaust deniers, but were university professors and social science researchers from Iran, Jordan, Algeria, India, Morocco, Bahrain, Tunisia, Malaysia, Indonesia and Syria.”

Dossa did not say whether he had time to examine one of the exhibits at the conference, brought along by the “historian” Frederick Toeben, who has served a prison sentence in his native Germany for denying the Holocaust. According to the official Iranian news agency, this was “a huge model of the Treblinka extermination camp, complete with model trains and human figures, which he said he would use to argue that the gas chambers did not exist”.

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

The Literary Review of Canada published my letter in response to Professor Dossa’s defense of his attendance of the conference in Tehran

.

I know nobody that denies that the Jews suffered in the second world war. I note that those that ‘question’ ANY aspect of the official tale are classed as deniers and are subject to massive ad homonym attacks. (Examples above are words like ‘notorious’ and ‘demagogue’ in just one sentence when naming such people.) I note that those who question are told to ‘prove’ that six million jews were not deliberately murdered – yet are carefully denied a hearing. It would seem to me that the burden of proof is upon those who claim they were, yet despite that, the questioners seem to have the greater evidence to justify their skepticism. Above all, I note that questioning the official story brings a jail sentence in so-called free countries. That indicates there is something Holocausters have to hide. Like almost everything in Counterknowledge the reasoned and well documented arguments/theories are avoided. Counterknowledge seeks to try to discredit these by ignoring them and by concentrating on the clearly whacky non-state conspiracy theories. Won’t work! For real analysis and a lesson in good journalism read the works of the Time’s Chief Foreign Correspondent for that period, Douglas Reed, especially Controversy of Zion. There were still some genuine newspaper reporters in those days! Counterknowledge is an amusing but unimpressive work. Try better next time.

P Brooks:

It would seem to me that the burden of proof [that the Holocaust occurred] is upon those who claim they were, yet despite that, the questioners seem to have the greater evidence to justify their skepticism.

This is precisely why diplomats, intelligence officers, criminal investigators, prosecutors, historians, and social scientists, both during the Holocaust and in subsequent decades amassed an unprecedented amount of evidence that speaks to the fact that the event happened, how it happened, its causes, its scale, and its consequences. There is the physical evidence of mass graves, corpses, gas chambers, and crematoriums; eye-witness accounts from not just survivors, but the killers and their commanding officers; designs for the extermination camps; invoices for the poison gas; pay-stubs for everyone who played a part; a bureaucratic paper trail regarding the planning behind the killings; photographs, film; as well as indirect evidence such as stolen property and census records. The point is that the proof is so robust that even if one piece of evidence is called into question, the basically agreed upon facts remain. The burden has been bared and the case has been proven well beyond a reasonable doubt.

The fact is that the deniers whom “P Brooks” erroneously calls “skeptics” do not have a better explanation for the sheer weight of evidence beyond taking anything they can out of context, ignoring anything they can’t, and fabricating the rest.

There is no “massive amount of evidence” for the so-called holocaust.. However, there is a massive amount of of hearsay, fabrication and irrationality; not to mention all the frantic ad hominem invective by the holocausters.

The “holocaust” dam is cracking – and that’s why they must throw skeptics into prison: they have no better answer.

Check out CODOH : http://www.codoh.com/

Citizenfitz: yes, you explain that to all those millions of families in Continental Europe, from France to Russia and from Norway to Sicily, who have personal memories of members murdered by the scum you defend. You see the trouble is that you cannot try and pretend that murder is not murder when people have seen and heard it done. Your heroes murdered, at a conservative estimate, eleven million civilians in cold blood in little more than six years. End of story. Go try and shock someone else.

Most of it’s lies. Anyway, there were scarcely six million Jews, if that, in all of nazi occupied Europe – and it’s know that millions of them survived.

The holocausters refuse to debate with revisionists, not out of any desire to deny them a platform for their “despicable” views, but because their fraud gets stripped naked. Same reason those who doubt it must be imprisoned, for pointing out the lies. But you can continue closing your eyes and plugging your ears, and spinning around in circles while you stamp your little foot…

sucker.

Here are a few paragraphs from Counterknowledge on Iran, Holocaust denial and a postmodern university professor:

History as well as science is under assault from Muslim counterknowledge. In December 2006, the Islamic Republic of Iran organised a conference entitled “A Review of the Holocaust” in Tehran whose participants included the notorious French Holocaust revisionist Robert Faurisson and the far-Right American demagogue David Duke.

One of the attendees was Shiraz Dossa, a tenured professor of political science at St Francis Xavier University, Nova Scotia. In the June 2007 issue of the Literary Review of Canada, Dossa attacked the “illiterate Islamophobes” who had criticised him for going to the conference. Their arguments were based on two fallacies, he said. The first was that President Ahmadinejad had ever called the Holocaust a myth: instead, he had merely questioned its “mythologising and sacralising” by supporters of Israel. Presumably, Dossa had missed Ahmadinejad’s speech in the city of Zahedan in December, 2005, in which he denounced “the myth that Jews were massacred”.

Dossa continued: “The second western fallacy is that the event was a Holocaust-denial conference because of the presence of a few notorious western Christian deniers/skeptics, a couple of a neo-Nazi stripe. It was nothing of the sort. It was a Global South conference convened to devise an intellectual/political response to western-Israeli intervention in Muslim affairs. Holocaust deniers/sceptics were a fringe, a marginal few at the conference. Out of the 33 conference paper givers, 27 were not Holocaust deniers, but were university professors and social science researchers from Iran, Jordan, Algeria, India, Morocco, Bahrain, Tunisia, Malaysia, Indonesia and Syria.”

Dossa did not say whether he had time to examine one of the exhibits at the conference, brought along by the “historian” Frederick Toeben, who has served a prison sentence in his native Germany for denying the Holocaust. According to the official Iranian news agency, this was “a huge model of the Treblinka extermination camp, complete with model trains and human figures, which he said he would use to argue that the gas chambers did not exist”.

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

The Literary Review of Canada published my letter in response to Professor Dossa’s defense of his attendance of the conference in Tehran

.

I know nobody that denies that the Jews suffered in the second world war. I note that those that ‘question’ ANY aspect of the official tale are classed as deniers and are subject to massive ad homonym attacks. (Examples above are words like ‘notorious’ and ‘demagogue’ in just one sentence when naming such people.) I note that those who question are told to ‘prove’ that six million jews were not deliberately murdered – yet are carefully denied a hearing. It would seem to me that the burden of proof is upon those who claim they were, yet despite that, the questioners seem to have the greater evidence to justify their skepticism. Above all, I note that questioning the official story brings a jail sentence in so-called free countries. That indicates there is something Holocausters have to hide. Like almost everything in Counterknowledge the reasoned and well documented arguments/theories are avoided. Counterknowledge seeks to try to discredit these by ignoring them and by concentrating on the clearly whacky non-state conspiracy theories. Won’t work! For real analysis and a lesson in good journalism read the works of the Time’s Chief Foreign Correspondent for that period, Douglas Reed, especially Controversy of Zion. There were still some genuine newspaper reporters in those days! Counterknowledge is an amusing but unimpressive work. Try better next time.

P Brooks:

It would seem to me that the burden of proof [that the Holocaust occurred] is upon those who claim they were, yet despite that, the questioners seem to have the greater evidence to justify their skepticism.

This is precisely why diplomats, intelligence officers, criminal investigators, prosecutors, historians, and social scientists, both during the Holocaust and in subsequent decades amassed an unprecedented amount of evidence that speaks to the fact that the event happened, how it happened, its causes, its scale, and its consequences. There is the physical evidence of mass graves, corpses, gas chambers, and crematoriums; eye-witness accounts from not just survivors, but the killers and their commanding officers; designs for the extermination camps; invoices for the poison gas; pay-stubs for everyone who played a part; a bureaucratic paper trail regarding the planning behind the killings; photographs, film; as well as indirect evidence such as stolen property and census records. The point is that the proof is so robust that even if one piece of evidence is called into question, the basically agreed upon facts remain. The burden has been bared and the case has been proven well beyond a reasonable doubt.

The fact is that the deniers whom “P Brooks” erroneously calls “skeptics” do not have a better explanation for the sheer weight of evidence beyond taking anything they can out of context, ignoring anything they can’t, and fabricating the rest.

There is no “massive amount of evidence” for the so-called holocaust.. However, there is a massive amount of of hearsay, fabrication and irrationality; not to mention all the frantic ad hominem invective by the holocausters.

The “holocaust” dam is cracking – and that’s why they must throw skeptics into prison: they have no better answer.

Check out CODOH : http://www.codoh.com/

Citizenfitz: yes, you explain that to all those millions of families in Continental Europe, from France to Russia and from Norway to Sicily, who have personal memories of members murdered by the scum you defend. You see the trouble is that you cannot try and pretend that murder is not murder when people have seen and heard it done. Your heroes murdered, at a conservative estimate, eleven million civilians in cold blood in little more than six years. End of story. Go try and shock someone else.

Most of it’s lies. Anyway, there were scarcely six million Jews, if that, in all of nazi occupied Europe – and it’s know that millions of them survived.

The holocausters refuse to debate with revisionists, not out of any desire to deny them a platform for their “despicable” views, but because their fraud gets stripped naked. Same reason those who doubt it must be imprisoned, for pointing out the lies. But you can continue closing your eyes and plugging your ears, and spinning around in circles while you stamp your little foot…

sucker.

The post Holocaust denial? No, ‘Global South’ first appeared on counterknowledge.com.]]> 67 ID and postmodernism – ugh! http://counterknowledge.com/2008/01/id-and-postmodernism-ugh/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=id-and-postmodernism-ugh Tue, 01 Jan 2008 14:04:39 +0000 http://counterknowledge.com/2008/01/id-and-postmodernism-ugh/ Steve Fuller, a professor of the sociology of science at Warwick University, has written a postmodern defence of Intelligent Design, entitled Science v. Religion? Intelligent Design and the Problem of Evolution. And here is a thrillingly savage review of it in eSkeptic magazine by Norman …

The post ID and postmodernism – ugh! first appeared on counterknowledge.com.]]> Steve Fuller, a professor of the sociology of science at Warwick University, has written a postmodern defence of Intelligent Design, entitled Science v. Religion? Intelligent Design and the Problem of Evolution. And here is a thrillingly savage review of it in eSkeptic magazine by Norman Levitt, professor of mathematics at Rutgers University.

Levitt is disgusted by Fuller, a supposed “progressive” intellectual who appeared as an expert witness in the case of the school board in Dover, Pennsylvania, that wanted to teach the pseudoscience of ID in the classroom. (They lost, spectacularly.)

Here are a couple of quotes to give you a flavour of Levitt’s review:

It is with frank satisfaction and not a little glee that I can report that it is a truly miserable piece of work, crammed with errors scientific, historical, and even theological, a book that will find approving readers only amongst hard-core ID enthusiasts hungry for agreement but indifferent to the quality of evidence offered in support of their position. Fuller really does make it up as he goes along, laying out arguments that hardly need serious thought to refute in that they are based on howlers and solecisms that collapse under the lightest scrutiny…

He seems to think that biology, as a constellation of disciplines, is some kind of socially-constructed freemasonry in which assent to basic Darwinian principles constitutes a ritual formula necessary to make one part of the brotherhood rather than a cognitively-justified inference from hard evidence. More, he seems to think that evolutionary thought is mere ideological window-dressing, contributing nothing to the “hard science” behind molecular biology and the like. None of this is backed up by serious analysis of the working methods and logical structure of biology itself. Fuller complacently views the ascendancy of evolutionary thought as a ‘rhetorical’ rather than a ‘scientific’ development. 

Postmodernism and creationism: it makes you queasy even to think of those two getting into bed together. But that’s counterknowledge for you.

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

What do you call the counterknowledge produced by someone who believes too easily that something is indeed counterknowledge? Perhaps you should look in the mirror; or perhaps read Fuller’s response to Levitt. It seems Levitt may not have read the book he reviewed — or at least didn’t understand it very well:

http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/08-01-16.html

The problem with postmodern theories is that while at their best they are a rigorous inquiry into what we can know– half of the academics who claim to be postmodern theorists don’t understand the theory and end up making seriously anti-rationalist arguments.

Stanley Fish, in his blog, probably gave the best general audience explanation I have read of postmodernism I have seen in a long time:

http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/06/french-theory-in-america/

It’s good– and also makes the case that rationalism and “postmodernism” are not necessarily opposed– except when one or the other is used in an intellectually dishonest manner.

Steve Fuller, a professor of the sociology of science at Warwick University, has written a postmodern defence of Intelligent Design, entitled Science v. Religion? Intelligent Design and the Problem of Evolution. And here is a thrillingly savage review of it in eSkeptic magazine by Norman Levitt, professor of mathematics at Rutgers University.

Levitt is disgusted by Fuller, a supposed “progressive” intellectual who appeared as an expert witness in the case of the school board in Dover, Pennsylvania, that wanted to teach the pseudoscience of ID in the classroom. (They lost, spectacularly.)

Here are a couple of quotes to give you a flavour of Levitt’s review:

It is with frank satisfaction and not a little glee that I can report that it is a truly miserable piece of work, crammed with errors scientific, historical, and even theological, a book that will find approving readers only amongst hard-core ID enthusiasts hungry for agreement but indifferent to the quality of evidence offered in support of their position. Fuller really does make it up as he goes along, laying out arguments that hardly need serious thought to refute in that they are based on howlers and solecisms that collapse under the lightest scrutiny…

He seems to think that biology, as a constellation of disciplines, is some kind of socially-constructed freemasonry in which assent to basic Darwinian principles constitutes a ritual formula necessary to make one part of the brotherhood rather than a cognitively-justified inference from hard evidence. More, he seems to think that evolutionary thought is mere ideological window-dressing, contributing nothing to the “hard science” behind molecular biology and the like. None of this is backed up by serious analysis of the working methods and logical structure of biology itself. Fuller complacently views the ascendancy of evolutionary thought as a ‘rhetorical’ rather than a ‘scientific’ development. 

Postmodernism and creationism: it makes you queasy even to think of those two getting into bed together. But that’s counterknowledge for you.

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to our RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

What do you call the counterknowledge produced by someone who believes too easily that something is indeed counterknowledge? Perhaps you should look in the mirror; or perhaps read Fuller’s response to Levitt. It seems Levitt may not have read the book he reviewed — or at least didn’t understand it very well:

http://www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/08-01-16.html

The problem with postmodern theories is that while at their best they are a rigorous inquiry into what we can know– half of the academics who claim to be postmodern theorists don’t understand the theory and end up making seriously anti-rationalist arguments.

Stanley Fish, in his blog, probably gave the best general audience explanation I have read of postmodernism I have seen in a long time:

http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/06/french-theory-in-america/

It’s good– and also makes the case that rationalism and “postmodernism” are not necessarily opposed– except when one or the other is used in an intellectually dishonest manner.

The post ID and postmodernism – ugh! first appeared on counterknowledge.com.]]> 69