The reemergence of
Bush Stole the Election!!!! Ohio Voting Fraud diaries (hereinafter "Ohio Fraud" diaries) [but see note at bottom] has reignited a Kossack debate over whether Daily Kos's Front Pagers are "censoring" diarists based on disapproval of their diary topics.
The front pagers argue that the Ohio Fraud diaries are advancing extroardinary, hyperbolic claims, but are not supported by any evidence. Accordingly, advancing those claims undermines the credibility of Daily Kos by making us look like a bunch of crazy conspiracy theorists who have forsaken the reality-based community for implausibly complex and unsupported allegations of dark cabals of secretive villians controlling the voting outcome in each and every one of the hundreds of thousands of voting precincts in the United States.
The Ohio fraudsters and their supporters, in contrast, argue as follows: Often theories that end up being true start out as extremely controversial and unsupported by any evidence, and therefore every theory should be hashed out and granted equal respect by the front pagers, without "prejudice" against "controversial" theories.. They also argue that "every idea should at least get a hearing; that unpopular or minority views should always be represented; that questions of right and wrong should be left open; that what currently counts as knowledge should always be suspect, because it will typically reflect the interests and preferences of those in power."
There is no question which side I come down on --- reality. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and therefore some basis of evidence is needed before anyone need respect a theory along the lines of "Bush Engineered the London Tube Bombings to Distract from Domestic Political Concerns," or "Republican Operatives Commandeered the electronic voting machines in Ohio and Florida to Systematically Doctor the Vote in Favor of Bush."
However, resolving this meta-issue is not the point of this diary. Rather, the point of this diary is to note that the arguments put forth recently in favor of the Ohio Fraud diaries sound an awful lot like -- no, exactly like -- the arguments put forward by ideologues who assert that intelligent design should be tought alongside evolution in the public schools:
Reknown Professor Stanley Fish explains this approach in an article entitled "Academic Cross Dressing: How Intelligent Design gets its Arguments from the Left, from the latest issue of Harper's which unfortunately is not on-line. Here is Fish's encapsulation of the Intelligent Design argument:
What the Christian Right took from [ Gerald Graff, a liberal professor of English at the University of Illinois] (without acknowledgment) was the idea that college instructors should "teach the conflicts" around academic issues so that students will learn that knowledge is neither inertly given nor merely a matter of personal opinion but is established in the crucible of controversy.
[snip]
What is ironic is that although Graff made his case for teaching the controversies in a book entitled Beyond the Culture Wars, the culture wars have now appropriated his thesis and made it into a weapon. In the Intelligent Design army, from Bush on down to every foot soldier, "teach the controversy" is the battle cry.
It is an effective one, for it takes the focus away from the scientific credibility of Intelligent Design -- away from the question, "Why should it be taught in a biology class?" -- and puts it instead on the more abstract issues of freedom and open inquiry. Rather than saying we're right, the other guys are wrong, and here are the scientific reasons why, Intelligent Design polemicists say that every idea should at least get a hearing; that unpopular or minority views should always be represented; that questions of right and wrong should be left open; that what currently counts as knowledge should always be suspect, because it will typically reflect the interests and preferences of those in power.
Fish moves on to distinguish the rigorous ideas of Professor Graff (who advocates teaching serious academic disputes to students), from the political misuse of it by the I.D. squad, and, in doing so, decimates the arguments of those who say absolutely anything goes in an academic forum, so long as there is an oppressed minority advocating its teachings:
[I]sn't it possible that, someday, refusing to teach Intelligent Design in science classes will be thought to have been in error too? After all, haven't many once-discredited theories been accepted by a later generation of scholars? And doesn't history show us that apparently settled wisdom is often kept in place by those whose careers are invested in it? Although the answer to all these questions is yes, the mistake -- and it is one made by some postmodern thinkers and seized upon by conservative polemicists -- is to turn the fact of past error into a reason for distrusting any and all conclusions reached in the present. The judgment of experts is not discredited generally because it has occassionally turned out to be wrong; one has to go with the evidence one has, even if that evidence may be overtaken in the long run. It is no method at all to say that given our uncertainty as to what might turn up in the distant future, we therefore should systematically distrust what now appears to us to be sound and true.
The same logic which Fish applies to the I.D. crowd applies equally to the Ohio Fraudsters. When dealing with extraordinary claims, the standard that must be attained is an evidentiary one. Without it, you cannot simply stamp your feet and say that your ideas should be heard in order to value "diversity of opinion." Doing so represents nothing but "an effort to accomplish through misdirection and displacement what [] cannot be accomplish[ed] through evidence and argument."
Note: Of couse, a strong distinction should be made between diaries which posit that "Bush stole Ohio"; and diaries that examine issues relating to voter intimidation and vulnerabilities in various types of vote tabulation equipment. The latter are extremely serious matters which can and should be discussed; the former are just plain nuts.