We remember the ACORN prostitute advisors, and the Shirley Sherrod saga at the Dept. of Agriculture. In both cases, conservatives selectively edited videos to make the truth fit their memes. They pulled the wool over the eyes of the media and the administration.
And here they go again.
This time, the victim is a professor of physics at Louisiana State. Dr Bradley Schaefer is teaching a class on global warming, when he has students change seats based on politics--- liberals on the left, conservatives on the right. After which he parodies the unproductive, goofy extremism found on both sides (granted, you only hear the conservative lunacy in the mainstream, but still...)
The point? Same as basic training, really--- shake away your baggage, in this case intellectual, so you can build a solid base of knowledge. Pedagogy 101, really. Of course, the students know what's happening, and a few of them are even snickering here and there, as the cynical are wont to do. You can watch this unhatcheted lesson, delivered with an infectious enthusiasm, here at Vimeo:
Full Video: LSU Astronomy Class from Campus Reform on Vimeo.
Now, if you watched the video released by the so-called Leadership Institute, you might get the impression that Dr Schaefer is "just another liberal indoctrinator."
LSU Indoctrination from Campus Reform on Vimeo.
You can read up on this at the Chronicle for Higher Education
Of course, if you're a conservative, the right-wing noise machine has already convinced you that "college" is really a dastardly liberal plot to indoctrinate our kids into being mindless Communist zombies. Nevermind that a) college students are adults, b) Communism is deader than disco, and c) they seriously overestimate how much students actually learn (no, I'm not bitter :) ). Those are mere facts. And if there's anything conservatives hate, it's facts. Especially when those facts show that their "beliefs" really aren't valid.
Another reason conservatives hate the college types is that we teach a simple method:
- Observe
- Generalize
- Theorize
- Test. If the facts don't fit your theory, FIX THE THEORY.
Contrast that to the conservative method of acquiring knowledge:
- Pretend
- Generalize
- Hyperbolize
- Solve fake problem. If the facts don't fit your "theory", FIX THE FACTS.
You could write a hundred diaries on the conservative fact-finding 'method', but we'll just stick to this case. Step one: Pretend that honest, God-fearing conservatives are victims of ideological college professors. Step two, Generalize: Every lesson actually has overt or secret messages that steer students astray. Step three, Hyperbolize: OMG!!! They're gonna turn our innocent children into demon-sheep!! (NB: "innocent"?, see Step 1). Step four: Solve fake problem: Well, they can't have Dr Schaefer fired--- he's tenured, you see, so he can only be fired for egregious misconduct, which he is innocent of. Instead, then, they'll simply make him look bad.
Unfortunately for them, the facts don't fit their theory. Fortunately for them, that's not a problem: If you're conservative, you fix the facts. So that's what the "Leadership" Institute did. Funny how they can only do this well with easily-edited digital video, one of the easiest ways to "fix" the truth.
They fooled us once, they fooled us twice. Are we gonna let these immoral scumbags make it a trifecta?