Tuesday, 2 August 2005

Le retour

It’s nice to see Matthew Stinson back in the blogosphere after an extended absence. Drop in and take a look around his fancy new digs… and update your blogrolls!

Content analysis of The Daily Show

Paul Brewer presents the results of a content analysis of The Daily Show conducted by some of his students and himself; the statistics lend credence to suggestions that TDS presents a lot of political information to its viewers.

Mind you, whether this is an appropriate substitute for making citizens sit through The NewsHour is an open question, one best left to people with a far more normative bent than my own.

Tales told by idiots

W comes out in favor of teaching Intelligent Design (a.k.a. Creationism with the serial numbers filed off) in public schools. Someone really needs to tell the president he can’t run for reelection, and thus no longer needs to behave like an idiot to gain votes. I take it all back—although, in my defense, I was discussing Congress and not the executive branch.

Unfortunately, the Democrats will fail to extract the correct lesson from this: teachers*, not politicians, should decide what should be taught, and the only way to stop politicians from deciding what gets taught is to get the government completely out of the education business. Instead, they will attempt to back evolutionary theory ad nauseum and further alienate the crowd in Kansas (and the rest of rural and suburban America) which they can’t figure out what’s the matter with.

þ: TigerHawk.

Update: Alex Knapp is sharing my wavelength today.

* I pointedly use the word teacher and not parent; mind you, absent the advantage for public schools conferred by taxpayer subsidies, parents would be free to choose among available schools and teachers on a level playing field.