Monday 25 September 2017

Professors get their dates a bit muddled..

Hmmmm, when was WW2 again??


Report from a mate in the U.S.:
On the 15th anniversary of 9/11, I heard one of those weekly radios show while driving in to work. On it, they had a panel a numerous professors, who uniformly blamed 9/11 on Bush, the Republicans, and the American government in general. 
Of course, there was zero discussion of why the attackers (described only in the vaguest terms) had bothered to attack; it was treated as an act of nature. This went somewhat off the rails when a caller asked why the learned panel wasn't interested in discussing the attacker's motives, only the US response, and the panel pointed out that was because the reason for the attack was clear. Obviously, the 9/11 attackers were responding to Bush's unprovoked war on Afghanistan.
When the caller tried to point out that it was the other way around, the professors all became very excited, and dismissively told the caller to shut up. When the host pointed out (referencing NYT stories on the timeline) that yes, 9/11 had preceded the invasion of Afghanistan, the panel was utterly bewildered. They were convinced that the host must be mistaken. The sainted NYT was beyond reproach, of course, but... no, that couldn't be right.
You could hear their cerebellums fusing in real time. 
Although that was gratifying, it was astounding that several university professors shared the common belief that was not only completely wrong, but easily disproved, and this was in their field of supposed expertise. An 11 year old kid with access to Wikipedia and a search engine could find the timeline of 9/11, but an history department worth of political science professors couldn't.
Why? Because they didn't want to. They were all wrong, and they were al insufferably smug about it, of course. The word pathological isn't sufficient to describe that level of idiocy.