@wandeljw,
The Knoxville News-Sentinel is owned by the E.W. Scripps Company which also owns a lot of other newspapers and TV stations and is based in Ohio.
Most astute commentators think that the gobbling up of the large number of locally owned news outlets etc by giant corporations is the greatest threat freedom is faced with.
And it is quite obvious that centres of force gradually eroding freedom, I can sometimes feel them pulsing when looking at them with a modicum of critical thinking, will take the line on this issue that the Scripps mouthpiece takes, as other large media corporations do as well, as we have seen, which leads any ordinary critical thinker to the tentative suspicion that attacks on religious institutions are eroding freedom.
Freedom is so important that a tentative suspicion is enough to find out on which side of the line to set up one's deckchair and have a snooze in the sun.
I would never have thought such an awful thing myself because I am rather innocent and, unfortunately, easily led, but wande rubbed my nose in it. Time after time I got Wikipee to examine, at first scratch, the sources wande quotes which are posing as if James Stewart was sitting on the front porch in a green eyeshade composing his daily or weekly address to the mugs. And they are not. They are run by men, and women, of the type William H. Whyte described in great detail. Like some other institutions.
It doesn't take a lot of nonce to be able to spot an organisation man, or woman, in a geology department or a (gulp) prestigious university philosophy department. Oms are like worms. I know some oms who actually think of themselves as right wing.
The sociological theory, and sociology is a science, that concentration of media into fewer and fewer hands is a dire threat to freedom, can, like any theory be used to produce conclusions. Speculative as they may be. It is up to the reader to make what s/he can of speculations.
One seems obvious to me--OM. Big Media. Pro evolution = Threat to Freedom. Not Pro-Science because most oms don't know what science is as is painfully obvious from the shite they put out.
Did you really think that you were picking this fight with people who thought Jesus walked on water? Thinking things like that is typical om thoughtwaves. It's like a fingerprint. Or psychic DNA of the maternal coddling strain. Veblen said that he learned all his economics walking alongside his dad when he was ploughing. So Veblen's off limits for oms. A female om I knew tore one of my copies of The Theory of the Leisure Class to shreds and threw it into the back window of her husband's car for him to return to me. After only 6 pages too. I was proud of her. She understood it fast. Thornstein was blackballed by the Higher Learning which turned out a bit counterproductive.
It's a fair enough challenge to the teaching of evolution to question who wants to teach it and are organised to promote the objective. And it's a complex matter.
The real question now is whether freedom is mal-adaptive because if it is oms are in the right. But I think that possibility is due to us no longer being able to make freedom adaptive. Due to overpopulation which is the cause of omming. Look how attracted most people are, at some visceral level, to a view which contains no sight nor sign of one's fellow man.
Which gets interesting but the maid is running my bath and I gotta scoot cos she shouts at me if I'm late.
I was mentioning sitting ducks on these threads years ago. Oms need sitting ducks. On the top step. Startled partridges are too fast for them.
A one-way megaphone over the nation with no answering back is the om's dream. Bilko took a scythe to them.
