Texas rejects science textbooks with too much information about climate change

Viking_Hippie@lemmy.world to Not The Onion@lemmy.world – 537 points –
Texas rejects science textbooks for explaining climate change
msnbc.com
46

God forbid the children learn anything.

No, that's not a figure of speech, it's a Texan prayer.

And that's why you let educators decide which textbooks they deem fit for their subjects, not partisan regulators with an agenda.

Daily reminder that Texas (and Republicans) sucks.

Republicans suck. Texas is fine. It’s just land. Texas was fine 30 years ago before all the repuglicunts moved in.

Republicans are an existential threat. I say this all the time. We've moved beyond "oh well it's a difference of opinion." The republican party is wrong on every issue of note. Many of their members tried to overthrow the US government, and the rest didn't leave the party.

We should be hanging republicans for treason.

WTF Texas was democratic?

Yup, Texas was democratic until around 2000. Which makes it even funnier when people here acted like it's been some Republican strong hold since the Alamo.

LOL, that's just because before then, conservative Democrats (i.e. Dixiecrats) were a thing.

The party switch happened in the 70s. By 73 Texas had elected Barbara Jordan, the first Southern African-American woman elected to the US House. While governors like Mark White would probably be Republican by today's standards, you couldn't really say the same for Ann Richards. They even had their Senator Lloyd Bentsen run as VP on the Dukakis campaign.

While Texas had slowly been drifting red since the party switch, it was cemented with the redistricting in the mid 90s. Since then they have done everything in their power to suppress democratic voters.

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Yeah, dont blame the dirt, it can't help it.

Fair’nuf,

Texans suck (*sorry Texan progressives, it’s a big brush. Everything is bigger in Texas, they say.)

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Not like the cause of trillions of dollars in future damage and wars and famines and recessions is an important topic to learn about

Maybe Texas should, you know, transition to selling wind energy so their economy doesn't crash when fossil fuels are finished.

I read Texas's biggest imports and exports are oil. So the only thing bigger than their oil economy is their resistance to change.

So here's the thing. When they say "Texas" in the royal sense like all of Texas is trying to will something, what they actually mean is the people and institutions capable of affecting change in Texas. Essentially the government and it's various arms.

Due to the fact that lobbying is very real and backroom payments are allowed to be a thing, the government inevitably bends to the entities with the most money. Guess who those entities are.

So when you say

Maybe Texas should, you know, transition to selling wind energy so their economy doesn't crash

what you're saying is

Maybe all those people who make their obscene riches in oil should give up their golden goose and let other people make their money in alternative energy forms

There's no reality where they go for that. "Texas" is always going to fight tooth and nail to keep alternate forms of energy down, because the biggest money in Texas is oil. The people have no control over that.

You've worded this much more eloquently than I could have hoped to. Thank you 🙂

Last I checked, "the people" didn't forget how to make guillotines.

When was the last time you saw a guillotine anywhere other than France circa the revolution?

The honest truth is that the Texas people arm themselves to the teeth in the name of controlling "undesirable forces", then they let the media branch of the government fool them into believing that the undesirable forces they need to be armed against are drag queens and mothers looking to get abortions.

It's a class war fueled by the same people who don't want the guillotines turned on them, and it's effective. Hoping that the people rise up against it with the state of politics right now (at least in Texas) is a pipe dream.

But don't you see? They've discovered the most dirty and destructive ways possible to extract the lowest quality fossil fuel remnants in the world for just long enough that all the top executives will probably be dead or retired by the time it runs out! In other words, no problem!

"Potentially harming the state's economy..."

And most importantly, shareholder's dividends.

When are we going to start building guillotines?

Ever wonder why Kennedy was killed in Texas?

Oswald was aiming for the books in the repository but missed.

Would you reject a science textbook if it had too much information about ionic bonding?

Depends how much the Ionic Bonding Lobby Group was paying me.

Nope. Then again, I'm not a fundie loon 🤷

So if the textbook was say 10 chapters, and 7 of them were about ionic bonding, that wouldn’t be a problem?

We're talking about actual legislation and ideologically based censorship, so please

Based on this headline it could be the situation I’m describing: that literally they have a problem with too much focus being put on a single topic, in a class that’s supposed to cover many topics.

So no, you don’t know that yet. Unless you can present more evidence that it is.

From the article:

Among the reasons the board rejected books: They had too much information about the climate crisis; they were published by companies with environmentally friendly policies; they portrayed fossil fuel use in an insufficiently positive light, potentially harming the state’s economy; and they included teachings about evolution but not creationism.

With this information, I sincerely doubt the board was finding honest problems with the texts. They rejected textbooks because they didn't include creationism -- there clearly isn't any legitimate desire for science.

Based on this headline

There's your problem. Read the article :)

it could be the situation I’m describing: that literally they have a problem with too much focus being put on a single topic

If you truly believe that, I have a mountain chalet in Florida to sell you.