I wouldn't have guessed that Bill Gates gives a million dollars a year to the inaptly named Discovery Institute, a think-tank that spends money on projects such as providing advice to "educators" on how they can promote Intelligent Design and/or undermine Darwinian Evolutionary Theory in the classroom.
I miss my Mac.
7 comments:
In a way it makes sense.
Evolution is to intelligent design as open-source development is to Microsoft. It simply works so much better without the benevolent guiding hand of some central organizing force that the very notion poses a threat to established systems of authority.
Apparently the Foundation has given grants for specific (transport I think) projects run by the DI - but that's not the same as giving it for ID.
Do you have any information to substantiate the claim of the headline?
Just what's in the link provided in the text.
I think it's a fair title, btw. Gates may say those dollars are intended to support the institute's transportation project, and he may mean it. But just the same, one project of the company getting a million dollar a year grant means the other projects don't have to support themselves.
If someone gave vast sums to the Republican Party every year for the past 8 years, it'd be fair to say they support the conservative agenda, and/or they support the war in Iraq. Their gift of money makes those things more possible / likely, thus they are supporting it, irregardless of how they'd hoped the national Republican Party would spend it.
Openparachute, I'd like to encourage you to read the article my post linked to. It makes the point rather more articulately than I did.
Having knowledge of how non-profits work, Rolfe is right. If you donate to one part of a non-profit, ear mark it for just one specific use that you like and support, it frees up money to be used anywhere else in the organization. So if you gave explicitly to Hitler's youth organization because it kept troubled kids off the streets, you were freeing up funds for gas chambers.
And OMFG! We can now berate Rolfe and belittle his ideas off-handedly. No more do we have to listen to his ideas and entertain his points of view as valid. We can just say, "The guy uses terms like irregardless, he obviously doesn't know what he's talking about."
As opposed to the previous paradigm, under which everyone just berated me and belittled my ideas, and certainly didn't entertain my points of view as valid...
The difference is, people used to say "That guy uses terms like (impeachment, conspiracy, christian, and/or vegetarian, depending on who was dismissing me) so he obviously doesn't know what he's talking about."
From what I can tell, the Cascadia Project is pretty much a legitimate front group which pays for a significant portion of the organization's salaries and facilities. It would be interesting to find out how much actually goes into their loonie division.
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