DI's Luskin - "What I don't know...can't hurt my argument"

Hi, I'm back.

I'll try to deal with what's been happening in my absence, as well as lay out where I'd like this blog to go in the future, in a later post.

Right now I just want to put the last bullet in this horse that's been stumbling around the DI p.r. blog lately - that being Casey Luskin's suggestion that the University of California at San Diego required all incoming freshmen to attend a November 14th lecture by noted ID critic Robert Pennock.

Luskin has made much of this supposed indoctrination, a notion Ed Brayton deals with quite nicely. But everyone's still dancing around the issue of whether all UCSD freshmen were required to attend the event. What I find hard to believe is that Luskin could manage no independent confirmation or denial of the facts, settling instead for asking friends and relying on hearsay. One would think the DI spokesman was less interested in the truth of the situation than how much hay he could pile up over it. He even went so far as to suggest that it's the ID critics who are obsessed over this issue.

But of course this isn't the case. What Luskin and his buddies are doing, as usual, is creating a phony controversy that essentially amounts to "Please, someone, take us seriously!"

Here's what I did, and what Casey could have done very easily. I contacted each of the UCSD colleges (sort of sub-colleges within the university structure, one of which would be "6th," the college that actually did require their freshmen to attend as part of a year-long cultural studies program) and asked them if their incoming freshmen were required to attend the lecture. The answers I received included "no, our freshmen were not required to attend" and a firm "only 6th college freshmen were required to attend."

So after about ten minutes worth of investigation I settled the matter. Is Luskin really so busy that this effort was beyond his reach, or was he simply, in his capacity as ID shill, following through on a job that owes more fealty to ideology than truth?

(Yeah, I know, that's just a rhetorical question)