Dr. Joan Bushwell's Chimpanzee Refuge

A few definitions: When I say "argue effectively," I mean present ideas in a way that would convince an objective onlooker in relatively short order that you've made an unassailable case and that the other person has no idea what he or she is talking about and is making things up on the fly; and when I say "easier," I mean easier from an executive and organizational standpoint -- those who have dozens of wrongheaded ideas about a given subject are willing and eager to churn out endless amounts of verbiage, cutting and pasting from various nutsites and intersperse this with unoriginally insane declarations and criticisms, making dealing with any one aspect of their BS beyond cumbersome.

As an example, look at strict Bible inerrantists. Where does one start with them? If people don't know after two pages of Genesis that they are dealing with allegorical literature, and can swallow the Noah's Ark story or notions of people living to be 400 to 900 years old, why bother pointing out comparatively mundane factual errors such as conflicting genealogies and alleged events not borne out by secular histories? Some claim the Bible is one hundred percent factually true, yet you can open it literally at random and find some absurdity or another within a minute or two of reading. No one can overwhelm that degree of insanity with logic and reason, certainly not in the presence of a dimwitted audience.

Mark at the Denialism Blog puts it succinctly: "If you throw enough shit most people will just look at the mess and say, 'I'm not cleaning that up.'"

For example, this woman, whose unapologetic dishonesty and and ad hoc emotional ranting Meatbrain regularly debunks, is as cranky as the day is long and twice as verbose. Look at a few things she says in one amazingly disjointed and error-packed evolution-denialist post :

"Creationists are using science to prove that the Bible is true; and they're doing a more effective job of it than the Evolutionists are proving that The Origin Of Species is true."

"High-school textbooks represent the worst of evolution education, rehearsing long-disproved evidences such as the peppered moth, vestigial organs, and mutated fruit flies."

"ID experts are scrupulously secular, and their proposals are neither Christian nor creationist."

"Darwin's theory said ... that life itself was not created by God, but happened because the right chemicals came together by chance in the ancient ocean."

"Darwin's theory says fish evolved, through many intermediate steps, into human beings."

"If the theory of evolution is true, it would follow that species would not be going extinct because the environment is changing, they'd simply mutate and change with the environment."

"Even millions of years in the jungle, donkeys would still be donkeys, because they only have donkey genes."

Jungle donkeys! They're as common as marine lions and desert manatees, you know.

This list barely scratches the surface. "Cao" has thus afforded herself the uberwacko's unique form of pseudoprotection from refutation: She's flung out so many lies and misunderstandings that settling on and refuting even 10 percent of them would take far too long for even the most ardent and articulate science defender, and convince her and those even slightly sympathetic to her of nothing. This is why so many of us resort to bashing and mockery from the get-go; asmuch of a waste of time as this is, it cuts out the rhetorical middleman and saves hours of typing.

So have at it. Come up with a compact and useful definition and you'll have a law named after you, and will probably wind up in Wikipedia too.