stupidity
pharyngula | June 19, 2007I'm about to set off for the Minneapolis airport — a 3 hour drive, aaargh — and I'm informed that the Vatican has some suggestions for us drivers. There's a set of commandments (but of course, it's not religion if they aren't ordering you about). First on the list: "You shall not kill."
Yeah, I'm already thrown off by that. I usually set out with the intent to run down anyone I see walking along the road.
Others are similarly trite. Obey the traffic laws, don't use your cars to sin, support accident victims, etc., and they suggest "periodic celebration of liturgies at major road hubs,…
pharyngula | June 18, 2007I don't normally mind people their hobbies and obsessions, even when I don't share any interest in their object of desire at all, but I did feel some intense schadenfreude at this story about people smashing their over-priced, over-powered sports cars. There is just something excessive about spending $1.5 million on a car. The other troubling part of the article, though, is the mention that more and more people are buying these extravagant luxuries — the number has tripled since 2003 — which is why we're seeing more of them involved in accidents. It's another example of how the rich-poor…
pharyngula | June 16, 2007E-cards are annoying. Now what if you had e-cards that looked like they'd been drawn by a first-grader, that contain extraordinarily cheesy tinky-boop music that sounds like it came off a first generation Nintendo, and that recited hokey lies at you? You'd have Christian evolution e-cards. These are guaranteed to turn your brain to mush with prolonged exposure. The lack of talent and stupidity on display will make you sorrow for your impoverished Christian brethren, as well.
Don't miss the marriage e-cards, especially the one about how wives must submit!
(If you are thinking about sending…
pharyngula | June 11, 2007The Power Team is one of many evangelical circus shows—they specialize in doing energetic school assemblies where they rip telephone books in half and breaking bricks, all with the intent of getting people to attend their tent revival shows where they somehow argue that all the machismo makes them better Christians. In a beautiful example of fighting meat with mind, though, John Foust has an excellent page of information on their evangelical intent that he has successfully used to shut down their shows in public schools. If your local schools start advertising one of these meathead shows,…
tlambert | June 2, 2007
In Tim Blair's latest column he takes a swing at scientists:
I did, however, turn up an intriguing claim, in a non-specialist journal -- possibly an old encyclopaedia. There it was stated that cricket balls do not -- could not -- swing or swerve en route from bowler to batsman.
This did not tally with my own experience, in which balls regularly swung past the bat, striking either the stumps or me ... Scientists, according to that half-remembered item, believed what I saw as swing was an optical illusion. ...
Yet in the US, a similar science-based belief - that baseballs don't curve -…
pharyngula | May 30, 2007Arrrr, curse ye, jpf. How dare you reveal this abomination to me? What's this crazy born-again doing reviewing a pirate movie as a justification for his dogma?
But back to Jack for a second — sorry, Captain Jack. I was thinking about one of the central themes of this movie which involves the principal characters, one that you've most likely picked up on it as well:
Resurrection from the dead
As it turns out, getting swallowed by a nasty beastie called the Kraken is a bad thing, so one of the key story lines in this film is a desperate need for Captain Jack to come back from the dead so the…
pharyngula | May 28, 2007Did you know that nature is a nice place, a kind of untamed Cute Overload where nobody ever gets an owie, there are no diseases or parasites, and everyone eats tofu? That seems to be what one school administrator in Florida believes, anyway.
A class was studying reptiles and a student brought in his pet boa. Somehow it was suggested that anyone who was interested could watch the boa being fed its usual meal: a live rabbit. The teacher arranged for the feeding to be held after school hours and attendance was voluntary. No one had to be there who didn't want to be there. According to the story…
pharyngula | May 7, 2007She beat Brownback. She trounced Tancredo. She even clobbered Coburn. America's Holiest Congressperson is Minnesota's own Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN).
Bachmann, an Evangelical Lutheran, and self-professed "fool for Christ," ran for Congress because God—and her husband—wanted her to. The representative publicly credited her campaign to her submission to her husband, who was channeling God's wishes for her.
Prior to this higher calling, Bachmann earned a law degree from Coburn, an affiliate of Oral Roberts University, and helped found a charter school where she reportedly worked to prevent the…
pharyngula | May 6, 2007It was as inane as you might have expected. It turns out thattheir "proof" of the existence of god was the coke can argument. If you don't know what that argument is, here it is: it begins about 2½ minutes into this, and is over about 3½ minutes in. He could have done it all in one minute!
I'm sorry, but if you're at all convinced by that pathetic argument, please, get help.
Comfort simply asserts that everything that exists had to have a creator. He goes on to build a silly argument: buildings must have a builder, paintings must have a painter, therefore creation must have a creator. We've…
pharyngula | May 5, 2007That recent D'Souza article is a rich vein of lunacy that I have to tap once more. D'Souza has additional tools to woo conservatives in his toolbox: how about the naturalistic fallacy?
But if Christian anxiety is misplaced, conservatives are even further off the mark. That's because Darwin's theory actually supports conservative positions in all kinds of interesting ways. First, Darwin gives a dark and selfish view of human nature, which is why we need a tough foreign policy to deal with bad guys who cannot be talked out of their badness--even if U.N. cocktails are served. In addition, the…
pharyngula | May 3, 2007The incompetence is stunning. Richard Dawkins makes the Time 100 list, and who do they commission to write up his profile?
Michael Fucking Behe.
That's not just stupid, it's a slap in the face. It would have been no problem to find a smart biologist, even one who might be critical of Dawkins' message, to write something that expressed some measure of respect from the editorial staff. But to dig up a pseudoscientific fraud whose sole claim to fame is that he has led the charge to corrupt American science education for over a decade is shameful.
I'm sure there's an editor at Time sniggering…
pharyngula | May 1, 2007Minnesota had a coagulation of reactionary Republicans at our capitol last week. Their goals were clearly stated, and were thoroughly repugnant, but at least they also had a small turnout.
The Minnesota Family Council, EdWatch, Citizens' Council on Health Care, and Minnesota Majority (formerly Minnesota Citizens in Defense of Marriage) came to the Capitol Thursday to advocate "less government, less taxes and less government spending" and to oppose legislation for domestic-partner benefits, medical marijuana, stem-cell research and comprehensive sex education.
I struggle to understand how…
tlambert | April 29, 2007
After Team Blair was beaten by six year old Ryan Gwin, Tim Blair tried to rewrite history:
Nine-year-old Sydney boy Ryan Gwin suffers anxiety over the fuel consumed by his father's bus;
Because if Ryan had really been nine it would have been less embarrassing to lose to him...
Then Blair lets his commenters loose on a quote from me:
Computer instructor Tim Lambert explains:
If the law disarms attackers, then it can make self defence possible where it would have been impossible if the attacker was armed.
Team Blair came up with stuff like this (and these are the more rational ones):
A…
pharyngula | April 25, 2007Time is running an online poll to discover "the most influential people of the year" — I'd urge you all to vote for Dawkins, except that when you browse the list you discover it's a collection of pop stars, models, sports figures, and the sparse sprinkling of a few politicians and random others. It's a collection that will depress you with its triviality and banality.
Imagine that aliens visited our planet and asked for a meeting with the most influential people on earth, the people most representative of our values, and we sent along a delegation containing Perez Hilton, Kate Moss, Brad Pitt…
pharyngula | April 25, 2007The most important battle in the history of mankind!
A bit more than a week ago, I mentioned this interview I did for a site called One Blog A Day. The comment thread on the interview has grown in a peculiar way — John A. Davison and his pet sycophantic monkey, VMartin, are babbling away in a most painfully lunatic fashion, cruelly egged on by wÒÓ†. It's hard to beat this comment for delusions of grandeur:
Martin and myself are waging a very effective war against the forces of darkness on both sides of this idiotic debate, sides which are dead wrong and always have been. Our success is…
tlambert | April 22, 2007Glenn Reynolds accuses me of quote doctoring, linking to this utterly conclusive proof by JF Beck:
Lambert himself engages in selective out-of-context quoting in attempting to refute Berlau's assertion that Paul Ehrlich advocated the forced sterilization of all Indian men who had fathered three or more children. Lambert reckons this is what Ehrlich wrote:
A few years ago, there was talk in India of compulsory sterilization for all males who were fathers of three or more children.
Hell, for all I know Ehrlich's next sentence says, "I agree". Regardless, if Berlau is guilty of quote doctoring…
retrospectacle | April 20, 2007According to nutty gun-lover Ted Nugent, school shootings like Virginia Tech could be avoided if we all toted guns, and has the anecdotes to prove it! There are so many gems in this piece. For example:
Already spineless gun control advocates are squawking like chickens with their tiny-brained heads chopped off, making political hay over this most recent, devastating Virginia Tech massacre, when in fact it is their own forced gun-free zone policy that enabled the unchallenged methodical murder of 32 people.
No one was foolish enough to debate Ryder truck regulations or ammonia nitrate…
pharyngula | April 18, 2007Let's support the troops! I always thought those stupid yellow ribbon magnets that people stuck on their cars were insulting in their triviality, but I did not know how low we could sink in the insipidity of token nods to those who are making sacrifices in the services. Mike Dunford received some helpful email from the military:
Effective immediately, the word "Families" will be capitalized in all Army correspondence. Please ensure wide dissemination of this change. Thanks for your continued efforts to do all you can to provide steadfast support to our Army Families.
There's an "F" word on…
pharyngula | April 18, 2007Dinesh D'Souza has a truly awful opinion piece up in which he basically accuses atheists of being hateful robots. Why? Because Richard Dawkins wasn't invited to any of the memorials at Virginia Tech, and because he couldn't spot any atheists in the crowds (I'm wondering what he thinks we look like, that he can say there weren't any there.)
Is this really one of the prominent thinkers of the American Right?
Notice something interesting about the aftermath of the Virginia Tech shootings? Atheists are nowhere to be found. Every time there is a public gathering there is talk of God and divine…
pharyngula | April 18, 2007Zeno makes an obvious point: creationists have no sense of humor. He singles out this tedious comic strip running on the Answers in Genesis pages, called CreationWise, and of course when anyone thinks of an unfunny religious apologist with a strip, they think of Johnny Hart. But even worse than any of these is Dan Nuckols. Seriously, if you enjoy cartoons, if you have any sense of humor or even an appreciation of the skill it takes to put together an amusing story in a few panels, don't follow that link; it's like snorting ammonia, it'll ruin the flavor of everything for a few days.
Zeno does…