stupidity
pharyngula | January 17, 2011Not in my backyard! I wouldn't want a hog farm to be built upwind of me, because of the stench. I wouldn't want an airport built next door, because of the noise. I don't want a church in my neighborhood, because of the traffic in stupidity (but too bad, I'm stuck with several of them). There are lots of reasons some kinds of properties are incompatible with residential living, but here's a new one. Tenants in a pricey Vancouver highrise are protesting the construction of a hospice nearby. I'd love to have a hospice go up next door; they tend to be quiet, tasteful, well-maintained, and good…
pharyngula | January 15, 2011Here's an interesting exercise for you: summarize the Bible in one sentence. A bunch of theologians and pastors took a stab at it, and failed to escape their preconceptions and say anything that made any sense.
The statements all vary in their length and their floweriness, but I picked this one example because it's fairly clear and representative. This is a one-sentence summary of the Bible by a Christian pastor:
A holy God sends his righteous Son to die for unrighteous sinners so we can be holy and live happily with God forever.
That is an empty statement, one that explains nothing and…
pharyngula | January 9, 2011That loopy homeopath, John Benneth, is bragging now that he is the most widely read homeopath in the world, and that his blog has broken all previous viewership records. He's quite proud of this "accomplishment".
One of the last John Benneth Journal entries for 2010, IN ONE YEAR, has broken all previous viewership records and sparked more commentary and outrage amongst the pharmaceutical company stooges than any previous Journal entry, enlisting the usual fury and nasty responses.
He seems to be aware of how it happened: I linked to that one article. What he doesn't seem to appreciate,…
pharyngula | January 7, 2011Earlier I had claimed that cable networks had bottomed out by conspiring with the Catholic church to make an exorcism show.
I was wrong.
TLC is making a reality show with Ted Haggard.
I will refrain from saying that now they've hit bottom, because if I do, some cable executive somewhere will step forward to plumb depths I can't even imagine.
pharyngula | January 7, 2011It's because it is the absolute bottom floor of any descent into crepitude. That's all I can conclude from looking at the fate of various cable television channels: they all seem to start out well with commendable goals, and pretty soon they're all selling out to the cheapest, sleaziest advertisers and producing the worst shows they can imagine, all to pander to the lowest common denominator. Look at The Learning Channel (you won't learn anything watching it anymore), the History Channel (yeah, if your idea of history always has Nazis in it), and the SciFi channel, which now isn't even trying…
pharyngula | December 25, 2010The CBC has one of those awful year-end countdown shows, and this one is rather appalling. It's a countdown of the top 10 miracles of 2010. Hey, there, Canada, I thought we were supposed to be the crazy country, while you were supposed to be the polite, serious brother! What happened?
It gets worse. As Canadian Cynic points out, they're devaluing the word "miracle". Among the tripe they're promoting is a statue of the Madonna that weeps oil (fake!), and the usual business of people going in for treatment of serious medical ailments, and ta-daaaa, the doctors fix them. But the #1 top "miracle…
pharyngula | December 23, 2010You know who really hates Christmas?
MUSLIMS!
I bet you didn't know that if you converted to Islam you'd get immunity to STDs, your debt would disappear, rapes, teen pregnancy, and abortions would never occur, the rave would be canceled, you'd stop making that silly claim that god had a son, there'd be no exploitation or promiscuity or crime, the night clubs would shut down, nobody would have sex with 9 year old girls (oh, wait a minute…), you wouldn't be a pagan anymore (duh), you'd get a house, but you wouldn't drink alcohol or do drugs in it. Amazing stuff. The Muslim world must be a…
tlambert | December 21, 2010You know, we used to be able to laugh at the Poms for electing a gullible fool like Boris Johnson Lord Mayor of London, but then The Sydney Morning Herald goes and republishes Johnson's stupidity:
Allow me to introduce readers to Piers Corbyn, meteorologist and brother of my old chum, bearded leftie MP Jeremy. Piers Corbyn works in an undistinguished office in Borough High Street. He has no telescope or supercomputer. Armed only with a laptop, huge quantities of publicly available data and a first-class degree in astrophysics, he gets it right again and again.
Well, no
he doesn't. Corbyn…
pharyngula | December 21, 2010The Council of Conservative Citizens is very angry, and is calling for a boycott of an upcoming movie that offends their values. The CofCC is a paleoconservative organization which has as its first principle the myth that the United States is a Christian country, so you might think that the reason it objects to the Marvel superhero movie Thor is that it promotes a pagan religion. You'd be wrong. They're upset because Marvel Studios has declared war on Norse mythology, which you'd think they'd consider a good thing, except that it violates another of their principles, that America is supposed…
pharyngula | December 20, 2010This is getting ridiculous. Now people are getting irate at the use of a common word.
The teacher…was explaining to the class how the cold climate in Trevélez, Granada province, aided in the curing of the village's most famous local product, jamón serrano. The boy told his teacher that hearing the word 'ham' in class was offensive to him because of his religion and asked his geography teacher to stop referring to the product which caused him offence.
El Mundo newspaper reports that the boy's parents then reported the teacher to both the National Police and to the courts. It's understood…
pharyngula | December 17, 2010Sorry, fellow atheists, but if you thought you could just get away with sitting quietly and not making a noise, you're doomed. The situation is worse than simply some silly believers flying into a snit because horribly militant, aggressive, obnoxious atheists put up signs that say something offensive and vile, like "you can be good without god" — you thought if you just avoided confronting people with such criminal sentiments, you'd escape their notice and condemnation.
But soon, they'll be coming for you if you are insufficiently fervent in cheerleading for god. Look at this: a group of…
pharyngula | December 7, 2010We've all been sitting around wondering what big questions would ever completely stymie science — we've been just knocking 'em down right and left, and scientists have been completely baffled about what good question they could possibly ask next. We've all had serious concerns that maybe we were all done, and we'd have to go work for a living or something terrible like that.
But we've been saved by Oprah. She, or rather the scientifically deep team of scientific and philosophical experts on her staff, have come up with a challenging list of Humongous Questions that we'll have to address in…
pharyngula | December 2, 2010Bill Donohue is on a roll. First he bravely put up a billboard that reassures everyone that Jesus was real, which is no problem, as far as I'm concerned; it's not true, but he isn't interfering with other people's right to express themselves. But now he has really done it: he has successfully pressured the National Portrait Gallery to remove an art work that Donohue did not like. That is obstructing the right of free expression, and is deplorable.
The work in question was a video about the pain of AIDS victims in Mexico, and references the Catholicism of that country by showing a crucifix…
pharyngula | December 1, 2010He's in a snit. He refuses to participate in Tulsa's Holiday Parade of Lights because it doesn't have "christmas" in the title.
"I did not do so last year because I'm not going to ride in a Christmas parade that doesn't recognize Christmas," he said. "I am hopeful that the good people of Tulsa and the city's leadership will demand a correction to this shameful attempt to take Christ, the true reason for our celebration, out of the parade's title. Until the parade is again named the Christmas Parade of Lights, I will not participate."
What a silly man. The parade, by the way, is on 11…
pharyngula | November 25, 2010So North Korea is rattling the sabre again, and I'm hoping some serious, mature people on our side will step up and act responsibly…but I'm pretty sure we won't find those people on the Republican side. So far, their responses range from the stupid to the evil.
Here's Sarah Palin babbling away on the Glenn Beck show (Can you guess that this is the stupid part of the range?)
CO-HOST: How would you handle a situation like the one that just developed in North Korea? [...]
PALIN: But obviously, we've got to stand with our North Korean allies. We're bound to by treaty -
CO-HOST: South Korean…
pharyngula | November 24, 2010So, various factions at the United Nations have been pushing for anti-blasphemy motions — after all, we can't go around picking on weak ideas. But do you know who the UN thinks are fair game? Non-heterosexual people.
Gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people were once again subject to the whims of homophobia and religious and cultural extremism this week, thanks to a United Nations vote that removed "sexual orientation" from a resolution that protects people from arbitrary executions. In other words, the UN General Assembly this week voted to allow LGBT people to be executed without…
stoat | November 10, 2010 Well, just one politician really. And an American one, and Republican at that, so I suppose we can hope his stupidity isn't truely representative. David Appell provides a wonderful quote from Chris Christie and Global Warming, from which I excerpt:
...that's probably one of the reason's why I became a lawyer, and not a doctor, or an engineer, or a scientist, because I can't figure this stuff out.
Yes, that's right all you lawyers out there: the Law is for people too dumb to figure stuff out :-). And politics, presumably, is for those too dumb even for the Law.
[I apologise for the lack of…
pharyngula | November 6, 2010A woman wrote an article on LiveJournal, freely available to readers and for her own interests, and then the managing editor of a small magazine picked it up and published it, without notification and without, of course, payment. When the author contacted the editor and pointedly brought up the matter of the ethical lapse, suggesting that compensation could be in the form of a donation to the Columbia School of Journalism, the editor, Judith Griggs, condescendingly wrote back with this load of tripe:
Yes Monica, I have been doing this for 3 decades, having been an editor at The Voice,…
pharyngula | November 3, 2010I've run into this particular phenomenon many times: the True Believer in some musty ancient mythology tells me that his superstition is true, because it accurately described some relatively modern discovery in science long before secular scientists worked it out. It's always some appallingly stupid interpretation of a vaguely useless piece of text that wouldn't have made any sense until it was retrofitted to modern science. My particular field of developmental biology has been particularly afflicted with this nonsense, thanks to one man, Dr. Keith L. Moore, of the University of Toronto. He's…
stoat | November 2, 2010Thank heavens, James Annan wrote this so I don't have to.
Truely, you have to hand it to our politicians: whenever you think you are finally inured to their stupidity, they find a further depth to sink to.
PS: no, I did *not* vote for them.