stupidity
pharyngula | October 1, 2008Forgive me if this amazing tale of ego and inanity makes you recoil in disgust.
And O'Reilly cites himself as proof there is a God:
"Next time you meet an atheist, tell him or her that you know a bold, fresh guy, a barbarian who was raised in a working-class home and retains the lessons he learned there.
"Then mention to that atheist that this guy is now watched and listened to, on a daily basis, by millions of people all over the world and, to boot, sells millions of books.
"Then, while the non-believer is digesting all that, ask him or her if they still don't believe there's a God!"
Mmm-…
pharyngula | October 1, 2008It's happened: craven YouTube has pulled all of the eucharist desecration videos. Click on one and you'll just get the message, "This video has been removed due to terms of use violation." FSMdude's account has also been suspended. There is no description of what rule was violated; I guess we must presume that YouTube is now in the business of defending religious dogma.
Catholicism seems to breed natural censors and cowards, doesn't it?
pharyngula | September 29, 2008The mayor of Fort Mill, South Carolina forwarded one of those stupid chain emails that throws around absurd accusations — in this case, the Bible predicted that the anti-christ would be a Muslim in his 40s, and that Barack Obama was therefore the anti-christ. There is so much wrong there; Obama is not a Muslim, the Bible doesn't say such a thing (especially since it was written before Islam), and you would expect such a devout Christian to know this. But he sent it on anyway.
Now if he were somebody of normal intelligence, at this point he'd be saying, "oops, hit the wrong button, I meant to…
tlambert | August 16, 2008Via Gummo Trotsky, the latest argument posted by Jennifer Marohasy:
Radiative equilibrium is one of the foundation stones of radiative forcing theory. But it is not a law of physics, only a rather archaic and untested supposition found in climatology textbooks alone.
"For the Earth to neither warm or cool, the incoming radiation must balance the outgoing."
Not really.
It's best to regard radiant energy simply as a finite power source -- indeed, that power is expressed as watts per square meter. An object is said to "cool" by radiating, yet this would seem to imply that restricting its…
pharyngula | July 10, 2008The Catholic League is preparing a stake for me. They're going to go straight for the jugular and threaten my job — notice how they repeat that you can access my post from my faculty page, nicely avoiding the fact that the post they find so offensive is not hosted on any university server, and that they are urging everyone to harass the president of my university and the regents and the Minnesota legislature. Extortionists and witch hunters, that's all these scumbags are.
Paul Zachary Myers, a professor at the University of Minnesota Morris, has pledged to desecrate the Eucharist. He is…
pharyngula | July 8, 2008There are days when it is agony to read the news, because people are so goddamned stupid. Petty and stupid. Hateful and stupid. Just plain stupid. And nothing makes them stupider than religion.
Here's a story that will destroy your hopes for a reasonable humanity.
Webster Cook says he smuggled a Eucharist, a small bread wafer that to Catholics symbolic of the Body of Christ after a priest blesses it, out of mass, didn't eat it as he was supposed to do, but instead walked with it.
This isn't the stupid part yet. He walked off with a cracker that was put in his mouth, and people in the church…
pharyngula | July 8, 2008I've been outclassed. Every scientist in the world is a modest little mouse in comparison. All of you readers: humble, demure, and retiring. Ray Comfort has just compared himself favorably to Einstein, saying that he has made a discovery more important than E=mc2. He even has a painfully vainglorious animated image on the page showing his face morphing into Einstein's.
I think Ray Comfort tried to look up "humility" in a dictionary once, but after slowly sounding out as far as "h - u -", he got stuck and settled for "hubris" instead. Close enough for a brain-dead Christian, after all!
pharyngula | July 7, 2008Sometimes you just have to sit and stare dumbfounded at the appalling stupidity creationists will state with absolute conviction. Here's an example that will leave you awestruck, too: a site that declares there is a Darwin conspiracy, and cites three fatal flaws that they claim conclusively prove that evolution is wrong. You might expect that such a grand claim would be accompanied by arguments that are at least impressively sophisticated … but no, we get two claims that kids should learn the answers to in high school, and a third that is just flaky and weird.
Wow, but these are amazingly…
pharyngula | June 17, 2008I just got an email listing 50 "proofs" for the existence of a god. It was also sent to a large number of skeptics, and included a plug for the dumb-as-bricks author's book — she's a flea who writes an imaginary scenario in which Richard Dawkins gets psychiatric counseling…from Jesus! If Debra Rufini's imaginary dialog is as bad as this list of "proofs" — more like a collection of cliches, bad quotes, and lies — I can't imagine wanting to slog through it.
Any one of these I'd happily rip to shreds, but 50 at once? The distilled dementia herein is overwhelming, and I'm sure she counts on that…
tlambert | June 11, 2008Andrew Bolt should have been embarrassed with his unthinking linking, but he is unrepentant:
If someone claims to find 24 mistakes in your work and you manage to kind-of defend just three, it might be wiser to actually stay quiet. If you don't actually have the integrity to admit and repent, that is.
I picked three representative examples from the 24 mistakes Beck alleges I made to show that not only is Beck wrong, he is obviously wrong and he won't admit it no matter how absurd a position he ends up in. The other 21 aren't any better and it would be extremely foolish to give Beck any…
tlambert | June 10, 2008
On the essential Missing Link, Ken Parish links to my post of yesterday:
Tim Lambert ably defends himself on scientific grounds against a concerted attack by anti-science RWDB "heavyweights".
And explains the scare quotes:
I wrote that extract. Blair and Bolt might be heavyweights in audience size terms, but in intellectual terms neither of them could power a flashlight globe. Or perhaps it's more wilful stupidity than lack of capacity. Certainly that's how Harry Clarke explains it on climate change:
The science on climate change is overwhelmingly accepted. Why are the right so vehemently…
tlambert | June 9, 2008Glenn Reynolds, Tim Blair and Andrew Bolt are prolific bloggers, posting several posts each day. With such frequent posting they don't seem to have time to check to see if they stuff they link to is correct. They don't accept the scientific consensus on AGW so they link to every thing that comes along about cold weather or global cooling -- for example, the misrepresentation of Tapping's views on the solar cycle got linked again and again and again and again.
Since I've been critical of Glenn Reynolds, Tim Blair and Andrew Bolt it's no surprise that all three linked to this post where JF…
tlambert | May 19, 2008Last year Graham Young, accused me of being blatantly dishonest for writing that Peiser had admitted to making multiple errors, even though Peiser had confirmed this in an email to Young. He ended up writing 20 comments denying Peiser's admission.
Now Young has lashed out at me in a post at On Line Opinion. He calls me a "bully" and a "tick" and claims I use "brown-shirt tactics". (If you don't know what brown-shirt tactics are, see Sturmabteilung.) My crime?
Lambert, through his blog Deltoid promulgates whatever the current orthodoxy happens to be, but he does not restrict himself to his…
pharyngula | May 2, 2008Oh, no … I mentioned the existence of godtube the other day, and now people are farming it for incredibly stupid videos that they send to me. It's rich soil for stupid over there, and they've got a bumper crop — you would not believe how awful some of their arguments are.
I hesitate to mention this one because I know it's going to trigger yet more bad videos in my in-box, but it is so bad, so crazy, that I have to share it. This one claims that Food Patterns of our Body Proof for Intelligent Design, and, well, you have to see it. It starts with the claim that a sliced carrot looks like a…
pharyngula | May 1, 2008Today is actually the National Day of Prayer. Really. Let that sink in for a moment.
We have regional coordinating groups — Minnesota is having events at the Capitol today. Did you know that prayer is "America's strength and shield"? I didn't. Our governor has issued a proclamation asking citizens to "open our hearts in thanksgiving". It's a weird document. It announces that we have all these problems like poverty and sickness and crime, and then declares that we've been strengthened by the "conscience-based actions of people of faith" … I guess we people of reason don't have consciences, and…
pharyngula | April 28, 2008It's criminal to ruin the brains of children.
He definitely has some talent, though. Should I adopt his rhetorical style for my classes?
pharyngula | April 28, 2008What fresh horror could drive the American Family Association to call out the troops? Evil, repulsive soap operas.
Procter & Gamble has resumed using explicit, open-mouth homosexual kissing in their soap opera, "As the World Turns."
So stop buying soap and shampoo, Christians! If you aren't dingy, greasy, and stinky, we'll know you're an advocate of boys kissing.
Helpfully, AFA includes a link to the "repulsive" video, so if you're a good Christian you can also watch these two attractive young men being affectionate with one another. You can watch it over and over. You can watch it…
pharyngula | April 27, 2008The other day, I mentioned that the Bemidji State University television station was broadcasting anti-scientific nonsense, a series of programs by a creationist loon that were just plain stupid. It may not be a fully official response, but one of their student broadcasters has issued a painfully bad defense: he says they were airing them to counter the claim that their station had a liberal bias. He actually says this:
There are some people who do believe god exists, and they should be able to have a show that they can watch to confirm that belief.
The video is at that link; somebody needs…
pharyngula | March 19, 2008Prepare yourself for some neutronium-density stupid, and do not watch this video clip if self-confident, blithering idiots make you want to slap someone. It's the trailer for a new movie, The Moses Code, "the most powerful manifestation tool in the history of the world".
If you must know but don't want to be enlightened by a series of pompous twits, this is from some guy who made a movie about "the secret" and now wants to milk money from more suckers. A "manifestation tool" is an entirely imaginary phenomenon in which people just wish for things, and by a nonsensical "Law of Attraction,"…
pharyngula | February 13, 2008The Danish cartoonists vs. Muslims conflict is flaring up again, with the discovery of a conspiracy by Muslims to kill a cartoonist. There are many levels of irony here; it's simply stupid to try and protest accusations that you are violent by committing acts of violence. I've also noticed an interesting pattern of escalation.
The aggrieved Muslims are saying, "Mock our god and we will kill you." They have the goal of suppressing images they consider blasphemous.
The cartoonists are saying, "Threaten to kill us and we will mock your god." Obviously, they'd like to stay alive, but their goal…