stupidity
pharyngula | May 16, 2011Oy, this will make your head hurt…mainly because you won't be able to handle the degree of stupidity involved in this argument. This is a video from Focus on the Patriarchy that makes an analogy: gay marriage is as unnatural and impossible as gravity pushing objects upward, and trying to claim that trying to legislate equality is as silly as trying to legislate the behavior of objects in a gravitational field.
And this is from an organization that has tried to legislate creationism into truth.
(via Jen)
pharyngula | May 11, 2011The Florida legislature has just banned sex.
An act relating to sexual activities involving animals; creating s. 828.126, F.S.; providing definitions; prohibiting knowing sexual conduct or sexual contact with an animal; prohibiting specified related activities; providing penalties; providing that the act does not apply to certain husbandry, conformation judging, and veterinary practices; providing an effective date.
At least there are a few loopholes. "It's alright, officer, she's judging my conformation and I'm studying for the NAVLE!"
Also, Disneyworld won't care. They suck the sex right…
pharyngula | May 10, 2011Salon has a tidy summary of the end-of-the-world claims of Harold Camping.
On May 21, "starting in the Pacific Rim at around the 6 p.m. local time hour, in each time zone, there will be a great earthquake, such as has never been in the history of the Earth," he says. The true Christian believers -- he hopes he's one of them -- will be "raptured": They'll fly upward to heaven. And for the rest?
"It's just the horror of horror stories," he says, "and on top of all that, there's no more salvation at that point. And then the Bible says it will be 153 days later that the entire universe and…
pharyngula | May 9, 2011This past weekend, I was feebly confronted by a Canadian creationist, David Buckna, with a list of his objections to evolution. I spent a fair amount of time trying to hammer him with the answers, and the most remarkable thing was that every time we'd start digging into a topic, he'd suddenly change subjects to another item on his list, and then, later, he'd switch back to the original topic at the very beginning of his harangue, as if I'd never said anything. And now he's pestering me in email, sending me more quotes (that's all he's got — no thoughts, just quotes) and rehashing pointlessly…
pharyngula | May 5, 2011I do experiments on fish. I've killed tens of thousands of embryos, but, you know, I take care to minimize pain, and do it for a purpose that can't be achieved any other way; I also have to answer to committees that enforce ethical conduct in animal care and use.
No such rules apply if you are a Christian priest.
Well, yesterday's sermon was a big hit! We had a mass execution of 200 feeder fish that I pulled out of a fish tank and then threw all over the floor. The kids were in shock and then started to pic them up and put them back into the fish tank. Obviously, most of them died in the…
pharyngula | April 25, 2011I cannot imagine being Ross Douthat. There's just something so bizarre and twisted in his brain that I cannot empathize at all with his point of view — it's a brain in which all the proteins have been crosslinked by the fixative of religion. Now he's arguing that Hell must exist.
As our lives have grown longer and more comfortable, our sense of outrage at human suffering — its scope, and its apparent randomness — has grown sharper as well. The argument that a good deity couldn't have made a world so rife with cruelty is a staple of atheist polemic, and every natural disaster inspires a round…
pharyngula | April 22, 2011Oh, my. The situation is dire. Texas is in big trouble.
TO ALL TO WHOM THESE PRESENTS SHALL COME:
WHEREAS, the state of Texas is in the midst of an exceptional drought, with some parts of the state receiving no significant rainfall for almost three months, matching rainfall deficit records dating back to the 1930s; and
WHEREAS, a combination of higher than normal temperatures, low precipitation and low relative humidity has caused an extreme fire danger over most of the State, sparking more than 8,000 wildfires which have cost several lives, engulfed more than 1.8 million acres of land…
pharyngula | April 19, 2011Scott Adams once again demonstrates his pointy-headed stupidity with an appallingly irrational rationalization of his sock puppetry. He's got some new excuses, I will give him that.
Guess what, he may have been naughty, but at least he's not a mass murderer.
On the scale of immoral behavior, where genocide is at the top, and wearing Spanx is near the bottom, posting comments under an alias to clear up harmful misconceptions is about one level worse than Spanx.
Great. So if ever I'm caught kicking a puppy or lying on the internet, all I need to do is explain that I didn't kill six million…
pharyngula | April 17, 2011Because when you're exposed, you look like an even more gargantuan idiot and pathetic narcissist. Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, has been discovered to have tried to pad his reputation with a fake ID … he's used the pseudonym "PlannedChaos" to go around the web praising Scott Adams as a "certified genius".
You know, it's a good rule of thumb that if you have to announce that you're a genius, you aren't a genius.
I've been remarking on Adams' stupidity for years. He's a creationist apologist who doesn't understand science, and the kind of insipid apologist for religion who thinks Pascal's…
pharyngula | April 17, 2011The American Journal of Surgery has published a transcript of a presidential address titled, "Can prayer help surgery?", and my first thought was that that was absolutely brilliant — some guy was roped into giving a big speech at a convention, and he picked a topic where he could stand up, say "NO," and sit back down again. If he wanted to wax eloquent, maybe he could add a "Don't be silly" to his one word address.
But a reader sent me a copy of this paper, and I was wrong. The author spent four pages saying "Yes". It flies off to cloud cuckoo land in the very first sentence, which compares…
pharyngula | April 15, 2011I can tell. It's coming. A royal heir has gotten engaged to some young woman, and there will be one of those royal weddings, and the sentimental argle-bargle in the British media will soar to new heights of fatuousness. I'll miss most of it, fortunately, but I pity everyone in the United Kingdom who's going to have to suffer with the royal romanticism for a while.
At least this time the Telegraph has set the bar for stupidity abysmally low, and I have no idea how anyone else willl sink lower (the fun will be in the trying, I'm sure). Someone has found a jelly bean that looks like Kate…
pharyngula | March 18, 2011Minnesota is leading the way. Our Rethuglicans have figured out how to end poverty: by making it illegal to have money if you're poor? Wait, that makes no sense.
Minnesota Republicans are pushing legislation that would make it a crime for people on public assistance to have more $20 in cash in their pockets any given month.
Lest you think our most contemptible lawmakers have no heart at all, consider that this is the generous version of their earlier plan.
This represents a change from their initial proposal, which banned them from having any money at all.
I'm not sure what they're…
pharyngula | March 12, 2011Japan has a tragic and devastating earthquake. American responses follow a range of attitudes. One that is normal and appropriate is sympathy and outreach by donations to organizations like the Red Cross; if you're in that group, good for you, congratulations on being a human being.
Another response that is far too typical is for people to drop to their knees and start praying to their fairy-tale magic man in the sky, being about as ineffectual as is possible while still feeling smug about it. That's human too, it's just dumb. You don't get congratulations for being a stupid human being, but…
pharyngula | March 9, 2011Harold Camping has been predicting the end of the world for quite some time. He's always been wrong, but now he is insisting absotively posilutely that the earth really will end on 21 May of this year, and he's got teams of brainwashed, deluded followers roaming the country claiming the end is nigh.
I've always wondered how he comes up with his specific dates, and now here's a short article that lays the math out for us.
According to them, Noah's great flood occurred in the year 4990 B.C., 'exactly' 7000 years ago. Taking a passage from 2 Peter 3:8, in which it is said a day for God is like a…
pharyngula | February 23, 2011The Rethuglican governor of Maine, Paul LePage, has been dismissing the health risks from Bisphenol A, an additive to plastics which is known to be an estrogen mimic. His remarks take "Not even wrong" to whole new levels of crazy:
The only thing that I've heard is if you take a plastic bottle and put it in the microwave and you heat it up, it gives off a chemical similar to estrogen. So the worst case is some women may have little beards.
Hey, I've heard that high densities of homeopaths and other quacks in your state gives off fumes that cause severe mental retardation in civil servants.…
pharyngula | February 21, 2011Here's some more sophisticated theology for you. "Prayer Warriors" in Colorado Springs are hopping into helicopters to fly over the city and deliver prayers from on high. Why? I don't know. Maybe it's the same urge I had when hiking in the mountains in the Rockies and Cascades, and every time I stood at the edge of a high cliff, I felt a temptation to unzip and sprinkle a little shower on the objects below me. I resisted, but gullible Christians apparently lack self control.
pharyngula | February 16, 2011If you asked me about cosmology, I'd defer to physicists — I've read Stenger & Hawking & Krauss & Carroll, and I might be willing to say a few generalities about what I've learned about the process, but I'd always say you should look to the original sources for more information.
There seem to be a lot of physicists, however, who believe they know everything there is to know about biology (it's a minor subdivision of physics, don't you know), and will blithely say the most awesomely stupid things about it. Here, for instance, is Michio Kaku simply babbling in reply to a question…
pharyngula | January 21, 2011Some gomer has set up a website about prayer with a subsection dedicated to an experiment: they're going to pray for PZ Myers. They're rather vague about what they're praying for, which I guess is tactically useful, since if I stay healthy or drop dead they can then claim success either way. I'm also going to confound their experiment since I'm going to tell everyone to not Pray4PZ, and since their site traffic is so minuscule, I'm going to overwhelm their results.
They also have a post titled "Can PZ Myers be reasoned with?", which is amusing — I guess the prayer effort wasn't doing much, so…
pharyngula | January 20, 2011Lately I've been receiving a flood of messages from the anti-choice zealots. They've got one thing in common: they all contain lots of images of aborted fetuses, a common tactic used by these creatures to intimidate with horrible images. I'm not impressed. Here's a representative example, with the url to yet another horror show removed.
Please read
Abortion is more than a "procedure" and it is rare that a pregnancy causes harm or death to a woman.
Maybe to better understand the murder that abortion truly is, you should study the photos in the link below. It is easy to desensitize yourself…
pharyngula | January 18, 2011The IDiots at Uncommon Descent are horrified and appalled by my ideas about the status of fetuses and babies … so horrified, in fact, that some of them want to make me the poster child for the fall of Western Civilization into a godless, nihilistic chaos in which babies are casually destroyed, and there are of course, a few comparisons to Hitler. But then, they are IDiots, after all.
I was amused by this remark from one of the deathcultists:
Sad to say, what we just saw from PZM, is the outworking of the corrosive nihilistic amorality that is inherent to evolutionary materialism. Hopefully,…