22 February, 2010

Dumbfuckery Double-Header

Yes, I'm still being mercilessly flogged by my Muse.  No, I didn't get a chance to read so much as one word of political news today.  Yes, I was allowed, begrudgingly, to peruse Pharyngula and Thoughts in a Haystack over dinner.  Briefly.  Long enough, anyway, to see there's a perfect double-header of dumbfuckery.

Those of you who read your Pharyngula daily already know about this:
Renew America, the bizarrely, deeply, weirdly conservative web site founded by Alan Keyes, really had to struggle to find someone crazier than Pastor Grant Swank and Fred Hutchison and Bryan Fischer and Wes Vernon (let alone Alan Keyes himself), but they have succeeded. They have Linda Kimball writing for them. She has written the strangest history of evolutionary biology ever — I think she was stoned out of her mind and hallucinating when she made this one up. It's called "Evolutionism: the dying West's science of magic and madness". The title alone is enough to hint at the weirdness within, but just wait until you read where evolution comes from.
That is some awesomely crazy shit.  And John's got a good chaser:
That would be the ever ridiculous WingNutDaily and, in particular, the even more ridiculous Ellis Washington, who "graces" its virtual pages. His latest screed, "Darwin is freezing over," really has to be seen to believed. The manner in which he connects Anthropogenic Global Warming, evolution, humanism and "shyster lawyers" is truly a textbook case of muddled thinking, the engine of which is willy-nilly correlation without any attempt to demonstrate causation, as exemplified in this...
"This" being an argument that would have looked batshit fucking insane if I hadn't read snippets of Linda Kimball's padded room thesis first.  Alas, it loses points on not being the most insane thing I've read today, but it stands strong on stupidity.

And now, alas, the Muse is calling me.  Since she's threatening to use the whip if I don't come quietly, for my own self-preservation, I'm going.

1 comment:

John Pieret said...

I saw Kimball's article too but decided that it was not nice to make fun of the mentally ill. (Okay, I just didn't want to wade through the spittle-flecks in order to come up with a post.) It's not even her worst spew at RenewAmerica.