Against Stupidity The Gods Themselves Struggle in Vain

I was reminded of the above Freidrich von Schiller quote from 18th century when I was blog walking and read an attack on Bill Maher on Eye of Polyphemus.

Eye of Polyphemus is one of the few conservative blogs I can read. The author Jamie Jeffords does know how to use the shift key instead of writing in all caps unlike most of the other conservative sites I’ve visited and he does actually try to make sense out of the Republican talking points. But there is only so far you can polish a turd.

Plus he puts lots of pictures of scantily clad starlets on his blog.

The post was about if the United States is a stupid country, so I responded with a few examples of stupid political movements that highlight the stupid.

1) Birthers.

People who don’t believe that President Obama was born. These people make up nearly a third of the Republicans and they are bat-shit crazy. In an earlier post I compared them to both the Moon Hoax people and the South Park Underwear Gnomes.

Basically they have a lot in common with the Moon Hoax people in that they will ignore any and all evidence presented to them.

2) Tea-Baggers

The Fox News sponsored Tea-Bagging Movement is a great place for nut-jobs to meet.

The premise behind the Tea-Bagging movement is they are protesting the fact that President Obama is shifting the $900 Billion that the Republicans had been giving out to corporations in no-bid contracts for non-existent services, into things like job programs and healthcare.

The idea seems to be that government should only rob the poor to help the wealthy, not help citizens for the common good.

Naturally when you get a group of people together to support such a wacky idea you are going to attract the super crazies, like the Neo-Nazis who look at these events as recruiting grounds and the people who want to burn books because they contain liberal things like facts.

3) Intelligent Design Supporters.

These are people that think schools should throw out hundreds of years of logical conjecture based on overwhelming observable evidence in favor of a scientific theory that relies on “Because I say so.” As its major point.

Confronted with overwhelming observable evidence of evolution isn’t a problem for these people they simply make up a different enemy, “Darwinists”.

They claim only Darwinists are allowed to teach in Universities, which is odd considering no Biology Professor that I’ve ever met has called themselves a “Darwinist”. One would think if Universities only hire “Darwinists” that you could find a “Darwinist” University Professor.

Now, if you want to claim that Universities hire science Professors that teach theories based on hundreds of years of logical conjecture based on overwhelming observable evidence like, gravity, entropy, and evolution then they have a point as that is what science is.

4) Climate Change Deniers

These are people that think just because the world burns enough oil every day that if it were put into barrels and they were laid end to end they would circle the globe 2 and half times, it can’t have any impact on the environment.

They simply ignore the observable facts about climate change.
A. The troposphere, the lowest layer of the atmosphere is getting warmer, while the Stratosphere, the atmospheric layer above it is getting colder.

This is because carbon dioxide in the troposphere traps the heat and doesn’t allow it to rise into the stratosphere and then be dissipated into space.

B. The temperature is rising at the poles.
As air warms at the equator it spreads out across the planet, as it does this the troposphere loses heat to the stratosphere making the temperature at the poles much cooler. (This is a gross simplification of the process but it illustrates the concept). Carbon Dioxide traps this heat so it transfers more efficiently to the poles.

On the planet and Moon in the solar system that have a runaway greenhouse effect, Venus and Titan there is little change in temperature from the equator to the poles. This is the tell-tale sign of the greenhouse effect.

Now as to the effects that Global Warming will bring to the planet there is a lot of room for debate. In fact I’ve written a post on it. “3 of the greatest imaginary threats to our Nation.”

At the time I wrote that the data showing that the poles are warming up faster than predicted was classified for National Security under the Bush Administration so I will raise my prediction to a 4-degree change over the next 100 years.

The fact that climate change is happening is impossible to deny.

It’s pretty clear what these groups all have in common, the ability to deny overwhelming evidence that is right in front of their face and claim any evidence is part of a liberal conspiracy, or as Stephen Colbert put it, “Part of the liberal bias of reality”.

The worst part of the stupidity of these groups is not that they are stupid in the sense of diminished mental capacity, but that they are stupid by choice. And since they are stupid by choice they feel that everyone around them should make the same choice and embrace the stupid.

The weird thing is they are against the “Intellectual elite” which should mean they would think being called the opposite “Stupid” is a compliment, but they get mad at being called that.