I’ve pointed this out before, but watch what you say, everyone. There are people out there who are completely unable to comprehend similes and metaphors. This site makes use of this fact to create a parody 9/11 conspiracy argument, claiming trains that were responsible for 9/11. They even quote a witness who saw one of these trains!
Ya know, I’ll bet that a significant number of woos suffer from a learning disability that impairs their ability to understand figurative language…
Just got through listening to Bart Sibrel (remember that moan hoax fucktard that Buzz Aldrin punched?) vs. Phil Plait and Michael Shermer (as if there’s any contest) from yesterday’s Dave Glover Show on 97.1 FM St. Louis. The recording is here.
Yes, Bart Sibrel is a notorious asshat, and his lunacy grows tiresome quickly (if you know who he is, you’ve already heard everything he has to say eleventy-seven times), but hearing Phil and Michael have to hold their tongues and stifle their laughter (not always entirely successfully) while he’s still midsentence making his accusations of conspiracy, and false analogies was delightful. This “debate” is highly recommended by me. Phil’s follow-up post is here.
Personally, I’m not entirely convinced that even Bart believes that the moon landing was a hoax. The lack of smartitude that would be necessary to buy his worthless arguments is truly mind-boggling. If I wasn’t so busy wanting to punch the guy myself, I’d feel rather sorry for him.
I’ve never been fond of them, except when employed by Douglas Adams.
I don’t have any particular reason for my distaste, I just find them generally annoying. But here’s a good argument for avoiding them (if you didn’t already clue in to the danger after all of that Gulag nonsense): if you use a simile or metaphor, some idiot out there is going to take you literally. Case in point — this is what Hoagie had to say yesterday after someone made the mistake of using a simile to describe materials found on Tempel 1:
Now, examine carefully Chick Woodward’s extremely tantalizing statement: “[the] silicates … might even be similar to the beach sand here in Hawaii ….”
Why choose THAT particular comparison … unless you meant it?
“Beach sand” is a highly specific, very weathered end product of a long history of planetary sedimentary processes … which can take place only on highly evolved, Earth-like (or, Mars-like) planets (with lots of flowing, liquid water)! To make that specific comparison, as a scientist, one can only think that Woodward was directly hinting at the “exploded planet hypothesis” itself … but without naming it as such–
This is where I bash my head into a brick wall. Repeatedly. (Actually, it got a good chuckle out of me. That and a whole lot of head shaking.)
P.S. If there’s anyone out there that abuses italics more than I do, it’s this guy. And please, Richard… quit it with the scare quotes. If there’s one thing I hate more than similes or metaphors, it’s the incorrect use of quotation marks.
Bush’s Subliminal 9/11 Backdrop?, taken from Alex Jones’ Infowars mailing list:
This one has even got me “creeped out.” I feel like I need new foil for my hat, but it just seems too clear to be a coincidence.
Look at this picture of Jr.’s speech and tell me what you see:
Then ask yourself, why are those two flags folded in such an unusual manner?
This is what I see: Two towers, one on each side of Bush. AND, if you think of the blue field of each flag as the top of a “9” (with the red stripe at the bottom right hand corner of the blue field as the bottom of the “9”) and each red stripe to the right of the field as “1”s – they clearly say “9/11.”
As Jr. himself once said, “here’s no need to get subliminable about this . . .”
Here is my response:
Richard Hoagland has a new blog up: Captain’s Blog. It’s always saddened me that he doesn’t update his site with new lunacy very often. Hopefully this will result in more frequent crackpottery for me to laugh at at work.
Former Bush Team Member Says WTC Collapse Likely A Controlled Demolition And ‘Inside Job’
A former chief economist in the Labor Department during President Bush’s first term now believes the official story about the collapse of the WTC is ‘bogus,’ saying it is more likely that a controlled demolition destroyed the Twin Towers and adjacent Building No. 7.
I don’t know why people want to believe that 9/11 was an inside job. I’m sure that the reasons are many and varied. But this guy exemplifies one theory that’s come up a number of times:
Reynolds, now a professor emeritus at Texas A&M University, also believes it’s ‘next to impossible’ that 19 Arab Terrorists alone outfoxed the mighty U.S. military, adding the scientific conclusions about the WTC collapse may hold the key to the entire mysterious plot behind 9/11.
It’s pretty scary when you think about it, that a few guys with boxcutters could have done what they did, and done it so easily. But it’s not a very involved scheme, and hijacking an airplane is probably at the top of the list of “most unoriginal terrorist plots”. But it’s on that list for a reason. It’s not terribly complicated, very little equipment to gather, no mucking about trying to buy black market uranium and such. And unless your terrorist buddies can’t keep a secret, it’s a secret that’s probably pretty easy to keep. So what’s so hard to believe? What was stopping them? What’s stopping them now? Not a whole hell of a lot, apart from a few inconveniences at the airport (okay, maybe it’s at least marginally harder to hijack a plane these days, but I wouldn’t know, I haven’t tried).
So let’s not think about how easy it was, and how easy it might still be for someone motivated enough. Too stressful. Who can live, thinking thoughts like that all day. Let’s cling to our belief that no one can outfox the Americans. If anyone could have done this, it had to have been through a highly involved “mysterious plot” that reached to the very top of the United States chain of command. Let’s strengthen those beliefs by nitpicking the quantitative data given to us, and despite that we are not qualified to do so, and have no fucking idea what we’re talking about, let’s assume that we are correct in doing so and that the engineers are just plain wrong (hell, that they’re actively lying to us), because it supports the conclusion that we are committed to believing in no matter what they say, anyway.
Well, I hope it makes life easier. at least it’s a more interesting story. It needed some spicing up. The real one is kinda… meh.
I shouldn’t need to point out that this latest conspiracy article that’s circulating and being used as yet another log to fuel the fires of lunacy is based on the beliefs of a goddamn economist. Er, yeah. Those Bush economists don’t even have the economy figured out, let alone the intricacies of structural engineering. And this guy doesn’t even have anything to add, he just says “yeah, I kinda sorta think that those conspiracy guys have a point, but since I don’t really understand what any of these people are saying, I’m just going to parrot the guys I choose to side with”. No inside information or anything. Boring. Oh, but he must know what he’s talking about. He has a tenuous connection to the White House!
Humbug!
