[ weird things ] | the man who made a real spectacle of himself

the man who made a real spectacle of himself

This is what happens when you're told you shouldn't read the comments but do it anyway.
emperors new clothes
Illustration by Jonah Kinigstein

While I think that I really should promote more thought provoking and interesting comments from my readers, often times there’s very little I could really add to them. Unfortunately when it comes to replies that show what one would politely refer to as abject imbecility and an astounding arrogance of ignorance, the situation is very quickly reversed, and all of a sudden, I don’t just have plenty to say about them I have trouble figuring out how much space I’m willing to dedicate to correcting all the errors, fallacies, and just sheer and absolute lack of a basic grasp on what should be common knowledge for those of us who managed to stay awake in a science class long enough to pass the tests. And here’s a fresh example of what I’m talking about, in a comment by someone trying to do his best to be the wise, insightful contrarian and failing miserably…

Me thinks, as a non-scientist, the Big Bang Theory has a few defects: Basic science tells us that there is NO resistance in space; if I send an object flying, it will continue to fly unless it hits another object, or enters into an atmosphere and burns up. How did the pieces of the giant mass, which went bang, and allegedly sent billions of pieces of something out into space miraculously mange to stop in space; not only do they stop, but they do so, all of them, apparently miraculously, in exact locations to become earth, the sun, the north star, etc., etc., etc.

Again, I thought that the expansion of the universe at an accelerating rate would be something you’d expect an average middle school student to understand. Not only hasn’t anything stopped since the Big Bang, it kept on going even faster. Nothing in space just sits still and the farther out we go, the more motion we see. Then, not content with already making a spectacle of himself, our clueless commenter decides to take it up a notch, implying that there’s some sort of pre-ordained spot in the sky for everything. Which is ridiculous because we, and all the stars around us, are moving. Our parent star is traveling around the Milky Way at 220 km/s and it’s going to keep orbiting the galactic core until it burns out and becomes a white dwarf. So basically, every single sentence here is wrong. But do little things like not having a damned clue about middle school astronomy so much as slow down this ignoramus? Of course not. In fact, he sums up his attempt at acting clever with what can only be described as a textbook example of arrogance of ignorance.

Sorry boys and girls, and all you theorized scientists, your theory won’t hold water due in part to the fact that your own fact(s) of science, such as anything flying out into space NEVER stops, denies you the argument that all the pieces just conveniently came to stops ALL over the Universe with no resistance. Then regardless of what the facts really are, it’s necessary to come up with an answer, even if it’s not true, and of course is just a T-H-E-O-R-Y. Theories are like rectums!

While this may not have been Jon Johnson levels of inanity, it doesn’t say anything good about this person’s elementary schooling and the addition of the “just a theory canard,” which only tells the world you haven’t a clue of how science actually works, combined with the kind of condescension only someone who will proudly add two and two to get five, then launch into a tirade about how math teachers are a bunch of know-nothings could ever hope to convey, makes me wish that rather than comparing theories to rectums, this fellow would learn to avoid speaking out of his. And on top of this witless sophistry, our imbecile here decided to leave his condemnation of the Big Bang on an old post which dealt with human evolution rather than cosmology. So not only is his display of ineptitude shocking in its ignorance, it’s also not even properly addressed. But while you may wonder why I chose to highlight this seemingly random brain fart, may I remind you of the Texas SBOE? Yeah, unfortunately ignoramuses like this are actually running school boards, which may play a role in why all international surveys rank the United States in roughly 48th place from an academic standpoint.

# science // cranks / pseudoscience / science education


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