klinghoffer opens mouth, inserts foot yet again
Just in case you haven’t heard, a lunatic named James Lee decided that the best way to save the planet is to hold people working for Discovery Communications hostage until they changed their programming and told their audience that humans must stop reproducing and polluting for the good of the planet. Obviously, he was not well in the head and simply found a very hostile outlet for his insanity which earned him a very violent end, but that hasn’t stopped online demagogues from spamming up comment sections of news sites blaming the entire incident on Al Gore and global warming, or one of the resident dolts at the Discovery Institute from once again spewing nonsense about “Darwin’s role” in events like this. One would think that even Klinghoffer, as slow on the uptake as he seems to be, would finally grasp that his argument has been debunked by everyone who has a clue about historical events, but no. Instead he rehashes the same material he fed to Sewell…
Historical figures who drew inspiration [ … ] from Darwinian theory include Charles Manson, Mao Tse-tung, Joseph Stalin, Josef Mengele, and of course Adolf Hitler. I’ve written about this many times before and received much abuse for it, not least when I took up the theme on the Huffington Post. (An editor advised me they will not let me do that again.)
Again and again this nonsense has been refuted, but apparently the concrete in Klinghoffer’s skull is simply not porous enough to let the facts sink in. Obviously, as a member of the Institute, he’s totally unable to tell the difference between science and pseudoscience, or actually go out and read a book that hasn’t been written by a hack whose education in history stopped past whatever he was told at a fundamentalist home school, and so he just keeps spewing this tired old garbage, lacking the talent to even rephrase it. Hey Dave, do you know why you took so much abuse for vomiting forth your ignorance on HuffPo and why they asked you to stay away from the site? Because you don’t know what you’re talking about, because your historical knowledge could be surpassed by a high school freshman, and because your vile spew casting scientists and those of us whose education actually covered biology rather than fire and brimstone demagoguery, as Nazi henchmen, deserves nothing more than contempt, and it’s author (that would be you by the way), should be dismissed as a twit.
In one of the rarest feats of inanity I’ve ever witnessed, he managed to get himself expelled from a safe haven for pretty much every pseudoscientist and post-modernist crank out there. When even HuffPo won’t have you, but takes Deepak Chopra’s futile attempts at grasping high school physics and Laszlo’s drivel instead, it really is a sign that you should consider another career, one that requires a mind capable of more than being the human equivalent of a broken record, merely repeating the same old discredited tripe day in, day out. No wonder the Templeton Foundation dropped the jokers at DI as soon as it could. They’re an embarrassment even to apologists willing to bend and twist science in a pretzel to satisfy their need to proselytize. I often heard the expression that a mind is a terrible thing to waste, but I’m thinking that very few people who took up fellowships at the Institute had all that much to lose and Klinghoffer is a perfect example of that.
