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on numbskull trolls
Someone called "Anonymous" has just left a comment to my entry here which for some reason I can't get the LJ software to unscreen. Here is the comment in full:
Having read CORRUPTED SCIENCE, and in the light of the exposure of global warming as a HOAX, I want to know if you will be publishing a CORRUPTED SCIENCE II to expose the real corruption. This is the most agregious case of scientific corruption in human history.
And here is my mild-as-milquetoast voice-of-sweet-reason reply:
Only someone of extraordinary stupidity and complete scientific illiteracy would think that global warming has been shown to be "a HOAX" -- someone of stupidity, illiteracy, and an infantile desire to choose to listen only to what you regard as the more comforting of the stories coming your way. Does it ever cross your excessively tiny mind to wonder who's responsible for the lies you're so eager to believe?
You are very wise to remain anonymous. Because of the activities of halfwitted or corrupt AGW deniers such as yourself, there's a very good chance there won't be very much of the human species in just a few decades' time. Frankly, I don't give a monkey's fuck if your life is cut short by this disaster, but I do very much care about my daughter's future well-being. Anyone who threatens it has a very angry me to contend with. Got that?
Now go crawl back into your pit of ignorance, you idiotic little turd.
Oh, and learn to spell "egregious" while you're about it.
When Thog lose patience, patience know it been lost . . .
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Oh, and in case anyone feels my response to this person might be a tad harsh -- that I should argue my case with a dulcet tone and a bit of gentle coaxing -- let me cite Rep Barney Frank in similar circumstances earlier this year:
You stand there with a picture of the president defaced to look like Hitler and compare the effort to increase health care to the Nazis . . . Trying to have a conversation with you would be like trying to argue with a dining room table. I have no interest in doing it.
I have spent considerable chunks of the past few years presenting sweet reason in this and other areas where the stupider members of the public regard the science as "controversial" because they think it's sexier to do this than to go and educate themselves. Enough is enough.
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just sayin....
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He hasn't actually reviewed the book, just advanced his "insights" into climatology -- the three lines cited above are the entirety of his comment.
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seriously though, I wonder why some people are willing to believe in science when it comes to getting in an airplane, or on a bridge, having their teeth fixed, or with their air conditioning, but for some slices of science they think that anyone off the street has an opinion as valid as people who've spent their lives researching it. i don't know personally that global warming isn't a hoax, because i'm not a geologist, but I'm not going to argue with a physicist that nucleosynthesis actually produces bananas and peppermint biscuits because I read on the back of a matchbook that it does.
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for some slices of science they think that anyone off the street has an opinion as valid as people who've spent their lives researching it
That's actually the crux of it. A couple of days ago I received a bulletin from WorldNutsDaily licking lips at the way Ann Coulter had been able to show dem idiot climatologists what's what. Really? Ann Coulter? A singularly ignorant political hack? Her views on climatology are weightier than those of tens of thousands of trained climatologists around the world? Our society hasd gotten itself into a sick and likely terminal condition when anybody could think for one moment that this might be so.
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Seriously, MTV's Made tells us you can become a martial artist, ballet dancer, or a basketball player in six weeks. The Biggest Loser tells us a lifetime of bad habits can be melted away in 6 months.
So, obviously anyone can be anything if they just work on it for a little while.
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So, obviously anyone can be anything if they just work on it for a little while.
The problem is that these buffoons don't seem willing to put in even the "little while". They gawk at FAUX News for an evening, listen to various dunderheads regurgitating Exxon's falsehoods, and believe that qualifies them to pronounce on a subject of which they know absolutely nothing.
It's a nightmare, really. The views of that drunken loudmouth bore everyone avoids in the pub are supposed to carry equal weight with those of the people whose area of expertise this is. I remember reading a science fiction way back in my teens where this was the case, and it was regarded as a dystopian satire; it never occurred to me I'd see it come into reality -- I assumed, naive fool as I am, that human beings would have too much good sense.
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Yep, lost it for a bit and for once on reflection am glad I did so . . .
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Watch it . . .
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Thanx. Not precisely adhering to my high rationalist principles, but it might draw the troll's attention to the fact that he and his denialist kind are widely regarded as the ignoramus scum of the earth.
Next he'll be offering his copious expertise to perform heart bypass operations . . . after all, he knows surgery as well as those overpaid elitist guys in the white coats . . .
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:)
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You watch it too . . .
Bravo!
Re: Bravo!
This is a very Russian response.
It is? Thanks!
To be honest, I think more people should be responding to the numbskulls likewise rather than attempting to reason with them. They have no powers of reason.
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I imagine you've said as much yourself on occasion, albeit perhaps in more temperate fashion.
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Do you think your troll is also an anti-evolutionist? Anti-science is a package deal.
This is very true.
There seem to be far too many people whose idea of what "science" is is merely a projection of their own self-indulgent fantasies. The earth was created in 4004BC? Sounds a cozy idea! So that's what the "science" must say. And all those elitist guys in the white coats are just fakers, trying to pull the wool over the eyes of us good God-fearin' red-blooded patriotic . . .
Of course, the trouble is that genuine knowledge/science, for all its flaws and gaps, offers what's generally a progressively closer depiction of reality, and reality doesn't give two hoots for what our plucky "free thinker" would like it to be.
Oh, and I must apologize for my French, ma'am!
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Thanks, but really there's nothing to applaud: it's just me finally losing patience with one of these self-indulgent, self-congratulatory brats.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Chronology_%28Fomenko%29
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Many thanks for this reference, Ian. Wish I'd known about this while writing Bogus Science, where I discuss some related notions.
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Just what is it about denying climate change and arguing for the plausibility of lightsabers that go hand-in-hand?
A little knowledge is a dangerous thing?
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Love, c.
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why do I automatically see this poster as male?
I don't know, but my automatic assumption was exactly the same -- and it's been worrying me that this should be so.
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Wonderful response. Just one more reason to love you. :)
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I repeatedly tell Pam as much, but it just makes her snort her coffee down the back of her nose.
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Yeah, well, I'm normally a bit quieter about it than this, but "Anonymous" seems to epitomize a whole tsunami of idiocy and ignorance that seems destined to overwhelm us. Good job I didn't meet him in a pub . . .
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That may be the most beautiful thing I've ever read. I think I'm going to cry.
Then my efforts have been worthwhile. :)