He’s doing it again. Bill Maher is defending his anti-vaxx ignorance.
“I’ve never argued that vaccines don’t work. I just don’t think you need them. There are so many maladies now that used to be rare and now are much more prevalent—things like allergies, ADD, asthma, migraines, autoimmune disorders, chronic fatigue, colitis, more colds. I’m not saying vaccines cause any of them, but the modern immune system might be less robust than it used to be because it doesn’t get its full workout going through a disease like the measles. I’m glad vaccines exist, just like I’m glad antibiotics exist, but we’ve abused the hell out of them. Bugs that no antibiotic works on anymore? I worry about that a lot more.”
I’m not saying X, but X
is a phrase I’ve heard somewhere before…oh, yeah:
As for the argument that you don’t need them: I’ll just mention polio and measles, and leave them right here. Idiot.
Does he even know that vaccines are different from antibiotics?
I can’t leave this other annoyance alone.
“My reaction once again was that if there are this many bad apples, there’s something wrong with the orchard. The fact remains that Islam is a uniquely intolerant and violent religion at this point in our history. The vast, vast, vast majority of Muslims are not terrorists. But here’s the point people don’t bring up: They’re not terrorists, but they share some very bad ideas with terrorists, and bad ideas lead to bad behavior.”
“At this point we probably need to take out a few bad people. But the long-term solution to radical Islam is to let them have the civil war they need to have between themselves. Let the people who want to walk into the 21st century stand up against the people who want to stay in the seventh century. They need to take out their own trash.”
I think Islam is a detestable faith, but then I think the same of all faiths. I do think it’s a cop-out to claim that Islam is “uniquely intolerant and violent”, though: it’s not. I think you could even look at atheism, and find people like Maher, and Harris, and Hitchens, who endorsed extreme violence against Islamic countries, justifying it with this claim that they are uniquely violent and need to be put down. We’re peaceful, they’re violent, so we need to drop bombs on them.
I also object to this attitude that we need to encourage them to kill each other. We’re talking about a billion human beings. How smart would it be to suggest that American dissent, all those tea partiers and gun fondlers and maniac Republicans, ought to be settled with a good old-fashioned civil war? Just arm the liberals and conservatives and let ’em settle it by killing each other, and accept that a majority of innocents will be collateral damage.
Do we argue that those pious, peace-loving Christians among us enable the minority of militants, therefore it is a good idea to kill Christians? I would hope not. Somehow, though, Christians and a few too many atheists think that logic is just fine if we change the name of the targeted people to Muslims.
I also see these people point fingers at other countries and telling them to take out their own trash
, possibly with a few good assassinations to take out the bad people, but failing to look at their own homes and recognizing that we have an awful lot of trash of our own. Dick Cheney is still walking free, getting the respectful attention of the Sunday morning pundits; Scott Lively was allowed to run for governor of Massachussetts; Pat Robertson owns a broadcasting network that runs in 180 countries; our television networks revere Abrahamic patriarchs, like the Robertsons and the Duggars, who in their beliefs would fit in just fine with the regressive mullahs of Islam. I could go on at agonizing length.
What would Maher’s opinion be if Sweden, for instance, looked at us and announced, we probably need to take out a few bad people
? He might agree, unless they included another bad person, Bill Maher, on their hit list. I would say that state-sponsored murder is never a good solution, no matter who they’re killing.
“i don’t know what i’m talking about, but i feel very smart when i talk, so i just say stuff” That’s Maher’s problem in a nutshell….Confussing vaccines with antibiotics, and his argument that our inmune systems are too weak and lazy is doubly stupid considering that vaccines are like a fucking training camp for inmune systems. Every time you get vaccinated you are basically giving your inmune system a course on self-denfense.
As for the “let them kill themselves”….just fuck him…no more need be said….
It amazes me that people like him are perceived as intellectuals and people whose opinions have merit.
… how does he think vaccines work?
Also, so many things he’s saying are begging for “citation needed.”
This was the scariest part for me.
Yes, he is right. Allergies are far more common today.
I remember when I was young, I had sniffles most of the year. But now it is allergies due to pollen or mold.
Hey, Bill Maher — maybe it isn’t due to the vaccines after all. Maybe we are just better at diagnosis.
What? I don’t… Vaccines strengthen our immune systems. Having a measles vaccine is exactly the same as having developed the immunity through surviving the disease. Our immune systems do have a much easier time now than they would have a few hundred years ago, but not because of vaccines. It’s because we started using soap and disinfectants and eat significantly less poop particles on a regular basis than our ancestors did. We also have fewer worms.
In fact, weren’t there researchers trying to cure asthma and allergies with controlled worm infections? Did that end up working?
The hygiene hypothesis is a serious scientific hypothesis and based on admittedly limited knowledge I thought it was fairly persuasive.
But as Saad says, vaccines don’t actually prevent you from being exposed to foreign pathogens. The hypothesis suggests non-exposure (included to parasitic worms) is the problem, not the lack of serious bouts of a single disease. Another case of a decent idea getting garbled by someone in service of a lousy point.
Dear Bill: We are seeing more maladies (that have nothing to do with vaccines) very likely because we’ve gotten modern medicine that allows many more people to survive and have offspring. Allergic to something common? Now we know how to identify it, and have things like benadryl to keep someone from dying from it, so it has a chance to become more widespread.
Also, as someone with severe ADHD… I personally think it’s adaptive if you’re in a hunter-gatherer situation. I’ll be walking along and go “strawberry plant. Bird. Lizard. Poisonous thing.” constant mental catalogue of all the stuff that’s around me. It’s only a problem in modern society where we’re expected to focus on a single thing for 8 hours straight while sitting still.
“I’m glad antibiotics exist, but we’ve abused the hell out of them. Bugs that no antibiotic works on anymore? I worry about that a lot more.”
Maher, you got the emboldened part right, but the rest of your monologue, is “false equivalency”. Our overuse of antibiotics is far different than getting everyone vaccinated. Having more people vaccinated does NOT make viruses stronger and more prevalent. [you know the first (smallpox) has been driven to extinction by vaccinating people, right?]
They work different. Vaccine is not some antibiotic that we shoot into our veins to kill the disease bugs. Vaccines are how we teach our bodies to kill viruses, antibiotics don’t work on viruses.
We also have a lot more people with learning disabilities that were once rare or non-existent as well. Like my step-father who dropped out of school around 12 years of age because he was- to use the technical jargon of the mid- to late-60’s- an idiot, a moron, and a dumbass. Years later when my little brother was having trouble in school, my step-father realized the problem wasn’t that he was an idiot but, in reality, he was dyslexic. Unfortunately, decades of believing himself to be stupid hasn’t been undone by finding out he had an issue that, with a little work and time, could have been corrected.
But I guess that’s just a result of our over-reliance on vaccinations.
What the fuck? Vaccines DO strengthen the immune system. That is their exact fucking point. To cause the immune system to basically exercise the same process it would if it were really at risk of getting infected, while minimizing the risk of actually getting the disease. And ADD has to do with vaccines huh? Is this the new meme, for those who are suddenly too embarrassed to stick to the ridiculous “vaccines cause autism” angle?
—————-
The unique distinction between Christianity and Islam isn’t the nature of their beliefs or their behaviors. It is that Muslim extremists become terrorists to kill people, while Christian extremists just have the state start a war or just use a bombing raid or a drone strike. The difference is largely resources and tactics. And limitations placed on the most odious Christians from the somewhat privileged, rich, stable, secular countries that they inhabit that provides them with the modern convenience of having blood on their hands without actually getting the hands dirty.
I’ve found this an appropriate description: War is a rich man’s terrorism. Terrorism is a poor man’s war.
Maher is correct, in a rather ignorant way. You don’t need to get vaccinated….as long as everyone else does. If everyone else gets vaccinated you can rely on herd immunity to protect you.
Ah, Bill, Bill Bill. The Dunning-Kruger effect is strong with this one. I try to like him, I really do. I will try to still respect him for his correct opinions in other areas (global warming, republicans suck, there-is-no-god, etc.,) but dammit, why do you have to be so dumb, Bill? Why??
We don’t need to worry about war. In these wussified days, people aren’t developing their natural defenses against bullets and bayonets. We really need to toughen ourselves up again.
We also don’t need to worry about terrorism or who is violent, because we’ll all be immune to violence, once we allow nature to take its course. Suicide bombings and school massacres will just be amusing, Dadaist performances!
Anytime people start talking about the need to civilize those savages through horrific acts, I always think about that one recent Oglaf comic that happens to be safe for work.
http://oglaf.com/heel-empire/
http://oglaf.com/heel-empire/2/
Autoimmune disorders are the result of weak immune systems? Does Bill Maher even know what an autoimmune disorder is?
(Long-time reader, first-time commenter. Hello, all!)
They’re not terrorists, but they share some very bad ideas with terrorists, and bad ideas lead to bad behavior.”
Either Bill Maher is a mind-reader, or he has absolutely no clue whether this is true at all. Just like he has no clue which ideas my Catholic father shared with either Cardinal Law or Pope Palpadict. And unfounded assertions are — to put it mildly — not a good basis for either reason or action. Neither is “argument by lebelling,” which is really all people like Maher and Harris do — judge a billion people by one of the labels they share, and pretending that label tells us every thing we need to know about everyone who shares it.
But the long-term solution to radical Islam is to let them have the civil war they need to have between themselves.
Holy fucking shit, this asshole is taking “not paying attention” to an almost Olympian level. Has he not noticed that this civil war is already going on? That’s precisely why there’s so much savage violence and bigotry in the Muslim world today! How on Earth can anyone look at the generations-long violent struggles going on in that part of the world and see it as anything but the “civil war” Bill Maher thinks is so good for Muslims to have?
So yeah, Bill Maher really needs to go away. He’s proving himself a complete idiot; and besides, we have John Oliver to replace him now, and he’s both funnier and more informative than Maher.
“…but the modern immune system might be less robust than it used to be because it doesn’t get its full workout going through a disease like the measles.”
He seems to think that a vaccine acts something like an antibiotic, in that it directly attacks the invader and save the immune system the trouble of doing so. Clearly he does not know what the fuck a vaccination actually does. If I were to attempt an explanation to clear this up, I would characterise the vaccine as a guy dressed up as let’s say measles, poking the immune system with a stick just to annoy it, to provoke a reaction from it and to remind the immune system to kill measles on sight because fuck that guy, he just poked me with a stick.
Christ, he’s an idiot. All those things have been around for a long time. He seems to be very unaware of how many things weren’t identified until recent times.
Yeah, that’s why people routinely lived to 80 before modern medicine was created!
Oh wait, they actually didn’t.
@ Raging Bee, #17
I’m not a mind-reader (either!) so I may be wrong but I guess Maher is talking about some big polls taken in “Muslim countries” and asking people if they believe, for exemple, that people should die for apostasy and the vast majority answered yes.
I don’t have a link to the poll, don’t know the numbers or the methodology or how to even interpret the results. Just saying he might be talking about that.
#15: An irony:
Oglaf with naked boobies or penises: NSFW.
Oglaf with a guy getting shot through the neck with an arrow: SFW.
Scott Roeder shared a lot of ideas with most Christians, Bill. By your logic we should be encouraging Christians to slaughter each other (again) to do away with the “bad apples.”
I find it baffling that assholes like Maher can say this shit about Islam and not apply it to other major religions, especially Christianity, which has a long and thoroughly well-documented history of violence, torture and cruelty that is still going on.
…I guess Maher is talking about some big polls taken in “Muslim countries”…
Who but an idiot would think such polls are valid or reliable? These are places where one can be severely punished for voicing any sort of unorthodox or dissenting opinion about the majority religion; and people in such places have absolutely no reason to trust a guy phoning them up out of the blue to hold their answers in strict confidentiality. They also have no reason to believe that telling their forbidden thoughts to strangers on the phone would do anyone enough good to justify the obvious and unavoidable risks.
And listening to people like Bill Maher and Sam Harris blather on and on about what other people believe, it’s pretty fucking obvious that their assertions are based on absolutely nothing but their own simpleminded reasoning, with occasional cherry-picked facts thrown in as afterthoughts. There’s massive amounts of facts and observations they’ve been ignoring for years, despite having heard them pointed out, often to their faces, too many times to count.
Oh, please, PZ, don’t pretend like you don’t know that the human body is sinful and dirty and bad… Now, gory violence, on the other hand, it’s just a fact of life, nothing to make a fuss about.
I find it baffling that assholes like Maher can say this shit about Islam and not apply it to other major religions, especially Christianity, which has a long and thoroughly well-documented history of violence, torture and cruelty that is still going on.
If he ever did, I’m sure there are plenty of people would eagerly point out to him that the Christians already had that cleansing civil war he fantasizes about — it was called the Reformation, and it was every bit as hateful, bloody, and counterproductive as the massacres we’re seeing in the Mideast today, and probably more so. And that period of protracted sectarian warfare didn’t advance the Christian world, it dragged it backwards into a period of barbarism and forced ignorance that almost made the Viking invasions look tame and civil by comparison. All of the advancements made during the Renaissance were rolled back, and stayed rolled back until the Enlightenment — which the children of sectarian civil-warriors bitterly opposed.
Someone apparently doesn’t understand how an immune system works, or what pathogens are, or how the two interact.
If Maher’s racism and his “jokes” about beating women aren’t enough to stop people from listening to him, is his anti-vaxxer ignorance going to affect anything? I somehow doubt it.
Maher has long since reached the point of being another Michelle Bachmann. It’s not if each will say something vapid, hateful, and stupid, it’s when. They’ve become too easy a target.
@ Raging Bee, #24:
Yup, agreed. That’s what I was saying about the methodology. For exemple: how did they ask the questions? (“Do you believe, like the Coran, X?” is one way that may lead people in a direction).
But I’ve heard Harris use this poll and that’s why I’m guessing Maher has the same one in mind.
Anyone who thinks US Christians don’t make terrorists needs to go live in an abortion clinic for a while.
Any filmakers out there? Someone needs to make a film called ‘Mahervelous’ to double-bill with ‘Religulous’.
left0ver1under @28
I was first exposed to Maher years ago on his show Politically Incorrect. IIRC I was really impressed at his views on religion and how open he was about his non-belief. I continued to watch him on his late night show Real Time for a few years until I began to learn about his rampant sexism and anti-Muslim bigotry. Then came his anti-vaccination stance. That was pretty much the death-knell of my appreciation for him.
It’s not enough that he’s an outspoken atheist who openly criticizes religion. He needs to be a decent human being, and he’s failing at that.
CaitieCat @30:
Oh, but that’s totes not terrorism. That’s fighting for the unborn!
I like to direct people here:
Terror from the Right: Plots, Conspiracies, and Racist Rampages since Oklahoma City.
There are 100+ examples. No, not all of them are examples of Christian terrorism, but many of them are. Here are a few examples:
There are many more examples of Christian terrorism in the United States.
@drst #23
Equally baffling about Maher, for all his incessant harping about how inherently evil and violent Islam is, he still frequently comes out in favor of using the death penalty here in the U.S. Or in favor of using it against people overseas, like when Anwar al-Awlaki was killed with an American attack drone in 2011. He could have least said something like “Yeah, he’s a Muslim, but he’s also an American citizen, so maybe we should try restraining ourselves for once.” But Maher’s problem was that it was up to the president to decide al-Awalki’s fate, not that the fate was execution from the sky by way of a UAV-launched missile. (He argued this nonsense on his show a few years ago with Glenn Greenwald, one of his panelists that night, calling him out on it, since Maher admitted that he thought al-Awlaki still deserved to die.)
But back to his idiotically reckless views on measles––he should check with the World Health Organization, which states that measles “is one of the leading causes of death among young children even though a safe and cost-effective vaccine is available.” They claim nearly 146,000 measles deaths occurred in 2013, or a lot more than the sixteen U.S. citizens the State Dept. says were killed overseas due to terrorism in the same year (or what the WHO says measles did in about one hour that year).
And yet terrorism, which Maher blames on and where so many warmongering Pax Americana neocons agree with him, is somehow still the bigger threat.
Or people should encourage Atheists to slaughter each other so in order to get rid of the chauvinists, racists, smug rich bastards who emerged from this flock.
Funny how once you start using “logic” arguments favoring massacring a given subgroup, the same “logic” can be applied to every other group, including the one you hail for.
***
I discovered Maher through his “Americans are stupid!” rant, so I knew from the very beginning that he was a smug douche.
Regardless, the “Religions are stupid” line is often a mere introduction to the “Religious rubes are stupid (and must therefore be browbeaten into submission by their intellectual betters)” despicable brand of authoritarian self-justification, so people who use the first line should always be approached with distrust until more information is made available about their worldview.
@Tony #33 – You should point Ayaan Hirsi Ali to that web page.
rietpluim @36:
Somehow I don’t think that would do any good.
@Raging Bee
I know your Catholic father calls himself a Catholic. If he’s remotely honest about calling himself a Catholic – and I don’t have to be a mind reader to assume that – then I know he also has some unsubstantiated religious beliefs. Those are bad beliefs, and they lead to bad behavior.
Many of us here try to get rid of false and unsubstantiated beliefs and replace them with better beliefs. Many of us here especially try to improve people’s reasoning and standards for beliefs. We do that because we know that doing so will make the world into a better place for everyone, including your wrong-headed Catholic father.
Drop this belief in belief shit already. Your father isn’t magic. Your father has patently absurd beliefs (or is a liar when he calls himself a Catholic), and patently absurd beliefs do lead to bad behavior. Not always, and not always to the same severity, but beliefs inform actions, and bad beliefs lead to bad actions more often than good beliefs. You know the phrase “good intentions pave the road to hell” ?
As we’ve argued about before, your father is part of the problem, and he is responsible for it. No more so than nearly all religious people in the world. However, all it takes for evil to flourish is for good people to do nothing. All it takes for bad beliefs to flourish is for informed people to say nothing.
EnlightenmentLiberal, to Raging Bee, quoting Maher:
How is this supposed to be arguing against Raging Bee? I’ve also known numerous Catholics my whole life who aren’t even remotely conversant with the vast array of official RCC dogmas. They honestly identify themselves as Catholics that because that is the religious sect they are a part of. When (not if) they don’t share views with Law or Benedict, they’re not being dishonest about their Catholicism. There’s no telling which views they share with the big muckety-mucks in the RCC, just like there’s no telling whether any given Muslim shares any specific view with fucking terrorists.
That’s just how it is, and it has nothing to do with the separate (and utterly trivial) claim that “bad ideas lead to bad behavior.”
A common trick is to then define “apostasy” out of existence…
The Thirty-Years War was like the Congo. It was way worse than all Viking attacks taken together.
Under such a narrow definition of “Catholic”, almost nobody is a Catholic.
That’s the real reason there’s no Inquisition anymore: it would be way too successful, leaving the churches empty even on Christmas and Easter, and leaving the Church to survive on a really tiny budget. The previous two popes understood this and lived in dread; keyword .
It’s estimated that one-third of Germany’s population died during the 30 Years War.
@28 and PZ:
Find a little proportion. Yeah, Maher says stupid things. He also says probably more intelligent things. Has Bachmann ever said anything intelligent? Whadda you do with a bushel of apples with some bad ones and more good ones? We know what to do with a bushel of all rotten apples.
Which leads to the question of whether someone who has 25% asshole opinions [YMMV] is a total asshole? I just sigh, snort and do a double eyeroll and wait for the tasty tidbits.
Vaccines are like doing pushups with your immune system!
UP!
DOWN!
UP!
DOWN!!
My immune system is bulgy and beautiful! YAY!
Sorry, I thought I should try to post my comment in Stupid; that way if Maher ever runs across it he may understand it.
@David Marjanović
What definition of “True Catholic” do you think I gave – except a vague “has some unsubstantiated religious beliefs” ?
@consciousness razor
Same response. I did not here imply that all Catholics accept all official Roman Catholic dogma. I just gave a vague “has some unsubstantiated religious beliefs”.
@To Both
Presumably most Catholics share a belief in an afterlife, and that Jesus was a magic man of some kind, or at least a wise man who gave wise and sage advice (which is bullshit). In almost every case, that’s part of willful conscious decision of almost every Catholic when a Catholic calls themself a Catholic. Some words are beyond useless and have absolutely no consensus usage. “Catholic” is not such a word. What your average Christian-terrorist and your average everyday Catholic shares in common are some false religious beliefs. I’m just thankful that most Catholics don’t take their religion seriously enough to act on it, or to even learn much of anything about it. (Note that basically all Catholics do know that believing in an afterlife and in a magic Jesus is a general requirement to be a Catholic.)
The basic and fundamental problem is belief in belief, magical thinking, lack of critical reasoning skills, lack of skepticism, and lack of humanism, and probably a few other odds and ends.
Oh, and intellectual honesty and intellectual fortitude.
Enlightenment Liberal
And which demonstrable “bad behaviour” arises from that?
Really, you must cough up some, with evidence that this is caused by the false beliefs, or you’re just making bold non sequitur.
natural cynic @ 42:
Do you suppose it matters at all that said person has an audience of millions, and uses asshole opinions to make somewhat pithy and generally wrong statements or comments on current events, when neither said person or most of the audience of millions has the ability to employ critical thought?
I know your Catholic father calls himself a Catholic. If he’s remotely honest about calling himself a Catholic – and I don’t have to be a mind reader to assume that – then I know he also has some unsubstantiated religious beliefs. Those are bad beliefs, and they lead to bad behavior.
Once again, your reasoning leads to conclusions that are observably false! First, yes, my father had unsubstantiated beliefs — but you don’t know they were exactly the same as those of his Church, and his membership in that Church does NOT automatically make his beliefs congruent with Church doctrine. Your conclusion is not supported by the available facts, any more than the Golden Gate Bridge can stand on Lego blocks.
Second, you don’t know that my father’s beliefs were “bad” beliefs. Again, neither his membership in an organization nor his use of a label prove or change his specific beliefs.
And third, your assertion that “bad beliefs lead to bad behavior” is kinda contradicted by the lack of bad behavior on my father’s part.
I really don’t know how to put this any more simply: Your reasoning leads to false conclusions, therefore it is invalid. Please go back and fix it, and stop insulting us with your bigoted sophistry and pretended knowledge. You simply cannot judge a person’s character by the labels he wears (for starters, my dad wore more labels than just the religious one — don’t they count too?). That is, in fact, the mark of a bigot, and you, EL are a bigot.
Your father has patently absurd beliefs (or is a liar when he calls himself a Catholic)…
So basically you’re saying that anyone who doesn’t conform to your simpleminded stereotypes is a liar. That, again, is classic bigotry.
Which is pretty much also Dawkin’s simplistic world view:
“You claim to be a religious believer? Well, either you’re an insane rabid fundie frothing at the mouth or you’re a closeted atheist too wimpish to openly challenge the aforementioned fundies“
@Raging Bee
I do not understand. Nowhere in this thread did I claim that your father holds the majority of Catholic beliefs. For the most part, I was clear that the fact that he calls himself a Catholic is enough for me to conclude that he holds unsubstantiated beliefs and that his epistemology is bad, or he is a liar, or he is ignorant, or some combination thereof. Please try to respond to what I say rather than what you imagine I say.
Again, you’re jumping to conclusions which I never said. In the interests of good faith engagement, let me clarify. In context, I meant to say that your father calls himself a Catholic, and it’s epistemically possible that he is honest when he says that. From that I can conclude that he has at least some unsubstantiated beliefs. That alone is not enough to conclude that he holds most of the official Roman Catholic church beliefs, but it’s enough to conclude that he very probably holds some general and unspecified unsubstantiated beliefs, and probably enough to conclude that he believes in an afterlife and that Jesus was a magic man, or at least a wise man.
As an alternative to that scenario, I also consider it epistemically possible that your father knowingly calls himself a Catholic just to fit in. In this scenario, your father doesn’t believe, knows he doesn’t believe, knows he’s not a Catholic, but calls himself a Catholic anyways, knowing that he is purposefully misleading others concerning what he really believes. This is an example of what most people call “lying”.
Again, It’s quite possible your father simultaneously is: 1- honest, 2- not a liar, and 3- doesn’t buy a majority of the crap from the Catholic church. However, if your father is honest on this point, it’s very probable that your father holds unsubstantiated beliefs and a bad epistemology.
…
@Giliell
Do I really need to explain how a belief in an afterlife can cause harm in this life, even if only to oneself? Especially when you must perform certain acts and forgo other acts in the only real life one will get in order to gain access to the fictitious afterlife. This should be obvious.
Further, do I really need to explain how having a bad epistemology can easily lead to other false beliefs with much more immediately bad consequences for oneself and others?
Further, do I really need to explain how calling oneself a Catholic provides social acceptance and cover to other Catholics who act badly on their unsubstantiated beliefs, such as the massive international child-rape ring that is the Catholic Church? Or the crimes against humanity that the church has done in Africa and elsewhere when they lied about HIV and condoms and otherwise interfered with safe sex practices, education, and supplies?
EL @52:
Dear godz, no.
The vast, vast, vast majority of [people who agree with EnlightenmentLiberal] are not terrorists. But here’s the point people don’t bring up [except when they do bring it up, or I’m not a person]: They’re not terrorists, but they share some very bad ideas with terrorists, and bad ideas lead to bad behavior.
cr @54:
You mean to tell me someone can hold a bad idea, but not engage in bad behaviors based on that idea?
Mind. Blown.
(snark not directed at you)
@consciousness razor, #54:
I know you’re trying to play nice here, but I see no reason to pussyfoot around. You might as well just use the worst version of this train of thought: people will be less inclined to passively accept it going off the rails.
Painful, I know, but sometimes shoving a sharp rhetorical stick through the eye*1 is exactly what you need to get people to see that they aren’t deep.
===================================
*1 …Commenting on Pharyngula is violence.
@EnlightenmentLiberal, #52:
Oh, bullshit.
You really need someone to quote your own words back at you?
Note the bolded portion. Note the surrounding context that does not contradict the bolded portion. This is a dichotomy, not a trichotomy.
Either,
1) You are lying when you characterized your previous statements as “clear” in providing 4 options: bad beliefs/epistemology, deception, ignorance, or a combination thereof.
OR
2) even with your comments fully searchable so as to be able to refresh your memory at any moment, you simply could not competently rephrase your own ideas
This dichotomy using the standard inclusive disjunction holds perfectly true. I won’t need to back down from it, though I will point out that this can be rephrased:
IF you did not lie, THEN you were not competent in the task of rephrasing your own words.
Is it more generous to you to believe you’re not competent to reread your own text and accurately paraphrase it? Or is it more generous to you to believe that you’re competent with words but lie your ass off even when it’s bound to be discovered?
I’ll go with whichever you pick.
Commenting on Pharyngula is a lie, there is only violence.
Through violence, I gain perfect epistemology.
Through perfect epistemology, I gain power over terrorists.
Through power over terrorists, I gain victory.
Through victory, my chains are broken. But brown people have theirs.
EnlightenmentLiberal shall free me.
Hmm… still sounds nicer when the Sith say it.
@any reasonable person reading this…
EnlightenmentLiberal, #45:
Wait, what? EnlightenmentLiberal said this?
EnlightenmentLiberal said this?
I am so relieved. I thought the mushroom cloud indicated terrorists had exploded a fusion weapon at the Burnaby Irony Meter Works.
This has to do with two subjects: the necessity of vaccines and the role of women in science–a topic often found in this blog. “The Women who Killed Whooping Cough” from the great site SciShow.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bx7OA60PRKg
Then there is this Celeb post from HuffPost(I know)promoting vaccination.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kristen-bell/vaccines-are-safe-and-facts-are-your-friends_b_7083504.html
EL
Do I need to explain the function of the word “can” to you? Like in “totally possible but not necessarily the case”? Do I need to explain to you that a lack of belief in an afterlife can lead to people causing themselves and others harm? Do I need to explain to you that “bad beliefs lead to bad behaviour” is not the same as “bad beliefs can lead to bad behaviour”?