I know everyone is talking about this demented blog supporting Brownback’s candidacy that, among other things, denounces heliocentrism. I honestly can’t decide whether it’s satire or genuine—I’ve met a few people who sincerely believe ideas that stupid. It’s just that they usually lack the technical competence to put a website together.
But then, of course, all you have to do is read Brownback’s official campaign site, or his official blog colony, which is almost as looney, and you have to wonder how crazy an idea would have to be to be rejected by a Republican presidential candidate. After all, Brownback looks like a guy who went into politics because his first career choice went kaput when he failed the balloon animal test at the clown college.
Oooh, you’ve just made yourself unpopular with blipey.
Bob
As sad as it is, you can’t rule out the idea that it’s genuine. Hell, one of Tara’s many tussles with HIV deniers brought a gravity denier out of the woodwork. Some people really are that insane.
I always thought he looks more like the generic weatherman on local morning TV shows. He’s got the wardrobe, the ability to read a prompter, and that Lee Press On Hair.
ZC
Oh, be fair, PZ. That balloon animal test is hard!
By the way, there is a small group of hardcore geocentrists within the Roman Catholic Church (although the Vatican prefers to ignore them as an embarrassment) who argue that Church tradition infallibly establishes the earth as the immovable center of the universe. So there! The curious can check out this line of argument here, although it’s rather tedious and a brief sample suffices to give you the sense of the whole. It amounts to quoting scripture and the writings of Church fathers. If those guys never realized that the earth goes around the sun, then how dare we disagree with them.
Pretty convincing, isn’t it?
Satire. Masterfully done satire, though. Look at “Update II:” even Conservepedia, for Maui’s sake, doesn’t say what Sisyphus says it does. And what Brownbackian would ever choose a pen name that has been in a Camus book title?
Or know who Sisyphus or Camus were?
I went to Brownback’s website, and I left nauseated and frightened that this idiot was actually elected to the senate.
I’m pretty sure it’s satire; some of the poster’s responses in the comment section are just a little bit *too* true to the stereotype. But it’s very well done.
I think we should find out.
Start up a web site that supports Brownback. Take an old idea, debunked by hundreds of years of science, and insist that is true and backed by the bible and christian tradition.
How about this one: The female has no role in reproduction except to serve as a vessel. The egg carries no genetic information, or whatever the cretins would call it.
Put it out there and see what happens.
xebecs: child’s play. You just have to make it sound complicated enough that it would take the average Brownback staffer more than 2 seconds to figure it out. Here you go:
Cloning technology, which has moved in the last few years to being a proven science, involves taking an egg, removing its DNA, and injecting a cell of another individual. A baby grows from this union, although there is no egg DNA present, thereby proving that egg DNA is not required for a baby to form. All that is needed to initiate fetal development is the added cell. What is a single sperm? A cell. Ergo, the egg DNA plays no role in the development of the fetus, and it is all dependent on the sperm. QED.
I think xebecs has a great idea. Has anyone registered alchemists4brownback.com? It’d be fun to write about Brownback’s views on spontaneous generation or the homunculus. Or why we should move to the lead standard.
Tyler: If you go look at the fellow on Brownback’s blogcloud with the most recent post “Reasonable Belief,” you’ll find that he’s actually pushing Intelligent Grappling (and yes, four or five layers down you’ll find that I was the one who originally posted IG to talk origins four years ago).
I like the fact that there are ID “purists” who acknowledge that if you believe in a God whose work at the scale of biology is inept and in constant need of tinkering, then it makes no sense to believe in God whose work is perfect and without need of correction at the scale of physics. It shows just how wacky these people really are.
waldteufel (‘forest devil’?):
I went to Brownback’s website, and I left nauseated and frightened that this idiot was actually elected to the senate.
It disturbs me less that there are people like Brownback than it does that there are thousands of people that agree with him and vote for people like him.
About 16 years ago, when I lived in Michigan, there was a guy running for office – I can’t remember if it was for the state legislature or the US House – whose entire platform was that everyone associated with abortion should be publicly executed… Oh, and everything else that is on the Republican platform. That such a person exists is bad enough – the fact that he actually got something like 300 votes chilled me to my core…
Start up a web site that supports Brownback. Take an old idea, debunked by hundreds of years of science, and insist that is true and backed by the bible and christian tradition.
It’s hard to think of an ancient idea that has been debunked that would be passable. Alchemy, perhaps? The sun is actually the wheel of a flying chariot?
Not sure what is more ridiculous than doubting heliocentrism. You pretty much have to claim along with it that everything NASA has ever done is a hoax or something.
Must be a hoax site.
That said if brownback does get nominated, the wing nuts won’t have to worry about border security. I’m going to write to my MP now and ask about planning for a fence for your northern border and the Mexican government will erect a fence so quickly on your sothern one that the USA will be totally secure. The only problem for us is that we’ll have to fence off Alaska too.
While that appears to be a genuinely pro-Brownback site, that post really strikes me as a parody. There’s this line:
That just has to be tongue-in-cheek.
If Brownback is nominated Dave C, can we get that whole emigration thing started?
WANTED
To a good home. Well educated, house broken male, 39 years old. Reads books, agrees that the scientific evidence supports evolution, supports science and education.
Oh, and when given a quote from Revelations (about Flat Earth), he asked for a link to it so he could evaluate it!
Yummy stuff.
I note there isn’t any objection to other accumulated conclusions of modern astronomy, most notably, distances within the Solar System. After all, they cite (only to dismiss) evidence from interplanetary exploration.
Therefore, if everything revolves around the Earth once a day, the most distant objects in the Solar System (e.g., Sedna) would necessarily have a geocentric velocity greater than the velocity of light (and we’re not even talking about stars and galaxies yet)!
Oooooooops.
Oh, well, I predict a simple creationist hand-wave will take care of that. After all, anti-scientific morons would readily accept the rhetorical line that space itself revolves around the Earth at whatever proportional rate their God would need it to, carrying Sedna, Voyager I, II, and all the stars with it, just like warp drive.
Oh, goody, a Star Trek analogy. That’s just gotta be scientific! If science fiction can move at the speed of plot, then why not the Bible? Any and all contortions to keep the literal truth of the Bible intact are acceptable, like defensive adolescents justifying technical virginity at Youth Group.
Or moralistic politicians justifying their own corruption and fraud.
Warp Six, Mr. Sulu!
The US is one of the few countries in the world that hasn’t adopted the metric system, even only formally.
I wouldn’t count on it.
Maybe you’d like to think so, Narc, but I remember being a legislative staffer in Sacramento in the days Jerry Brown was governor. The California Department of Transportation put up some road signs that listed distances in both miles and kilometers. People went nuts. My legislator got angry letters from constituents demanding to know how this could be done without a vote of the people and how terrible (and confusing) the metric system was. I don’t recall any letters or phone calls that actually called it evil, but it was a near thing.
By the way, the metric system’s origin in France during the Enlightenment and its adoption as the standard of measurement by the French revolutionary government cause it to be regarded askance in some circles, since that associates it with ungodliness and revolution. It’s clearly not a system based on God.
The really freaky part is all of the other posts on the site by the same guy. I think that qualifies him as nuts one way or the other!
He did say, “Americans have figured out that Republicans are better at governing, and are flocking to areas of Republican governance. (One need look no further than Kansas or New Orleans to see why.) Soon, the GOP will have complete control over American politics. Then this nation can retain its enjoyment of sensible, moral leadership.”
So hard to tell…
Oh, c’mon, everyone knows the metric system is the tool of the devil. my car gets forty rods to the hogshead and that’s the way i likes it.
/grampa simpson
The heliocentric site is satirical, and very good at it.
You guys stop it!! There is absolutely nothing wrong with feet and miles. If it was good enough for Jesus its good enough for the US of A.
It’s really not that hard for us to imagine that the sun revolves around the Earth. I mean, doesn’t everything revolve around L.A. anyway?
That is, if you take the literal interpretation of Us Weekly.
I think it’s satiric, but it’s hard to say. After all, remember the Warren Chisum/Ben Bridges incident?
http://www.burntorangereport.com/upload/Chisum.pdf
That heloicentric page is only one of very many. I admire people who produce spoofs like this – it is well enough done it really isn’t that obvious, though they sometimes go a bit over the top:
“If you don’t share my religious faith, and feel that defying the Sabbath is the appropriate thing to do, I wanted to make sure that you didn’t feel that I was neglecting to reply to you. Even though you’re sinners now, you may repent yourselves later. I love you all, and I’ll try not to be too judgmental just because you’re foolish enough to tempt your own sin-soaked demise by violating one of the Ten Commandments. We all have our time in the depths. As a former Democrat, I understand that sometimes you can squander years of your life on truly idiotic beliefs.”
There is nothing to absolutely prove it is a spoof – and it is hard to get more extreme than a wierdo (remember the April Fool Egnor?). But if you go on google and check on who links INTO their site – none of the really right wing sites do, so I doubt they are true bretheren or sisteren.
Well, by all means, we cannot elect a man who receives support from nutcases. Instead, lets elect a sane, sound candidate who just talks to the dead.
I cannot believe the morons who fell for this obvious satire. Anyway, how much longer until we get our first female and Spiritualist channeler as commander-in-chief?
Of course, there is always the ever-rational Dennis Kucinich to consider:
“Dennis Kucinich is the first politician to begin communicating that Truth in the political arena. We must let him know that he is not a voice crying in the wilderness. He is a profound force, speaking on behalf of the billions of people evolving on this precious Earth.”
-Patricia Diane Cota-Robles, President of the non-profit educational organization New Age Study of Humanity’s Purpose
“Having met Dennis Kucinich in person, we were astounded by his impeccable balance of spirituality and practicality. Indeed, his voice is manifesting as a reflection of our collective consciousness – revealing that there is a powerful, radiant force of people that believe in the Dream of Peace. Dennis’ authenticity and capability as a caring and visionary human being emanate true compassion and wisdom, and deserve to be supported by all who seek fundamental transformation of the status quo.”
– Robert & Eden Sky, Authors + Publishers of the 13-Moon Natural Time Calendar, North American Representatives of the Planet Art Network, Parents, and concerned citizens of Earth
Yep, those sound-minded liberals and their “practical” candidates….
…are you down with the liberal paradigm?
Mrs. Clinton’s conversations were employing a recognized psychological technique.
It’s similar to something many family therapists have had success with. In the so-called “empty chair technique” one talks to an empty chair as if it were a difficult person in one’s life or one’s past, even (or especially) a deceased one. It’s a way of accessing thoughts and feelings not usually available to the surface consciousness. It is never used by any responsible family therapist to suggest any actual communication with the dead.
None of us can know the actual context of Mrs. Clinton’s work with Houston, but by all accounts it appears to derive from psychology not spiritualism.
A hugs gulf separates the personal self-development technique Mrs. Clinton used and the claims of charlatans who believe they have two-way conversations with the dead. I find it odd that anyone interested in science and truth would suggest otherwise.
The metric system quip is a dead giveaway that it’s satire. Brownback is probably not amused, but he can’t really go after the site without exposing himself to questions he’d rather not answer.
Oh come on MikeC you only attacked two of the democratic candidates. I thought for sure you would go on a run and at least go after Obama. You’re on a roll man. I mean the republican candiates are all so reasonable. No reason to find fault with the evolution deniers, cowtowers to the fundamentalist religion folks (aren’t we fighting a war against fundamentalist religion wackos?) oh and of course, the war hawks.
test
I feel sorry for Brownback that women and not fetuses have the right to vote. Maybe there’s a way that we could poll fetuses in the womb so that they can cheer on his principled pro-life stance. The women might complain- but they usually swing democrat anyway.
This guy’s last name makes me think of spiders, the kind that are agressive and will actually bite you give the chance.
True, tim, but, I think redbacks would make for a better politician than Brownback.
Definitely Satire. It reads like Landview Baptist Church.
The guy does a good job of staying in character, though. Got to hand it to him.
-jcr
If you think this was obviously satire, you just haven’t spent enough time around real crazies. I’ve seen goofier sincerity, though not by much. The metric system comment was a pretty good indicator.
From Brownback’s site: “Today, America has lost a true spiritual leader and a man of great faith…”
I’ve been out of the country for almost two weeks. Did somebody die? *Halo* ;-)
(There’s a funny story connected with this, but be patient, I shall recount all.)
I was sure that the blog was a parody site when I read the first comment – I thought of Jonathan Swift, too – but the replies by Sisyphus (“Who’s Jon Swift?”) are either as straight and dumb as a toilet plunger or drier than a windstorm on Mars. I really can’t decide. Please let it not be a parody! Oh please, oh please…
Tara’s many tussles with HIV deniers brought a gravity denier out of the woodwork.
A gravity denier?
Gingrich is at it again:
LYNCHBURG, VA. — Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich told Liberty University’s graduating class Saturday to honor the spirit of school founder Jerry Falwell by confronting “the growing culture of radical secularism” with Christian ideals.
Gingrich, who is considering a 2008 presidential run, quoted Bible passages to a mournful crowd of about 17,000 packed into the university’s football stadium four days after Falwell’s death.
[…]
“A growing culture of radical secularism declares that the nation cannot profess the truths on which it was founded,” Gingrich said. “We are told that our public schools can no longer invoke the creator, nor proclaim the natural law, nor profess the God-given quality of human rights.
“In hostility to American history, the radical secularists insist that religious belief is inherently divisive and that public debate can only proceed on secular terms,” he said.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-gingrich20may20,1,2587267.story?coll=la-headlines-nation
I have tipped my hat to “Sisyphus” for the best satire since Objective Ministries.
I’ll admit that I was teetering on the brink of believing he was in earnest, until I read his response (#6) to a commenter:
“Attacking vulnerable Copernicanism is a strategy that outflanks the entire secular science establishment (overrunning the Theistic Evolutionist’s position in the process!)”
Did you know that Phil Plait was covering your flank?
I was the one who originally posted IG to talk origins four years ago)
Don’t know Elf, according to Wikipedia, I beat you by four days.
Kristine,
Go and read the bottom paragraph of this comment to Tara’s blog, I found it hard to believe myself.
Kristine, are you back?
MikeC – You think a couple of New Age nutflakes represent all liberals? Why am I even talking to you? I must be a nutflake myself. Put an amethyst on your forehead for 48 hours and you’ll feel better. Trust me.
FWIW, the people I know from Ohio aren’t too keen on Kucinich. These folks are liberals, too.
That gravity-denier was pretty interesting. Hep-C was invented to fill a gap in the HIV/AIDS paradigm? Wow.
“Gravity denier?”
There is no gravity, Earth sucks.
Though if you follow out the logical implication of one provisio of Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity…
Wow! maybe we can help him out with the flat earth evidence.. http://www.bitbutter.com/16/geocentrism-yes-flat-earth-maybe/
Oh, c’mon, everyone knows the metric system is the tool of the devil. my car gets forty rods to the hogshead and that’s the way i likes it.
/grampa simpson
By my reckoning that’s one eighth of a mile on 52.5 gallons – and Imperial gallons at that! What make of SUV does he drive?
So what’s a force for which there is no energy source? Answer: A non-existing force.
My, oh my. I thought that gravity was a distortion by matter of space-time. Naive me. ;-)
Kseniya, I am back! And Jerry Falwell ain’t.
The description of evolution was actually reasonable..none of the creationist nonsense about tornados in junkyards….so I’m inclined to believe that post is a joke.
#4: I’m amazed. So many Bible quotes that support geocentrism, and yet the good man ignores all the quotes that say the Earth is flat (linked to from #48).
Also ignored are the four verses that say the Earth has four corners (also linked to from #48) — hey, it could be a tetrahedron…
#4: I’m amazed. So many Bible quotes that support geocentrism, and yet the good man ignores all the quotes that say the Earth is flat (linked to from #48).
Also ignored are the four verses that say the Earth has four corners (also linked to from #48) — hey, it could be a tetrahedron…
Oops, sorry. He does mention a lot of “pillars” and “foundations”. Apparently these are somehow metaphorical or something.
Oops, sorry. He does mention a lot of “pillars” and “foundations”. Apparently these are somehow metaphorical or something.
“A gravity denier? ”
There is no gravity. It’s Intelligent Falling.