I prefer all of them to loony flat earth trash.
Candace Owens tries so hard to make women who read silly romance novels sound stupid, while she pretends to be an intellectual.
Can you guys imagine being married to me? My my poor husband, he rolls over, he’s like, what are you reading? And I feel like a regular wife says something, I don’t know, maybe a love series. Nora Roberts sweeping her away. Me, on the other hand — he rolled over, he asked me and I said, oh, I’m reading a flat earth theory. And it dawned into an entire conversation. He’s like, why are you reading a flat earth theory? And I’m like, because somebody messaged me on Monect about it, and they included some links, and I’m just reading them. I don’t know. I’m just an interested person no matter what. If there’s a bunch of people that believe something, I now want to know what it is that they believe. And, of course, he pushed me on this, and he was talking about the earth curvature and science. And I said to him, listen. I’m not a flat earther. I’m not a round earther. Actually, what I am is I am somebody who has left the cult of science. I have left the megachurch of science because what I have now realized is that science, what it is actually, if you think about it, is a pagan faith.
Sorry, lady, you were never a member of that “megachurch”. Witness the fact that you are bragging about taking flat earth theory seriously.
Who remembers when lots of conservatives were reliable supporters of science and engineering, and called liberals “moonbats” for their crazy hippie ideas? What happened to them, anyway? Are they all dead?
Also, I cannot imagine being married to Candace Owens. My wife has to be intelligent and not a gullible, bigoted buffoon who makes excuses for Nazis.
Her poos husband, indeed. The “cult of science”. Fuck’s sake
just like with ayaan hirsi ali, it was always easy to see where candace would end up.
a few years ago, a patheos evangelical blogger pointed me to ms owens as an “exciting new black thinker”. apparently, she was the harbinger of a mass african-american exodus from the democrats. i guess the lure of the round-earth dogma was too deeply embedded though?
*i guess the round earth dogma was too deeply embedded, not “the lure of round-earth dogma”. sorry to sound like an idiot there.
If she’s discarding science, you have to wonder what theory of epistemology she’s bothering to follow, if any.
Is she just abandoning the idea that you can model reality accurately?
Dignifying flat earth garbage with the word “theory” is s new one on me.
@PZ Meyers
lets not be too quick to judge here. this weekend, i told my wife that i couldnt mow the lawn because a ufo was outside and i would be kidnapped and sent to neptune if i left the house. she told me that if i didnt get the lawn mowed, i would be sleeping on it that night.
if i had been married to candace owens, i’d have had a much better chance at an extra hour of leisure!
To their credit, the flat earth believers have produced some ‘so bad they are good’ documentaries.
Not quite as fun as ‘the alien anductors are really demons masquerading as extra-terrestrials’ crowd however.
I had to google Candance Owens. In my defence she is not likely to get a phone call from Stockholm next Nobel season.
If you want to go for a wild ride, check out the far-right South Korean Happy Science cult.
Unlike Candace Owens they even produce animes with their messages.
This is pure Post Modernism.
Almost everyone discarded Post Modernism because it failed. It doesn’t work in the real world.
Close.
Candace Owens is discarding the idea that there is even a reality.
She is also discarding the idea that it is important to understand reality.
I’m not sure what you call this. Solipsism maybe.
I would just call it being really stupid and pointless.
I was about to suggest that Owens needed to do or say something really dumb to hold her status as a black-accepted-by-right-wingers … until I realized that whites-accepted-by-right-wingers have to degrade themselves in exactly the same way.
She has left the cult of understanding the real world.
Science isn’t a cult or a faith.
It is how we understand the real world.
It’s also the basis of our modern society.
Science has taken us from the stone age to the space age.
PS: Candace Owens just lies to get money from right wingnuts. She is just a scammer.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, she was a loud antivaxxer. Her name was usually spelled Candeath Owens. Some of the people who listened to her ended up dead, dying from a preventable viral disease.
“And I said to him, listen. I’m not a flat earther. I’m not a round earther. Actually, what I am is I am somebody who has left the cult of science. I have left the megachurch of science because what I have now realized is that science, what it is actually, if you think about it, is a pagan faith.”
It seems to have elements of “bothsideism” from a right-wing perspective. There is a dislike of how science findings are incompatible with right-wing assertions (that she would have to take seriously), but she has nothing for an other side but to act like science is a cult.
My understanding is that the Cold War ended and suddenly there was no longer a need to prove that we were smarter than the Soviets. So they went back to hating public education and trying to defund it.
Sat what, now? There was a time that conservatives supported science and engineering? I must have missed it. (More likely, I was in the lower grades of elementary school and not paying attention to the wider world.)
She’s rejecting science as an authority because it too often comes to conclusions that she politically and religious rejects. i.e My faith/ideology says the scientific community is wrong about X. If the scientists are wrong about X, then what else are they wrong about?
That, or she knows that defiance toward the “leftist academic elites” sells among the MAGA-hat wearing chuds who resent scientists telling them their pick-up truck is destroying the planet, they better get vaccinated, and that
they are related to black peoplethey evolved from apes.They supported “applied” sciences, and usually only for projects that made someone rich or the military. They didn’t care for the those theoretical fields, because they were profitable or came to uncomfortable conclusions about the godless, purposeless reality in which we live.
Meanwhile, the New Age lions are either joining the fascists, or supporting Jill Stein. Pretty much the same thing, I know.
Siiiigh… I miss this. Back when we could all agree on bashing some religious or pseudoscience loon rather than bickering with each other over leftist strategy and goals.
“cult” also distracts from efforts to point out where the cult behavior is. If it’s a threatening concept being pointed at them any opportunity to take it rhetorically…
Of course that’s a general human thing and you have to be correct for it to work (ideally, if society isn’t too gossip dependent). That’s partly why I took SJW long term in my name. They couldn’t do anything about it, it was just whining.
Yeah, they supported applied science and millitary applications, but at least that was something.
Since when is the shape of the Earth a theoretical field?
Maybe I should collect their new insults in similar fashion…how to make it not ridiculously long though?
Since when is the shape of the Earth a theoretical field?
It’d be pretty funny if they succeeded in packing the Lockheed Martin engineering dept with a bunch of these dummies though. Imagine them all sitting there with their slide rules trying to compute ICBM trajectories on a flat Earth.
Maybe not funny “ha ha” though. Is un-aimed thermonuclear fire better or worse than the aimed sort? I’m not sure.
@ 23
Let’s find out!!! (Hits “Launch” button) BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!😉
PZ Myers @ # 21: Since when is the shape of the Earth a theoretical field?
Since whenever anyone tries to figure it out to a higher precision than the available data.
Do you want our oblate fractal spheroid mapped to the nearest mountain, meter, or molecule?
I’m in the middle of The Majority Report segment where they interview author John Ganz who recently published When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s. I lived through that era and both didn’t pay enough attention then and have forgotten quite a bit. I do recall Pat Buchanan primarying Bush Sr. as he was seen as a centrist Rockefeller Trilateral RINO at the time. He had signed some Civil Rights legislation (“quotas”?) that had Buchanan irked. Maybe, for all his flaws, Bush Sr was the last traditional Republican president. He famously mocked voodoo economics and reneged on “no new taxes”. The GOP started slowly shifting to clown car politics soon after via Gingrich’s Contract on America and via the influence of now room temperature Rush Limbaugh (piss be upon him).
Candace Owens is a current morphed reflection of that radical conservatism getting mutated to the point I wonder if it’s still conservatism or a zany off the rails populism that would make Ross Perot himself retch. People like George Will, Bill Kristol, and Liz Cheney represent shades of center-right conservatism and have each balked at where things are going with the MAGA cult.
In an alternate history, if Jeb happened to beat Hillary in Bush v Clinton 2.0 we would be lamenting things he would have done as POTUS but would be completely oblivious to the likely much worse MAGA-verse and its ousting of disloyal RINOs like Jeb.
After reading Avi Shlaim’s collection of essays Israel and Palestine:
Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations which is more a long arc set of ‘in the moment’ book reviews than a comprehensive book in itself, I get the impression of Bush Sr and his Secretary of State James Baker as being somewhat tougher on Israel than many recent presidents. Baker may have been mildly Arabist in outlook (because oil). Not sure how to read Bill Clinton overall in comparison. Far more should have been done to impose a two state solution back then.
I parts of that The Majority Report they unpack the political “facelift” of David Duke and how Bush Sr et al tried to distance themselves from that sort of regressive knuckledragging overt racism that reemerged in Charlottesville.
Of course the racialized subtexts were more subtle with Bush Sr. Ahem Willie Horton. Southern “New Dem” Clinton raised him the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, the infamous Stone Mountain photo op, and the “superpredator” crime bill. Triangulation.
Given those optics I could see some subset of black people getting antsy and wanting to bolt the Democratic coalition. The “plantation” rhetoric of Owens seems a bit unhinged though. Going from southern conservative “New Dems” posing with saxes on Arsenio to MAGA seems frying pan to fire.
Pierce,
You don’t think it’s dynamic and therefore transient?
(It would need to be a live map to be accurate, obs)
@ 27
Remember Sister Souljah?
Ganz drops the f-bomb as a term for the combo of mob street violence and electoral politics. Before SCOTUS Red Caesared us in its recent POTUS immunity decision I was hesitant to apply that word to what we are witnessing emerge with possible Trump 2.0 and Project 2025. It’s here. I expected more at least from Roberts.
Authoritarianism+ = Fascism
Fork → Done
@30 Akira MacKenzie
Yeah her too.
I was more into Consolidated so was kinda familiar with the edgier Paris and his extremely subversive Guerrillas in the Mist. Made Public Enemy look mild.
I must say I didn’t process this fully at the time:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sister_Souljah_moment
Sure she said some over the top stuff at the time of the riots. I instead was digging the heavy metal sounds of Ice T. No song that I know of then generated the “thin blue line” meltdown of “Cop Killer”. I’m glad my neglected CD collection retains a semblance of alphabetical organization. I just checked and I still own the original Body Count CD before that song was purged. Ice T had me with “6 in the Mornin’”. Free speech!
Maybe she read the “World of Tiers” SF series by Philip José Farmer as a young girl and somehow got imprinted with the concept of flat discs?
[ahem]
And Bellers. Ahem. Oh yeah, Amerindians.
Oh yeah, and of course Riverworld.
But, yes.
Paul Janus Finnegan/Kickaha, the equivalent of the Moorcock’s Eternal Hero, the equivalent of the Childe Cycle by Gordon Dickson, and so forth.
(About https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Feast_Unknown and suchlike, we shall not speak)
[content warning]
Well, ta. Got me started now.
In one of his stories, Tarzan was forced to irrumate [that exceeds fellation and has other connotations] an antagonist that got the better of him.
This, after Tarzan had (in manners and ways and attitudes exceeding mere Olympic athletes and with utter pragmatism) survived odds that would be impossible for lesser people.
IIRC, and no, I am not gonna try to look it up, he pointed out that the, ahem, defecations of puny hervibores had roughage and base carbs, but that the like from carnivores had undigested protein and fats.
Grist to the mill, but for lesser people, perhaps unpleasant in terms of palatability.
…
Where am I? Oh, right.
As someone familiar with his corpus, I assure you Tarzan duly gets his revenge and more.
And the point? Dunno…
Ah, right.
PJF was writing psychosexual stuff back in the day.
Anyone interested, check out his Doc Savage stories.
—
… or so I’ve heard. Ahem.
[I’ve read the original Tarzan, BTW. PJF is just more, well… more]
i like watching flat earth take down videos. there are several good channels out there.
it is hilarious what flat earthers can come up with to explain what they perceive.
even better when an experiment of theirs is consistent with the earth being a globe.
cognitive dissonance FTW!
I’ve linked to this so many times over the years… Oh, damn, it’s 404ing. Well, it’s in the web archive.
The Relativity of Wrong
Isaac Asimov: