Twitter is bad because it is full of hate and lies, but TikTok is bad because it is full of stupid. I can’t engage with either of them, but occasionally the folly leaks through.
DNA contains sulfur, and is made up of 24 strands, and you can “activate” it, whatever that means, by making silly noises? These smiling happy people have had their brains pithed at some point.
So, I take it you won’t be accepting the TIKTOK “Don’t poop for a month” challenge?
The what??!?
I miss the days when all we had was cable access TV and letters to the editor with lengthy, bizarre conspiracy theories that had to be photocopied and individually mailed to multiple newspapers and never made it past the mailroom.
The Internet ruined everything.
In order to pith their brains — they need to have brains to pith.
These people are redundant.
christoph @#1
I had a clerical assistant who admitted she only shit once a fortnight, I thought that was bad enough!
@PZ, # 2 (ironically?): It was a TikTok challenge, but I’m not sure it was a joke or a real one. I’m not competitive enough to take it up.
@Jazzlet, # 5: She may have had motility problems. There are pills for that.
I’ve commented on this before. PZ’s article just reinforces it. Other than ‘keeping in touch with the grandkids’ (with spyware watching your every keystroke), Social Media is TOXIC.
What is more scary, an article I read yesterday (digby?) said 30% of people in this deteriorating society get their news from tiktok!
Huh. An REM song reference! Nice.
YouTube tried to match it with their shorts.
(More noise one has to avoid)
Angels being religious fantasies, a couple Asimov quotes seems appropriate:
“It is religion that recruits their squadrons. Tens of millions of Americans, who neither know nor understand the actual arguments for or even against evolution*, march in the army of the night with their Bibles held high. And they are a strong and frightening force, impervious to, and immunized against, the feeble lance of mere reason.” — Isaac Asimov
“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.” — Isaac Asimov
*Substitute “anything rational” in place of “evolution”, and the end result remains the same. These pathetic loons reject reality in favor of their ridiculous fantasies, because reality is simply WAY TOO SCARY for them to ever cope. Willful ignorance leads directly to that end.
I dunno, that the women were largely given the role of actually looking “stupid” and speaking glossolalic gibberish, while the men were only shown declaring nonsense, made me feel the video was culturally weighted against the one, more than it was the other. It didn’t help when the presenter then made a joke at the expense of his wife.
What do I know? Very little I’m sure, but that was first impression I received upon watching, making me flinch instead.
In the news: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/ahead-midterms-republicans-confront-cooling-support-young-men-over-trump-2026-03-09/
@13 John showed us a headline: RNC FOLLOWS TRUMP TO TIKTOK
I reply, and they are being grabbed by the nose and lead down the path to pervasive ignorance.
@8 shermanj
I have no love for TikTok, but as news sources go there’s far worse with comparable reach. There’s plenty of rank idiocy there, there’s plenty of right wing nutjobs, but it’s not monolithically that which makes it a hell of a lot better than the likes of Fox News (also at roughly 30%), let alone the likes of Infowars, conservative talk radio, OAN, etc. Hell, even PZ’s excerpt here isn’t any worse than Bill Reilly’s infamous “tides go in, tides go out, you can’t explain that”.
I got about 20 seconds in before I had to stop.
According to Exodus 34:14, God’s name is “Jealous.” (KJV).
Neither DNA (AGTC) nor proteins (ARNDCEQGHILKMFPSTWYV) contains all the necessary letters to spell “Jealous.”
Reginald Selkirk@16–
Apparently the Hebrew word qanna has differently nuanced meanings (Young’s Literal Translation uses “Zealous” instead of “Jealous”, for instance).
There’s a Wikisource project dedicated to translating the Bible as literally as possible from original sources. According to that, the English translation of Exodus 34:14 is “Because you will not bow down to another god, because Yahweh is jealous of his name, he is a jealous god.”
Not knowing any Hebrew, I am in no position to judge the accuracy of the translation, but “jealous of his name” makes more sense to me than “Jealous is his name.”
Meh. Proper names for the deity were not a thing in those writings, unlike in the English tranlations.
Names/titles/aspects is what it is. A descriptor.
e.g.
(https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus%206%3A3&version=NOG)
@17 chrislawson
If this being cannot choose a name which translates properly into all human languages, it does not deserve to be called “God.” Same if He/She/It cannot raise up the proper translators. Omniscience and omnipotence ain’t what they used to be. Their God is as puny as the very human and imperfect excuses they continually offer for it.
Deciding “this is what makes sense to me, therefore it must be what God said” is pretty much the definition of blasphemy.
Jesus is like my Scanning Electron Microscope
by Mark H. Armitage M.S. ED.S.
Armitage has truly milked his Masters degree from ICR, and his status as a PhD candidate at Liberty University, to launch his science career into an even deeper pit.
@20: The reviews on that page are worth reading for the lulz. Especially the second one ;-).
@8 shermanj
I saw a study recently that 92.7% of the statistics you see on the Internet are completely fabricated.