Wednesday, August 17, 2011

In A World Gone Upside Down...

Hey their, kids! Enigma's got two brilliant pieces of work for you today, so just set back and enjoy the commentary and dissection of the incoming stupidity.



The first comes to us from the Liberty Council. Now, if there was ever an Orwellian named organization outside of the "Discovery" Institute, or the American Civil Defense League, or the Minute Men/Teabaggers, it's these guys. I'm not entirely sure what they do, but it seems to me that they spend a great deal of time whining and bitching about stuff they don't understand for sure.

According to these guys, the APA is a pseudo-scientific organization.

Yes, that APA. The American Psychiatric Association. Them. The APA. The APA that defined the APA style that you often have to cite research papers in (unless your school uses Chicago style or, more rarely, MLA style). Pseudo-scientific. And they're pseudo-scientific because...
Staver: You know, we’ve known for many years about the APA’s liberal background and their bent since 1973, but this 157-0 vote [backing marriage equality] shows that it is clearly a political organization that is hopelessly embroiled in politics and not in science.
So there you have. The APA is hopelessly embroiled in politics because they said something that I disagree with. And Staver is a man who knows all about science. See, SCIENCE happens when you start with a conclusion and then work backwards, throwing out facts that don't match what you want your conclusion to be. This is how the Right does SCIENCE to things all the time. Because the APA, the people who publish the DSM-IV, who handle almost all of the psychiatric research and clinical psychiatric research in the country, wouldn't know science. Of course, Staver isn't the only one who's said something this stupid:
For example, when the journal Pediatrics found that children with same-sex parents “were psychologically well-adjusted and had fewer behavioral problems than their peers,” then-president of Concerned Women for America Wendy Wright said that the study must be wrong simply because their finding “just defies common sense and reality.”
It says something I don't like it too, therefore, it's not real.

Lady, let me blow your mind. We know quantum physics is real. We've seen the particles. Did you know that just observing something can alter it's state? That you can know the direction something is going, or where it is, but not both at the same time? Did you know that two different things can interact with each other on different sides of the goddamn universe without disturbing anything in between? How about this: if I go at light speed and orbit the galaxy and come back, I will have aged less than if I'd just stayed at home. In fact, if I set two clocks - my house clock and my wrist watch clock - and go for a walk, when I come back, my two clocks will be slightly out of sync with each other. I could become immoral if I could achieve the speed of light. Oh, and what about this one: Gravity is the weakest of the four nuclear forces? Gravity's cause is unknown, and there's more black holes in the theory of gravity than there are in the theory of evolution.

Things that define common sense are reality.

She's just made because the journal for Pediatrics is proving her wrong, and she's got nothing to back her up, so she's resorting to the old "common sense and reality" card - like she'd know what either of those things mean.

Oh, and speaking of things that exist outside of reality and defy common sense, this next piece comes to us courtesy of Gingrich that Stole Christmas:
“The concept of family being between man and woman and the concept of all these core values that grow out of 3,000 years of Judeo-Christian tradition,” Gingrich answered. “This is a direct threat to the entire secular world.”
“We're becoming increasingly secular, the family is under attack and economically we're experiencing woes like we've never known in our history it seems. So what is the connection here?” Limandri asked.
“You have to recognize that free enterprise is based on free people and … free people are based on faith,” Gingrich replied. “The very basis of our belief and freedom is that we believe we are endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights. The very source of our strength is that we believe these are truths – not theories, not ideologies, not gimmicks, not political consultants, powerpoints – truths, and so there's a core absolute overlap between free enterprise, freedom and freedom of faith. And if you don't have freedom of faith in the end you're not going to have free enterprise because there's no moral force that defends and protects you.”
That's right. Gay marriage is the cause for our current economic woes. The concept of the family grows out of this Mysterious JudeoChristian religion, that the Right likes to cite a whole lot, despite having existed long before that with the Sumerians, and the Greeks, and the Egyptians, and the like...

The family is under attack! King Henry the IV legalized divorce and... oh, wait.

Hasn't Gingrich been divorced before? Multiple times? Didn't he serve his wife with the divorce papers while she was in a hospital bed?

Remember kids. To talk about Family Values, you have to not give a flying flip about your own family. Hypocrisy helps. To quote my friend Starsinger: It's better to be a hypocrite than a heretic. Gingrich invokes that rather stupendously.

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