Monday, February 18, 2008

Fundamentalism at its finest


The video, taken during the recent evolution hearings in Florida, speaks for itself. Stay with his story 'til the end. It's pretty funny.

This post, like the two below, addresses the issue of epistemology. Is reality malleable?

9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Is reality malleable, no but that dudes puddin' head sure is...wow
Flo

Anonymous said...

oh my. this is the willful ignorance susan jacoby was talking about this friday on bill moyers. not unrelated to the willful ignorance, pathology style, joseph describes below (also my looong comment).

as for reality being malleable, if my excursions into epistemology have left me with anything at all, it's the strong sense that it actually is. but that fact does not relieve us of our duty to be truthful.

the more truthful each of us can be, the more our experience expresses a fidelity to each and all of us, which is of course the most harmonious 'reality' there is.

and on that platitudinous note, i'll go back to trying to figure out just what the hell this poor guy was trying to say with his turkey shit analogy.

Anonymous said...

That orange isn't the first cousin of anyone's pet, unless that pet is another variety of orange.

Way back in time, 2.1 billion years ago, give or take 1/2 billion depending on whom you talk to, the first common ancestor of oranges and poodles (to select a pet) emerged on the Earth. It was a proto-eukaryote. Eventually (forgive me for not knowing when), there were 2 distinct surviving types of proto-eukaryotes. One was a cell with 1 "tail" (flagellum) which we call unikonta. Animals (including poodles and dummies at Florida education meetings) are descended from them. The other type was the bikonta, cells with 2 "tails." Plants such as oranges are descended from them.

1st cousin? No. We are 1 zillionth cousins 1 zillion times removed.

Puddin' head. Yes. However, pointing out that he's just as related to oranges as poodles are is being rude to the oranges.

.R.S.E.

Anonymous said...

yes Joseph, I did like the part where he was calling the people from the Dept. of Education some kind of hybrid turkey/maggot life form.
I got it.
Hillbilly humor, my old dear departed Grandpa (b 1893)was a pro at it.
Flo

AitchD said...

My niece is up from Gainesville to train on some new software (she's a geek at a hospice care facility) here in NC, but since her employer is paying, she didn't drive, so I get no Minneola tangeloes this year. The impossible citrus fruit only grows in January and February.

If you've had a Minneola tangelo, you've drunk the sweetest Darwinism Juice on Earth. If Rick Santorum or that schmohawk in the video knew about tangeloes, they'd try to outlaw them because a tangelo is a hybrid citrus, part grapefruit and part tangerine, while a tangerine is a hybrid of an orange and a nectarine. It's manifest Darwinism with some inevitable miscegenation and incest. Probably beastiality too if the bee colonies don't collapse again. Anita Bryant, too, if you remember.

Anonymous said...

Oh, yeah. Here's another fine example of high-minded "christian" values:

http://blog.beliefnet.com/jwalking/2008/02/benny-hinn-in-uganda.html

Anonymous said...

Tangerines are not hybrids (cultivars) of anything. The name comes from Tangier (Morroco) and has nothing to do with nectarines which would be impossible to cross with citrus. The guy in the video appears to be a human-turnip cultivar. I would have thought that impossible too, but apparently not.

Anonymous said...

Ah, yes, the truths of the universe according to Foghorn Leghorn. There's real government waste: listening to that guy talk for two minutes and say not two wits.

AitchD said...

Thx, EricJ for the correction plus. Literal "willful ignorance" on my part. I didn't make the absurdity up or dream it, someone told me, someone I trusted for irrational reasons. Probably my older sister (who also told me that veal is 'unborn calf', but I ignored that definition).