why do i hate that artist thing that people keep posting on my facebook so much? why am i such a jerk?

if anything i blame a plethora of shitty pop science publishing, right up there with Tragic Life Stories on the train station book shop pile

It's weird that "loving science" has become some kind of geek badge of honour. I also blame The Big Bang Theory.

see i blame that for not being very funny and for being on 24/7

that too, also weird geek wish fulfilment.

gonna go out and boss some amoebas later, who's with me?

that's it, show them who's higher up the evolutionary ladder my saaahn!

I don't understand the point of that macro, it basically seems to try to use science as a guilttrip. What does it entail to act like the result of "evolutionary success"? Does creating hideous pictures of useless text have something to do with it? Is it simply a call for everyone to around planting their seed and killing predators?
Gonna go to the museum and lord it over some dodo bones now. "Y'see birdie, what you should've done is grow some opposable thumbs, like I did a heap of generations ago. That shit's really practical."

grass is the result of x billion years of evolutionary success iirc

I think you've already thought about the content of the message more than the author did before they foisted it upon the interwebs, which is the main problem with the JPG.

only if you consider that authorial intent is the sole metric to contemplate Facebook memes by

well yea I'm probably giving this person more credit than they deserve

It's weird that "loving science" has become some kind of geek badge of honour. I also blame The Big Bang Theory.

― Neil S, Wednesday, 16 January 2013 10:35 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

see i blame that for not being very funny and for being on 24/7

― non-elitist melted poo (Noodle Vague), Wednesday, 16 January 2013 10:36 Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

My son watches that all the time and wears t-shirts with things like "I am not a geek I am a level nine warlord" yet doesn't like role playing games and isn't particularly interested in science. BBT has made him aspire to be a geek without actually learning stuff.

He reads comic books. I suppose that counts.

tbf, he's geeking out about a television show

I want to attribute some quotes to "The Marley Lama"

Christ. I just had a 'conversation' with a Truther who was pulling CaptainLorax-isms all over a friend's page (a friend who is a journalist, I might add, that was sharing a colleague's very sad story). and..I've just never felt this pessimistic about humans, before. Pre-internet and early internet days, these types of people were no less omnipresent, but you could ignore them easier because you weren't splattered with their BS. But even in the age of social media, most of these dudes I was coming across were trolls on Fan pages. Now I'm seeing it crop up with people on my friends list, or friends of friends.

It just makes me sad, not only as someone who values logic, but predominately because of what an insult it is to the grieving families to be told that their children aren't really dead. I really hope all of these families aren't seeing this shit because that's just fucked.

I realize it's only a fraction of the population, but, man. Fortunately, if I see it on any friends pages, I am trading them off my Madden team deleting them immediately

i think folks like that have been on a FB-specific tear recently: FB itself recently banned(?) infowars and naturalnews

News Trolls.

these people are so dumb and sad and oblivious i try not to be too mad at them

but yeah what a horrible hobby

I'm just not used to it cropping up with people that I either know IRL or are connected to them. This girl I met recently at a wedding, who'd just posted a pretty intelligent comment on gender constructs hours earlier, posts the video LEGITIMATELY asking "what do you think" (uhm, that it's retarded), only to get a reply of "makes you think" from their friends.

here's a rundown of it from inside the paranoidosphere (imo)

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2012/12/facebook-purges-political-activists.html

(fwiw barry ritholz reruns washingtonsblog shit all the time, wtf is with that)

already got the "Snopes is invalid" argument from that troll, too. There's a few angles they play, either that they're in the pockets of Liberals, or the new one, which is that they're "only a husband and wife team with no investigative experience". It's great circular reasoning. I feel like playing that one clip from the psychologist in Terminator to them....except he turned out to be real so fuck that.

It's interesting to imagine that the gov't is powerful and coordinated enough to orchestrate this sweeping conspiracy through coordinating the actions of hundreds of thousands of public and private citizens, yet is unable to simply delete your conspiracy post on Facebook.

barry ritholz is kinda dumb

sometimes he posts good links tho

quick, someone post another un-truther related stupid JPG you saw today so I can forget about this crap.

There must be a deluge of Community memes today, right?

its really kind of amazing how big this conspiracy shit has gotten, its got to have a hold to some extent on like a third of the country

I would like to point out that every single living organism on earth is as much the product of "3.8 billion years of evolutionary success" as I am. So, if I lay my eggs under your skin, and they hatch, travel through the bloodstream to your brain and begin to eat it, I don't want to hear any complaining.

http://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1314902446p5/545.jpg

“Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo---which, given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and everything that wasn't a stupendous badass was dead.”

- Neal Stephenson

If anything, sea turtles should have greater bragging rights because they had things right all along

i remember the first time a friend of mine brought this conspiracy shit up like it was a real thing, we were in a mexican restaurant in ft collins and and elderly man there with his wife asked me to stop yelling and swearing

If there's one thing science and religious evangelists can both agree on, it's that the human race is special and the pinnacle of creation! Go us!

Pre-internet and early internet days, these types of people were no less omnipresent, but you could ignore them easier because you weren't splattered with their BS.

unfortunately the internet has allowed ppl like this to construct meaningful-looking quote macros that, just for a second, make other ppl "think"

the only conspiracy nut i ever met was the husband of my old p0t dealer. he would literally scream and rave about all the people who wanted to 'take him down', and every day of his life was like a battle against all the scumbags of the world who had it out for him. he was also a proud rifle owner. he's all about Alex Jones now on FB, and is a truly frightening person.

imho these fuckers were way less omnipresent pre internet, internet has lead to a real flowering of this shit

It's been said before, but one huge downside of the Internet is that it has made it really easy for people whose views are alarming and dangerous to civil society to find each other, form communities, and convince themselves they are part of a movement rather than the isolated cranks they would be in the olden days. Granted, there were newsletters and other means to stay in touch with the larger kook network, but now, if you keep your head down at work and just soldier on til 5 PM, your entire social world can effectively consist of people on the lunatic fringe, who amplify, reinforce and radicalize your nascent nuttiness.

Which is all true of ILX too, I guess, but the collective project here is at least marginally more valuable to human existence.

thing is i dont think conspiracy nutterism can really be considered fringe anymore, thx to the 'net

Yeah the net has become this incredibly powerful tool for genuine fringe lunatics to rope in much larger numbers of mere stupid assholes.

i feel like yeah pre-net if you were 'alone' in your stupid beliefs you might eventually get over them, but the net only exacerbates them. of course on the flipside pre-net i'm sure a lot of marginalized folks like gay kids in small conservative communities etc didn't find others like them too.

in theory a lot of stuff is more easily disproven w/ the internet too, so I think the odds of someone moderately intelligent believing in fringe stuff goes down at the same time

the net is the best overall imho but it has some unfortunate side effects

The net and computers also allow ordinary jackasses to make much slicker propaganda. It used to be that conspiracy theories were mostly printed on bizarre-looking, badly xeroxed leaflets handed out by a bugeyed guy in Washington Square Park. Now you get well-edited youtube videos.

i think the mind of the conspiracy theorist readily dismisses enough hard evidence in favor of vaporous fantasies that i'm not sure even coherently disproving stupid notions will have any effect on a lot of them.

youtube particularly was huge for conspiracies, they like to communicate through videos, those prosumer production values convey legitimacy, loose change brought a lot of people into the fold

the odds of someone moderately intelligent believing in fringe stuff goes down at the same time

the internet has done some things to change my idea of what "intelligent" can mean

there are many types of intelligence!

Woah did all those people really get suddenly deactivated?! I don't think that's a good idea to just shut down dissent like that even if it is annoying and insensitive. And some of those people, like Amber Lyon, are actual journalists covering stuff like police crack-downs on Occupy groups and stuff and not just talk radio kooks. Makes FB look pretty bad IMO shutting down the pages of people who cover actual abuses of power from the government and not just theoretical moonbat ones.

i think you guys are underestimating how easily and widely distributed fringe stuff was in the pre-'net days. behold a pale horse was a bestseller