An email from PJTV:
Don’t Talk To (Alien) Strangers: Stephen Hawking Warns Our Naive Scientists
Just like our own scientists, aliens must be peaceful geniuses, too…right? Famed astrophysicist Stephen Hawking says not so fast. The Trifecta crew discusses why this typical liberal viewpoint could get us in trouble – not just with the space aliens, but right here on earth.
Who knew that the typical liberal viewpoint was that aliens were dangerous! I must be behind on my talking points from George Soros.
Watch this and please tell me it is actually a sketch comedy from SNL.
Panurge
I think they mean that the “typical liberal viewpoint” is that aliens are Enlightened Beings Sent Here To Help Us, which TBH makes sense in a superficial way. Apparently this doesn’t jibe with the right-wing “shoot first” attitude.
tbogg
Bill Whittle creeps me out more that the scary clown under my bed. As for Stephen Green: he’s a less violent, more douchey Patrick Bateman.
Rosali
Did God create the aliens or did they evolve somehow?
Violet
@Panurge: If that’s true, then that must mean that Stephen Hawking is a conservative. But, but… in the health care debate he made it clear he was grateful for the British National Health Service after the wingers tried to claim he’d be dead if he had to use nationalized health care.
I’m confused.
Bill E Pilgrim
Okay so with the caveat that listening to those people is liking visiting aliens on another planet, I think actually they’re saying the opposite. That some right wing scientist said the same thing and was made fun of, and this is because all the other scientists are liberals, and that it’s the liberals who assume that all aliens out there will be nice and gentle.
Sort of an extension of the “soft on terror” idea, you know.
I assume the next step is a call for a prememptive invasion of the universe, just in case. That should keep the Haliburton in HAL for some time to come.
gbear
I would watch that, but then I’d have to kill myself.
JC
They talked about Flubber and re-animating zombies where as they could have talked about our nuclear scientists, the atomic bomb, and such.
I’m not sure who they are trying to joke with or make fun of cause conservatives are never funny, but it does seem to be a skit. It’s just too over the top to use a flubber reference as proof our scientists are evil.
Walker
I cannot find the post, but didn’t DougJ post about this last Sunday?
Besides we all know that aliens need our organic material to melt us into giant squid-like starships.
El Cid
So, New Agers and alien-visitation nuts are now “liberals”?
jake the snake
@El Cid:
Anything that they don’t like is by default liberal.
Panurge
@El Cid:
Well, “New Agers and alien-visitation nuts” are pretty much the first people right-wingers think of when they hear the word “liberal” (except maybe for hippies, but then there seems to be lots of overlap there, anyway).
Ella in NM
Stephen Hawkings obviously been listening to George Noory on Coast to Coast WAY too much.
wrb
If aliens see that this planet is crispy cream
Linda Featheringill
Spoof, spoof, spoofity spoof.
But cute, anyway.
Hawkins has a point in that maybe we should not open the door and invite alien species onto Earth until we have studied the would-be visitors a bit. They might be contaminated with bacteria we have no defense against or something like that.
Still, I am not going to worry my pretty little head about aliens until we find some. [And then I shall become wise and deep and profound and honored among my own kind.]
licensed to kill time
__
Tell me that doesn’t sound like BJ’ers trying to translate wingnut.
“Don’t run! We are your friends!” /Mars Attacks
Jay in Oregon
I think El Cid nailed it; “liberal” is the new “gay” (as in, “don’t be gay”, the epithet most used by idiots on XBox Live…)
kdaug
Cole’s recommendation credibility -5
Seriously, I’ll never get those 10 minutes back.
Thanks a lot, John.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
Space aliens are coming to take our jobs, drink all of our booze and terrorize us by driving fast on our highways and using up all the toliet paper in the public restrooms. The only possible response is for Arizona to pass a law giving the police both the authority and the obligation to perform DNA field testing if they have reasonable suspicion that anyone they encounter may not be human.
Lawful contact x Close encounters of the third kind = Hawking Radiation from the wingularity event horizon
MikeBoyScout
Well John, you blew it.
I lasted 3 minutes in to the vid you asked us to watch over on nuthouse, and I will never again follow a link of yours to a whack-a-doodle wingnut site again.
Mark S.
Show us on the doll where the Drake equation touched you.
cleek
i take it you haven’t been watching “V”.
they love to set up parallels between the V’s, their magic free medicine, their promises of hope, the way people flock to them, and Obama.
cleek
my last was phrased poorly.
i should have wrote something like “they set it up so that the V’s use Obama-styled rhetoric and goodies like free health care and magical “blue energy” … “
licensed to kill time
@cleek:
Ha! The first time my spousal unit and I saw a V commercial, the one with the woman looking down from the sky and promising health care for all? we looked at each other and said “You know where THIS is going to end up…”
LuciaMia
As Carl Sagan used to say, it’s a little late to worry about it now. Radio signals have been going out into space since the early 20th C.
DFH no. 6
Panurge got it right — the “typcial liberal viewpoint” discussed is that aliens must be peaceful, which could get us in trouble.
John, most-brilliant and favoritest blogger that he is, atypically got the meaning 180 degrees outa whack.
It’s not really about ET or Stephen Hawking, but about libtards being naive race traitors who love them some brown hordes, who we take as “peaceful” at our peril. You know, the aliens (illegal and otherwise) right here on earth. The notion that we would foolishly mis-read “To Serve Man” if some galactic visitors came calling just proves that point.
Conservatives aren’t crack-brained, Know Nothing, nativist racists. Nosiree.
Don SinFalta
Nice to know that my refusal to add to PJM’s traffic had the side effect of sparing me several minutes of boredom.
Speaking of boredom, it must be really sad to be someone that translates every event in any aspect of life into something having to do with the existential battle against the evil libruls. I’d always thought there was more than one dimension to existence, but I guess that’s only true for some of us.
someguy
WTF, Cole…
If the alien abduction stories are true, they like to interrogate people under bright lights, brainwash them, and anally probe them against their consent.
That means they are, for all intents and purposes, the unholy offspring of a NeoCon, Karl Rove, and a Catholic Bishop.
And you want to make friends with these fuckers?
JGabriel
@Rosali:
Evolution is a lie, so they couldn’t have evolved. That means they can’t be aliens, but, instead, must be: demons!
.
JGabriel
I didn’t ask for the alien probe!
.
racrecir
@LuciaMia: My first thought.
Hawking is just pointing out one of history’s lessons: always be wary of Enlightened Beings Sent Here To Help Us.
TenguPhule
I’m ashamed that Avatar hasn’t even popped up in this thread yet.
Forget the Aliens, the Universe needs to worry about us first!
After all Everyone knows that Humans are Special!
Triassic Sands
Jeebus, John, if you’re going to watch that kind of crap, at least pay attention. (or is your conclusion a typo?)
The “typical liberal viewpoint” is (apparently) that aliens are NOT DANGEROUS.
I’ve never assumed any such thing, which explains why I’ve spent the last four decades hiding in my closet wearing a Styrofoam suit.
If anyone wants an example of the downside (or at least “a” downside) of the Internet, they can follow your link and watch a complete moron tell us that liberal scientists are putting us all at risk because they believe aliens are just like they are. Bozo says scientists have no evidence for their speculations about aliens, but I’d say a more immediate problem is that Bozo has no evidence for his assertions about liberal scientists.
Comrade Javamanphil
Dear Conservatives,
The following are also items that are typical of a liberal worldview. Please take note and cease and desist from partaking in them ever again:
Sex
Scotch (or indeed any whiskey)
small batch beers
wine
Enjoying music (Christian music excepted)
Going to oil free beaches
relaxing
being happy
facts
We look forward to your 20,000 word rebuttals to why these are bad for us. We’ll be engaged in some combination of the above until then. Thanks in advance.
Typical Liberal
ruemara
“watch this…”
Uh, no. Not even with Douthat’s eyes.
Kyle
Conservatards have departed the mental realm of Earth and are now projecting their own pathologies onto space aliens — if we are aggressive, warmongering, ignorant assholes, then so must they be.
I’m waiting for their next demand that Bruce Willis be launched to drill, baby, drill for oil on Mars.
DPirate
It is a joke, of course. It is also a good argument against beaming/sending stuff out in the hopes of attracting any attention. The best you could hope for is for them to adopt a hands-off policy and watch us amuse ourselves to death.
http://popup.lala.com/popup/504684693663454824
Brachiator
@LuciaMia:
And based on the number of times their TV show has been broadcast over the years, arriving space aliens might reasonably conclude that our leaders were Ricky Ricardo and his wife Lucy.
@Kyle:
People of all kinds of ideological beliefs project their hope and fears onto space aliens. This kind of thing entirely maintains late night conspiracy radio programs like Coast to Coast. The funny thing is that at this level of wackiness, no one sees any difference or contradiction between guests with “space aliens hate us” and guests with “space aliens love us” theories.
xanthippas
There is a debate among scientists who work in this field, of whether or not it’s a good idea to attempt to contact other civilizations. Hawkin’s viewpoint is definitely the minority one, but it has nothing to do with liberal vs conservative; most scientists favor SETI. I don’t think its because they think contact will be peaceful; rather, the idea of physical contact seems extremely remote and abstract. I think most imagine that somewhere, someone is searching the skies for our signals, as we’re doing for theirs, and that all we’re looking for is evidence of intelligent life, not back and forth communication, let alone actual contact. I think many scientists believe that given the vast distances between us and other worlds, contact may not even be possible.
Basically, this has nothing to do with UFOs, alien probes, or Star Trek fantasies.
Visceral
All of this is assuming that intelligent life doesn’t eventually destroy itself completely or simply regress technologically once its resources are exhausted, something I consider to be far more likely than crusading alien fundies or profit-crazed alien colonists.
The universe could well be filled with alien civilizations, but they’re probably either preindustrial or the survivors of environmental devastation or something like Peak Oil.
slippy
I think concern about alien invaders is just a tad overblown. As far as anyone currently knows, it takes so long to get from point A to point B in the universe that any reasonable attempt to “invade” another world is virtually impossible.
I always tell people to think of it this way: if an alien species is listening to our transmissions they are using the same communications technology we are. Ergo, we should be hearing them too. The fact that we aren’t, even with a dish like Arecibo which can carry on a conversation halfway across the galaxy, tells me that there is nobody nearby who could conceivably pose a threat to us. If we ever contact another civilization in the Universe, it will probably be more like getting a time capsule from the very distant past, as they must be VERY far away. And from VERY far away, the Earth and our entire solar system are so insignificant nobody is even looking in our direction.
matoko_chan
@tbogg:
This is no coincidence.
Will the real Bill Whittle please stand up?
funnie….now Bill is on the side of the Evil Dead.
matoko_chan
my comment is in moderation……what did i do?
violate the link rule?
or is Bill Whittle’s name a killing word?
terry chay
Didn’t you know, Libs want to give these aliens CITIZENSHIP?