I can’t get enough of this kind of stupidity:
O’REILLY: I’ll tell you why [religion’s] not a scam, in my opinion: tide goes in, tide goes out. Never a miscommunication. You can’t explain that. You cannot explain why the tide goes in.
SILVERMAN: Tide goes in, tide goes out?
O’REILLY: See, the water, the tide comes in and it goes out, Mr. Silverman. It always comes in, and always goes out. You can’t explain that.
All the Jeebus-makes-the-tides-go-in/Jeebus-rode-dinosaurs stuff used to make me depressed about the state of affairs in the United States. Then I went to a drug store in Paris and saw all the quack homeopathic remedies on the shelves and then I read about the Korean belief that running a fan in your room can kill you, and now I don’t feel so bad.
People are dumb everywhere. What sets the United States apart from most of the rest of the first-world right now is the success that the right-wing has had in harnessing the power of stupidity.
ploeg
Yeah! Fuckin’ magnets, how do they work?
schrodinger's cat
Has BOR never heard of gravity? What an idiot, has he never had to take a class in physics.
Triassic Sands
Tides? The Baby Jeebus (the Giant Baby Jeebus) lies on the bottom of the ocean and swallows and regurgitates water.
I thought everyone knew that.
Moonbatting Average
I hate to break it to you, DJ G-E, but the quack homeopathic stuff isn’t just confined to the local Whole Foods/hippie co-op in this country. Walgreens carries Boiron crap, for example
JPL
When I first heard that discussion all I could think of was Chauncey Gardener. O’Reilly could become the next president.
Mark S.
Bed goes up, bed goes down.
(Man, they’ve sure scrubbed most of the Simpsons off of youtube. I’m thinking of an old one where Homer is dying but is most fascinated by the hospital bed.)
BGinCHI
Doug, you’re wearing a Pats helmet with a full face mask while you’re typing, amirite?
Nathan
O’Reilly’s mouth opens, bullshit comes out. Never a variation. You can’t explain that. You cannot explain why the bullshit always comes out.
schrodinger's cat
@ploeg: What do you call a really attractive Polish person?
Lurking Canadian
The white face in the sky scares us, Preciousss, yes it does. We won’t looks at it, Preciousss, we will just look down at the sea.
stormhit
Silverman didn’t exactly reveal himself to be any type of great intellect by also being unable to explain the tides.
schrodinger's cat
@Triassic Sands: Tides? The Baby Jeebus (the Giant Baby Jeebus) lies on the bottom of the ocean and first he swallows and
regurgitates water. then he pees.Corrected for accuracy!
Maude
We could name this post:
By The Light of The Silvery Moon.
ploeg
The sun comes up in the east, and goes down in the west, and you don’t see it again until it comes up in the east the next day. Just try to explain that, Einstein.
Bread goes in the toaster, toast comes out. I won’t even try to explain that.
Mike Kay (Chief of Staff)
and asshole BillO went to Harvard!
hahahhahahahahhahahhahahhahahhahha
Mike Kay (Chief of Staff)
@schrodinger’s cat:
a Polack
Baud
There are actually a lot of interesting, unresolved issues in physics that reflect how perfectly things had to come together to create the universe and us. Sadly, what causes tides isn’t one of them.
S. cerevisiae
Everyone knows it’s the Great Old Ones causing the sea to heave in an unholy rhythm of evil before they rise up to consume us all.
Doesn’t everyone know that?
schrodinger's cat
@Mike Kay (Chief of Staff): A Magnetic Pole!
schrodinger's cat
Shorter Bill O Reilly
I is on your TeeVee spewing nonsense
Chad N Freude
Stephen Colbert covered this rather nicely.
Takeaway quote: “There must be a God, because I don’t know how things work.”
Chad N Freude
@ploeg: If you watch the Colbert clip, you’ll see O’Reilly doing exactly this.
BGinCHI
Why doesn’t God smite people?
Dear God,
More smiting please! Hint: start with stupid, rich Catholics.
Thnx,
BG
ps. I can haz pony?
Omnes Omnibus
@ploeg: I am presuming magnetism is involved.
Culture of Truth
god: cue the tides
tides angel: fuck you i’m on a break
god: don’t make me come down there waterboy
tides angel: all right don’t have an earthquake
calipygian
Believe it or not, a fan left on overnight in a room almost DID kill me. I was traveling in a third world country and in a hotel room. There was a standing oscillating fan in my room near the window. During the night, a breeze came in and blew the heavy curtains over the oscillating fan, stopping the fan and overheating the motor. I woke up, smelling smoke, walked over to the fan and it was too hot to touch. I suspect a few more minutes and it would have lit the curtain on fire, probably killing me in my sleep.
Can’t make that shit up.
El Cid
Right, tides are caused by the Moon, and its orbit around Earth — what do you take us for, fools? The firmament spheres within which the Moon is but a shining spot are equidistant and equally weighted in all directions.
You might as well be one of those fringe conspiracy kooks suggesting that the Earth simply floats along in space, free of being surrounded by the firmaments, and the Sun rotates around the Earth because of some invisible magic force which keeps them together.
GregB
When will Jesus bring the pork chops?
DougJarvus Green-Ellis
@BGinCHI:
Not til next week.
Culture of Truth
O’REILLY: I’ll tell you why [religion’s] not a scam, in my opinion: tide goes in, tide goes out. Never a miscommunication.
Except for the Indonesia tsunami. Even God takes naps.
BGinCHI
@calipygian: Are you blaming the fan or the wind?
Physician, heal thyself.
Linda Featheringill
@Baud:
There are a lot of mysteries in the universe and life is certainly one of them. The official explanation of how we actually got our moon is wild. The whole thing is awe-inspiring at times.
Gravity, however, doesn’t prove or disprove the existance of a diety.
noncarborundum
Looking at this charitably, Bill-O could be expressing the theological position that divine activity not only created the universe, but is necessary to keep it going — and, in fact, to keep it existing — at every moment. In this view (which, by the way, I’ve seen expressed by both Muslim and Christian writers), if God didn’t continuously act to keep the Earth turning, then it wouldn’t turn, and neither tide nor sunrise would happen.
Granted, if this is what Bill-O meant, he picked a really stupid way to say it.
BGinCHI
@Culture of Truth: I wonder how many times the nuns had to hit him before he internalized that narrative.
scav
@Culture of Truth: You implying there’s a union of Angles, Seraphim, Cherubim, Ophanim et al? In Heaven!? Yawah Forfend!
BGinCHI
@noncarborundum: Worst charity ever.
jwb
@Baud: Yes, the least he could have done is pushed the mystery back to gravity, where there are at least some interesting questions even if we have very good theories for predicting its effects. This is what aggravates me about conservatives: they have become so lazy and incompetent, they generally can’t be bothered to generate a well-formed thought but will jump at the first lazy-assed notion that sprouts in their head.
Triassic Sands
@S. cerevisiae:
What a load of superstitious crap.
Read your Bible, man!
Bill E Pilgrim
@Culture of Truth: The BobbleBible.
Mike Kay (Chief of Staff)
@schrodinger’s cat: I haven’t heard that one. mine was an oldie but goodie from lenny bruce.
RSR
ah, that explains the seemingly random tweet from Atrios yesterday: fucking tides… how do they work???
S. cerevisiae
@noncarborundum: In other words the Divine Watchmaker can’t make a self-winding watch.
Mike Kay (Chief of Staff)
if BillO so believes in God, then why is he and his loofah breaking most of the 10 commandments.
apocalipstick
@stormhit:
I don’t really blame Silverman too much. How often do you expect to encounter that level of sheer obliviousness? It’s like you sat down to discuss the NFL playoffs and the first thing out of the other person’s mouth was “Why is a football shaped like a turd?”
Pretty much brings discussion to a screeching halt.
Cat Lady
I thought it was turtles all the way down. Huh.
Culture of Truth
@Bill E Pilgrim:
I have translated passages on occasion. I would call the OT “Don’t Make Come Down There”
Joseph Nobles
@S. cerevisiae: Back to the Necronomicon!
AAA Bonds
“It’s a Zen thing, like how many babies fit in a tire.”
Nick
It’s almost as if there’s a celestial body orbiting the earth everyday which has a slight gravitational pull. It must be Jesus.
RSR
I wonder if I do too
aimai
@El Cid:
I’m still reading my way through “Coming of Age in the Milky Way”–fantastic book about the history of Astronomy and Astronomers. The problem for “explaining” the tides with respect to gravity and the Moon is that the person listening has to want to know other things, other dependencies. And he has to be willing to stop thinking that the important thing, in the explanation, is “is there or isn’t there a g-d?” Because when you study the history of how we, as humans, come to understand something like Gravity it all has to do with seeking explanations for things that we observe, and then seeking explanations and predictions for things that we haven’t yet explained. The O’Reilly’s of the world prefer to cut out all that questioning and exploring and just wave their hands. They can always continue doing that, even after you explain about Gravity and the Moon by saying “Well, g-d made that.” Because they just don’t care about the other stuff–like why the Moon and the Sun and the Stars do what they do or how a theory (like Gravity) relates to predicting the behavior of stars we haven’t yet discovered.
aimai
AAA Bonds
@Moonbatting Average:
Hell, Wal-Mart carries magnetic insoles. I’m always asking the folks there how they work, but I don’t think anybody’s sure, and to be honest I swear a lot so that may have caused problems.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Culture of Truth: It’s funny I was reading that comment thinking wait, that style rings a bell, and only then noticed your name.
I think David Gregory as God would be pretty funny.
“Tosses hair, sending static electricity that alters the orbit of several of the smaller planets”
AAA Bonds
@aimai:
Another crucial component is to be able to say, “I don’t know. We have to investigate further.”
There’s nothing less likely to come out of a pundit’s mouth. The god of the gaps dwells between their ears.
AAA Bonds
@apocalipstick:
Exactly. I’d have been trying to divine the esoteric meaning of the metaphor O’Reilly was using. It would have taken me longer than Silverman to figure out that he was being literal and actually thinks that no one has considered the question.
AAA Bonds
“Consider the lilies of the field. They toil not, neither do they spin, and you’re telling me that this is some sort of ludicrous accident!”
scav
@AAA Bonds: The alternative explanation being they were behind the shed smoking a quick one when fingers were handed out.
Yutsano
@Bill E Pilgrim:
Oh man. David Almighty would have me on the next transdimensional portal to another universe. There really is a limit to teh stoopid I can take.
AAA Bonds
@noncarborundum:
Yeah, but that’s stupid too, no matter how many wordy Wendys have argued for it. It’s like trying to find “the animating force” in life.
“How could things exist if they didn’t all hang out with a separate property-that-makes-things-exist? Surely cause and effect couldn’t operate unless there was a cause-and-effect-machine in operation nearby at the time.”
Culture of Truth
god: yo aquaman the tides are ten minutes late
tides angel: shit i overslept
god: demmit
tides angels: fucking iphone
AAA Bonds
Where were you at Deepwater Horizon? DAMN YOU, BONG BOY!
Laura W.
I’m gonna be your #1!
noncarborundum
@AAA Bonds:
But it’s a different level of stupid. I’m guessing everybody in the blogosphere wouldn’t be jumping up and down and pointing and laughing if O’Reilly had directly expressed some form of the “what keeps the universe going if not God” question, rather than implying he has no idea what causes the tides or the sunrise and therefore God.
Oh, screw it, I’m defending O’Reilly. He’s an idiot.
freelancer (itouch)
@noncarborundum:
Just call him BillO Al-Ghazali.
Mark S.
@noncarborundum:
I don’t know. I don’t have much of a problem with the deist conception that God set up the Universe and then let it go like a watchmaker. I think it’s kind of dumb to think God has to keep it going or it all falls apart.
That’s why I find it ridiculous when “principled conservatives” say they aren’t Creationists but they don’t believe in one species evolving into a new species. I guess they believe that God comes along every million years or so to plop down new species to replace the ones that died out. I actually have more respect for the clowns who think the world is 6,000 years old.
Dennis SGMM
O’Reilly will issue a clarification next week. He intends to state that tides are caused by the sun and all of the planets orbiting the Earth.
noncarborundum
@S. cerevisiae:
I don’t think it’s quite that easy. To the extent that I understand the argument, I think it’s that all of creation is a construct in the mind of God, so that if God stops thinking of it, it ceases to exist. The analogue of a self-winding watch in this model would be something like a self-dreaming dream.
Please note that I am a reporter here, not a defender. As an atheist I don’t believe in the dreamer, much less the dream.
me
Kneel before Neil!
BGinCHI
The revolution — of the earth around the sun — will not be televised.
bottyguy
Can you start adding “Idiocracy” to these posts?
JBerardi
@scav:
As long as we’re riding the religion-mockery train, take a moment to appreciate just how bad Christians (especially Catholics) are at the whole monotheism thing. The trinity, the angels, Mary, thousands of saints… it goes on and on. My favorites are the Nephilim. Earth-roaming Angel-human hybrids who are freaking GIANTS? Zeus would be proud.
El Cid
@aimai: In fairness, as you’ve no doubt read, the theories of the solar system / universe being set in cosmic spheres was not actually a bad one in terms of explaining planetary movements—overall at least. It even allowed for quite a good degree of prediction. The ‘clockwork’ heavens, or mechanisms in those days.
The models were ‘refined’ and all sorts of additions and modifications and funky placed spheres were needed to try and address things like the apparent retrogression of Mars. (Ptolemaic.)
But it wasn’t just a joke. At least, not until they were retained over rival theories by authority and power rather than free debate. The Islamic astronomers may have accepted the Ptolemaic clockwork fundamentals, but without their incredibly thorough observations, the later European natural philosophers would have had no evidence with which to arrive at different views. (Not to say that there weren’t consistent hints at dissent from the Islamic astronomers and philosophers themselves, just that they were never prominent and never pushed.)
What it and successor theories had in common, even after the spheres and firmaments were mostly or entirely abandoned, is the core notion that the heavens were perfectly set and that movements in the heavens were perfectly circular and/or spherical.
Skipping ahead a lot, there are those who argue that it was truly Kepler who broke away from the perfect circularity which even Copernicus retained in his revolutionary (in terms of public advocacy and depth of argument, not that it hadn’t been advocated and accepted by some predecessors, including the earliest of ancient Greek intellectuals) heliocentrism, which the Catholic Church helped out so much by declaring as, well, you know. Galileo and all.
Kepler’s willingness to push for elliptical orbits as the one successful mathematical explanations for orbits wasn’t something people were too happy with.
And then Newton had to go and screw things up even more by re-introducing mystical, invisible forces: i.e., gravity. With the sort of aether / particle collision / flow that such as Descartes used to explain all motion, including gravity, everything could be explained by comprehensible physics—things collide, things move around in a universal fluid and sweep things backwards and thus gravity.
And we’re still basically where Newton was with regard to gravity.
So I try not to look at any of the predecessors as foolish except when they’re being fools, such as the Church.
Cermet
@El Cid: No, relativity gives a very easy to understand ’cause’ for gravity – the main is that space-time is curved by a mass and so any smaller body will follow the larger space-time curve; since mass causes time to slow down (that has even been measured using atomic clocks) and since the kinetic energy of the body must be conserved, then the extra KE is converted into motion (ie acceleration by the body towards the mass.)
wmd
Bill O probably got confused by Christoffel symbols when he was studying General Relativity. Christ is a substring of Christoffel and so he thought Jeebus is the reason for gravitation.
Hob
O’Reilly’s philosophical victory is a bit late; the existence of God was already proved by the Jackie Gayle character in Tin Men:
Tilley: You found God at the smorgasbord?
Sam: Yeah. I go there … I see celery, I see lettuce, tomatoes, cauliflower … and I think, all these things come out of the ground. They just grow out of the ground. They had corn– out of the ground. Radishes– out of the ground. You say to yourself, how can all these things come out of the ground? You know what I’m talking about? All these things are out of the ground. I mean, how can that be? Out of the dirt all those things came. And I’m not even getting into the fruits! I’m just dealing with vegetables right now. With all those things coming out of the earth, there must be a God.
Tilley: I’m not getting the same religious effect that came over you.
azlib
@stormhit:
The bit I saw, Silverman looked just absolutely stunned at BOR’s statement. It was one of those “Huh?” moments.
gil mann
@Laura W.:
For the purposes of this thread, the “W” stands for something other than your last name, dig?
El Cid
@Cermet: Curved spacetime doesn’t explain the effects of gravity, which is what leaves scientists at a loss to unify it with the other forces. Relativity helps put gravity in a context, but it doesn’t fully explain it.
Nevertheless, it’s not relevant to the point about Newton vs. the mechanical philosophy: curved spacetime is not analogous to an aether in which gravity works via the collision and flow of particles, and would still be ‘spooky action at a distance’, the same from the point of view of the pre-Newtonian natural philosophers.
El Cid
@azlib: That’s sort of what I thought. It would be one thing to hear someone say they don’t know what causes the tides, or spout a really wrong explanation. But to have someone state repeatedly that no one knows how to explain it, that’s just stunning.
Donut
“People are dumb everywhere.”
But especially Midwestern yokels who respond to corn-fed shit-heels like Mitch Daniels?
Asshole.
shirk
Someone with video skills needs to create an Insane O’Reilly Posse mash-up. Just sayin’.
Porlock Junior
This thread has missed a crucial part of O’Reilly’s ignorance. I mean, he’s some kind of Roman Catholic, right? And not just any kind, but a super-troglodyte kind, which I believe to be a minority in the USA, if perhaps not in all countries. But he doesn’t know what every real Catholic apologist for the Inquisition(*) knows. Which, as a Shorter, is this:
Galileo actually wrote up an explanation for the tides, in terms of science. It was erroneous. Therefore, teh Inquisition was right!
It’s all simple logic. And the first two sentences are true. And I saw “teh Inquisition” and decided it didn’t want to be corrected.
(*) The phrase “apologist for the Inquisition” I got from a book on the history of science. I don’t know exactly what it was in the original Italian; the English phrase comes from its translator and publisher, George Coyne. A Jesuit, by the way.
matoko_chan
you dumb fucking cudlips dont evah get it, do you DougJ?
WE ARE NOT THE SAME ANYMORE!
tell that to congresswoman giffords, you assclown. the FUCKING DIFFERENCE is that xians think they have a fucking mandate to try to cram their stupidity DOWN EVERY ELSES THROAT, retard, by force of arms if neccessary.
Its called proselytization, and it gets defended here all the fucking time…..