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The Daily Banter: This Is Why We Can't Have Nice Things: "Popular Science" Shuts Down Its Comment Section/9.25.13

Quote of the Month

"You’re an asshole. And so is Alex Jones."

-- Unidentified Boston resident who took it upon himself to verbally annihilate InfoWars pretend reporter Dan Bidondi today

You have to see this. It was only a matter of time before somebody did something like this to these fucking morons.

Sir, I have no idea who you are -- but you're a goddamn hero.

That said, if you want to continue to be depressed by how stupid some people are, click over to YouTube and read the comments for this thing.

Quote of the Day

"If you have guns, if you own guns mostly we would prefer you have them in a lock box. At least have them out of the reach of children."

-- Greenville, South Carolina Police Media Relations Officer Jonathan Bragg, following the death of a three-year-old boy who accidentally shot himself in the head while playing with a real pink handgun that he thought was a toy (for obvious reasons)

Needless to say, the kid is dead.

There's an old Life in Hell strip, written by Matt Groening, that features a sign in a restaurant bathroom that reads, "Employees are encouraged by law to wash hands." I loved that surreal little touch the first time I read the comic -- and the above comment brings it right back to mind.

Really? The police would "mostly prefer it" if parents kept deadly weapons in lock boxes? Or "at least" out of reach of children?

First of all, if you buy a pink handgun you're an idiot who probably shouldn't have a gun at all since I seriously doubt you respect and fully appreciate the power of it. It's not a toy, whether you're a child or an adult. As for police preferring that guns in households with small children be locked safely away, sorry but that's not good enough. Put the fucking thing in a lock box or not only will you lose your child if he or she happens to find your weapon and play around with it -- you'll lose your freedom.

Quote of the Day

"I’d also like us to encourage people to gang rush shooters, rather than following their instincts to hide; if we drilled it into young people that the correct thing to do is for everyone to instantly run at the guy with the gun, these sorts of mass shootings would be less deadly, because even a guy with a very powerful weapon can be brought down by 8-12 unarmed bodies piling on him at once."

-- Megan McArdle writing at The Daily Beast

I've tried my best to completely ignore politics and the often idiotic rantings of those who make a living proffering right-wing political opinions since last Friday. I honestly feel like that kind of pettiness should have been put to shame for at least a little while. I don't know, I guess it just seems like it's beneath all of us right now.

But this was unavoidable because Megan McArdle is apparently a very special brand of idiot. It's already been well established that her views are the worst kind of insipid libertarian drivel and that they come from an intellectual featherweight -- why anyone actually pays her to try to think is one of the universe's great mysteries -- but her most recent column crosses the line from dumb into unthinkably offensive.

For most of its painful 4,000 words, it's standard McArdle -- a lot of the-government-can't-do-anything nonsense backed up by arguments a 5th grader would be able to knock holes through -- but then comes the above quote. I never thought I'd be one of those parents, but I guess I am: There's no fucking way humanly possible that Megan McArdle has a child (and if she does, the state she dislikes so much should step in and take him or her away immediately). If you can come up with a worse idea, a more jaw-dropping disaster of a response to the Sandy Hook shooting, than to suggest to your six year old and his or her friends that they should say "let's roll," get into attack formation, and undertake a kamikaze run at a guy armed with an assault rifle, I'm open to hearing it -- although you'd probably be too high to talk.

Ben wrote a really good piece on this today over at Banter and my favorite part about it is that he acknowledges what I kind of alluded to about McArdle, namely that she's such a joke that she barely deserves being mentioned and only gets the honor today because rarely has she herself proven it so spectacularly.

Pussy Riot

Today's column for the Daily Banter takes a look at the less incendiary thing Todd Akin said on Sunday, but the more thoroughly insane -- and how it's just the latest example of the right's ongoing anti-intellectualism and its willingness to gleefully wallow in absolute know-nothingness.

Here's the opening shot:

"I’d really like to be surprised by Republican Rep. Todd Akin’s breathtakingly contemptible comments about “legitimate rape” and the inner-workings of the female reproductive system, but doing so would mean that I haven’t allowed myself to be completely overcome by cynicism and disgust at the state of American politics in general and the Republican party in particular — and believe me, I have. By now you all know what Akin said, you’ve heard his half-assed non-apology for it and you’ve felt the seismic backlash it’s unleashed; it’s rare that the mainstream GOP attempts to behave like a sane political entity anymore, so when even the normally tea-bagger-beholden mouthpieces of the party release the Outrage Kraken on you and demand that you submit or else, you know you’ve done something indefensible."

Read the Rest Here

Quote of the Day, Jr.

"My stated goal is to have B. Obama held responsible for his forged birth certificate and not be in the Oval Office for the next election... If we continue under such cowardly, lying, wimpy leadership, the enemies of America will be successful. By the way, your sharia, koran, muslim, islam loving gig is up. Burying that creep bin Laden with religious honors is traitorous to Americans...Maybe you are on the wrong side, huh?"

-- From the Twitter and blog posts of a conservative Christian Air Force airman named Daryn Moran, who's staging a sick-out from work (you and I know it as going AWOL) until President Obama is arrested for being illegally elected

The irony of this guy's name -- it's just too wonderfully delicious.

(Update: And here's the hilarious last-minute twist.)

Brightness Falls

For those of you who live under the misguided assumption that a lack of book learnin' is something relegated mostly to the flyovers and Central Florida -- take a second to marvel at how half of these places are in California.

If you've ever driven even 40 miles or so east from, say, the Pacific Coast Highway, this will come as no of surprise to you at all.

The Huffington Post: The LEAST Educated Cities in America/7.19.10

Choose Wisely

You know, what with the latest addition to Sarah Palin's impressive pantheon of really fucking stupid comments -- namely her defense of just making up words as she goes -- I thought I'd dip into the archive and find something I wrote way back in September of '08, during the closing days of the presidential campaign.

With midterms approaching and the talk of the 2012 White House race already ramping up -- I think this sentiment bears repeating:

"And this is what it's come down to. They've drawn the battle lines and all that's left now is for the rest of us to choose which side we're on -- because they've seen to it that there is no middle-ground.

You're with us or you're with the idiots.

You're smart or stupid.

You either want your leaders to use their brains or you align yourself with the ones who would play the role of the dumb jocks mocking those who dare to think as being a bunch of effete wimps who can't be trusted.

You vote for great minds or for people who don't just devalue great minds but demonize them.

Sarah Palin was right about one thing last night: This is a battle for survival, but defeat doesn't mean death -- it means dumb.

I don't know about you, but I don't want the two most powerful people in the free world to be a couple of folks I'd just like to sit down and have a beer with; I want them to be fucking super heroes -- sharper, stronger and wiser than I could ever hope to be. They have the weight of the world on their shoulders; I want to never have to worry that they won't be able to carry it.

But that's my choice.

Now it's your turn.

Where do you stand?"

Well?

Raptor Ready

From the L.A. Times:

"Soon after Sarah Palin was elected mayor of the foothill town of Wasilla, Alaska, she startled a local music teacher by insisting in casual conversation that men and dinosaurs coexisted on an Earth created 6,000 years ago -- about 65 million years after scientists say most dinosaurs became extinct -- the teacher said.

After conducting a college band and watching Palin deliver a commencement address to a small group of home-schooled students in June 1997, Wasilla resident Philip Munger said, he asked the young mayor about her beliefs. Palin told him that 'dinosaurs and humans walked the Earth at the same time,' Munger said. When he asked her about prehistoric fossils and tracks dating back millions of years, Palin said 'she had seen pictures of human footprints inside the tracks.'"

For the record, it's not that Palin's claims have anything to do with religion -- she just didn't pay attention in science class and really doesn't know how old the earth is.