The inevitable descent of conservatives often seems to end up here:
The older I get the more absurd the concept of “dinosaurs roamed the earth until a great big meteor hit” becomes to me.
This is just the latest in a long line of Candace Owens’ conspiracy theories. When they start babbling about creationism, I think the turkey is done.
The
oldermore senile I get the more absurd the concept of”dinosaurs roamed the earth until a great big meteor hit” becomes to me.I think she’s more intelligent than she appears (unlike, say, Jesse Lee Peterson, who I’m pretty sure really is that ignorant).
She’s found that it’s a very profitable grift to tell white conservatives whatever they want to hear. As they sink deeper into the intellectual sewer, she’s going down right alongside them.
The more evidence shows I’m wrong, the more fervently I hold onto my false beliefs. How “absurd” you find something is irrelevant – the amount and quality of the evidence is what matters.
I gotta say, I’m having a really hard time figuring out what she thinks is absurd about the concept that a giant fucking rock traveling tens of thousands of miles an hour (at the very least) slamming into the Earth can cause an extinction event.
It’s not complex. It’s literally just F=ma (plus the immediate physical and long-term ecological effects that naturally follow from such a massive collision)…
There’s the Chicxulub crater in the Yucatan, dinosaur fossils end at the K-Pg boundary, and the layer of iridium at the same boundary. There are even fossils that show signs of damage the animal received from the impact.
I’m not seeing any absurdities here.
This is a woman who sued a university over racial discrimination only to make a career out of claiming racism doesn’t exist. She’s liable to say anything for money.
Gaebolga @ 4
Maybe she thinks the asteroids are made of wossname the food stuff that rained down on Moses when he travelled through a (very small) desert for 40 years?
BTW the dinosaurs are still roaming the earth; A subset of theropods are probably nesting right now in the trees outside Candance Owen’s house.
i’m amazed only 80% of the species went extinct due to the impact.
as the ejecta from the impact rained back down all over the earth, it burned up in the atmosphere, releasing heat. imagine the whole sky filled with meteors raining down on earth. the heat pulse has been estimated to be 20 kW/m^2, or about 15 times the energy per m^2 the sun puts out. temps on the surface would have reached hundreds of degrees for 7 minutes or so during the pulse.
(imagine sitting in an oven set to “broil” for 7 minutes…)
The effect would have been less the further from the impact, but temps would still have soared all over the earth.
the pulse could have ignited firestorms all over the surface of the planet.
it was not a nice spring day that day.
birgerjohansson
It was called manna if memory serves correctly. Apparently the Israelites hated it and preferred to eat Egyptian leeks. It seems Yahweh is pretty shitty even in his own book.
@5:
This is also the woman who tried to start up a doxxing site as an anti-cyberbullying tactic. (When we have lots of evidence that a lot of bullies don’t care if their names are known, and a doxxing site would be co-opted by the bullies as a tactic almost immediately.) When folks like Zoe Quinn and other Gamergate targets told her this was a bad idea and why, she decided that Quinn was bullying her, and ended up actively joining up with GamerGate.
So, yeah, Candace Owens has been going down the rabbit hole deeper and deeper for years, and has long since buried any sense of self-awareness that might lead her to question her decisions as a black woman to collaborate with neo-Nazis.
I’m more amazed that given this depth of stupidity, these people can formulate sentences, let alone express them in written form. On top of that, these boneheads obviously know how to operate a computational device of some sort. Wonders never cease!
Do people want to get information from science, or from an old book of fairy tales where chapter one and chapter two can’t both be right, unless you get to pick some words to not have any meaning? I pick the whole fairy book to not have any meaning.
Those of us with African or European ancestors probably have no ancestors from the time of the story who had heard of the Middle East.
The older Candace Owens gets the more absurd Candace Owens gets.
Almost.
When they start (openly and proudly) babbling about Jews and Blood Libel, the turkey is done and the world of Mad Max is on the way, but without any of the style, creativity or glamor – just the ugliness, stupidity, cruelty and suffering.
And that is the goal of many “conservatives” and “Christians,” almost consciously now.
*This in no way excuses the current actions of the current (and now justly describable as genocidal) government of Israel’s actions. IN “Western culture” anti-Semitism is the final line (unless there are also Romani in the area.)
Alright, so this may be pandering to their audience, I get that.
But I wonder if that’s in any way logical: the facts about dinosaurs are pretty well established, and the evidence about that whackin’ big meteor is also rather solid. There’s scads of people who visited a natural history museum at least once, and they did see all those bones arranged together dinosaur-like.
Denying all that seems a bit counter-productive and hard to sustain, at the very least it’s narrowing her audience a fair bit – not a canny commercial move, considering how popular dinos are. And these people are all about business, said business being separating fools from their money.
So what’s going on? Unless simple brain-rot is the explanation…
“Conspiracy theories” require “conspiracies.” What’s the one here? Did the CIA really kill the dinosaurs then plant the meteor story to throw us off their scent?
Can’t wait to read this. Love liberal retellings of stupid conservative dogma!
If only you’d read the featured post, you’d have seen it.
Here, for you: “They lied to us about so much.”
So, the one here is where us (the public at large) is lied to by “they” (the conspirators) about dinosaurs.
A pretty short wait, no? Heh.
Maybe she’s actually realized dinosaurs didn’t go completely extinct? Toward the subset that didn’t I wonder if she realizes the threat from a prevalent virus:
https://theconversation.com/the-next-pandemic-its-already-here-for-earths-wildlife-222306
Maybe not quite a bolide in long term effect. She believes viruses are huge threats to life I assume given her cogency on dinosaurs still roaming among us. It’s not like she’s downplayed the recent human pandemic. So maybe she realizes a virus could spill over as a zoonotic from the dinosaur descendants that the bolide didn’t kill off. And maybe she will encourage H5 vaccination when it becomes more widely available.
I wonder what she thinks about consuming raw milk.
The way she phrases it makes it unclear as to whether she thinks it’s absurd that a) a meteor wiped out the dinosaurs, or that b) there were ever dinosaurs to begin with. Not that it matters which she meant, since either makes her sound idiotic.
@Ridana #18
Both. : )
Maybe someone should drag her to a few museums to observe the fine dinosaur skeletons to be found there.
Why are you all speculating one what Auntie Ruckus is talking about? It’s perfectly clear to me: She is flat out rejecting the actual prehistory for her filthy fucking superstition (i.e. Young Earth Creationism).
Furthermore, why are you complaining at all? It’s not as if you are going to do anything to shut her up.
@ 20
Pointless. All she do is claim they are fake.
Akira MacKenzie @21
How could anyone posting here do anything to shut her up? That’s a really weird thing to drag us on.
People here are free to complain, point out the flaws in her ideas, or kvetch about obvious batshit ideas on her part but we have no power or effective means to make her stop. We are just a blog commentariat. Perspective!
Well, she’s actually right – it wasn’t a meteor.
By definitiion and by the Chicxulub crater ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater ) it was a meteorite or bolide impact. Maybe a comet althougfh comets and asteroids can kinda overlap..A meteor or “shooting star” wouldn’t have impacted and, at worst, would’ve been “just” a Tunguska style airburst. Locally damaging but no Mass Extinction Event. Of course, science has never said otherwise, well at least in terms of the impact theory versus volcanic eruptions, diseases, global climate change & other.. alternative theories before Walter and Luis Alvarez noted that iridium layer.
Oh and, natch that minor technicality aside; Candace Owens is 100% laughably wrong.
@21. Akira MacKenzie : “Furthermore, why are you complaining at all? It’s not as if you are going to do anything to shut her up.”
More semantic technicalities but no one here is complaining, we are mocking, laughing at, observing and exposing Candace Owens’ dire wilful ignorance and tin foil hat spouting of rubbish.
Will it stop her? No. But y’know, first Amendment, free speech and ogh tyeah that old adage about not interrupting your enemies when they’re in the middle of making a mistake. What Ownes is doing is opening herself up to ridicule, discrediting herself and exposing she knows less basic, fundamental science than the average ten year old kid. (Admittedly bias given the usual and understadnable child’s love for dinos.) We’re duly ridiculing and raising awareness of her blatant lack of knowledge, understanding and credibility. What else would you recommend we do?
Also what #23 Hemidactylus wrote too.
@ 23
Because I’m sick and tired of this shit! Each and every day I scroll this and other atheist/political sites and I watch as religion and theism (along with capitalism) eat away at our civilization and all I hear is how it’s a bad bad thing. Nothing else.
Great. We know she’s a creationist shit. Now what? What are we going to do about it?
@ 20 cheerfulcharlie
Fossils, not skeletons.
(/pedant)
I’m sorry that I put this shit on you. Believe it or not, despite no one taking me seriously, I love this place because it’s one of the few places I can find anywhere that is atheist-friendly. However, to say that our current state of affairs terrifies me and the feeling that no one is doing anything substantial about it frustrate me would be a gross understatement.
I hate this reality. I hate theism and supernatural belief. I hate the right be they all-out fascists of the “mainstream” conservatives. I was hoping we’d have a world without any of them by this point in our history, but that isn’t going to ever happen. All I feel these days is anger and anxiety. I hear about Owens, Trump, Carlson, Sharpio, and others like them and I want them punished for what they are saying and doing because they are ruining this world.
I don’t know what the fuck to do. All I can do is scream my rage into the blog comment section in hopes that someone will give me a practical solution that doesn’t take centuries of slow-plodding change that will probably never come anyway.
No worries, Akira.
It’s just your disposition; me, I know to what you refer, it just doesn’t particularly affect me.
It would be nice if one could change oneself, since one can’t change the environment, no?
If you can intellectualise it, that surely helps. And you’re doing that, right there.
Walter Solomon @8: If memory serves, the Hebrews complained about having nothing to eat but manna so Yahweh sent them quail… which turned out to be rotten and inedible when the Hebrews tried to cook them. Definitely a real nice guy, that Yahweh.
I’m guessing old Candace’s brain is now full of absurdity…
I thought from the title that this must be about the UK – where, due to the greed and indolence of the privatised water companies, the answer is: “in the rivers and around the coastline”.
They lied.
To us.
<
blockquote>“Conspiracy theories” require “conspiracies.” What’s the one here? Did the CIA really kill the dinosaurs then plant the meteor story to throw us off their scent?/
<
blockquote>No, that would be silly.
…
Back then, they were called the OSS.
Arrgh! HTML-foiled again!
The really funny thing is that the people who go around saying “they” without any antecedent are generally the same people who go around complaining about people using “pronouns”.
Generally speaking when people write “they lied to us” you can read it as them writing “(((they))) liked to us.” There is a well-trodden path of conspiracy theorist to anti-Semite.
Anyway, I still get amazed how people can find science to be absurd, but not the concept of a giant deity who is one of a kind with no need to reproduce but is still male for some reason who magicked everything into existence including someone he specifically made into a man but then only made a companion woman as an afterthought. He gave them no concept of good and bad or any understanding of consequences and told them not to eat fruit that would cause them to have this knowledge, and allowed another intelligent being to come into contact with these two naive characters to talk them into having some of the fruit…
But enough of that, as this is an audience who knows damned well how actually absurd this story is and continues to be for pages and pages and pages and pages without stopping until the last.
@28. Akira MacKenzie : Can relate. Things do get infuriating, news, the world generally.
But things can change really fast at times too.
The end of the Cold War and collapse of the Soviet Union exhibit A.
Let’s just work to try to make the change for better not worse.
The older I get the more absurd I find Candace Owens
Akira@28–
I know it’s easy to be despondent in recent times, but it’s not useless to participate on blog sites like this. At the very least, there is the social feedback, reminding us that we are not alone in our opposition to regressive forces. But more than that, there have been concrete gains. Pharyngula is very much a descendant of the anti-creationist blogosphere which was instrumental in fighting and winning the Kitzmiller v. Dover case. Without people gathering online to kvetch about creationism and the DI, that would never have happened.
Logically, these people should go to the sewagephilic Great Britain while they can.
Once the tories get thrown out, there is a risk the new government makes a law requiring the privatised water companies to buy the chemicals they need to actually fucking treat the sewage! Like they did before the rules were eased to help the profit of Tory donors.
birgerjohansson@41,
I wouldn’t bank on it. Starmer has been galloping rightwards so fast there’s a risk he’ll end up denouncing Farage as a commie!
@26 & @28 Akira MacKenzie in exasperation wrote: I watch as religion and theism (along with capitalism) eat away at our civilization . . . What are we going to do about it?
I reply: I feel your anger, too. You are far from alone. It is important that many of us commenters here have voiced understanding and support for your anger. We all see how wrong it is that crapitallist billionaires fund these rtwing xtian terrorists. I will not resort to their violence and corruption. But, we find opportunities to thwart their hateful insanity in our own limited way.
Almost two years ago, a couple in our neighborhood had to endure homophobic slurs from a checker at a grocery store. And, we were told by that same checker that if we weren’t patriots and loved god and this country we had leave it. There are two grocery stores here. My family and the gay couple stopped shopping at that one back then. My family just wrote a letter to the manager of that store letting him know that checker’s hateful words cost the store: ~104 wks x 2 families x $225 per week avg. for groceries = ~$46,800.
Additionally, we all signed a petition to oust a city council ahole that banned drag show story time at our library.
Look on the bright side, Akira, Trump was convicted, Bannon is going to prison, and Alex Jones is completely ruined. Furthermore, Musk seems to be fucking up more and more.
I think our side is winning.