When trying to decide what the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard was, there are so many choices it becomes virtually impossible. Some sort of ranking system is required; a moderately dumb thing said by a smart person is therefore stupider than a really dumb thing said by a really dumb person. Because the smart person should know better, while the dumb person may not be able to proces the difference between a smart/correct comment and a dumb/wrong comment.
Real stupidity is when smart people say things that are not just dumb, but self-evidently dumb and factually wrong.
Today on the History Channel I heard something so mind-snappingly stupid, coming from someone clearly not *that* stupid, that it rocketed to the top of my list. The TV was on basically for background noise, and was playing some “documentary” about ancient aliens. There was some blather about some region in norther Mexico where things like radios and compasses don’t work right (but I noticed that the video cameras shooting the place seemed to function just fine), and how this is due to some magnetic field or other. And then came the moment: this idjit right here opened his trap and said something so dumb I felt my IQ drop several points.
Paraphrasing, his claim was that 10,000 years ago, the aliens that visited Earth did not have highways to follow, so they would use major magnetic anomalies to find their way from place to place across the surface of the Earth.
Really?
REALLY???
So… aliens that can traverse the lightyears use magnetic anomalies for navigation… but haven’t figured out how to look out a window and check the coastlines against a map?
The same “argument” has been used as an explanation for the lines and illustrations on the Nazca plateau…that these are navigational aids for ancient flying saucers. Now, assuming the space buddies somehow *didn’t* have their own shockingly advanced version of GPS in Earth orbit, how exactly are a couple of magnetic smudges or tracks in the dirt a better navigational system than mountains, coastlines, rivers and lakes?
The question I have is “are these people who are smart enough to dress themselves, get on TV and write books so stupid as to believe this rubbish, or are they simply smart enough to invent this rubbish and smarter still to know how to use this clearly stupid rubbish to get money out of large numbers of people who are in fact stupid enough to believe this rubbish?
My large suspicion is that most of the people you see actively and publicly pushing monumentally and self-evidently stupid ideas like “9/11 was an inside job” or “flying saucer navigators are morons with nothing more than a compass” or “evolution/capitalism are about to fail” don’t actually believe that nonsense. Instead, they’ve found a way to make money from the gullibility of others. Basically, if it wasn’t for their current “dumb idea” business plan, they’d be out trying to sell air conditioners to polar bears, or televangelists or politicians. But the disturbing thing is that there is a sufficiently large number of the trying ill-informed and/or non-thinking that these yahoos can make a pretty good living of of ’em.
5 Responses to “The Stupidest Thing I’ve Ever Heard”
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Those stories of ancient Indian vimanas come in there somewhere…..
I think.
Yeah, History Channel, Discovery Channel, and Science Channel have been getting more and more bullshit on them in the past few years.
Military Channel at least still shows military stuff.
Tonight’s The Learning Channel line-up consists of women in prison, and loud-mouthed women of the south.
TV is turning into pure shit, but luckily we only have a year or so to wait before the Mayan calender runs out and the Knights Templar destroy the Earth, as Nostradamus predicted.
I think most of that nonsense is driven by the hope that it will sell. The local schools are not teaching the kids to do any critical thinking, so …. Every now and then I give some time to the idea that maybe I can come up with an idea that will be just fringe enough to be accepted and to sell. I can never quite convince myself to do it, though.
If you’re gonna do that, come up with “crazy” with a mission, not just generic, defocussed crazy. It’s a tosdsup, of course… if you teach the kiddes Crazy Notion A, you’ll get some percentage that believe it to varying degrees, and some that might not. So if Crazy Notion is a good idea (“socialists are, in fact, secret Nazis who want to kill your puppy, so don;t ever vote for anyone who wants to make the government bigger”), then getting believers is a good idea. On the other hand, when they grow up and figure out you were full of crap, those who realize the truth and reject it might just go 180 degrees the other way (“socialism is totally *not* evil, greedy and stupid”).
On the gripping hand, kids are taught a bunch of utter rubbish and find out the truth… and yet generally don’t entirely rebel.
Air conditioners to Polar Bears.. with global warming, that’s not a bad idea. I wonder how many people I could get to send me money to keep the Polar Bears cool?