Manufactured Proof

It must be great to be a right wing extremist. You don’t have to justify anything you say, you can just make it up. As long as your followers are prepared to swallow it, any old rubbish is OK. But why be content with any old rubbish when it can be funny.

A case in point. This morning Ken MacLeod re-tweeted a link from Jim Henley (who I don’t know, but who deserves the credit). The link is to a page on Conservapedia that contains a heap of “facts” intended to prove that the Earth cannot be more than a few thousand years old. You have to be pretty dumb to swallow some of it, but my attention was drawn to the section on Biology where point 1 is as follows:

The intelligence of humans is rapidly declining, whether measured by SAT scores, music, personal letters, quality of political debates, the quality of news articles, and many other measures. This means that if one goes back far enough, intelligence would measure at ridiculous heights, if humans were even tens of thousands of years old.

And the best evidence for the rapidly declining intelligence of humans is…

I cannot believe that anyone would have written this without their tongue firmly in their cheek. Will someone pay me to write this stuff? It would be so much fun.

7 thoughts on “Manufactured Proof

  1. I read the article after you mentioned something about it.

    My most fascinating thing: the number of changes in rate of process that are directly or indirectly caused by global climate change, but extrapolated back into the past to demonstrate that X process couldn’t have changed at that rate for millions of years.

    RIght, it couldn’t. But if I used that exact argument to demonstrate changes in those processes, they’d be screaming.

    Like you, I don’t see how anyone could seriously have written most of those statements. I now want to think of something that I can write a similarly-senseless list for.

  2. I’m willing to entertain the possibility that Conservapedia regulars are exempt from the Flynn effect.

    1. (re O.G.N.:) I’d think the Flynn effect would be a *better* argument for a Young Earth— just extrapolate backwards to when we had zero intelligence, that’s obviously the moment of Creation.

  3. The comment about the decline of “natural, pure bred dogs” is amusing given that there is nothing natural about them. Apparently whoever wrote that doesn’t understand that all dogs were descended from wolves, that human intervention created all dog breeds, and that many dog breeds have only existed for a relatively short period of time. I suspect they think all dog breeds have been around 6 thousand years and were created by God.

    1. You’ve missed the point, Tim. Whoever writes this stuff isn’t ignorant, they are making it up in full knowledge that it is wrong, because they find it funny when their supporters believe it, and when their enemies explode with outrage. It is trolling.

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