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Tuesday, July 11, 2006

If Ya Wanna Laugh...

If you want to laugh, if you want to laugh until you cry, if you want to keep laughing at odd and inappropriate moments until you die.... you must read Ann Althouse's post about the "Islamic studies" lecturer hired by the University of Wisconsin (her university), who plans to devote a full week of his class to the MIHOP theory. The University of Wisconsin has decided that this teaching is protected under academic freedom, thus raising the collective hopes of DU for those full professorships that had always heretofore eluded their brilliance. They always knew it was a conspiracy.

The full, heart-pounding joy is in the comments. Several moonbats show up, and well, I'll let Pogo take it from there:
It's hard to out-crazy people.

In my early training, I worked at a VA hospital in the psychiatry locked unit. Some of the posts here have that familiar earnest lunacy about them.

Best visual analogy occurs in the film "A Beautiful Mind", when the wife of mathematician John Nash enters his office to find a crazy quilt of unrelated newspaper and magazine article with red marker circling"evidence" and colored string tying various pieces together.
This must be preserved for posterity. Here is just one tiny piece of a comment embodying that "familiar earnest lunacy":
- Why did John Ashcroft stop flying commercial planes before 9/11? What did he know?
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2001/07/26/national/main303601.shtml
Did you know that steel cannot be melted by a hydrocarbon fire? You didn't? This is apparently one of the mainstays of the technical MIHOP support. For some reason, welders don't find this argument convincing....

Most people know how iron was first smelted. You need ore, fuel and a structure to contain and concentrate the heat. Here a guy (it's always men who decide that it would be fun to smelt some copper in the back yard) demonstrates how to smelt your own copper. The first iron extraction was done in basically the same way at relatively low temperatures, and, should you wish to go into the ironworking business, there is always some helpful male on the internet to show you how to proceed. Ah, the DU dummy cries triumphantly, iron is not steel. Go here, twit. Most steel has a lower melting point than iron. So, like, uh, suppose you wanted to make a really hot oven - do you think a giant basement with tons of debris on top with fires burning for weeks would form a smelting oven? Yes, indeed it would.

This is how stupid these people are. You don't even have to know any science to figure out how completely stupid they are. Some very basic cultural history of the type any liberal arts student should know is all that's needed to understand how pathetically unfounded at least some of their claims are. This type of history was taught in grammar school back when I attended (true, we had just emerged from the Iron Age, which may account for the lack of such information in elementary schools now).

You know what's even funnier? These students in an intro course are going to have to sit through a week of this, and none of the great intellectual lights of the esteemed Unversity of Wisconsin appears to be able to summon up the intestinal or intellectual fortitude to refute it. Kiss civilization goodbye, because a society that can't do better than this on the objective reality index is culturally pancaking straight into the ground.

Why would anyone think that a person can get an education in an institution like this? It must be an intellectual lunatic asylum. Academic freedom doesn't protect the right to teach falsehoods. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion and interpretation, but no one is entitled to teach their own set of facts.

Hey, before I go, a really, really rare bird makes an appearance on this thread. He's a Christian Anarchist Aerospace Engineer who doesn't know how to smelt iron. You just can't make this stuff up:
The other main two are the presence of pools of molten structural steel in the basements of all three buildings that collapsed that day (including WTC-7). Hydrocarbon fires like the fires in the towers don't melt steel like that. The other big one is the fact that the towers collapsed at virtual freefall speed, which indicates they encountered no resistance on the way down. The indicates the superstructure of all three buildings was completely compromised at the timeof collapse. The "pancake theory" cannot account for this.
Dr. Sanity takes a lot of heat for pointing out that some people on the left appear to be nuts. I think the post and the comments above should be factored into an assessment of her analysis before anyone disputes it, though. Stupidity cannot explain what we are seeing in our "institutions of higher learning". There's something else at work.

Comments:
Freedom's Zone linked to your post but was unable to trackback to you.
 
Let's file this one under "Mediocre Minds Think Alike" or some such. I have a post yesterday :Oil For Food responsible for Reducing Deficit. It's HERE for the curious, but the point of extrapolating events and just linking them is not crazy. It's a way to shove your views down somebody else's throat.
 
Sorry, my post is HERE.
 
"This is how stupid these people are. You don't even have to know any science to figure out how completely stupid they are"

I love that- I really, really, do.
 
Howard, I am having increasing problems getting to your site. Today is no exception. I hope it comes back up later.

Based on what you wrote here, I am very interested. Because craziness can't be the explanation, and stupidity can't be either. If an entire university finds itself unable to insist that the rules of nature are actually the rules of nature, then something more is at work.
 
SC&A - but there's a psychological question that I am unable to resolve. Maybe you can.

Why? If a sixth-grade education is all that's necessary to know that this is nonsense, why will it be taught? Why will it be taught unopposed? How is this academic freedom?

This is as if the UW law school allowed a professor to make up their own text of the US law. It's as if the chemistry department allowed one of their lecturers to insist on his own periodic table.

Our entire way of life is based on everyone recognizing that the laws may be interpreted, but that the text of the law remains what it is until it is changed by Congress. It rests on the idea that we can and do know the composition of elements. UW is suddenly deviating from that course with no explanation at all.
 
MIHOP theory?

Is that the tinfoil-hat one that Chimpy Dubya Bushitler personally blew up the WTC?

Or the one that Osama Bin Laden and al-Qaeda are stooges for the JOOOOS?

I really wish I could tell the difference between reality and South Park. Or between official reality and 3 ayem phone-ins to Art Bell...
 
MIHOP = Made It Happen On Purpose.

There are different MIHOP flavors. Some MIHOPers believe that the Bush administration knew about the plane in advance, and mined the towers with explosives in order to destroy them after the planes hit. Other MIHOPers claim that no Muslims were involved at all, and that the planes were flown in by remote control. They don't account for the disappearance of the passengers - you are allowed to draw your own conclusions about that one.
 
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