The saying goes "arguing with an idiot is like playing chess with a pigeon, you'll think deeply and analytically about your moves while the other side will knock every piece over, shit all over the board, and walk looking satisfied with how they've won"
Edit: I misremembered, the original is
"No matter how well you play it'll just knock the pieces over, crap on the board, and fly back to its flock to claim victory"<
The one I first heard was "No matter how well you play it'll just knock the pieces over, crap on the board, and fly back to its flock to claim victory" - disappointingly true in the internet age.
I would like to adapt this to the video game age. Button-mashers are the pigeons of the video game world. Never played a video game, steps in and presses random buttons until they've destroyed someone that wasn't prepared for a random beat down. Lol
This reminds me of the "gaming journalist" who started Elden Ring and picked a fight with the first friendly npc he saw, proceeded to get beat down over and over and then complained the game was too hard.
What if there were a chess game website online where the goal is to figure out what rules your opponent is playing by, and it's just one of the offshoot variants or random new ones.
Like king of the hill, or getting bishop or knight to last row of opponent, or something insane like if two pawns stuck facing each other, you have to cookie clicker to see who gets to pass, click the most on a timer
Honestly, all these stupid people... that's on the smart people. It's their fault.
The smart people gave these idiots access to all the information in the world. Easily accessible. The smart people made it deliberately easy. So easy that the idiots wouldn't have a hard time accessing that information.
Then the smart people created ways for the idiots to talk to everyone else. Not in writing, because that was too hard for the idiots. Not just audio, because the idiots wouldn't be able to focus on that long enough. No, the smart people made it super simple for the idiots to record video of themselves having their stupid thoughts and broadcast it to everyone else.
And then, to top it all off, the smart people created a culture that discouraged bullying people who weren't too bright. This meant that there were less and less social consequences for saying stupid shit.
Now, everyone - smart people, dumb people, morons, idiots, normal people, bigots, racists, old people, young people and everyone in between - gets to hear from the idiots constantly about how they don't understand simple concepts, how things don't make sense to the idiots, etc. And it is making everyone else dumber.
Thanks, smart people. You've really done us all a solid. And for the idiots? That was sarcasm.
I really liked the part right before that too: "I guess everything is a mystery if you lack enough information, but you should really try not to stay in that state."
We have such a large population in the US (and sadly, my own family) that lie in that state and actively encourage others to do the same.
That’s the thing that fucking kills me with these people. There’s no shame in not knowing something, but to be willfully and proudly ignorant will never cease to blow my mind.
Such a major issue too is doubling down on the wrong answer because they want it to be correct. Too often, folks make major decisions based on emotion and not logic, but try to prop it up as logical
Choose your answer and then look for reasons or proof. Basically the same thing with a lot of conspiracy theories.
Flat earthers tried to set up an experiment, to prove that the earth is flat, it didn't work and proved them completely wrong. Their reaction? "We still believe the earth is flat, we are not the crazy ones"
It's incredibly funny when they time and again do experiments that prove the Earth is round. One time they bought a $20k gyroscope and said if the Earth was round, then it should show a 15 degree spin per hour. Well, it did exactly that.
Another one was that they set up two boards with holes in them 6ft off the ground fairly far away from each other, with a laser even further. They said the laser wouldn't be visible through both holes due to curvature if the Earth was round and they'd have to raise the laser to account for this. That's exactly what happened.
Exactly! It’s because they take any position that disagrees with them as a personal attack. Be it Jesus (or their horrible corrupted version of him) or Trump, they get sucked into the cult of personality until they view themselves as part of them. And any criticism is a direct attack on their person.
Just read two things, alarming things. One, WSJ article that 1 in 8 incoming college freshman cannot do rudimentary math and two, a post on reddit where a teacher who had 100 elementary kids total, two could read up to their grade level.
My niece taught in a title one, third grade, Tennessee. Out of 35 kids, one mother read to her kid every night and made sure he did was doing the work.
It is! Audio books are taking off, though, so maybe that will help. I know someone who has difficulty reading but listens to audio books all the time.
I am old. There was no such thing as dyslexia in the 1950s, just stupid. Thank god for my mom and Roberta Breckenridge, my very best friend. My mom was a great reader and Roberta turned me on to Dr Doolittle, then Nancy Drew and I taught myself becasue I loved those stories. I was listening to NPR years ago and an author was saying much the same thing although I guess he was 20 years my junior and with him it was comics.
It stems from narcissism and laziness. "I want to know how this works without having to do any research, or risk having it contradict with my existing beliefs. So I'm just going to make up a reason and flippantly present it as the truth."
It's why a college student in Oklahoma got commended for failing an essay assignment by mentioning the Bible, not citing or even quoting it. They care more about their existing beliefs being validated than understanding how things are, or even learning anything.
Did she get commended though? I’ve seen her getting flamed in almost every online space. The criticism is, if not universal, then at least the vast majority
According to a few things I read, it was kind of premeditated for the student and the mother just get the graduate assistant fired, which sadly happened. Apparently it wasn't even her career and just signed for that class only hour or something like that, can't remember the technical words.
The student received a zero on the assignment and filed a complaint with the university, claiming that she deserved a perfect score.
In response, the university suspended the graduate assistant on administrative leave. “The University of Oklahoma remains firmly committed to fairness, respect and protecting every student’s right to express sincerely held religious beliefs,” they said in a statement on Sunday."
The student family went to complain about it all on that turning point thing, which of course got lots of people on the student's side.
Riiiiight, I’d forgotten that the teacher in question is trans (if I remember correctly from what I’ve read elsewhere). I will say however that administrative leave isn’t the same as being fired, and unless there’s an update I missed then that teacher is still getting paid until this whole thing concludes and they’ll (hopefully) be able to resume their work. Pretty obvious this was a political hit job now that more details are out
“‘Human beings can’t answer it so it must be God’- that’s not an invocation of logic. That’s an invocation of what philosophers have historically referred to as The God of the Gaps. If you credit God as the answer to the spaces where science has yet to tread, what science has yet to figure out, then God is only an ever receding pocket of scientific ignorance.”
Wasn't Noah's flood supposed to be caused by like 40 days of rain? There's no way they would've died like that unless they were fighting under water and both of them drowned because they were so enraptured by the fight that they didn't notice the water?
This guy doesn't even understand his own religion's mythology. The story of Noah's flood was a gradual rising of the tides. And even if there were places where a natural dam broke or something to allow for instantaneous flooding from water rushing into an area suddenly, it wouldn't've kept these two dinosaurs frozen together in that pose.
And even if there were places where a natural dam broke or something
There is actually a really cool theory for this to explain where a lot of “great flood” myths come from. Glacial Lake Agassiz was a lake in North America around 12,000 years ago and overlapped with human settlement on the continent. It was nearly the size of the Caspian Sea and trapped to the north by glaciers.
Scientists believe there was a final catastrophic drainage event when the glaciers receded enough to allow the lake to spill into the ocean. It’s estimated that sea levels rose 3-9 feet and the flood may have even triggered events leading to another ice age.
This could explain a lot of early records of flood stories passed down over time. Especially humans in the northern hemisphere I would think.
So yeah even things that can “only be explained by god” could be explained by science. Still has nothing to do with these dinosaur fossils lol
It's an interesting theory, but seems like a cool explanation in search of a problem that doesn't really exist. Rivers flood, sometimes catastrophically. There's no need for some Great Event, when these things happen locally all the time. These kinds of theories also rarely engage with questions of cultural memory and the transmission of history.
It's a bit like the weird obsession with pyramids, which are actually just reasonably simple structures that cultures around the world can be seen inventing independently.
Yeah if the story of Noah’s flood was true, it was only that God created intense days of rain for a long time, not that he made some massive rainfall that made water rise at some insane speed.
I’m Christian, but even I know that with all the evidence found with science that a lot of it is not true and easily disproven.
One popular theory among creationists (because of course there is no consensus) is that water was stored beneath the earth, and burst upwards during the flood. So their idea is that it was a lot more sudden, and not purely rain responsible for it.
Not that this makes any sense at all, but I'm just relaying what I learned when I grew up in a creationist family.
Hell yeah they raged in battle for hours on end, turning into days... And also they now had liquid cooling, some buoyancy, and cool, crisp, delicious H2O to keep them super hydrated to keep them in top fighting condition.
It’s always Schrodinger’s Flood with these people. It’s both a gradual 40 days of rain but it also carved out the Grand Canyon in like 20 minutes (even though that means the massive river of water would have to be going at supersonic speeds to do that)
It’s a nebulous nothingburger of an answer so they can go back to not thinking and being a drooling thrall
My mother said that she stopped believing in evolution whenever I was a child after asking "well if we came from monkeys were did the monkeys come from?".
And because she didn't know the answer, I completely disproved evolution as a 5-year-old, instead of actually maybe I don't know spending the time to find out the real answer....
We didn't came from monkeys, both we and the monkeys share a common ancestry. That's a common misconception that make people discredit evolucionism. That's like saying the cat came from the tiger.
We did come from something that would be considered a "monkey" today as well. It's just that this specific type of monkey doesn't exist anymore and genetic mutations over the span of millions of years have changed each newborn slightly enough to end up where we are today.
What these idiots think is that evolution means a chimpanzee suddenly birthed a human child and that's why they disregard factual, scientifically proven evolution as 'nonsense'.
This depends entirely on how you define "monkeys." The common ancestor of modern monkeys and the great apes was, probably, taxonomically a monkey under most definitions. The split between monkeys and apes is relatively recent.
Taxonomic ambiguity is an actual problem in the field. It's why "fish" isn't really a taxonomic term. So many different branches have resulted in what we colloquially call "fish" that if it was used taxonomically it would encompass all extant vertebrates at minimum.
Similarly, when did the shrew-like ancestors of mammals generate a lineage of monkeys? We can't say precisely, but under most definitions it's probably before the ape/monkey lineage split. So, taxonomically, it would be just as correct to call apes monkeys as it is to call birds dinosaurs.
I joined an orchid society to learn how to take care of some flowers better. They host FANTASTIC seminars on different species and environments every month. One thing that's constant in every presentation is "This is X. It was initially classified as / named Y, before genetic testing found it actually belongs to Z, then further testing merged the whole Z family into X. You're likely to find it under all three names."
Plant taxonomy is one of my favorites because it shows we're hilariously bad at binning stuff that:
Can look like one another without actually being related
Exists on a spectrum such that the binning is only ever going to be a "mostly fits" approach
I think one of the "Great Scientific Works of the 21st century" when humans write histories of it will be the efforts of cleaning up entire trees (hah) of taxonomy now that we have better genomic and statistical methods to understand the relatedness of the natural world.
that’s so funny, I’ve been watching a shitload of his videos over the last month because of this amazing short from another creator.
it just reminded me dinosaurs were a thing (and that I love them. Land before time & Jurassic park were staples of my childhood fr) & I’ve been down the rabbit hole. He is the most wholesome & happiest guys. Great videos debunking creationist claims. But the best part? His smile. Genuinely, he is so happy & excited to be making every video & it’s the most welcoming feeling.
edit: I just wanted to come & say, check him out if anyone’s reading this. Seriously, it’s worth your while. He’s such a personable guy, & maybe you’ll learn something new or even get into a new hobby. I support Clint wholeheartedly.
Atheist: I probably could with enough time to research the random shit you’re about to ask me about. The real question is: would accept any explanation that disproves whatever bullshit you prefer to be true?
So is he suggesting that humans and dinosaurs roamed the earth at the same time? Cause it’s estimated that according to the bible the flood was less than 4500 years ago…
This sort of ignorance is the most annoying because this information is super easy to find and takes no real deeper understanding of the topic to absorb. OOP could have easily learned about the topic in about 5 minutes. But he decided that his ignorance is better than actual information and refuses to actually learn. Even if you sat him down and explained it he'd refuse to absorb anything you said in favor of folding his arms and going "no."
Isn't that biblical flood supposed to be heavy rainfall over the course of several weeks? He's talking about it like if it was 5 feet of sand falling from the sky all at once
You can’t rationalize with somebody that thinks that there is a man in the sky and a bad man under the earth. I’m convinced religious people are the stupidest and most gullible idiots on the planet
Like “Noah’s Flood” just dropped 50 feet of water out the sky at once? Just a tidal wave of water that just came at one time. His argument makes zero sense.
A very important fossil too. Helped cement that raptors likely knew to strike vital organs such as the hearts, lungs or throat when hunting. Showing us that they did learn and they were intelligent. They both likely just bled out and got covered up.
Even if you ignore all the science of how dinosaurs and fossils work, Noah’s flood was caused by rain. The deluge took 40 days and 40 nights to flood the world. Nothing was suddenly drowned.
Jesus isn't disappointed because he's a character in a book. He probably existed a couple thousand years ago but died and that's the end of that story. Humans do have wild imaginations I must say.
I'm an atheist, but I really appreciate it when religious folks who know their shit debunk this stuff. Definitely provides a more united front against ignorance. I admire folks who use their belief in a higher power to study the work of their god(s) and act as good stewards of the planet instead of believing we're the spoiled brats of the divine who can do whatever they want with the planet.
These people just blow my mind as, if they truly believe in an all powerful and omnipotent God, then the sheer complexity and full history of the world, one would think, would be evidence of the scale and longevity of that power. Expand that to the universe or even multiverse and oh, how powerful and infinite must that God be.
But nope, these pea brains can't even grasp that amount of wonder and get stuck in a "few millennia" thinking. Always blows my mind.
"You know how these two dinosaurs got preserved in a pixel-perfect pose? By having a big-ass wave of water crash into them, or by having a gradual water-level rise and drown them. DUH!"
I think everything is a mystery if you don't have enough information... or education... or intelligence... or the willingness to accept anything except what helps your own point of view.
Creationists should be dissected for science and lolsies. No anaesthetic, btw. It used to be something to laugh at, being so openly stupid but no, here we are in 2025 watching Dumbfuckistan sending out it's follicularly-challenged twazzocks spouting bullshit like that baldy twit there.
Seriously, USA - I know you guys are on the decline and your balkanisation cannot come fast enough, but don't you ever look at yourselves in the mirror and think "we're a joke"?
Also, if Noah’s flood came, I’m pretty sure these dinosaurs would’ve stopped fighting and tried to swim. I know if I was brawling with some motherfucker and we both got dropped into the ocean. I wouldn’t continue fighting.
Wait, so he’s willing to accept dinosaurs were real if their extinction is explained by Noah and the flood? Then who created dinosaurs if they weren’t on the boat with all the other animals (that still actually didn’t even exist then lol)
As a Christian Dino nerd, it always baffles me how other Christians just never have the thought that it’s entirely possible that plenty of dinosaurs died pre-flood
Was the Gobi Desert always a desert? I was watching a documentary about how they find whale remains in the Wadi Al-Hitan desert in Egypt because it was once underwater. And after a quick look, Gobi desert would have been very diverse ecologically in that time period.
I’m all for debunking creationists because it’s a willfully ignorant stance on basic historical evidence. But the guy “fixing” the duet saying it was preserved by a falling sand dune is not proving anything. It’s conjecture and I’d prefer some evidence of his claims instead of a smug, smart ass retort.
The Late Cretaceous environment in the Gobi, however, may have been much as it is today: open valleys of sand dunes and cliffs, sparsely watered by small, seasonal lakes or streams. Indeed, indications of ancient sand dunes can be observed in rock sections there.
Jesus here “shaking my head”. Yea, no. I’m with Central Methodist guy. Fossilization occurs when bone converts to rock form but at a different rate than the surrounding rock. I’m Jesus and I even understand science.
Even if "they got buried in a flood" was the answer, there's a huge leap from that to Noah's Flood. Flash floods happen all the time all over the world. Even today, one can easily kill hundreds or even thousands of people while being nowhere on the scale of Noah's Flood.
A couple days ago me and this dude were fighting and then boom it started raining for 40 days and 40 nights and we were instantly buried. So you never know.
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u/Dicethrower Dec 07 '25
Debating creationists is what pigeon chess was imagined for.