Republican Joe Barton asks world-class stupid question

[The Spartan]

Couple that sort of thinking with the kind of blinders that being a Creationist puts on you can start to see how someone would believe such a thing.

I refuse to fucking believe that anyone who got two engineering degrees from two upper-tier engineering schools believes that crap.

I'd love to agree with you, but, unfortunately, it wouldn't be the first time.

[Darth Wong]

Couple that sort of thinking with the kind of blinders that being a Creationist puts on you can start to see how someone would believe such a thing.

I refuse to fucking believe that anyone who got two engineering degrees from two upper-tier engineering schools believes that crap.

Compartmentalization, my friend. Compartmentalization.

If he can simultaneously worship Jesus Christ and Ayn Rand, he can do this too.

[Darth Yoshi]

It's no different from YEC biologists mentioned a couple months back in SLAM. Apparently, they use the proper nomenclature in their dissertations, despite not believing a word of it.

[Rogue 9]

I sent him an email using the form on his webpage:

Greetings, Sen. Barton.

<snip>

He'll probably get lost halfway through and decide I'm wrong because he doesn't get it, assuming of course that he even reads it in the first place. It gave me something to do, though.

You do realize he's not a Senator, right?

[Mayabird]

It wasn't the best snappy comeback I've ever seen, but he did better than a lot of people would do when blindsided by a stupid question. One of the secondary reasons why people are told not to publicly debate creationists is because creationists will, at some point, say something so mind-bogglingly idiotic that the opponent ends up in dumbfounded silence. One example was when a creationist declared that the oceans actually used to float in the sky as a big water dome until Noah's day when they all came raining down...then declared victory because his opponent couldn't respond for a few seconds (because his brain was having to do a soft-restart from the pure stupidity of the statement).

Also yes, out in the backwoods there are many people who "don't believe in plate tectonics." Like one girl in my eighth grade science class who refused to believe in it because it wasn't mentioned in the Bible. This was the same girl who had theological disagreements with the existence of protons and neutrons.

[Executor32]

You do realize he's not a Senator, right?

Yeah, I realized it right after I submitted the email.

Like I said, though, he probably won't read it, so it's no biggie.

[Pablo Sanchez]

It wasn't the best snappy comeback I've ever seen, but he did better than a lot of people would do when blindsided by a stupid question.

I think in his position I would have been silent for a few seconds, asked "Is that a serious question?" And then I would have been castigated for being flippant and impolite to a US Representative. This case is actually less absurd than some questions Michelle Bachmann asked of Geithner and Bernanke a month back. Basically she believes in some kind of paranoid bullshit story that there is going to be a global currency that will replace the dollar and she wanted them to categorically state that the USA would not abandon the dollar, so they both looked very puzzled and a little angry (in Bernanke's case) and did as she asked.

The thing that pushes this Barton event over the top is that he twittered about how clever he was afterward.

[hongi]

I seemed to have baffled the Energy Sec with basic question

Yes. You've baffled a Nobel Prize winning scientist and the Secretary of Energy with a question any high school student could answer. Sure you did.

[Patrick Degan]

I'm not sure if there are words adequate enough to describe such levels of stupid.

[Tanasinn]

It's times like these I pine for the old days, where being an obnoxious moron in Congress could get your ass kicked.

[Thanas]

It's times like these I pine for the old days, where being an obnoxious moron in Congress could get your ass kicked.

I sure hope you did not just agree with Preston Brooks.

[The Spartan]

I'm not sure if there are words adequate enough to describe such levels of stupid.

It's a level of idiocy that requires medical intervention. The doctors in the ER are going to have to drill a whole in his head to pour out all the stupid.

The problem is that to many of his slathering base and the mindless middle are going to see the Energy Secretary puzzled by the question instead of baffled at the rank stupidity of Dippy Do and his male pattern baldness.

[Chardok]

The impression I got was not that he was aghast at the pasty dude's ignorance/stupidity (being a scientist - he probably assumed the question was geniune) but it's a mind-bogglingly complicated question. Where does oil come from and how did it get to Alaska - I mean, FFS, the guy said "I have a question here for the last 60 seconds" 60 seconds?! 10 of which is spent asking the question. I defy anyone to explain Plate Tectonics and whateverthehell the process is that makes dead stuff into vicous hydrocarbon-liquid/gas stuff in 50 friggin seconds in a way that a pasty old white dude could understand it.

[Tanasinn]

It's times like these I pine for the old days, where being an obnoxious moron in Congress could get your ass kicked.

I sure hope you did not just agree with Preston Brooks.

That would imply that Brooks had attacked an obnoxious moron, which wasn't the case.

(The statement isn't serious, anyway - hence the emoticon.)

[Thanas]

Well, what morons were beaten down?

And I guess political violence is funny now?

[The Yosemite Bear]

I noticed his second degree was in ADMINISTRATION, thus proving my long held blue collar beliefs about the stupidity of professional management. Sorry I've known too many MBAs that I wouldn't trust to tie thier shoelaces. Not to mention a few products of degree mills that haven't even got a basic high school education....

[Lonestar]

I noticed his second degree was in ADMINISTRATION, thus proving my long held blue collar beliefs about the stupidity of professional management. Sorry I've known too many MBAs that I wouldn't trust to tie thier shoelaces. Not to mention a few products of degree mills that haven't even got a basic high school education....

Industrial Administration is intended to provide management skills to people who come from Technical backgrounds. So it isn't an MBA, it's a MSIA. It isn't like he got a BA in something like "Organizational Leadership" and then got an MBA.

[The Yosemite Bear]

Okl, true, still, that's a damn dumb question comming from someone whose in the Technical Field/Industrial Field...

Then again, I get ex-tern chefs every summer that can't figure out how to use a double boil method... (not burning dairy or choclate by using boiling water below the pan your cooking in, to keep the pan from getting too hot...)

[Patrick Degan]

In less than a decade, the GOP has managed to utterly annihilate it's own legacy. Sure, they can continue to pimp out the ghost of Abraham Lincoln, but you would probably get nothing but blank stares if you ever tried to tell people today that the Republicans once stood for progressivism, anti-monopolism, pro-civil rights, justice, pro-choice, pro-fiscal discipline, and pro-intellectualism. That last one is almost impossible to credit in the age of Sarah Palin and Joe Barton, but it was just fifty one years ago that there was a Republican president —Eisenhower— who had as two of his major national and international initiatives the International Geophysical Year and Atoms For Peace; the former in part because he feared the U.S. was losing it's lead in scientific education and that spelled to him looming disaster for the nation. Today, the GOP motto could well be "Rock-stupid and DAMN PROUD OF IT".

[Gil Hamilton]

Try looking at it through the eyes of the average Republi-Moron. Dr. Chu obviously isn't the best speaker. He stutters a tad and doesn't sound as sure of himself as the congressman; perhaps out of surprise at being asked such a stupid question. Not to mention the fact that he's given all of six seconds to explain a complex scientific theory. That, of course has no bearing on whether or not he is correct, which he of course is, but we all know how idiots listen to their gut and instincts, as opposed to what's actually being said.

There is another problem as well. As an example, yesterday I delivered, as part of my senior Chemistry requirements, a 4 minute seminar for the students and chemistry faculty on a scientific paper and I actually ran a little over because there was alot to cover.

Afterwards, I was discussion it with my physical chemistry professor, it being a physical chemistry oriented paper, and told me a quote by Woodrow Wilson, of all people, who responded on how long it takes him to write a speech. To paraphrase "That depends. If the speech is ten minutes, then it will take me a week of prepration. If it is fifteen minutes, I'll need three day. If a half an hour, two days. If it is an hour long, however, I am ready now."

The point being, that when anyone who is trying to deliver a point on a complex subject, even a Nobel Laureate, it ALWAYS takes longer to correctly craft a short blurb than it is to speak on the subject at length, because it takes much longer to distill and re-distill the main points of the subject in bullet points that support themselves without sounding like you are merely asserting them.

There is absolutely no way Dr. Chu could have, in six seconds, answered Congressman Dipshits question on something as complex as oil geology and plate tectonics without preparing SIGNIFICANTLY beforehand to answer that specific question. Then, then Dr. Chu sounds somewhat awkward as he very quickly attempts to distill the point and then blurts out a simplistic answer because he's on the spot, it sounds like "Gee, this "Nobel scientist" really doesn't know any, hur hur hur... I got 'em."

If the congresscritter had asked Dr. Chu to stand up and gave him thirty minutes to address the subject, as someone who is an expert in the field, he could have had a much easier time of it. Delivering a lecture isn't a problem for someone whose had a distiguished scientific career, you do it regularly, and depending on the individual research, occasionally off the cuff and for fun whenever they have an audience (for the aformentioned P-chem teacher, you NEVER know when a impromptu lecture will happen around that man). However, giving a blurb of a summary is.

Somehow, paradoxically though, Joe Moron thinks its harder to give a lecture than a brief statement. So Dr. Chu comes off looking bad to the people that the Congresscritter wanted him to.

[Patrick Degan]

Dr. Chu needs to be advised that, when talking to Republicans, he needs to pitch his explanations to the level of answering the questions of a five-year old.

To take up Rep. Moron's challenge, one way to pitch a simple explanation of plate tectonics for him might be something like this: "Picture the continents as titanic puzzle-pieces floating on an underground global sea of molten lava. The turning of the Earth, the pull of the moon, causes the floating puzzle-pieces to move, break apart, and come together again in new shapes over millions of years. Which is why the continents looked very different then than they do now and why they will look very different millions of years in the future than they do now. And which is how oil ended up scattered where it is all over the world as we know it today."

[The Yosemite Bear]

not to mention earthquakes because those puzzel pieces tend to rub against each other...

[Gil Hamilton]

Dr. Chu needs to be advised that, when talking to Republicans, he needs to pitch his explanations to the level of answering the questions of a five-year old.

To take up Rep. Moron's challenge, one way to pitch a simple explanation of plate tectonics for him might be something like this: "Picture the continents as titanic puzzle-pieces floating on an underground global sea of molten lava. The turning of the Earth, the pull of the moon, causes the floating puzzle-pieces to move, break apart, and come together again in new shapes over millions of years. Which is why the continents looked very different then than they do now and why they will look very different millions of years in the future than they do now. And which is how oil ended up scattered where it is all over the world as we know it today."

Dr. Steven Chu is a Nobel Prize Winning physicist who ran the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories up until recently (it's a place I want to visit, specifically for the Advanced Light Source section). Someone of that prestige having to baby talk a moronic question to some jackass trying to play a political gotcha game, particularly given that Dr. Chu isn't a geologist and would be well within his rights as a scientist to defer the question as outside his expertise, puts more than a little bile in my mouth.

It's almost a shame that he's in a political position now, because someone with his body of accomplishment in the field shouldn't have to dumb himself down to monkey level when some congresscritter asks a question that could be the subject of a middle school science fair poster. Then having the congresscritter think he actually won out of sheer lack of comprehension is... argh... I'm ACTUALLY getting a mad on.

[Patrick Degan]

Dr. Chu needs to be advised that, when talking to Republicans, he needs to pitch his explanations to the level of answering the questions of a five-year old.

To take up Rep. Moron's challenge, one way to pitch a simple explanation of plate tectonics for him might be something like this: "Picture the continents as titanic puzzle-pieces floating on an underground global sea of molten lava. The turning of the Earth, the pull of the moon, causes the floating puzzle-pieces to move, break apart, and come together again in new shapes over millions of years. Which is why the continents looked very different then than they do now and why they will look very different millions of years in the future than they do now. And which is how oil ended up scattered where it is all over the world as we know it today."

Dr. Steven Chu is a Nobel Prize Winning physicist who ran the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratories up until recently (it's a place I want to visit, specifically for the Advanced Light Source section). Someone of that prestige having to baby talk a moronic question to some jackass trying to play a political gotcha game, particularly given that Dr. Chu isn't a geologist and would be well within his rights as a scientist to defer the question as outside his expertise, puts more than a little bile in my mouth.

It's almost a shame that he's in a political position now, because someone with his body of accomplishment in the field shouldn't have to dumb himself down to monkey level when some congresscritter asks a question that could be the subject of a middle school science fair poster. Then having the congresscritter think he actually won out of sheer lack of comprehension is... argh... I'm ACTUALLY getting a mad on.

Agreed, but that's the hand Chu and the rest of us have to play. You're up against GOP imbeciles arrogant enough to insist that ignorance has a valid opinion about anything. You know Chu isn't going to get through to Rep. Moron (R-Bonehead) but just might do so with the people watching who actually have more than two braincells to rub together.

[Darth Wong]

It reminds me of the "it's just a theory" creationist argument against evolution. It takes 3 seconds to say "It's just a theory". But it takes at least ten minutes to explain the actual concepts of scientific observations, theories, and laws to laypeople with enough detail to make them understand. Worse yet, 90% of whom will lose interest before you're done, because they hated science in high school anyway.

Most peoples' opinions are non-philosophical, ie- they are not really based on whatever arguments they put forth to defend them in an argument. Instead, they are a simple matter of subjective likes and dislikes, which they dress up with pseudo-philosophical arguments that are really nothing more than verbal contrivances.