For the most part, I believe taht humans are generally good people who strive towards rational answers to life's questions. So occasionally, when someone says something that's astoundingly stupid, I'm quite willing to believe they're putting us all on.
Combine this with April Fool's day and I'm quite able to be fooled when someone does in fact believe something utterly stupid.
But sometimes, I still have to wonder. Why would an otherwise intelligent person go on to make horribly stupid arguments, relying on age old mischaracterizations and fallacies? I can't fathom a reason, beyond satire.
Writer Peter Olofsson at Live Science, wonders the same thing about Ann Coulter. In her book, Godless, she attacks evolution, spewing out tired creationist arguments, mostly stolen from Jonathan Wells' book Icons of Evolution.
But when is the critical mass of stupidity reached, that one can conclude no one could actually be that stupid and still have a functioning brain? That's a hard question to answer, but Olofsson ventures that Coulter has crosed that line and is indeed engaging in subtle satire of the entire creationist movement.
I'm not sure that I feel she's crossed that line, but taken with some other comments she's made encouraging discrimination based on race, gender and religion, "raping" the environment, demolishing the first ammendment, and more, I'm tempted to say she's getting pretty close.
Either that or perhaps she really is crazy.
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