… or that you could capsize Guam if you move too many people there.
You can obviously make fun of them for whatever reason you want (within board rules). But quite a few posters seem to be taking Gohmert’s question at face value, and making fun of him for believing that the U.S. Forest Service can alter the Moon’s orbit, which he very clearly doesn’t actually believe. Unless there’s meta-trolling going on here and I’m the one being whooshed.
If you’re making fun of him for something you know he doesn’t actually believe, and knowingly twist an obvious bit of absurdist mockery into portraying him as honestly believing the absurdism rather than using it as mockery, that’s intellectually dishonest.
If you want to make fun of Gohmert for denying the overwhelming evidence for anthropogenic climate change, I’ve got no issue with you. If you want to make fun of him for the stupidity of thinking that fluctuations in the Moon’s orbit are driving rising sea levels and other effects of ACC, have at. If you want to make fun of him for thinking that his question is actually any sort of “Gotcha!”, I’m right there with you.
But if you make fun of him for believing that the U.S. Forest Service can change the Moon’s orbit, I’ll “defend” him because it’s just clearly not true.
Well, just if they clump up on one side of it, obviously.
But that’s stuff to disagree with and debate about. I can think poorly of someone who doesn’t accept the overwhelming science that shows that man is having a severe impact on the client, but it’s not really something to laugh at.
I’m laughing at him for saying something stupid.
Let’s take my initial response to this, where I said that if I were the Forest Service, I would have replied that he should try jumping up and down every day at noon. Now, obviously, I do not believe that the orbit of a planet or its moon can be affected in this way, so it’s a stupid response to a stupid question.
However, if I had, unprompted, said that in order to combat global climate change everyone should jump up and down at noon, then I’d be rightly ridiculed, even if I didn’t believe it would work.
I think at this point we’re going in circles.
Quite a few posters in this thread seemed to take Gohmert’s question at face value, and pushed back against @UltraVires when he contended that Gohmert didn’t actually believe that the U.S. Forest Service could change the Moon’s orbit, but was making a rhetorical point with an absurdist question. I was responding to that push-back, which I am still struggling to understand.
I’m not entirely sure I understand your position. If you know that Gohmert doesn’t actually believe that the U.S. Forest Service can alter the Moon’s orbit, but you mock him for believing that anyway, that’s intellectually dishonest. If you’re mocking him for saying something “stupid” because you think there’s no difference between asking an honestly stupid question and asking a deliberately absurdist question as a form of mockery…I really don’t know what more there is to say there.
Is there any evidence that he isn’t that scientifically ignorant?
I’m willing to accept that Gohmert was attempting to troll/ask an absurdist question. Though, I am curious: did he, himself, give any follow-up comments or statements (either during the meeting, or later) to support that? Did he ever say, “no, of course the Forest Service can’t move the moon,” or “If we could move the moon, we could affect global warming, but we can’t do the former, so we clearly can’t do the latter?” Or, did he just leave the initial question hanging out there, to be interpreted as one chooses?
You do get the title reference, right?
Yes…and?
Just wondering. You asked. (You seem oddly hostile about the whole thread.)
No, I didn’t. I wondered if all the posters who seemed to be taking Louie Gohmert’s obviously absurdist question literally was actually some sort of meta-trollery that was whooshing me.
I’m not quite sure how to respond to that. I’m certainly disagreeing with a number of posters in this thread. If that comes across as “hostile”…shrug. I’m not taking any of it personally, if that’s what you mean.
But, of course, I don’t always know how I’m coming across to others, especially in a medium such as a message board. How should I be presenting my point of view so that I don’t come across as “hostile”?
All I’m saying is that if you pretend to be stupid, then people may assume that you actually are. And that’s not on them, that’s on you*.
*you, in this case referring to Gohmert, not to @gdave.
Certainly.
Though it’s IMO even worse when you’re pretending to be stupid in order to be a disingenuous troll, all the while shielded by parliamentary rules that prevent public official witnesses from mouthing off back and putting in their place Members who are being asshats.
And to expand on that, it’s surely important to understand your opponents’ actual position, and to challenge their actual errors. Consider a teenager who has grown up in rural Texas smothered in right wing antiscientific nonsense but is still reachable. If they see everyone taking Gohmert’s sarcastic rhetoric as a serious question, and mocking Gohmert for actually thinking the FS could move the moon, they will think we are the idiots, and that we just don’t understand the underlying [fallacious] idea that maybe global warming is attributable to natural orbital changes that are beyond human control.
So many choices…
Ha, I pawned you Libs! I really had you convinced you that I was that much of an idiot.
Of course it is not you, it is the chums marinating in anti-scientific nonsense the ones that are then unaware that even that bit about ‘the current global warming taking place because of natural orbit changes’ is into the “not even wrong” territory, orbital changes in climate take place in timelines of hundreds of thousands of years, the current global warming increase has been shown many times already that it is not caused by those millennially slow changes.
Finally, Earth is currently in an interglacial period (a period of milder climate between Ice Ages). If there were no human influences on climate, scientists say Earth’s current orbital positions within the Milankovitch cycles predict our planet should be cooling, not warming, continuing a long-term cooling trend that began 6,000 years ago.
So, Gohmert is either trying to troll the libs with an already stupid idea, or he knows that his very idiotic followers think that that is the reality. And he does not care about the consequences, he needs their votes.
It’s not that people think that he thought that the forest service could do this, it’s that he is claiming that this is what would be necessary for man to affect the climate.
But, as long as we have the Gohmert whisperers here, he recently why the Director of the FBI didn’t declare the Jan 6th Capitol riot and insurrection to be “mostly peaceful”. Is that also him being sarcastic and trolling, or is that an example of stupidity on his part?
I would have liked it if the person being addressed by Goobert had replied along the lines of:
“Sir, we’re trying to have a serious conversation here about a serious topic. Humans have been putting millions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere in the past century and this is contributing to a crisis of changing climate. This crisis will cost billions if not trillions of dollars, and lead to deaths. I’m sure we would all appreciate it if you would not make childish jokes about a serious matter like this. Thank you.”
I don’t know exactly what everyone thought initially or think now, but @Ultravires first spelled out the correct parsing of what Gohmert said at post #9 (that it was sarcastic mockery, albeit ill-conceived), and a lot of the middle of the thread consisted of people disputing that and arguing with @gdave about it.