John Oliver is a Moron: John Oliver is a Moron

John Oliver is a Moron

Tenet 1: John Oliver is a Moron

Tenet 2: John Oliver is wrong on virtually every subject.

Tenet 3: If you find yourself agreeing with John Oliver, you are probably wrong.

John Oliver is a Moron

My apologies for the uncreative title, subtitle, and section headings, but sometimes these things just write themselves. Here's a John Oliver meme I recently encountered which reminded me of my long-held belief that John Oliver is a moron. (Apologies to all morons out there of the more benign variety).

John Oliver is a Moron

Here we see Oliver stumble gracelessly into the dual subjects of climate change and public opinion. First we are told that the opinions of 25% of the population are simply irrelevant. Trenchant commentary if he was talking about a country that is not a democracy. Looking at our handy list of dictators and focusing on the Americas, that would limit him to Cuba (whom he defends) and Venezuela (whom he doesn't defend yet can't bring himself to properly criticize either). In those countries, and many of the other dictatorships throughout the world, popular opinion is very unimportant. However the United States is governed by a democracy (link provided for John Oliver). Under a democracy policy decisions are ostensibly made with large input from the governed citizens. Thus 25% of the population doubting climate change does in fact matter. It matters whether you agree or not, because those people have input into policy making. Granted it might be true that the US is not in fact all that democratic and people don't actually have that much input in policy. Or it might be the case the democracy is an institution doomed to failure because people on the whole are not rational. But Oliver is not making commentary on the principles of democracy: he is just ridiculing rubes for chuckles.

John Oliver is a Moron

Second, you have to love this sentence:

You don't need people's opinions on a fact.

And this is where we really dive into the depths of his moronity, or perhaps just the shallowness of his understanding of the domain in which is he is ridiculing people for their beliefs. (Aside: I've still never had a debate with one of these climate change fanatics who could share even basic details about the climate science they're so sure of.) So why is it that Oliver can be so sure climate change is a "fact"? What they will always respond with is: the scientific consensus. Yes the consensus, or the opinions of experts, is all the proof you need. So Oliver's stance on climate change is driven by the two following premises.

1. You don't need people's opinions on a fact.
2. Climate change is a fact because of people's opinions.

The only thing proven here is that Oliver is highly immune to cognitive dissonance, drawn from the observation that his head has not exploded (unfortunately). Although another explanation is that he has so little intellectual curiosity that he doesn't realize that consensus is the key argument supporting his assertion that "climate change is a fact". This kind of protection from the trivial nuances of the domain should be generally true in any field of knowledge. We shall henceforth refer to it as the Oliver Effect: when one's understanding of a subject is so shallow that the fundamental contradictions of their opinions on that subject are hidden from them. But this is just what we all know colloquially as "being a moron."

He lists a number of facts to compare to. Let's see if we can prove those things.

Which number is bigger, 5 or 15?

You can't really prove this as it is practically axiomatic.

Are there owls or hats?

Pretty easy to prove by providing an example of either.

Climate change cannot be similarly proved! For reasons I previously explained, we can't actually prove anything about a theory given a single chaotic instance of the phenomenon in action. We can't prove it won't rain tomorrow. We've all seen downpours on days forecasted to have 0% chance of rain. That 15 is larger than 5 is a fact. That owls exist is a fact. That it will rain tomorrow is a model-driven probability, not a fact. "Climate change" is not a fact, or even a statement. Scientific fact requires reproducible experimentation. Blind faith in the academy is exactly what science is designed to avoid.

John Oliver is a Moron

In conclusion, with one bumbling statement Oliver has negated the fundamental bases of both democracy and scientific inquiry in his zeal to paint other people as morons so as to take some pressure off of himself. He's like the kid in class who couldn't read well so he made fun of the teacher's shirt to make everyone else laugh. Granted he is funny. So laugh at him, not with him. And for the love of god please don't be making political or scientific opinions based on the quips of a comedian so lacking in knowledge that the phrase "the Oliver Effect" was named after him. 😄

Trudon't Tread On Me

It looks like six spots have opened up for Trudeau's valuable refugees.

One of two gunmen who shouted 'Allahu akbar!' as they opened fire at a mosque in Quebec City was of Moroccan origin, a witness and local media reported Monday, revealing the first details about the attackers in the massacre that killed six people.

The terror suspects were identified as Mohamed Khadir and Alexandre Bissonnette......

A second source confirms they were both yelling Allahu ahkbar, and that the non-Moroccan had a heavy Quebec accent.

This is a strange attack because initial reports indicate a shooting on a mosque by Muslims, one an immigrant and the other possibly a native Canadian convert. However we do have to consider Coulter's Law on this. If the other shooter was white it would likely have been plastered all over the news by now.

Either way, the race of the perpetrator's is not highly significant: that they were killing in the name of Allah is. This is abysmal timing for Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau, who just recently tweeted (the second being faked):

The virtuous PM is basing his nation's immigration on the notion that all refugees are, well, refugees. Even if that was the case I would strongly condemn such a policy. If for no other reason that if you believe it is our duty to help them, you can help 12 times as many by assisting them in theater. So for every refugee you bring here you're telling 11 others to screw off. But even worse it ignores the fact that a great many aren't fleeing persecution, terror, & war, but exporting it. The German interior minister has stated there are over 500 ISIS Jihadis posed as Syrian refugees. This isn't a vague future threat. It is already happening.

I stand by the notion that the worst thing you can do to the west is bring in the refugees, the worst thing you can do for the home countries is bring in the refugees, and the worst thing you can do for the refugees is bring in the refugees.

• It's bad for the west because it is a destabilising force. This "Diversity is our Strength" talk is utter nonsense. Has it ever been true anytime in history that diversity was strength? It could be argued that strength leads to diversity, because people want to live in the prosperous country. There is simply no evidence that diversity is strength. However there is a multitude of examples of homogeneous nations that became powerful, and then fell after they became diverse.
• It's bad for the home countries because it drains them of their key resource: their people. Look at Syria, where men of fighting age have been allowed entry to Europe by the hundreds of thousands. Who is going to rebuild the country? This is not just a problem of Muslims. The quaint east-European nation Latvia is struggling immensely with a demographics crisis because the most talented seek employment in the west. By letting them in the western countries are draining Latvia and other nations of life. That doesn't seem very charitable, and is certainly not a wise approach for long-term continental stability.
• It's bad for the refugees in the long-term. In the short-term it may seem charitable to allow them admittance to escape the savages of war. Except most of the refugees are not fleeing war. That vast majority are not from war-torn areas or even war-torn countries. They are opportunistic economic migrants. As the western nations lose their cultural, religious, and ethnic bonds, they largely are tied together by one force: economics. And that is precisely why the refugees come in the first place. It's only for material benefit. What happens at the next economic collapse? Surely it'll happen eventually; it always does. What happens when there are food shortages? If wide-scale violence ever descends on the west, the foreigners are going to bear the brunt of it. Groups of unassimilated foreigners will not fare well in a collapse situation. 

The great failure of democracy is that policy is now being made by feelings rather than intellect, despite the left's self-assurance that they are the defenders of science. This is not recipe for success. The decline is imminent. I never predicted Trump could save the west, but I held out some hope. As I've seen the visceral emotional reactions from the left, I'm quickly losing all faith in that. My facebook feed is insane, and it's only the more reasonable liberals that have not unfriended me over politics. I can only imagine what it would look like if I had never actively supported Trump. 

We can't have a democracy when feelings trump reason. We can't have a democracy when half the country actively pursues the demographic destruction of the founding nation. We can't have a democracy when one parties primary strategy for power is to import votes at taxpayer expense. We can't have a democracy when half the country is increasingly condoning violence in support of political objectives. (The definition of terrorism). 

Civilizations exist to solve problems. The hallmark of the left is their solutions always end up creating problems worse than what they were trying to solve in the first place. There are big problems with global capitalism but the solution of Communism is by comparison to anything else a disaster. There are two paths the US is likely to take. In one path we continue this long march to Communism. In the other the country becomes increasingly weakened to the point of dissolution of the union. I'm seeing the latter as more likely. We're already seeing a serious movement for Calexit. And if you are an intellectual or free thinker of any sort you should be hoping for the latter. Communists always start killing the intellectual dissidents first. If you care about yourself and your family you should be supporting liberal exits from the US, rather than having them drag us into an oppressive system where they control the state apparatuses of violence. And at this point I would also urge you to consider that liberal democracy does not offer long-term stability and we should be considering other forms of government.

UPDATE It's looking like the shooter was not an immigrant (he's white with a French name) and not a Muslim. However than doesn't invalidate my post. Cultural conflict is happening even if in this case it went in the other direction. Also this post was written in response to general trends, not a single isolated incident, although the incident did compel me to write on the subject.