• TrismegistusMx@slrpnk.net
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    8 months ago

    What’s always astounding is how much a person has to actually know to be as stupid as Ben Shapiro (and Matt Walsh, and others). They have to study and learn in order to misuse the things that they’ve learned. It’s impossible to be this wrong on accident.

    • themeatbridge@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Ben Shapiro isn’t stupid. He is talking to stupid people, because stupid people give him power by following him.

      Ben Shapiro is a conservative, which is to say he is a narcissist. He will say anything that benefits himself, and it is justified because he is Ben Shapiro, and Ben Shapiro believes Ben Shapiro is good. Therefore, if Ben Shapiro needs to lie, or obfuscate the truth, or speak to the emotions of his followers, he is righteous because it helps him win.

      He is not concerned with reality unless reality helps him win. Ben Shapiro sees himself as a Nascar driver, and the truth is a frog hopping across the track. He’s in a mindset that does not even register dishonesty as it’s farting out of the large hole in his face.

      He’s talking to the people who will never see the replies calling him stupid. He’s talking to the people who, like him, believe that they are the inherently righteous. They may or may not be stupid, but that doesn’t matter to them at all. Ignorance isn’t possible when you are good, because being good means you know and understand everything that a good person needs to know and understand. Anything more is elitist snobbery and deliberately confusing.

        • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          He’s a professional who has spent his whole life aspiring to be the next Tucker Carlson (who aspired to be the next William F. Buckley).

          His entire career has been predicated on far-right ideologues promoting his identity as a brand. Dude is entirely a product of celebrity and he spends every waking hour working on the next self-promotion. If his mouth is dropping turds, that is only because shitting out your gullet is what publishers and media magnets want to see in their spokesmodels.

          If only Ben had been a staked 10/10 hottie or a roided up macho man, he’d be running for governor by now.

        • MotoAsh@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          Dude thinks a wet vagina is a sign of health issues and not excitement… Ben doesn’t know the first thing about bodily functions. He probably even thinks that shit smell on his breath is normal.

      • TrismegistusMx@slrpnk.net
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        8 months ago

        No lies detected. I’m glad to see other people realizing that “Conservatism” and it’s uglier cousins, Authoritarianism and Fascism, are emergent from mass scale narcissism.

      • no banana @lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Also - I’ve read somewhere on the internet - that he, and this is not me saying this but the internet by the way, that he, Ben Sharpie, thinks about his sister a lot. It’s just something I’ve read somewhere I believe.

      • Smoogs@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        While there are other options than to become a conservative, conservatives are stupid.

          • Smoogs@lemmy.world
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            8 months ago

            I don’t think it’s strictly a generation but more location.

            You could go to certain provinces and states all around the world and find all generations in the same stupid echo chamber. Hence red /blue states. Also what their socioeconomic background is is a huge factor.

    • Patapon Enjoyer@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Don’t give them that much credit, all you need is a superficial understanding of something, done by skimming half a wikipedia page.

      • rtxn@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        No, this goes beyond ignorance. What that fucker is doing shows at least a fundamental understanding of the subject to deliberately arrive on the opposite side of reality.

        • dustyData@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          It has nothing to do with intelligence or stupidity. You can’t fail the way Shapiro fails at thinking being stupid. It’s malice, the cruelty is the point. When you uphold hatred and cruelty above all, logic goes out of the window and then this advanced stupid becomes possible. He is not arriving to a POV from an understanding of a subject. He decides what he wanted his POV to be first, then he uses whatever he has at hand to justify it.

        • Grayox@lemmy.mlOP
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          8 months ago

          Being a Rightwing Grifter is hella profitable. Chuds love throwing money at people that validate their shitty opinions with fancy talk.

        • flerp@lemm.ee
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          8 months ago

          In fairness, the misunderstanding of the first law of thermodynamics isn’t a new thing. You hear it come up from every bad theist apologist so it’s not like he came up with this argument on his own based on researching science and misunderstanding his own research. He just heard someone else say it and is parroting it like all of the other people who make similar bad arguments related to the laws of thermodynamics.

          • frezik@midwest.social
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            8 months ago

            Someone in the chain had to have some understanding of the issue. Most conservatives are stupid, but there has to be a few smart but evil ones to start the meme going.

      • theneverfox@pawb.social
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        8 months ago

        Nah, the guy isn’t dumb, he just has zero integrity. He finds ways to reframe arguments to win arguments - that isn’t easy, the dude knows his takes are garbage. Every once in a while the mask slips

        Someone like Jordan Peterson on the other hand? The dude believes what he’s saying, his takes are also trash, but he’s so dogmatic in his world view that he can’t grasp anything outside them. He’s not really that dumb either, he just has issues.

        If you want just straight up dumb, Trump is the epitome. He doesn’t understand anything - he just has so much charisma it doesn’t matter. Try reading his speeches - you might listen to them and think “wtf is he on about?”, but without his delivery, it’s just incoherent rambling

        For an example of an idiot who can sound smart, Elon musk comes to mind. He memorizes facts the way a child does about the specs of their model cars, but he can’t apply any of that knowledge

    • Ann Archy@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      The difference between sophistry and philosophy.

      You become a philosopher to understand the world.

      You become a sophist to misuse your understanding of the world to profit off of others.

  • Barttier@feddit.de
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    8 months ago

    Ben Shapiro is an intellectual steamboat. A lot of hot air. Way to much effort. Stuck somewhere in the past.

    “Whats next, libtards? Wireless phones? How can you charge a phone without a wire?”

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      8 months ago

      And guess what I found when I opened my phone up? That’s right, wires. The thing is filled with wires.

    • kameecoding@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      The “Some more news” videos about him are a good watch.

      also that time he called a conservative UK tv host a lib because he didn’t like being called out on air by him

      • chatokun@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        8 months ago

        Doctor Mister Cody Johnston? The roasts they do on Behind the Bastards are great too. Especially reading Ben’s books.

  • wick@lemm.ee
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    8 months ago

    Yea it sucks the energy is only renewable until the sun explodes. Oh well, back to coal.

    • qyron@sopuli.xyz
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      8 months ago

      Not enough mass to go supernova; the sun is expected to become a red dwarf.

      • sebinspace@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        White dwarf

        Red dwarves are failed stars that never attained the mass necessary to become a full-on star. Jupiter actually isn’t far off from this status.

        On a related note, red dwarves will probably be some of the last sources of light in the universe, and live for trillions of years due to how slowly they burn fuel, so… suck it, Shapiro?

        • vithigar@lemmy.ca
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          8 months ago

          You might be thinking of brown dwarfs. Red dwarfs are fully qualified stars which sustain nuclear fusion in their cores. Brown dwarfs do not, though still emit radiation by other various means.

          Jupiter is also somewhat close, in astronomical terms, to being a brown dwarf. It is not even remotely near being a red dwarf.

          Your last point is correct though. Red dwarfs last much, much longer than all other stars due to being fully convective which allows them to consume all their fuel uniformly.

        • Ann Archy@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          “Small improvements cannot instantly solve the whole problem. Therefore, improvements are meaningless.”

          - The condensed ideology of conservatives

          • mack7400@lemmy.world
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            8 months ago

            I mean, I’ve had braces for a whole day and my teeth are still crooked, so dentistry is a sham!!1 /s

        • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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          8 months ago

          Jupiter’s quite a long way off from being a red dwarf it would need to be in any 10 times the mass be a red dwarf.

          Jupiter is somewhat close to being a brown dwarf which is a star that failed to even become a failed star and is merely hot and glowy but not plasma. Jupiter’s atmosphere is just gaseous though perhaps really deep down at the core it achieves brown dwarf level status but we don’t consider it to count because it’s not the whole planet.

          • vorbixol@lemmy.world
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            8 months ago

            Red dwarfs are not failed stars. They are the lowest mass objects capable of nuclear fusion. Brown dwarfs are failed stars. Brown dwarfs officially start at 13 Jupiter masses, & have a maximum mass of 75 Jupiter’s. Beyond that mass, fusion starts & the object is officially a star.

            • Affine Connection@lemmy.world
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              8 months ago

              Red dwarfs are not failed stars. They are the lowest mass objects capable of nuclear fusion.

              Brown dwarfs are capable of fusion of deuterium at an extremely low power output. Their inability to conduct more substantial fusion involving hydrogen-1 is what sets them apart from red dwarfs.

            • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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              8 months ago

              Well failed star is an erroneous term it just means any star that is not bright enough and hot enough that any world around it could sustain life (at least carbon-based as we know it to be).

              Any world close enough to have liquid water would be so close as to be irradiated beyond anything we consider to be survivable and probably tidily locked to boot.

              It’s still a star in the real sense of the term just quite dim and cool.

              • Affine Connection@lemmy.world
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                8 months ago

                No, it means that it failed to become a star by initiating stellar fusion reactions. This isn’t some science fiction term. Red dwarfs are stars, and brown dwarfs are not.

          • sebinspace@lemmy.world
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            8 months ago

            It’s fine, he’s the kind of person that goes “yeah, you might’ve won $500m in the lottery, but it’s only $300m after taxes” because that’s fucken chump change or smth

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              8 months ago

              Even after taxes, there still is a huge pile of cash left.

              I can’t imagine how I would spend €300m. And I have some pretty wild ideas for it.

  • CrazyEddie041@kbin.social
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    8 months ago

    Man… even being as generous as possible, it’s still an incredibly stupid point. “Renewable” doesn’t mean “infinite”. If something can only be renewed a finite number of times, or even once, then it’s still renewable.

    • flerp@lemm.ee
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      8 months ago

      Sometimes you need time to think up the perfect comeback. For example, “The Jerk Store called, they’re running out of you!”

      Pure gold takes time to form.

    • Asafum@feddit.nl
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      8 months ago

      And judging by the time and the #teaparty it’s actually #KochFundedPAC.

      The tea party movement was pretty much entirely on the shoulders of the Koch asshats. Astroturfed “grassroots” bullshit. It’s pretty much how we ended up with the Freedumb Caucus…

    • Jax@sh.itjust.works
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      8 months ago

      What, you think there’s a statute of limitations for clowning on dumbfucks?

      Weird.

  • TowardsTheFuture@lemmy.zip
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    8 months ago

    Ah yes… Conservation of Energy… which means… that we never lose energy…

    I… is he trying to prove that there… is… renewable resources or is he just that dumb? Oh yeah its that.

    • FaeDrifter@midwest.social
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      8 months ago

      I think he’s trying to say, “energy cannot be created or destroyed, therefore all energy is renewable”. Implying gas and oil are just as “renewable” as wind and solar.

      Conservatives back gas and oil purely for personal financial incentives, and like to project that renewable energy is also only for financial incentives and not the good of the planet.

      Which should only work on high school kids. In 9th grade I didn’t understand why air conditioners required power instead of generating power. Heat is energy, right? Why don’t they just take the energy out of the air and convert it to electrical energy?

      I’m very confident Ben knows how the second law of thermodynamics works, and he’s taking advantage of a populace that was put through a failed education system.

      • Mr_Dr_Oink@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        I always thought of “renewable” as just used to distinguish forms of power generation that relied on processes that already occur, unlike oil and gas that exist but need to be extracted and processed to create usable energy, we have solar, wind and hydro that take adva tage of sources of energy that we simply intercept. Like a solar panel generating energy from the light that’s already hitting the spot that we installed the panel, the wind turbine that’s generating energy from the wind that’s already blowing, etc.

        That may not be strictly true (im vaguely remembering secondary school geography lessons), but thats how i tend to distinguish them

        It seems like ben is relying on word play to create a fallacy to confuse the meaning of renewable, which oil and gas are not.

        Even if you look at it from the perspective of is a resource finite, which technically everything is, oil is going to run out an insurmountable amount of time before the wind stops blowing.

    • Delphia@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      I honestly believe that he knows he is full of shit and arguing in bad faith, but he knows it keeps him in the money. He is entirely too clever to beleive everything he says.

      • 1847953620@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        Iono, he’s said some insanely stupid stuff that only embarrasses him and doesn’t help him politically. Have you seen his writing before he became famous? Ridiculous stuff. I think he just has an unchecked ego hopelessly warped by his sycophant backers.

        Basically exactly what the previous commenter said, dunning-kruger effect over and over and over.

        • Delphia@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          IMO he speaks too well and articulates his points too well in interviews for me to beleive its always ego and stupidity all the time. How many of his twitter followers are people who follow him just so they can call him an idiot? How many people watch him in interviews because they are hoping he rams his foot in his mouth and looks like an idiot? Even the “WAP” thing which made him look like a complete twit meant that he was trending on Twitter for like a week.

          Enragement drives engagement, and he is an infuriating tool, but also someone who is making a career out of being one.

          I’m not saying he doesnt belive some of it, or even most of it. But I have very little doubt that sometimes he is hamming it up just to get the clicks and stay relevant.

          • 1847953620@lemmy.world
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            8 months ago

            If you believe he speaks well and articulates his points well, I have a Benny Shaps edition bridge to sell you.

            • Delphia@lemmy.world
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              8 months ago

              By the standards of right wing talking heads. I dislike the man immensely and I hear the bullshit and debate club tactics but he is a pretty capable speaker, especially when playing to audiences who want to believe what he has to say.

              I think the man is a fucking weasel, but I dont think he is a dumb weasel.

  • frezik@midwest.social
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    8 months ago

    There’s no such thing as free health care. Now excuse me, Home Depot is selling carpet with free installation.

    • Grayox@lemmy.mlOP
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      8 months ago

      The heat death of the universe will occur in 1.7×10 to the power of 106. Why should humanity even get out of bed, much less harness all of earth’s energy becoming a type 1 civ or build a dyson’s sphere and become a type 2 civ…

  • kaffiene@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    So I guess he’s technically correct. I mean the Sun will run out at some point. God he’s a fucking idiot. He has the gall to cal others dumbass? JFC

    • Knusper@feddit.de
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      8 months ago

      I think, he’s rather well-ackshuallying the fact that you don’t renew the actual energy itself. It remains conserved at all times…

    • dangblingus@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      The same as the person at Olive Garden who is contesting the truth behind the “unlimited breadsticks” claim

  • SokathHisEyesOpen@lemmy.ml
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    8 months ago

    I guess on a multi-billion year time scale, he’s right. Eventually the sun will stop burning and we won’t be able to harness its power. Until then, it’s renewable energy. What a fool.

    • Knusper@feddit.de
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      8 months ago

      Yeah, I think, that was him just actually being dumb. His tweet is from 2011. Back then, it wasn’t yet obvious in everyday life that it is changing, so Mr. Facts-Don’t-Care-About-Your-Feelings probably felt extra edgy ignoring the facts.

      • Ann Archy@lemmy.world
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        It was obvious in everyday life in the 90’s. He has no excuse except for being a bigoted privileged midget man, and honestly he’s the one who gives them all a bad name.