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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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?
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.
B-but you don't understand, why b-bother using renewable energy if you theoretically can't use it forever? We might as well just keep using fossil fuels since there is obviously an infinite supply of them and they totally don't harm the environment?
Global warming? Oh that's just climate change, that's why I was sweating my ass off on Halloween, the southern US is just obviously becoming a jungle now instead of a swamp
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.
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.
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.
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.
Indeed. Even dunking on him, every time I see a tweet or whatever related to him, I just keep thinking to myself "I'd be better off not knowing this person exists."
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...
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....
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.
It's called a thought cancelling argument. Essentially it's a non sequitur that's so fucking dumb that your stunned silence is seen as "getting owned" by limpdick morons.
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.
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.
Where does Mr. Shapiro think the energy contained within fossil fuels came from?
It's all the Sun in one way or another. Renewables just capture that energy more directly, effectively making them infinite until the Sun does out...
Unfortunately "Effectively infinite until the Sun dies out" doesn't have quite the same ring to it. Though you'd think you wouldn't need to tell someone as "smart" as Ben Shapiro about something so basic you can literally see it in the sky.
He's thinking of the second law, anyway. The first law is just conservation of energy and if anything that makes limitless power sources seem more plausible.
Bruh, the US is still uncertain Trump won't be elected. The proven criminal and grifter is at risk of taking the country AGAIN. The brain rot is real in the US. Of course Shapiro is a savant to them
When you're less intelligent than the layer of algae on the lake, any moron with a room temp IQ seems intelligent. Which, incidentally, is why republicans are anti-education: when your constituents are stupid AF, they'll believe any dipshit claiming they want to make America great while they burn it down around their ears.
My hot take .. This is what happens when someone doesn't learn to find their own answers. Too much of education is spoon feeding instead of having kids investigate shit they're interested in on their own, with guidance on critical thinking. It is better now than it was BaCk In mY DaY.
But I'm just sitting here contemplating my own brain journey. I learned far too late how to find my own answers and verify them for correctness. I tried to raise my kid from an early age to think for herself more by sometimes not verifying things for her but having her do that.
The other thing is learning how to apply the scientific method to something you care about--to some project, say. It really has an impact when you get an answer that goes against common sense and then you verify it and think really hard and it turns out your new theory is correct.
Imagine if education were set up with at least some portion of the day dedicated to satisfying curiosity in these ways...
Kind of makes me think once I retire I should set up some kind of summer camp program like this.
I have a friend who likes Ben Shapiro. He doesn't really follow any of his agenda, so it's not that bad. But if the topic comes up I just switch it asap.