

Bachmann: Hawking Blunder on Black Holes Shows Danger of Listening to Scientists - pbreit
http://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/stephen-hawkings-blunder-on-black-holes-shows-danger-of-listening-to-scientists-says-bachmann

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qohen
It's satire -- it's from The Borowitz Report section of The New Yorker, by
Andy Borowitz [1], who, among other things, created The Fresh Prince of Bel
Air (yes, really).

Now, you'd think, even if one isn't aware that The Borowitz Report is meant to
be satirical, that the word "humor" in the URL would tip people off, but
apparently, this isn't so -- in fact, it's enough of an issue that _The Awl_
has a piece entitled "The Borowitz Problem" [2], which is an interesting read.
It starts with this statistic:

 _According to Thompson, “The Borowitz Report” was responsible for six percent
of all of NewYorker.com’s traffic last year._

And then makes this point:

 _But when you publish a fake headline that sounds almost real, place it on
top of satire that 's soft enough to skim without really reading, give it a
newyorker.com URL, and promote it on Facebook, where basically every headline
sounds like satire now, you know what you're really doing.

Not always, but frequently, these posts are going to go viral as the result of
people who don't know they're jokes; as a bonus, every few months, a foreign
outlet will aggregate them as if they're genuine. That Travolta story had, at
one point, over ten thousand Facebook shares, not because a sophisticated joke
flew over thousands of heads, but because its form is intentionally
misleading._

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Borowitz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andy_Borowitz)

[2] [http://www.theawl.com/2014/07/the-borowitz-
problem](http://www.theawl.com/2014/07/the-borowitz-problem)

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andrewksl
I don't know whether to laugh at the ridiculous (and almost obligatory) ad-
hominem science denial or cry because there are people who are ignorant enough
to actually take this seriously.

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bediger4000
How very bizarre. Bachmann's point seems entirely based on some view that we
should only listen to authorities, and we should only listed to authorities
that are correct all the time.

If your view of truth doesn't stem from "what I was taught", that is, from
taking some Big Kahuna's word for it, then what Bachmann says seems
nonsensical.

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jmcguckin
Surprisingly, this is not dated April 1.

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venomsnake
Satire? Seems like it.

