RationalWiki:What is going on in the clogosphere?/April 2019

April 2019
Michele Bachmann: Trump is the most “Godly, Biblical” president we’ve ever seen Good ol' Natural News is back at it again: they've cherry-picked a NASA study to claim that fossil fuel emissions are good for the planet and that the Green New Deal is a "death cult" that aims to create "a cold, dead world devoid of plant life." Don't worry about global warming! Aliens are cross-breeding with us to create heat-tolerant humans, according to Oxford University academic Young-hae Chi, a specialist in Korean language and society whose research interests include Christianity in Korean culture. After Carl Benjamin, who broadcasts on YouTube under the name of Sargon of Akkad, and is now standing as a UKIP candidate for the European Parliament, doubled down on a tweet which said he "wouldn't even rape" a Labour Party MP, local UKIP members have called for his deselection. In scenes reminiscent of a Donald Trump press conference, Benjamin called journalists "dirty smear merchants" and initially refused to answer their questions. Some liberal Twitterers are claiming that the Notre Dame fire is Karmic justice for France's colonial history. (The cathedral was completed multiple centuries before the French colonial period). We don't see a fraction as many left-wing bad takes on tragedies like this as we do right-wing ones, but I'd say this one just about qualifies. (The right, for what it's worth, is blaming the fire on Muslims, because of course it is). Roosh V says the image of the black hole is probably fake and only went viral because the media wanted to praise a woman for something other than making a baby. More than 52 years after Carson McCullers's death, author of (among many other works) The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, someone has finally determined how she could so masterfully depict such vivid black, Filipino, bisexual, and otherwise unorthodox characters in her time... she was secretly transgender! Effective Altruism sure doesn't get much more effective than asking for $28,000 to give away copies of the LessWrong Harry Potter fan fiction, which is already free. Peter Hitchens now claims that the murder of Jo Cox wasn't politically motivated and was due to the killer's mental capacity. This is despite fellow journalists, prosecutors and the judge of the killers trial saying it was.