ORLY, O'Reilly?

The Bill O’Reilly “God of the gaps” incredul-o-fest video spawned a number meme-o-grams, some of which I have seen on reddit. Now I see links to collections of them over at Bad Astronomy.

The comments in the BA post are interesting, too, especially the ones with the “why are you picking on him” flavor. It’s because he’s embracing willful ignorance and encouraging people to run away from critical thought. It was bad enough that he had repeated the “you can’t explain tides” canard until it blew up. But the kicker is defending his “facts don’t matter” attitude with his fallacy-laden argument. With that he’s inviting scorn and ridicule. It would be rude not to accept.