The View's flat earther blames "senior poopy moment"
Sherri Shepherd, the co-host of The View who said she didn't know if the Earth was flat or round and that she didn't care, today said she knew all along it was round. She was just having a “senior brain-poopy moment,” when Whoopie tossed her that difficult question.
Her co-host, Elizabeth Hasselbeck defended her conservative pal:
LinkHASSELBECK: I don’t think you have to learn to be perfect either… you’re just yourself. I thought you handled that so well yesterday. You said ‘You know I actually, my mind is full of what’s my son doing right now, what am I going to feed him for dinner, I’m a mom.’ Like I think that’s completely fine to say ‘You know what, today I don’t care if the earth is round or flat. I may not care tomorrow, I just wanna know that…’
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Yes, we could all hear the collective "Awwwwwww, she just wants to feed her little boy". Because everyone knows those atheist scientists let their little kids starve.
Theocracy, do it for the kids!
They're both pious frauds.
In most countries, they take your children away from you if you can't tell the nice men in white coats whether the Earth is flat or spherical.
Way to spin her stupidity as the View suffers a backlash from hiring an idiot.
This is complete BS. Your brain shouldn't have to think about whether the Earth is flat or not, it should just be there. I'm a parent of two without a nice TV job and you can bet I'd know the answer to that question without gumming up the "what's for dinner" train of thought.
We need to stop celebrating these idiots by giving them spots on TV shows.
Finally, if you have to rack your brain for the shape of your planet, maybe raising a child isn't such a good idea.
Dumbass.
This is funny, since it reminds me of a very interesting episode during one of dear Mr. Sherlock Holmes' adventures.
In said story (I forget which one it was right now) Holmes and Watson are on a train trip, when Watson discovers Holmes didn't know the earth orbited around the sun, and is doubly surprised when Holmes exclaims the fact to be interesting and that he was going to try and forget the fact.
In the story Mr. Holmes explains that to him, the mind is a tool, or in this case a tool chest. And that if he puts too many "tools" that are not useful for his work in the chest, then he'd have a less efficient tool chest full of clutter.
Even though I feel this vision to be very interesting and maybe even "practical", I also think it's innacurate myself, since general knowledge far from being useless, helps a person understand and interact with the world at large in a more effective manner.
And as such even if a piece of knowledge is not directly useful to solve a problem, the paradigms, workings or ideas behind that knowledge can be used or adapted to a situation at hand. I could count a lot of times in which I've used ideas or theories I learned from reading sci-fi stories as a kid to solve a situation in real life.
Anyhow, all in all it seems our dear Sherri is an avid Conan Doyle fan maybe?
If Miss South Carolina Teen USA (with her brilliant geography answer) is worried about getting a job, she shouldn't bother. There will always be a place for her.
It's not round, or flat, or even a sphere. The earth is an oblique spheroid. If you don't understand that go back to middle school, please! And if you cannot explain why pi is an irrational number, or even what that means, just... just go back to your job and stop pretending as if you where enlightened.
This reminds me of why this is so funny. Crack whore view is much more entertaining.
my question is why do we care what a talk show host thinks about the shape of the world? or rather why do the media (boing boing included) want to try to make us care? Seems to me it's more of the magician's trick to distract us from what's really in need of our attention.
@bliss: The "An empty mind is a tidy mind" school of thought. Ridonkulous, but there it is. The correct frame is that the mind is a muscle, and the more you try to lift with it, the stronger it becomes.
But moving on to woman from "The View": The real problem is not that she is so completely dumb.
The problem is that she is dumb and yet profoundly confident in her dumbness--confident enough to expound on evolution, the shape of the planet, politics, everything under the sun, in front of a large audience, without a clue in the world, but without any sense of shame. I blame self-esteem schooling.
I'm still a little stunned that she missed this simple fact-- globes aren't all that uncommon, and practically every news program uses some sort of globe graphic of the world... even the phrases "around the world" or "circle the globe" or "globe-trotting" give it away... Or hey, look at the crescent moon sometime! See that shadow?
Someone please poke a hole in this lady's box-- she might suffocate in there!
Didn't Whoopi say this nugget, “There are certain things that are indicative to certain parts of the country.” My mom says this is hyper-corrrection or something, I think it means you can get on TV being a native speaker, no matter how poorly you speak English.
She then went on to say Vick was from the deep South. Newport New, VA is like 40 minutes from Washington, DC. Right?
Or hey, look at the crescent moon sometime! See that shadow?
I think you're having a senior poopy moment...you're thinking of a lunar eclipse
bliss @ #6 - If I recall correctly, Doyle had a spiritualist bent, and Holmes was meant to be a parody of the materialist mindset. Holmes' tidy mind was probably not intended to be emulated.
Clearly we should not embarrass the mentally deficient like Sherrie. Whoopie (and all other well educated people) should be made to wear an ear piece that blares loud noises every few seconds. That way they can't ask humiliating questions. This will spare the likes of Sherrie from the trauma of not knowing such difficult subjects.
Wouldn't want to damage their fragile psyches.
I further propose that we build a rocket ship, then start a PR campaign on how Jebus will meet them in the clouds on Venus. I am sure they'd go for it. Venus really is beautiful this time of year ya know. All the leaves are turning, it's quite a sight. I'd pay for Sherrie's ticket.
> my question is why do we care what a talk show
> host thinks about the shape of the world?
Because this ignoramus now has a platform, and because we need to ask ourselves why we live in a society where profoundly uneducated people have an open channel to 300 million viewers.
I'm sorry, but since when has anyone on The View EVER been relevant? Anyone who takes any of them seriously is a fool anyway.
aawoken, you are absolutely correct! Whoopi's mischaracterization of Newport News as the "Deep South", instead of the "South", is exactly the same as Sherri's not knowing whether or not the Earth is flat.
Oh, and look! She did a "hyper-corrrection or something" too. She's so stupid!
I'll look up corrrection later.
I think she's ensured that a lot of us will never watch the view again, ever.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Two of America's dumbest women...
Ms. Shepherd was asking for a $2 million salary. I don't think she got it. Since $2 million is, of course, the minimum income necessary to feed 1 child, I understand why she was so distracted.
Saying Newport News is in the Deep South is like saying Colorado is on America's West Coast.
i don't think this new lady is going to last long.
What the hell is a "senior poopy moment" is? Is she saying she's senile, or incompletely potty trained?
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I can't believe Whoopi is wasting her time on this stupid show. Baba Wawa is getting karmically what she deserves at last.
Earth is flat or round? Well, it could be both, like a dinner plate. That's a stupid question, and any answer would be stupid. Anyway, seen from Kansas it *is* flat. If Abraham Lincoln had given a stump speech saying space was curved he would have been locked away as a lunatic before his name was on the ballot.
It reminds me of the Dan Quayle 'potatoe' incident about 18 years ago. On that occasion, he mixed up the spelling of 'potato' with 'potatoes', and not a single dyslexic stood up in his defence. Somehow that was seen as evidence of whether you were fit to have your finger on the nuclear trigger.
Those who ask stupid, point-scoring questions and think they are being intelligent worry me a lot more than those who give unthinking answers to them.
On another note, I have no idea where Korea is on a world map because I'm too busy worrying about feeding my kids every second of every day.
I actually think her misdirection/excuse is what makes this most pathetic. I really don't care if she knows what shape the planet is, but to try and cover up her ignorance by saying "oh, but I am a mother and I am too busy raising my children to have any degree of common knowledge whatsoever" is ridiculous. Don't ever ask this woman to walk and chew gum at the same time.
#8, that would be oblate spheroid.
"Oblate" is a good word.
@#8 Anonymous - It's oblate, not oblique, and an oblate spheroid IS round, as any section would be an oval or a circle. It's not a perfect sphere, but it is round.
The View is irrelevant to most readers of BoingBoing, but not to the huge audience of mostly undereducated women who watch it. And by celebrating the purposeful ignorance of such a host, the View provides comfort to the audience who were so poorly served by the American educational system. Which interestingly enough would be a great segue for these conservatives into starting an argument for instituting a voucher system to fund private religious schools. You know, I'm the perfect evidence that education in America has failed?
Except for the part which would require ignorant fools who don't know that the earth is an oblate spheroid to be the same ones arguing for vouchers for private religious education.
Damn, bitten in the ass by irony.
I never liked that business about Holmes not knowing about the Copernican universe. First, it would be almost impossible to learn about the motions of celestial objects without learning the heliocentric model. Second -- and this is the part that really bothers me -- not knowing that model makes it much harder to remember and understand related information. The old Ptolemaic model of the universe was full of arbitrary information about stuff like the epicyclic motions of planets. If you happened to have three planets in the sky at once, understanding their relative positions was an immensely complicated matter. If you know the Copernican model, you can look up at three planets in the sky and see them defining the plane of the ecliptic: elegant, logical, and far easier to grasp. Ptolemy's hard. Copernicus is easy.
But back to Sherri Shephard. She may not be a rocket scientist, but I don't believe for a moment that she didn't know the world is round. I think she was lying.
Thing is, the Old Testament says the earth is flat, has corners, and has pillars at those corners. If Shephard had admitted knowing that the earth is round, she could have been challenged on whether she actually believes in the literal truth of the Bible.
That's the trouble with Biblical literalism: you can't pick and choose. If you insist on a dead-literal (i.e., Creationist) reading of Genesis, you also get stuck with a flat, square earth, plus a giant heap of rules about how you can't eat shellfish, shave your beard, wear clothing made of mixed fibers, live in a building that has contracted leprosy (that one's exceptionally mysterious), or refuse to have sex with your brother's widow.
Sherri Shephard saw that she was about to get caught out on a question, so she denied knowing whether the world is round or flat, and retreated to a basic fallback position: "Think of the children!"
It's the same thing young Miss South Carolina did when she got caught out on a question. In her case, she retreated to two and a half basic fallback positions: "Think of the children!" plus "America is the greatest country in the world," with a side order of "We need a better education system." She'd have sounded more coherent if she'd only gone with one of them, but she couldn't figure out which default response matched up best with the question she'd been asked.
Why is that supposed to make it any better. She is still an idiot who doesn't believe in evolution.
@Theresa Nielsen
I agree that she was lying, but for completely different reasons. I don't think she was thinking deeply enough to even attempt to address Creationist concerns about the literal interpretation of Biblical flat earth descriptions. She just looked/sounded more confused than anything else, and compelled by defensive position to continue being adversarial with the other idiots.
Also....
You said: "...plus a giant heap of rules about how you can't eat shellfish, shave your beard, wear clothing made of mixed fibers, live in a building that has contracted leprosy (that one's exceptionally mysterious), or refuse to have sex with your brother's widow."
That's a misconception perpetuated by opponents of Christianity to carry the religion into some realm of irrelevant absurdity. Sure, it was silly of Jehova to put those restrictions on the Jews, and is easily mocked on that point. The vast majority of Christians, including fundamentalists, believe that Jesus negated those rules, a la New Covenant vs. Old Covenant. Sure, sometimes something scares them and they fixate on one of those antiquated rules, but by and large Christian theology agrees that the Old Testament commandments are null/void.
Point being.... There are plenty of things to argue against in Christianity, but this argument about literal interpretation of OT rules is a straw man. Anyone vaguely versed in Christian theology doesn't take it seriously.
My Mum gave me a little globe when I was three. I loved it.
Now I realise that f*cking b!tch wasn't thinking about feeding me, she was titting around wasting brain power on knowing the shape of the Earth. I am now filing for parental divorce.
Quoting IVY MIKE: "I think you're having a senior poopy moment...you're thinking of a lunar eclipse"
Ummm, no, Davex was referring to the shadow the earth casts on the moon. See, that shadow causes the moon to look crescent-shaped sometimes - a clue that the shadow-caster (i.e., the Earth) is spherical.
I'll simplify it for you Mike: see, you would cast a human-shaped shadow on a wall, right? That would hint at the fact that you, the shadow-caster is what shape? That's right, HUMAN shaped. Good boy.
Quoting Glugenwog: "I'll simplify it for you Mike: see, you would cast a human-shaped shadow on a wall, right? That would hint at the fact that you, the shadow-caster is what shape? That's right, HUMAN shaped. Good boy."
Actually IVY MIKE was right -- what you've just described above is a lunar eclipse. The monthly phases of the moon are NOT caused by the earth's shadow. They are caused by the earth's position relative to the illuminated portion of the moon's surface. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_phase
Ahhh, so even Jesus thought the word of God was not quite literally the word of God.
What I find interesting is that we're really worked up about Sherri but didn't they mention that some of the presidential candidates didn't believe in evolution either? Do they know what shape the earth is?
@Dan
Bah... what are you thinking pointing us to an unreliable source like Wikipedia? Glugenwog was on the right track, and from this line of reasoning we can clearly see that the shape of the earth changes constantly throughout the month. It's round when the moon is crescent, flat when the moon is half-full, and bowl-shaped when the moon is gibbous.
This explains why Ms. Shepherd couldn't say whether the Earth was round or flat; she simply couldn't remember what phase the moon happened to be in at the time.
@Lester Reale: Sweet.
The earth is flat and round.
http://akrobotics.com/comics/2007/09/20/flat-earthers-unite
My money's on slightly-oblate spheroid, but maybe I'm being picky.
Yeah, I think she knew the earth is a sphere... but it does seem flat.
She probably just hasn't heard the old story of Columbus trying to prove the world was a globe.
He actually thought the Earth was much smaller and that he had reached India.
It seems that Wastrel and OutlanderSSC beat me to the punch. #8, you should be careful playing with petards, lest you be hoisted by your own.
Thanks for reminding me WHY I don't watch The View or any other daytime show for that reason. MORONS.
Maybe she's a member of the Flat Earth Society?
http://www.alaska.net/~clund/e_djublonskopf/Flatearthsociety.htm
I'd never watched The View before. If this is representative of the sort of information you get, maybe I should watch it for laughs occasionally. On the other hand, I'd have to put up with all that chaf I heard before the flat/round dialogue. Hmm... No, I don't think I'll watch it again. But the clip was pretty good. A better question Whoopie could have asked would have been about the number of dimensions occupying space according to string theory- then the co-host could have pulled out the child-feeding defense.
Re: Sherlock Holmes' dismissal of basic facts of astronomy... you also have to take into account that the dialogue mentioned takes place in the earliest of the Holmes stories (forget the title, but I believe it was the first one, where Watson and Holmes have their first adventure together). So Doyle can be forgiven for exaggerating the peculiarities of his famous detective... he was just establishing the character as highly eccentric... in the later stories, Holmes seems much less of a caricature and more nuanced.
(Isn't this more interesting than whatever that dumb f!wit said on The View?)
I DON'T HAVE TIME TO READ THIS STORY OR THINK ABOUT WHAT IT COULD MEAN, I NEED TO FEED MY KIDS.
Let's all be ignorant together!
Thank you Whoopi for being deliberate and rational.
What does flat mean?
ABC should be ashamed of itself by putting this MORON on as a co-host. Sadly, it sends the wrong message to young people who may watch, as well as denigrating women and blacks, and does nothing to improve the national dialog or culture.
Most of us who have grandchildren under 4 years of age KNOW the shape of Planet Earth. My 3 year old does. Saw a world globe displayed in a store and found North America.
Sherri probably does not have a clue what gravity is and wonders what keeps us and our objects from just floating around in space.. But thinking about this would be incompatible with "feeding my son". I guess thinking and eating are simply too incompatible. GOD HELP US.