Steyn

Carl Zimmer summarizes: In earlier days, Will liked to claim the World Meteorological Organization as an authority when he wrote that there has been no global warming since 1998. Now that the World Meteorological Organization has set things straight, he's claiming a columnist at National Review as his authority. That's quite an upgrade. Actually, it's worse than "a columnist". His authority is fact averse Creationist Mark Steyn.

Mark Steyn on the trouble he has with facts: Incidentally, I stopped writing for the [New York] Times a few years ago because their fanatical "fact-checking" copy-editors edited my copy into unreadable sludge. I think it's some sort of chemical reaction -- add facts to a Mark Steyn column and it curdles into sludge. Macleans doesn't seem to bother with fact checkers because check this Sten column out: The other day, an admiring profile of Cate Blanchett ("Green before it was hip, she cites Al Gore and David de Rothschild as heroes and believes that leaf blowers 'sum up everything that is…

Johann Hari reports on the National Review cruise: The idea that Europe is being "taken over" is the unifying theme of this cruise. Some people go on singles' cruises, some on ballroom-dancing cruises. This is the Muslims Are Coming cruise. Everyone thinks it. Everyone knows it. And the man most responsible for this insight is sitting only a few tables down: Mark Steyn. He is wearing sunglasses on top of his head and a bright shirt. Steyn's thesis in his new book, America Alone, is simple: The "European races"--i.e., white people--"are too self-absorbed to breed," but the Muslims are…

John Holbo finds this piece of stupidity from Mark Steyn: Ann Coulter's new book Godless: The Church of Liberalism is a rollicking read very tightly reasoned and hard to argue with. After all, the progressive mind regards it as backward and primitive to let religion determine every aspect of your life, but takes it as advanced and enlightened to have the state determine every aspect of your life. Lest you doubt the left's pieties are now a religion, try this experiment: go up to an environmental activist and say "Hey, how about that ozone hole closing up?" or "Wow! The global warming peaked…

Quoting myself: One of the less pleasant parts of my job is talking to students that I have caught plagiarizing assignments. All too often, rather than admit to copying they will tell me clumsy lies and blame somebody else. Like Mark Steyn. When he was caught stealing from a blog post by Geoff Pullum, instead of apologizing and giving Pullum appropriate credit, he implausibly claimed that he had independently came up with the same examples and wording. From John Quiggin and PZ Myers, who got it from Bitch, Phd, who got it from Unfogged. My previous posts on Steyn are here. Update: See John…

Mark Steyn gets this email : ARE YOU A CREATIONIST? I enjoy your various articles in the Speccie, torygraph etc and agree with most of what you say and your support for Right views. But I am concerned with your right-wing mates in the US and UK who seem to be on the intelligent-design rubbish bandwagon. I hope you will distance yourself from them in future articles on this subject as there is no evidence for their views at all whereas evolution is supported by enormous volumes of evidence. You don't strike me as a creationist irrationalist. And responds with: The fact is that this is a…

After falling for an obvious hoax, Mark Steyn has refused to correct his error. Instead he just keeps digging himself deeper and deeper into a hole. (My previous posts on this topic: 1 2 3). In his latest effort Steyn complains about how the meanies at Media Watch asked him what checks he made to prove the validity of Bryant's unlikely tale: But Chantal explained that she'd checked out the show and that the Media Watch concept involves them accusing you of something, you emailing back your 15,000-word response and then they pick the infelicitously phrased seven-word throwaway subordinate…

Some of the readers of this Mark Steyn column might have wondered why he seems oddly determined to dispute one date in the 9/11 Commission's time line: they seemed oddly determined to fix June 3, 2000, as the official date of Atta's first landing on American soil Of course, those people who heard how Steyn got busted by Media Watch for falling for Johnelle Bryant's story (my posts are here and here) will know the real reason why he is determined to dispute that date---for Bryant's story to be true, Atta would have had to have been in the US before June 2000. Here's Steyn's argument: But I do…

Last week the gullible Mark Steyn was busted by Media Watch for basing a column on Johnelle Bryant's crazy story about being visited by Mohammed Atta in early May 2000. She said that Atta threatened to cut her throat and wanted a loan to buy a crop duster. Unfortunately for her story, Atta wasn't in the country until June. And, as I wrote then: Strangely enough, Bryant did not tell anyone else at the time about Atta threatening to cut her throat. A normal person might guess that this was because she made the story up, but Steyn triumphantly concludes that the evilness that is multiculturalism…

Mark Steyn relates a story told by Johnelle Bryant: Bryant is an official with the US Department of Agriculture in Florida, and the late Atta had gone to see her about getting a $US650,000 government loan to convert a plane into the world's largest crop-duster. A novel idea. The meeting got off to a rocky start when Atta refused to deal with Bryant because she was but a woman. But, after this unpleasantness had been smoothed out, things went swimmingly. When it was explained to him that, alas, he wouldn't get the 650 grand in cash that day, Atta threatened to cut Bryant's throat. He then…