FAIL Quote of the Day: More Vox Day stupidity

I’ve been feeling a little lazy about blogging since yesterday, which accounts for the conspicuous decrease in my posting rate from average, but as usual, you can leave it to my favorite punching-bag to say something stupid, unfounded and untrue to get me involved again:

The amusing thing is that the self-styled defenders of science who are so vocal about so many unrelated issues don't give a damn about the state of scientific education. Atheists such as Richard Dawkins and PZ Myers are FAR more concerned with preventing creationism from being taught as an alternative to time + chance + natural selection (probably) + magic stardust/aliens than they are with the fact that students are increasingly being taught scientific history rather than science.

This is mind-numbingly idiotic in a variety of ways, as per usual. Leaving out his usual anti-evolution silliness (which indicates, once again, how hilariously ignorant he is on the matter for someone who claims to know enough about it to judge it to be false), the primary claim in this excerpt is that by choosing to focus their energies on one particular facet of the defense of science and scientific education – the one of preventing anti-scientific bullshit from being peddled into public science classrooms in the form of ID/Creationism – “defenders of science” like Dawkins and PZ supposedly demonstrate how they actually don’t care about scientific education. This is as ridiculous as is claiming that, say, because an environmentalist chooses to specifically try and save crocodilians or whatever, that he/she therefore doesn’t care about the rest of the ecosystem. Or that because a chef chooses to specialize in pastries, he’d be perfectly fine with the rest of the staff serving pig slop to their customers.

People (not specifically “atheists”, which is nothing more than yet another mindless overgeneralization from cretins like Vox Day) like professors Dawkins and Myers choose to specialize their offensives (and defenses) against the ID/Creationist crowd because that’s the group of scientifically illiterate and religiously fueled cranks and loons that they’re the best at dealing with. It’s called “specialization”; being concerned about a general issue – the state of scientific education, environmentalism, culinary arts, etc. – doesn’t mean one has to focus their energies equally across the entire field. That Vox apparently doesn’t understand this indicates, not Dawkins or PZ’s supposed indifference, but Vox’s own profound lack of sense.

That’s pretty much all for that first bit of silliness. However, in the post directly succeeding the one above, comes this quote that literally had me make a double-take:

Obama won't prove to be the worst president ever, as Wilson and Lincoln almost surely have first and second positions locked down, but he is definitely one of the most comedic.

Okay. I can understand Vox spouting nonsense about science and a whole variety of things he’s demonstrably ignorant of; that much is a given. But to actually claim that President Lincoln – Abraham “Honest Abe” Lincoln, the revolutionary leader who saved the country during the Civil War, ended slavery, created some of history’s most iconic speeches and is generally viewed by modern scholars to be the greatest President in American history – is one of the worst presidents ever?

I’m willing to give him a chance and concede that he may have made a mistake, a typo; something. But if such is not the case … then I’m not sure whether this speaks more of profound ignorance or complete insanity.