cognitive dissident

(This isn't bleeding-edge news anymore, but--since I keep seeing it crop up elsewhere--I thought it deserved a comment.) In reference to last Friday's earthquake in Israel, Knesset member Shlomo Benizri commented:

"the Gemara refers to earthquakes as disasters, but you are searching only for the practical solutions how to prevent and repair. But I no [sic] of another way to prevent earthquakes; the Gemara mentions a number of causes of earthquakes, one of which is homosexuality..." [emphasis added]

(For all the gentiles in the audience, the Gemara is part of the Talmud.) I don't have much to say about this sort of lunacy, except to mock it: Israelis must be quite remarkable in bed if their lovemaking can shift tectonic plates (Did the Earth move for you, too?), but the 19-second duration may leave their partners unsatisfied. The geologically-inclined may be aware of the following information about the cause of Israeli earthquakes, unless they were homeschooled by scientifically ignorant parents and attended fundamentalist colleges:

Seismicity in the EMR [Eastern Mediterranean Region] is mainly associated with the northward movement of the Arabian plate. The 1,000 km-long western boundary of the Arabian plate is a complex plate boundary, extending from zones of sea-floor spreading in the Red Sea to zones of plate convergence in Turkey, and lies along the line of the Gulf of Aqaba, the Dead Sea rift, and the Ghab depression. The sense of motion along the transform fault system is left lateral, with the east side moving northward relative to the west side. Total displacement is estimated at about 107 km since Oligocene time, with an annual rate of about 0.5 cm over the last 7 to 10 million years.

Lest anyone think I'm bashing Jews instead of idiocy, I'll quote H.L. Mencken:

We must respect the other fellow's religion, but only in the sense and to the extent that we respect his theory that his wife is beautiful and his children smart. (Minority Report, p. 3)

In this case, to follow Mencken's analogy, Shlomo Benizri's wife is a troll and his children are imbeciles.