Yesterday I blogged about the UKip satire twitter account, @UKipWeather, as a truly fabalous response to the rather weird claim made by David Silvester, that recent storms and floods were caused by the legalisation of gay marriage.
Well guess what .. I was wrong, apparently Gay Marriage really does cause flooding.
Dean Burnett has laid out conclusive compelling evidence in his Guardian column that Same-sex Marriage does indeed cause flooding. The fact that he is not only a neuroscientist by profession, but also moonlights as a comedy writer and stand-up comedian should give you an idea of what is coming up …
Logically, same-sex marriage leads to an increase in the number of weddings. Weddings invariably involve a large number of people congregating in one place, which leads to a lot of body heat and warming, and this heat enters the atmosphere, increasing the air temperature and producing more warm fronts. People also cry a lot at weddings. This is likely to be even more pronounced at same-sex weddings, with the added element of recently achieved equality making the events even more poignant. Tears are basically water, which quickly evaporate, thus adding to the water content of the atmosphere. Weddings also typically involve a lot of alcohol, which makes people colder, meaning they’re more likely to turn on heating systems when they arrive home, releasing more heat andCO2 into the atmosphere.
He is of course mocking the very idea in a rather uniquely funny way, and least anybody fail to get it, he spells this out at the end …
The main problem seems to stem from people becoming explicitly angry about the fact that two people of the same gender can get married in a way that doesn’t affect the rest of the population at all, and then blaming them for a series of devastating natural occurrences.
Our best defence may be to divert their attentions elsewhere, e.g. by writing ridiculous blogposts that look like they support their views but in fact just openly mock them.
Now what is truly funny here, is that even after being that explicit, there were still comments like this after his article …
That’s just stupid. After all there are many more hetrosexual weddings and nobody is saying that these weddings cause precipitation.
Yes, somebody clearly has a broken sarcasm detector, and even after Dean being that explicit, a couple of people still did not get it.
Really?
Yep …
What is however quite encouraging is that apart from the few who appear to have lost the plot (or never actually grasped it in the first place), the vast majority of those that commented not only got the joke, but also appreciated it; and nobody was really disagreeing at all. This perhaps also reflects why satire and humour is a far better way of deploying criticism. If for example Dean had instead been very serious, and either went with a pure fact-based rebuttal of the daft claim, or simply vented about them being homophobic bigots, all within an article laced with well-known rather descriptive angle-saxon phrases, he would have perhaps reaped a rather different set of comments.
In many ways being truly diplomatic is perhaps having the ability to tell those that you disagree with to “go to hell” in a manner that enables them to be actually looking forward to going on that journey – now that really is a fine art, and appears to work rather well when satire and humour are deployed as a reply to some truly silly ideas.