Friday, November 17, 2017

Stumped

There is probably no wilder product of the ongoing dissolution of fact and knowledge, than the Flat Earthers.

So there is no wonder that their weirdness, and especially their rejection of intelligent argument, is bound to produce even weirder myths as time goes on. It's actually entertaining to watch their insane cosmology develop, in a way that one might observe a schizophrenic's attempts to make sense of the slipping reality with failing remnants of cognition and memory. Except here we have a whole community of would-be inmates who dote on the ravings of the most far-gone specimens and converting that into more mythopoeia.

Here's an article on their most recent twist. An epic post-apocalyptic myth in which the very mountains are stumps of felled trees which once reached into the crystal spheres of heaven and connected the earth below to the celestial realm.

I can almost understand their feeling of being excluded, cheated on, their longing for something grand and wonderful in their lives that they cannot find in the world around them.

Almost.

But then I realize that to be swept away by this mythology you have to be really, really, REALLY REALLY freakin' ignorant about the millennia of collected knowledge of that same world around them, that they pooh pooh on. They are so bought into the idea of “all opinions are equal” that they do not have any intellectual compass — they are vehemently fighting off any hint of an intellectual compass.They blather about conspiracies and profusely invent wild myths about the world which they haughtily dismiss but which they cannot be bothered to learn the first things about.

Not just any naive questioning ignorance. Malignant, militant ignorance that pretends to be knowledge and seeks to supplant it.

Saturday, March 4, 2017

On not being understood

According to the legend, the inventor of these stick sugar packages committed suicide when he found out that people tear off one end. He had intended for them to be broken in the middle.

On one hand, it's understandable. The man offered a brilliant idea to the world, the idea that shone in his mind: people elegantly breaking the packages over their cups, from which sweet contents pour into the espresso. And what instead! Tearing off the end! Poking the stick into the coffee! Philistines! His aesthetic sense could not suffer it.

On the other hand, if he only had stopped to think whether something seeming obvious to him might not be obvious to others, he could have simply printed the "break here" line along the middle.