pattycakes_

Can turn naughty
The axis of evil.

People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster.

—JAMES BALDWIN
 

pattycakes_

Can turn naughty
I sat with a classmate from Harvard Divinity School who is now a theology professor. When I asked her what she was teaching, she unleashed a torrent of arcane academic jargon. I had no idea, even with three years of seminary, what she was talking about. You can see this retreat into specialized, impenetrable verbal enclaves in every academic department and discipline across the country. The more these universities churn out these stunted men and women, the more we are flooded with a peculiar breed of specialist who uses obscure code words as a way to avoid communication. This specialist blindly services tiny parts of a corporate power structure he or she has never been taught to question. Specialists look down on the rest of us, who do not understand what they are talking and writing about, with thinly veiled contempt.

- CHRIS HEDGES, Empire of Illusion

(top book btw)
 

version

Well-known member
I seem to remember Michael Lewis saying something about this in The Big Short. That the language of finance is intentionally difficult and alienating.
 

Leo

Well-known member
He's got that sort of bumptious Richard Dawkins rationality where you just think all your Unexamined and inherited assumptions are plain common sense and everyone else is bananas

don't we all feel that way, to some degree? that could describe a fair number of people here, yet most are humored while tea is pillared.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I'm not against speculation at all. I just don't think it's a synonym for "baseless paranoid fantasy".

I mean, yyaldrin obviously has a religious conviction that the USA is absolutely and fundamentally evil - literally the Great Satan - not because of any particular things it does, but inherently, and by definition. So the question of what America stands to gain from starting a plague in China (never mind how, or that plagues have happened since the dawn of time) becomes as meaningless as asking what Jack the Ripper stood to gain from murdering prostitutes. It's evil for evil's sake.

I don't call that "speculation", I call it a projection of supernatural forces onto the real world. It's a pathology that's led to witch hunts, the Spanish Inquisition and the Holocaust, among other things.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
I love the idea of a nefarious Deep State made up of genocidal environmentalists willing to kill billions for the sake of the climate, though. It's like something out of QAnon. A perfect enemy for Donald Trump, the Coal Warrior!
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Did you ever read Dawkins' comments on X Files, Luka? Properly mental. Might've mentioned it here before.

I dunno why Dawkins keeps coming up here. I've never read any of his books and I think he's a dick. I'm aware he's said some very silly things about X-Files, Harry Potter and so on.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
Archetypal faith in science rationalist innit. And so committed to that it leads him into caricature.

You are much more at peace with the irrational I think.

Each week The X-Files poses a mystery and offers two rival kinds of explanation, the rational theory and the paranormal theory. And, week after week, the rational explanation loses. But it is only fiction, a bit of fun, why get so hot under the collar?
Imagine a crime series in which, every week, there is a white suspect and a black suspect. And every week, lo and behold, the black one turns out to have done it. Unpardonable, of course. And my point is that you could not defend it by saying: “But it’s only fiction, only entertainment”.
 

luka

Well-known member
Did you ever read Dawkins' comments on X Files, Luka? Properly mental. Might've mentioned it here before.

Not seen it no. Let's have a look! And the reason Tea gets it is because he is fatally impelled to launch himself into every discussion as the Voice Of Reason. Other people will just raise their eyebrows, snort, move on.
 

luka

Well-known member
I love the idea of a nefarious Deep State made up of genocidal environmentalists willing to kill billions for the sake of the climate, though. It's like something out of QAnon. A perfect enemy for Donald Trump, the Coal Warrior!

in this theory they are not always environmentalists. Often the environment is a cover. Google Agenda 21 and see how people have run with it. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agenda_21

It's not a a huge stretch if you assume there is a pocket of the elite for whom overpopulation is an obsession. A world with 500 million and all today's technology. Might be quite nice.

A lot of conspiracy theories exist because they write themselves.
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
Dawkins is profoundly mad albeit in a very boring way.

Yeah, in a racist and sexist way (see all the stuff with Skepchick) rather than build an enormous brain ray or engineer a cripping genetic disease sort of way. At least Reich changed the weather and shot down UFOs.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
Archetypal faith in science rationalist innit. And so committed to that it leads him into caricature.

You are much more at peace with the irrational I think.

If you take 'irrational' to mean emotional and intuitive, then yeah, I'm perfectly fine with that. I'm not Mr Spock and neither is any other human, even (or rather especially) those who think they are. Dawkins's dismissal of fantastical fiction as somehow harmful to children's brains is itself very irrational.

There's another quite different meaning of the word, though, which is a belief in the literal reality of the divine, supernatural or occult. (Sorry if that sounds pejorative, it's not meant to - perhaps you've had experiences which would make me feel the same way you do about this stuff if I'd had them. It's certainly not about my brain working any better than yours, at any rate.)

A third angle to this, and the most dangerous, is related to the second meaning but goes further because it cannot fail to have to have real-life consequences (whereas it's possible to be a religious believer and not want to go and kill people as a result, obviously). This aspect is the privileging of intuition and faith over reason and evidence, to the point where an assertion becomes *more* certain the *less* evidence there is for it. This lies at the heart of the conspiracy theorist's worldview, and it's formed the seed of many of the greatest crimes in history.
 

luka

Well-known member
Yes but you elide the way the irrational cloaks itself in the rational. How the irrational is rationalised. I think you're hugely complacent in this respect. You think reason and rationality are simple things.
 
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