As a middle-aged divorced guy, I occasionally indulge the habit of going out for coffee with women who, I like to think, are aspirants to the position of my next ex-wife. Most of them, mercifully, have a remarkable ability to skip right to the “ex” stage of any relationship. When you consider my 5 years of marriage that ended like the shrinking dot when you turn off an old television set, it’s something of a time saver that way.

Mostly, I’m just killing time, which is odd as it’s really the one thing I’m running short of. Five years, ten years. They add up to a lifetime.

So, after the obligatory exchange of emails, I arranged to have coffee with this woman, sight-unseen and age undetermined, because her answer of “wise” when asked for her age wasn’t exactly specific. It’s a perennial question why some women see fit to lie about their age and weight. Are we not supposed to notice the disparity between claims and reality? If a woman in her 50s says she’s, say, 39, — the age at which my paternal grandmother died, having maintained it for 50 years –  does she think she looks younger? No, now she looks like 39 years of very rough road. Same with weight. Many women hide their deception by not referencing their weight, but their dress size, which most men, including me, don’t understand anyway. Bra size, maybe, dress size, not really. However, what I have learned from this artful deception is that The Hindenburg was apparently a size six.

Anyway, this woman was running late and the coffee house along my stretch of Columbia Pike closed at 7:00 p.m., so there was nothing to do but retreat to Bob and Edith’s Diner, where you can get arteriosclerosis just by walking in the door. However, they do have pie and my GERD was in remission enough for me to tempt fate just a little bit.

Hey, if it’s inevitable that you’re going to have a bad time, you might as well have pie while doing it.

However, what I’m writing about isn’t this woman, except to the extent that she a carrier of a viral meme that I see cropping up more and more frequently, an idea that must have spread like the animated contagion map in The Andromeda Strain. Somewhere there’s a “patient zero” for this particular meme, and that’s got to be the most “open-minded”, “objective”, conspicuously tolerant dumb-fuck that ever walked the earth.

It’s like this: Sitting at Bob and Edith’s as I tentatively sipped my coffee, seeing if the caffeine was going to trigger off a gastro-intestinal reflux reaction that would release the flaming ferrets to gnaw a burrow under my sternum, we made small talk before the job interview began in earnest. She asked me about my self-description as an atheist and skeptic, mostly to ask what I was skeptical about. By way of example, I explained that I’d spent years arguing with Kennedy Conspiracy Theorists in venues on usenet like “alt.assassination.jfk”. What struck me most was the endless intellectual dishonesty of people who took the conspiracy position She brought up the fact that there were still “questions” about the Kennedy assassination such as the “zig-zagging” bullet that “hit Kennedy in the head”.

This is the point at which I started peering over my white ceramic mug of coffee.

First, during the assassination Kennedy was struck by two bullets. Oswald’s first shot went wild, because either Oswald was nervous and impatient and jerked the shot, or it hit the branches of trees outside the Texas School Book Depository that obscured the presidential motorcade. The shot which hit Kennedy in the head was Oswald’s third shot. Before that there was a shot which struck Kennedy in the high back, exited just below his neck and went on to strike Governor Connally in the back. This was the notorious “magic bullet” which conspiricists insist had to change direction in mid-air in order to cause the sequence of injuries to both Kennedy and Connally.

That is, it would, if you sat Kennedy and Connally sitting straight forward like two department store mannequins, rather than their actual positions, complicated by Connally sitting on a jump seat that was lower and more inboard than Kennedy.

When you figure in the actual positions of the two men, rather than set up straw-man diagrams like are found in most lying-assed conspiracy books, then the “Single Bullet Theory” makes perfect sense.

I don’t want to get hung up on the Kennedy assassination as such, and I didn’t want to then either.  If you want to read a perfectly concise summary of the case against conspiracy in this instance, try Facts and Fiction in the Kennedy Assassination on the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry (formerly CSICOP) website.The point is, the idea that the second bullet that struck both Kennedy and Connally didn’t “zig-zag” is a demonstrable fact. Now, I can understand someone making conversation about something they may or may not know something about, but then came the following disheartening conversation.

“Well, you can’t really know what position they were in”, says she.

I tried to make the stare I gave just as long and blank as I could. It’s probably at this point that you shrug and say “So what, just go along with it, what does it matter”. In which case you’re part of the problem too, you mush-headed little pud-knocker.

“Yeah, we can know…there’s film, the Zapruder Film. It’s been used in computer reconstructions. We not only have a picture of the assassination, we have 18 frames a second worth of pictures”

She doesn’t even skip a beat. “Yes, but you still can’t know”.

Can’t know? When there’s  a film? Now I know that I’m not so much dealing with stupidity as willful ignorance, one of the many people that have gone along with the zeitgeist that total epistemic nihilism is synonymous with tolerance. As the conversation develops it’s clear that she doesn’t really believe you can’t know anything, especially after I quizzed her on whether she leaves her house by the front door or the second story window. If you can’t know anything, and gravity is “just a theory”, then it shouldn’t make bit of difference.

It’s a curious thing: We’ve reached the point in civil discourse when “that’s my opinion” is taken to end an argument rather than being the tepid beginning of one. Once someone states that something is their opinion it is suddenly sacrosanct and untouchable. At the same time, stating “that’s just an opinion” or, even worse “everything is just opinion” is given out as justification for the casual slaughter of the very idea that anyone can know anything.

The problem is, that when people say these sorts of things, they are not presenting it as anything like a theory of knowledge or even a form of nihilism. Rather, it’s just considered impolite to point out to people that they are so egregiously wrong that it would make a reasonable person’s fillings ache.

So there I am, sitting there, feeling the first pre-acidic gurgles in my stomach and wondering at what point would someone just so open-minded as the woman sitting across from the table from me at a greasy spoon actually be forced into the position of saying something was wrong.

“Look,” I say, reaching for the most ludicrous example I can think of, “say you have two people standing on the curb about to cross the street. One looks and says a bus is coming and the other looks and says there isn’t a bus coming. The one who denies there is a bus coming steps off the curb and gets run over by a bus. Can we say they were wrong?”

No, again there is no hesitation on her part that would indicate anything like thought:

“Well, I don’t know if we can say they were wrong”

OH JESUS FUCKING CHRIST ON A STICK ALREADY!

I thought that. I didn’t actually say it. Which is probably one of the reasons I have acid reflux.

My active mental participation in the conversation ended at that moment. I picked up the check soon after and walked home after parting so politely that it was clear I wouldn’t be calling.

Maybe it’s just confirmation bias, but I seem to be butting up against this “fact trumped by misguided politeness” attitude. Of course, it’s not that polite, because in in making the hyper-tolerant claim that you can’t say that there are facts and that some people just don’t have them on their side, the person making that claim is also making the tacit assertion that anyone pointing out that someone else is wrong is wrong to do so.

But where in hell did that come from? First and foremost it seems to be an outgrowth of the religiosity of this country. When you’ve got a significant number of people walking around believing things that, were they not part of well-respected and wealthy entrenched religious tradition, would get them dosed on Thorazine in the psycho ward, then there is a tendency to adopt this attitude just in case the person you are dealing with let’s fly something that is bat-shit crazy, but cloaked in religion.

It’s not just tolerance gone bad. If you should ever see a panel discussion where the major religious traditions are represented, they panelists are more than tolerant of each other. They are chummy. It’s as if they tacitly understand that they may not believe the same bullshit, but at least they believe in some manner of bullshit and its the discarding of fact and common sense that makes them members of the same club. Besides, if it ever comes down to a major religious difference that might, say, require suicide bombing or flying planes into buildings, there’s always someone else to do that for them. That’s what converts are for.

None of this would actually matter much if this sort of epistemic nihilism was confined to discussions of the Kennedy assassination or crazy things believed by the overly religious. The problem is that we have people stepping in from of buses or, even worse, shoving people in front of them.

I’ve spend most of my adult intellectual life arguing with people who present claims of the paranormal, of religion, of conspiracy and other unlikely things, topics that I tend to dump together under the label “woo”. However, when the same mode of thought, or lack thereof,  that ends in comedy when espousing the Ancient Astronaut Hypothesis turns to tragedy when applied to issues where people’s lives and well-being are actually at stake.

If you may have noticed, journalists in what passes for our media pride themselves on never making a factual assertion themselves. Facts are hard things to work with, and so it’s just quicker and easier to cop an attitude of “objectivity” where what is the truth doesn’t actually matter when you can get a quote from a person saying one thing about an issue and another quote from someone who says something else, even if that something else is outrageously wrong and stupid, and act like you’ve covered all bases. Unfortunately, the truth doesn’t exist in the balance between fact and just plain wrong. In the case of the Kennedy assassination, the truth isn’t a compromise between whether the second bullet zig-zagged in mid-air, in defiance of the laws of physics, and the claim that it moves in straight lines unless deflected. One side is right and the other is not only just plain wrong, but they’ve been corrected about being just plain wrong for decades now and so the next time they repeat the same canard you can’t even give them the benefit of the doubt and say they’re mistaken. They are lying, consciously lying in order to convince those people who know the least about the issue.

I can name a pants-load of issues where there isn’t a balancing point between two sides where truth is the fulcrum. Rather, one side is sensible, and the other is so wrong that it’s a form of bat-shit crazy. There’s no compromise between the claim that vaccines cause autism and the fact that it doesn’t. There’s no reconciling the idea that health care would be a positive boon to people’s well-being and the claim that it would lead to inevitable “death panels. The truth hardly ever lies in the middle. Rather it tends to severely skew to one side or the other, and the people who it skews away from are just plain wrong.

You’d never know it from discourse in this country.  Americans have a long tradition of anti-intellectualism and the “objective” stance is not only profoundly anti-intellectual, it’s also lazy enough to appeal to a population growing increasingly fat, dumb and miserable. Truth is hard. Facts are a bitch. The mastery of the minutiae of any given issue takes work that could be better applied to watching reality television. It’s much easier to say everyone is right with a brain-dead shrug and step off the curb.

Unfortunately, It’s not just an (anti) intellectual exercise:

One hundred or so people die every day from lack of health care, the necessary debate on the issue completely derailed by “death panel” nonsense.

Thousands of American troops and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi men, women and children are dead because people — especially in the media — thought it would be impolite, impolitic, or just not worth the effort to point out that the Bush Administrations case for war was a vast pile of unrefined, unpolished bullshit. If we need to have a patron saint of journalistic malpractice, Judith Miller of the New York Times is ripe for canonization.

As of this moment it’s unclear just how many children have been killed by Jenny McCarthy, model and anti-vaccination “activist”.

However, I don’t want to give the impression that all purveyors of bullshit are honestly crazy or stupid like Supermodel McTits above. What’s worse, far worse for arriving at sensible answers to pressing problems is that not all anti-intellectualism, not all well-meant and lazy “open-minded” is an honest difference of a complete lack of justifiable opinion. As religions have done in the past, the Republican party and other cynical bastards know that it’s only in a state where people are so completely lacking in the logical and critical reasoning skills to question it, that laughably bad, transparently manipulative propaganda can take hold. The teabaggers in front of Congress protesting against their own interests aren’t merely personally stupid, they’ve been raised in a culture of politics and religion that is little more than organized stupidity.

As it’s impossible to reason people out of positions that they didn’t reason themselves into in the first place, there’s little hope for teabaggers and the like. The politicians that feed them a steady diet of nonsense are too soulless and cynical to ever stop doing what they do best. The news media has a relatively easy gig taking a quote from one side and another from the bat-shit crazy side and pretending that they’ve done the job of journalism to ever stop.

Despite the stupid zeitgeist, knowledge and belief aren’t the same thing. Not even close. Opinion isn’t the end of discussion, it’s, at best, the opening sentence of one.  Truth isn’t in the grand sweep of unsubstantiated assertion, it’s in the details. Facts aren’t interchangeable with nonsense. Finally, when you get right down to it, reality has absolutely nothing to do with what anyone thinks. As anyone who has jumped off a building or stuck a fork in a light socket and lived can tell you, gravity and electrical theory don’t need anyone’s approval.

As someone with a degree in Philosophy I’m often asked by people  with advanced degrees in Hotel and Restaurant Management, barely attempting to conceal a smirk, what philosophy is good for. I have a two word answer for them: “pulling weeds”. In order for knowledge to flourish you have to clear away the nonsense. You have to pull weeds. One at a time. If arguing with Creationists, conspiracists and the political equivalent of crack heads giving $10 blow jobs has taught me is that I have to keep jerking the same weeds out of the ground  again and again. But as I don’t have a lawn to tell kids to get the hell off of, this web site will have to do.

The fun part is when you eventually just sledgehammer the little fuckers.

And that’s a mission statement.

As this post more or less coincides with President Obama’s first State of the Union Address delivered last night, I guess I should give at least give an idea of what I thought of the speech.

It’s this: Nice speech, fat lot of good it will do.

Obama does give good speech. What worries me is that I also have every reason to believe Civil War general and military paperweight George McClellan was a better public speaker than the much less charismatic but far more kick-ass Ulysses S. Grant. See, the people back then who needed to be pounded into submission so that what’s right could flourish, the  ass-backwards slave-owning secessionists, not only wouldn’t have cared who could talk better, they would have encouraged doing nothing but talk. Grant could have been mute and scratching “charge” on a slate hung around his neck — as he did later in life — for all giving speeches mattered.

For all the wingnutty talk of taking up arms every time things don’t go their way, it’s appalling that Democrats still can’t bring themselves to put up a good legislative scuffle over things that really, really matter.  Like health care, like Iraq, like other things in which people dying allow for a little in-congress rudeness. The few Democrats that consistently do fight, such as Alan Grayson and Al Franken, should not just be copied, they should be cloned. You’d think that after Joe Lieberman screwed them five or six times, cracking a grin with a mouth like a sheep’s labia, Democrats as a whole would get the hint.

While I prepare for my New Year’s resolution, to start writing again (especially since Barack Obama is turning out to be a surprisingly conventional douche-bag), you can follow my observations devoid of much of any content on Twitter.