Steppers Without Defects of Character?

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.

]]> http://www.mykeru.com/?feed=rss2&p=82 12 http://www.mykeru.com/?p=61 http://www.mykeru.com/?p=61#comments Thu, 28 Jan 2010 23:38:27 +0000 Mykeru http://www.mykeru.com/?p=61 [...]]]> 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.

Unfortunately, Obama has had a good year to demonstrate that talking about fighting and actually pulling the trigger are two completely unrelated things. Now, many reasonable explanations have been given for President Obama’s endless, open-invitation to the Republican party to join the human race and get things done. It may be political calculation, designed to show how unreasonable and unmoving the Republicans are, but for the life of me I can’t imagine how this is intended to impress the unreasonable and unmoving people who will just vote Republican anyway. If he keeps it up, and doesn’t realize that the right-wing is sand-bagged into their bunkers until he just fucking goes away, already, and he starts lobbing tear-gas in after them in preparation for mowing them down when they come running out, then he looks clueless, naive or some other iteration of just plain dumb. Not because of anything he says, but because he’s attempting to raise the mentally and spiritually dead.

What Obama doesn’t seem to understand is that the Republicans have rendered themselves profoundly, willfully irrelevant. Whatever happens, whatever will happen, whatever can happen, it will have to happen without the Republican party and in spite of it.

Whatever the ideas behind Obama’s State of the Union, its content was overshadowed by not a portent of things to come, but a portent of more of the same: The sorry spectacle of the Republicans, surly as pimply know-it-all teenagers in after-school detention, not only failing to applaud  anything Obama said, but also yawning, smirking, slouching over their Blackberries and generally looking bored with the whole governing thing. These are exactly the attention deficit types that stand in front of teabagger rallies and conflate the Declaration of Independence with The Constitution. Not because they are trying to pull one over, but because a command of American history, and either document, is pretty irrelevant to what they are in office to do:  Which is nothing more than what they are told by the people giving them money and setting them up for cushy jobs when they leave.

They have their marching orders, they know what they are going to do, regardless, and there’s simply nothing that President Obama can say to change that. The Republican Party isn’t a political entity that can be persuaded by rational argument, or even their own self interest or that of their supposed constituency. Unfortunately, people like Obama, and much of the Democratic Party, make the mistake of seeing people in opposition to them as mirror images, equals on different poles, rather than a whole breed apart. Just as the Republicans ceased to be “The Party of Lincoln” during the civil rights era when they absorbed the Dixiecrats and went from being the party of emancipation to the party of segregation, the Republican party ceased to be a group one could agree to disagree with once it was coopted by corporatism, neocons and the more ravenously vacuous elements of fundamental Christianity.

You’re certainly welcome to disagree with them, and you can argue with them, but, and this is the key point, you’re not going to talk them into being decent human beings, part of a civil society, that gives a shit about anything. These days Christians couldn’t be convinced to act Christian if Jesus did the haranguing himself while pacing around in their bath tub.

What may have been an actual political party once, the Republicans are now little more than a front group (or people who determine to ride into office by paying lip-service) for the corporations who fund them and the Religious Right and various fringe groups who they pander to just enough to get that little extra bump that lands them in office. That sounds pretty conspiratorial, but conspiracy actually takes some effort, and these people are hardly trying to conceal it. Aside from that, they are answerable to no one, least of all whatever atrophied conscience they may have left. Remember, these wingnuts are the people who have screamed endlessly that the greatest threat to America, besides Al Qaeda and the “Death Tax”, is ACORN, a group whose main purpose is to register poor, black and otherwise disenfranchised groups to vote. Republicans, as you know, hold voting in such high regard that they like to ensure only the sort of people who meet their approval actually get to do it.

Obama could give the most rousing, carefully constructed, reasonable bi-partisan speech delivered so eloquently that he makes Abraham Lincoln and Dr. Martin Luther King seem like sputtering crack heads with a mouth full of cock and the next day the lot of the Republicans will be right back to business as usual claiming he’s a Marxist bone-in-the-nose witchdoctor with a bogus birth certificate sent as a Manchurian Candidate from Kenya to destroy our freedoms™. In that sense, as with religious nut jobs and conspiracy theorists, you have to give the Right Wing credit: They are completely cynical and bat-shit crazy, but their discipline in unwavering adherence to a completely fictional narrative is admirable.

Then again, no matter how recalcitrant and stupid the right-wing is, those attributes wouldn’t make any difference at all if there weren’t a significant percentage of the population as mean, rude, compromised and bat-shit crazy as they are, who keeps putting them back into office. In fact, what worries the Republicans these days is not whether they are mean, stupid and crazy, but whether whether they are mean, stupid and crazy enough to make significant gains with the American voting public in time for the upcoming mid-term election.

As I attempt to reboot this sad, Mary Celeste of a web site, I wish to affirm that, through the years, through divorce, and recovery, illness and despair one thing has not changed: And that is my complete contempt for the  fatuous, mean-spirited bags of fucking stupid that makes up a deciding majority of Americans.

Yes, the people in elected office are tools, but the real rat-fuckers are the ones who keep putting them there, mostly to prevent fictional welfare queens from stealing stuff they don’t even have.

Things were bad during the Bush years. So bad that if future historians don’t see that period at a complete derailing of our Constitutional Republic, at the very least the wheels on one side of the train hovered over the rails by at least a couple of feet. The election of Barack Obama had a feeling of the same sense of relief a passenger on that train would experience with the jolt of those wheels slamming back down in place. So we can now say that the train is securely back on track.

Which would be reassuring, except we are firmly back on a track where the route goes over a chasm, and the bridge is out.

The real would-be-comic-if-it-wasn’t-tragic thing about the right-wing ciphers and cardboard cut-outs in office is to look at the poor sacks who keep voting for them. They aren’t the elites. There aren’t enough fabulously wealthy people to win elections on their own and corporations — as of this moment, but subject to change without notice under the Roberts Supreme Court — can’t vote. The people who keep putting the wingnut elite back into office are the masses of aging, marginally middle-class, undereducated, just-about-trailer trash, fat-assed, burger-eating douche-bags who could really use a comprehensive universal health care plan, but can be cajoled by a few Facebook comments by Sarah Palin and some cheap propagandistic ads into taking the streets screaming bloody murder how they don’t want what’s good for them. These are exactly the same sort of people who get all worked up over the idea that if their daughter is taught Evolution in the public schools then, as a logical necessity, she’ll get knocked up as of fifteen minutes ago. In the past the sort of issue that riled up this sort was communism, fluoridation, and being denied their God-given right to shit where they slept.

More bullets and bacon, please

Forget the economy. Forget the two wars we’re mired in in the Middle East, one of which serves absolutely no sane purpose, even forget health care and think of this: That whether or not we can teach the Theory of Evolution in American public schools — a theory first described by Charles Darwin in 1859 and supported by every advance in genetics, biochemistry, developmental biology, comparative anatomy, immunology, geology, and paleontology since — is still an iffy proposition. That should serve as a rough measure of just how close-minded, anti-intellectual, agenda-drive and, in a hyphenated phrase, bat-shit crazy we are as a country. Before one can solve problems one has to face facts, and from Iraq to Wall Street that’s something we’ve show time and time again we just can’t do.

I’ve spend most of my intellectual adulthood arguing with religious fundamentalists, spiritualists, conspiracy theorists and believers in all manner of unlikely woo. You just can’t convince them that the nonsense they believe in isn’t true. Creationists will continue to believe that the earth is 6,000 years old. Conspiracy theorists will continue to believe that JFK was shot with a “frangible bullet” fired from the Grassy Knoll by Badgeman under the direction of Carlos Tropicante , as performed by the inmates of the Asylum of Charenton, and there’s very little you can do about it. It’s not because they are incapable of comprehending reality, they tend to hold down jobs and can fill out complicated tax forms in other circumstances, but when it comes to some specific subjects they are just mental. The Republicans tools in office will keep shilling and the teagaggers, birthers, racists, paranoids and generally stupid will continue voting for them.

I feel for Obama. I really do. Because as a reasonable man he’s not just trying to teach pigs to sing. Instead, he’s put himself in the unenviable, untenable position of being choirmaster to the all-pig chorus.