| Oct. 17th, 2005 @ 06:14 pm Beh-low me |
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People have asked me if I am planning to write some form of logical rebuttal in regards to the escapades of Jack Thompson, the poster boy for what passes for logic and social criticism in the modern United States of America.
The answer is I am not. Jack Thompson is a idiot, an asshole, and probably marginally insane to boot. He does not actually pose questions of morality, or raise legitimate concerns regarding the state of society. He is literally Making Shit Up as he goes along. Trying to deal with his brand of bullshit is like trying to play Monopoly with someone who writes a cheque to pay you when he lands on Boardwalk, and then screams at you that you can't cash that cheque because cheques aren't in the rules, and then calls you a cheater for trying to break the rules by cashing a cheque.
What Jack Thompson also is, is a symptom of the decay and rot of the collective intellect of western civilization. There was a period in my life, when I was a young teenager, where I thought I was smarter than almost everyone else and that adults were morons. Then I started thinking that this was probably egocentric and unfair of me, and that I should adopt a more moderate stance on my views of society. To try and be a little more forgiving, a little more understanding.
But you know what, fuck it. Fuck it all. I AM smarter than most people. I have the joy and pleasure of usually being surrounded by equally intelligent human beings due to my university life. I also have plenty of friends who don't attend university, and never have, and sure they don't know how to diagnose acute damage to lobes of the brain, or know the differences between structural functionalism and functional structuralism, but as far as I'm concerned they're even smarter than I am in a lot of ways, because they learned to think critically, to think for themselves, to accept that life comes in shades of grey and that the answers to problems are never clear-cut and straightforward! As far as I'm concerned, that's the mark of genius! But HOLY COW, are there a lot of idiots in this world!
I mean, seriously, I've bumped into so many people that watch an asshole like Thompson on CNN, or Bill O'Reily on Fox News, and take their statements as being the literal scientific truth. People who either can't see self-aggrandizing bullshit for what it is, or are simply too intellectually paralyzed by the daunting task of actually having to make up your own mind. I just want to scream at them "It's bullshit!! Can't you see that? Don't you think, that by the time you are an adult, the ability to detect bullshit might be a useful ability to add to your personal social toolkit? So that when a big, steaming, wet and pasty glob of it lands right on your head, you can say to yourself 'My goodness! This appears to be bullshit!'?"
To be honest I don't think that the problem with America, and parts of the rest of the western world, is truly a question of intelligence. I think it's laziness. People are just too damn lazy to think. Too lazy to read. Too lazy to seek out opposing viewpoints, to actually weigh the evidence, to make conclusions. "Oh is THAT why children are so hostile and cynical now? Video games? Phew! For a minute there I thought it might be the proliferation of our handgun-centric culture, crushing inner-city poverty, apathetic parenting skills and impotent legal system! What a relief!" |
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