Pancacophony

The review is done, but the posting is not.

I was ranting to Mike NTPB about a month ago about the lunacy of the elections and how we have no access to anything real or substantial, how everything is filtered and it's all turned into a game of idiocy. How we've devolved from thinkers into soundbiters, and that attempts at grasping the situation truthfully are doomed to fail because the subtlety and level of engagement necessary to *really get it* are so beyond the attention span of the average American consuer. (Did I say consumer? I meant voter. Whoops). Can you see the steam pouring from my ears? Mike patiently listened to the diatribe but at some point broke down and just said, "Dude, you're bound to be disappointed."

So color me disappointed, not just w/r/t the body-pile that is modern politics, but as to these quasi-intellectual debates. Dawkins book is award winning, and he's praised (get out your irony signs!) as a god in intellectual circles. But that book was OBVIOUSLY not scientific. In the slightest! I will give it up to the clearly more accomplished and "successful" man - it's "well-written," whatever that means, researched and put together coherently. But it's painfully biased. The cart is before the proverbial horse - he wants to present a certain argument, and so he does. He can make all of his claims to evidence and such, but ultimately, you are not writing that UN-dispassionately unless you've got some pretty irrational emotions motivating the enterprise.

But you can't even fault him for that, because that' show you have to write in order to sell the book. And then it sells, but who's buying? The intro was full of caveats of "I don't mean to offend," but how can you adopt that tone and think that you're going to persuade anyone? And he says that his writing "is no more rude that restaurant critiques." Well, restaurant reviewers are jerks then! Plus restaurant critiques are being written to a religious following of said restaurant. When you rant at the reliheads, you're talking to biggest fans of the diner! You don't dissuade me from going to iHOP by telling me that rationally, the pancakes suck. I'll just say: NO THEY DON'T. QED, Mr. Scientist man.

And that's not even the point of this post. You only have to read reviews of Dawkins book for five seconds to get the sinking feeling that there ain't gonna be no consensus. Fifty people praise, fifty people dissect. Flaws are found, rebuttals are made. I find this argument flawed. I don't. You're an idiot. No I'm not. Here's why. Etc. It's ridiculous and stupefying, and pulling it back to the politics, the grand measuring stick is the masses. Really? Really? He who votes on America's next top model also decides the next leader of the free world. Wait, what's that? And he's basing his choice on fabricated notions that have little to nothing to do with the actual job that person will do in office. BWWWWWAAAAA WHAT???!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?

But wait, there's more. Look above. The intellectuals and the masses do the same thing. They yell and scream and argue and pretend to have access to real things, man, real feeling or consequences or evidence or truth, but they don't. So now even your top professors at top universities engage in this rhetorical garbage. The intellectuals are the intellectual masses, too! We're all masses! Plus I'm American, so I'm fat. Masses.

I'm all in favor of fighting the good fight, but this is stupid, really, really stupid. Everybody shouting. All with their own biases. The people pretending to be unbiased being biased, knowing it but failing to admit it because biased but unbiased sells better. So this is me, biasedly telling you about strawberry fields.

And now: bath time!