CSotD: Sunday Morning Stupid
Skip to comments
Leading off today with Matt because, while I'm confident Matt Pritchett drew it in anticipation of Brexit, it has an infinite number of applications where facts are treated as mere predictions by those who dislike them.
The brilliance of it is that there is nothing to disagree with, no interpretation in the statement. A marathon is 26.2 miles. Period.
Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing is up to you. Facts cannot be "good" or "bad," though, certainly, you can take them as reassuring or scary, as inspiring or discouraging.
Does anyone bathe in very short time? Don't say that he bathes badly, but in a very short time. Does anyone drink a great quantity of wine? Don't say that he drinks badly, but that he drinks a great quantity. For, unless you perfectly understand the principle from which anyone acts, how can you know he acts badly? – Epictetus
However you feel about it, a marathon is 26.2 miles. After that, it's a matter of what shape you're in, how much you want to do this and so forth.
Meanwhile, you can't "disagree" with a definition. A goddam marathon is 26.2 goddam miles.
Yes. I know there are also 10k's and 3k's and ultramarathons and triathlons.
There are also giraffes and javelins and ice cream sundaes. None of which change the definition of a marathon.
But, oh deal lord, we are a fact-and-logic-challenged species.
It's bad enough that Daily Kos puts one of these stupid pop-ups over everything, but obviously they don't screen for anything but political leaning, which I say because I've never seen one, for instance, that said, "Sign if you agree: All Muslims should be deported."
So here's a nice liberal sign-up-for-spam call-to-arms being offered for your approval and participation as if it made any sense at all.
When I was in back there in civics class, there was a person there who put forth the proposition that you can petition the Supreme Court with signatures.
Petition the Supreme Court with signatures.
Petition the Supreme Court with signatures.
Sure. Then, after you sign that petition, sign my petition.
Ain't nothin' like a good petition to get things moving in the right direction.
And a happy Sunday morning to you, too.
I don't know what British TV is like on Sunday mornings, but over here, it is filled with Very Important Men and Women in Suits putting forth all sorts of propositions, and I've stopped watching because, after all, I can roll like a dog in steaming piles of self-assured talking points on Facebook all week long, where someone recently posted a Bill Murray quote:
It's hard to win an argument with a smart person, but it's damn near impossible to win an argument with a stupid person.
I would be more inclined to disagree with the definition of a marathon than with that statement.
Juxtaposition of Predictive Genius
If you don't follow football, you may be unaware that the 2016 NFL Draft begins Thursday.
But it does, and Tank doesn't exaggerate the hoopla surrounding the thing, including "mock drafts" in which sportscasters like Tank try to anticipate the choices each team will make, a process that becomes pretty futile after about the first dozen picks, since each time you're wrong, the variables change geometrically.
However, it's a fun way to pretend to be a genius, and even more fun if you're being paid to do it.
Back in 1979, I was a humor columnist for a monthly magazine and remember writing a piece in which political parties held a draft to select Senators and Representatives, but I can't find it and may have never submitted it. It's not a particularly break-through concept, given the number of times I've seen the same idea since.
Anyway, forget it.
Riffing on the Draft as a way for opinions to be treated as if they were facts officially ended forever after Dave Chappelle dropped this:
So the NFL Network has been talking about the Draft for the past several weeks, with mocks and interviews and speculation, but this weekend they went over the top by broadcasting past drafts, which sounds insane: How totally nerdish would you have to be to watch a rerun of teams selecting players?
But when I flipped past it, well, I didn't flip past, because I found it fascinating, and this is where today's Non Sequitur comes into things.
It wasn't the who-drafted-who part. I know who drafted who.
Rather, a large part of the Draft coverage consists, as spoofed in Chappelle's piece, of NFL Draft Experts not only speculating on who the next team to choose will pick, but on why a particular player was a sound choice and how it will impact the team's future.
If I were an NFL Draft Expert, I would sue for defamation of wisdom.
Think of every one of those hilarious "Television won't be able to hold on to any market it captures after the first six months. People will soon get tired of staring at a plywood box every night." predictions, lined up one after another after another.
What is ostensibly a sports program becomes comic/tragedy as you see some teams making what are declared to be throwaway choices but you know are going to turn out to be the genius picks of the decade, while can't-miss-future-superstars are praised and you have to Google to see if they're even still in the league.
I would love to see someone do that with "Meet the Press" and "Face the Nation" and "Trust the Suits" and the rest of the Sunday morning political programs: Give us a nice long afternoon stream of repeats from past election seasons and let us hear the profundity, now that we know how all that speculating on the actual, measured length of a marathon turned out.
A loaf of bread, a jug of wine and Jennifer Garner, beside me laughing in the livingroom, oh, livingroom were paradise enow.
Now here's a Sunday Morning you can believe in:
Comments 3
Comments are closed.