CSotD: The Getting of Wisdom
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So I got home Sunday night, tired after a 6 hour drive, and flipped on the computer to check email and Facebook, which is probably why today's Baby Blues made me laff.
Yesterday was mostly mop-up and catching up on sleep, but I did have plenty of time to stew over our collective stupidity.
All the way home, I'd been hearing about the church shootings, about which nobody knew anything yet, so it was just the same preliminary information over and over, with different people citing different body counts and nobody really adding anything to the conversation.
However, when I got home, I found all uncertainty banished on Facebook, which was flooded with people who have Darryl's excellent background in self-defense and a similar level of active-shooter training and an unquenchable inability to STFU about things they don't get.
Granted, they weren't all explaining how to handle an active shooter (in case you missed it, the answer is either to have everybody be an active shooter, or to ban guns entirely).
The theological experts were explaining how, obviously, the shootings supported their atheism, because people wouldn't die in church if there really were a God.
This was counter to what to a good Catholic like me was taught, which was that the best way to die would be to be hit by a bus on the way home from Confession.
Of course, we were also taught that, if you took communion on nine First Fridays in a row, you were guaranteed a chance to make an Act of Contrition at your death, and there are enough people hit by buses when they're not on the way home from Confession to make you doubt that one.
Still, there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of even in Neil DeGrasse Tyson's philosophy, and I have come to believe that there is no significant difference between absolute belief in God and absolute belief that there is no God.
My college major included both theology and history of science, through which I learned that expressing certainty about anything is a sign of ignorance.
Ever seen God? Ever seen a proton? And who has seen the wind?
So I hover somewhere between the Irish saying about fairies, "I don't believe in them, but they're there" and Tolstoy's observation that, if a group of natives discovered that their wooden idol was not god, it wouldn't prove there is no god, only that he is not made of wood.
Though I suppose the righteous road is that laid out by Epictetus:
(I)f ever any talk should happen among the unlearned concerning philosophic theorems, be you, for the most part, silent. For there is great danger in immediately throwing out what you have not digested. … For sheep don't throw up the grass to show the shepherds how much they have eaten; but, inwardly digesting their food, they outwardly produce wool and milk. Thus, therefore, do you likewise not show theorems to the unlearned, but the actions produced by them after they have been digested.
Though what fun is that?
Besides, Edison Lee came along to explain to me how one sorts and evaluates all this Internet wisdom and I felt a lot better. Just find a second source!
At the conference, John Cole had mentioned this cartoon he had done just before coming up, and I would say it fills in the holes, but, obviously, that big hole is too large to simply spackle over.
Nor is anyone in a position of power — in Russia or the US — trying.
It's not a hole, it's an opportunity to employ the OJ Simpson strategy of denying the evidence, deflecting the blame and imposing your own reality.
I've said many times that the technique of blandly restating things so that, shorn of their camouflage, they are revealed to be idiotic, doesn't work when everything is already self-evidently idiotic on its surface, but Tom Tomorrow does a nice job here.
Mind you, he's preaching to the choir, but the choir needs to be reminded from time to time that it is right and should keep up the good fight. If you let fellow-believers become dispirited and fall away, you might as well bail water with a pitchfork.
Which thought brings us to our
Juxtaposition of the Day
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(Part of destroying the Affordable Care Act involves cutting funding so that low and middle income people in many states will have to pay for their policies without subsidies.
But another strategy the Republicans have pursued has been to cut the period for signing up for coverage, cut the promotional funding that lets people know about the enrollment period and cut funding for assistance in enrolling.
Which creates a real need to reach out and make sure people know the One Percent are trying to prevent them from having affordable health care.
How you extend beyond your normal audience is a challenge, particularly with the decline in general-interest media like newspapers and the rise of media dedicated to the people who are already locked into one group or another.
It's great that the Internet allows left-handed flute players to band together, but when they begin to only read things intended for left-handed flute players, they don't hear much about the rest of the orchestra.
As someone who owes his life to the Affordable Care Act, I feel strongly about this.
I'm also struck by a conversation this past weekend with a British-born cartoonist who noted that, for all they may rail against governmental incompetence, blue-collar Brits don't complain all that much about taxes and they certainly don't question that health care is a natural governmental responsibility.
In America, people are allowed to die because they are not wealthy and well-educated, and because they trust their leaders.
Go here. Do that. Then spread the word. Save lives.
Bop to him. Don't listen to him.
(Ironically, he did. How's that for a serving of humble pie?)
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