When You Have a Very Specific Question on Social Media...

 ...like say you have a very specific question about a certain sort of widget, so you go to the widgets sub on Reddit cause you figure at least some of the world's leading widget experts must hang out there, and you search first to see if someone else has already asked, but no, so you post with a very specific question, make it clear as day that you came there because you wondered about this very specific thing...

And -- of course -- someone leaves a very long comment about important things about widgets, all of which you already knew, and says nothing about what you asked. So you thank them, but repeat that why you came there was because of the question you already stated very clearly.

So of course they leave an even longer reply full of important things in the history of widgets, still haven't said a thing you didn't already know, still haven't answered your question -- OH! but at the end of this long comment they say something you already suspected: they've never heard of the kind of widget you asked about.

So you express a little mild annoyance. And so then a couple of his friends and admirers chime in, saying things like, "Oh, so you're saying you don't care about all these important things this important man has taken his important time to tell you, you ungrateful worm [...]"

When all you actually said was that Mr Important didn't answer your very specific question, the very specific reason you came to that sub, and no-one else has answered it either, even though you've repeated it four or five times by now and emphasized as clearly as you know how to that it -- your specific question -- is why you came there in the first place.

When you clearly have a specific question, people who don't know the answer DON'T NEED TO COMMENT. 

But they do, don't they. Sure as rain in Oregon. And now it seems very likely that no-one in the sub will ever answer your question, and you're going to be perma-banned from the sub.

Grad school can be like that, unfortunately. That's why I finally dropped out.

Buy The Chaos Machine on Amazon: https://amzn.to/3EaLYYY 

I Understand

I really do. There is nothing in this great big beautiful world cuter than a baby rhino. This one

is being looked after by qualified experts at the zoo in St Louis. Apparently it likes getting its nose scratched with that thing.

I have absolutely no trouble understanding why you wanted to have a baby rhino as a pet. I want a baby rhino as a pet. I want to have it as a pet and squoozle it all of the time and scratch its nose and do whatever else it likes. 

But I know that as the baby rhino grew, things would get... awkward. I know that soon I would not be able to handle the situation. I know that eventually I would have a full-blown disaster on my hands.

I know that it's not always a good idea to do what I want to do.

Maybe you really didn't know all of this before you paid $3000 cash money to some very shady types to get your baby rhino. But as soon as you had it, all sorts of people told you everything I said. Some of them went into much greater detail about all the different kinds of trouble you were getting yourself into. 

But you didn't listen to any of them.  The few people who thought it was great that you had a baby rhino, you chose to listen to them, even though you knew they're the biggest idiots you know.

And look what happened.

Get vaccinated, dummy!

The Big Stupid Elephant in the Room

The Federal Department of Education is investigating states which are prohibiting mask mandates in schools on the grounds that this may be endangering disabled schoolchildren.

I'm glad the Biden administration is doing something. The problem is that anti-mask measures are an attack on all children, and all adults, and science, and sanity, etc. 

We (by "we" I mean the non-stupid majority) have been much too nice about this. 

There's a time and place to be considerate of idiots' feelings. This is not the time and place. When a house is on fire, and a maniac is pouring gasoline on the fire and raving about how this is the correct way to put out fires, we don't stand off to one side and try to reason with the maniac, being careful not to insult him. For some time now, the deadliest enemy in the US, the one killing the most people, is no longer COVID. It's human stupidity. It's yahoos refusing to wear masks or get vaccinated or let their kids wear masks or get vaccinated, and comparing masks and vaccines to Nazism, trying their damnedest to make it impossible for any of us to have any masked, vaccinated place we can go. 

It's idiots. It's morons. It's stupidity.

Since long before COVID appeared, since long before Trump ran for Persidunt, I've maintained that mankind's deadliest enemy is human stupidity. First Trump, and now COVID have made this point increasingly clear.

And yet, we refuse to say it. For fear of hurting stupid people's feelings, we are greatly endangering their lives by coming right out and saying that they are stupid. For the sake of political correctness and misplaced librul over-sensitivity, we are greatly hindering our own efforts to end a plague.

If ever there were a perfect example of the uselessness of political correctness, we are living in it now. And dying for the sake of it.

Things actually could be worse. They have been worse. During the flu epidemic in 1918 and 1919, public officials thought it was a good idea not to let the public know there was an epidemic. We learned from that disaster that it's better to talk openly and publicly about disasters.

We partly learned it. Hopefully we're still learning. We've got a long way to go.

It Looks as if I Can't Stop Writing About Trump Just Yet

Believe me, I'd really like to. Believe me, I completely understand those of you who never want to read another word about him. But he hasn't gone away yet. From strong hints that he would run for President again in 2024, Trump has shifted, according to accounts so numerous and similar that it has become impossible to dismiss them, to the belief that he will be reinstated as President in August 2021.

Charles CW Cooke's National Review article ends by describing him, on the issue of his reinstatement, as "so unmoored from the real world that it is hard to know where to begin in attempting to explain him."

I agree. My only issue here is, this describes him in general, not just on this issue, and for a long time -- since long before 2015 -- not just recently, as Cooke seems to believe. The GOP has been following "a world-historical buffoon," as James Carville so beautifully put it.

The problem is not that Trump is a moron. There have always been lots of morons, and the world deals with them, keeps them safe and away from sharp objects and so forth. The problem with this moron is that he's got millions of dedicated followers. You'd think that more Republicans would know better. You'd think that more of the ones who know better would have the guts to stand up to him. 

 

I've got to stop over-estimating Republicans.

 

Stupidity and Global Warming

There's a meme going around: a picture of some Country & Western-looking German woman playing a guitar, with the claim that she said (in German),

"I don't think that global warming is nearly as dangerous as human stupidity."

There are several things wrong with this statement, whoever said it.

For one thing, the cause of global warming is human stupidity. It makes no sense to say to people who are battling global warming to say, "Don't worry about global warming -- human stupidity is much more dangerous!" when they're battling a direct product of human stupidity. If you say to researchers who are looking for a cure for AIDS, "Don't worry about AIDS -- viruses are much more dangerous!" all you've accomplished is to demonstrate that you don't know nearly as much about AIDS or viruses as the people whose very important work you're interrupting in order to say stupid things to them.

A statement which in itself is very stupid is not necessarily the best course against stupidity. Not every single time. Not in my opinion.

Also, asserting that global warming is less dangerous than human stupidity goes directly against the record of human life, which shows us thriving for many thousands of years despite many thousands of years' worth of very widespread and uninterrupted stupidity. Stupidity has certainly made our lives less pleasant in many ways, but it hasn't killed us yet. On the other hand, if it were not dealt with at all, global warming would kill us all in much less than a thousand years.

Global warming is now being dealt with, on an ever-larger scale, at a rate which just might possibly save our lives. But this is happening, not because people suddenly got smarter, but because energy generation which doesn't generate deadly levels of carbon and other toxic emissions suddenly got much cheaper, and continues to get less and less expensive.

If alternative energy saves us from killing ourselves off -- and it looks as if it just might -- then it will not have been our wisdom which saved us, but our greed. We will have remained just about as stupid as we were, just about as stupid as if, for whatever combination of economic reasons, alternative energy had never become cheaper, and, therefore, it never made the headlines nearly as much, and so it wasn't able to prevent us from killing off our own species with fossil fuels. Once again, our stupidity will not have been enough to kill us.

Yes, I think it's very important -- and almost hopeless -- to struggle against human stupidity. But if, for example, I and another person were stranded somewhere in a vehicle, and a grizzly bear was attacking the vehicle, trying to open it up so that it could eat me and the other human inside, and the bear was making progress, gradually making bigger and bigger cracks in the glass in the windshield and windows -- Ah say Ah say if I were in a situation like that, and the person next to me inside the vehicle said to me,

"I don't think that that grizzly bear is nearly as dangerous as human stupidity."

then that person would be showing a profound lack of a sense for what is urgent and what is not. Yes, it may very well have been human stupidity which got us into that predicament. But solving the problem of human stupidity -- assuming we were somehow able to solve it, there inside that stranded vehicle -- would not save us from that predicament. The problem we would have to solve, in such a situation, is the bear. If we didn't solve that problem, we would never be able to solve another problem.

Stephen Greenblatt and New Atheism

It took me a while, but I finally noticed the link between a recent source of aggravation, Stephen Greenblatt

and his profoundly misinformative and hugely popular book The Swerve,



and that earlier source of annoyance, those avid consumers and champions of misinformation, the New Atheists.

I had separated myself from the New Atheists. It was amazingly easy to do: I simply stopped seeking them out, and, to my amazement and immense relief, I rarely came across any of them any more. There was a whole big wonderful world out there which was almost entirely free of them. Almost.

New Atheists are atheists who believe that religion is the source of most or actually all of the world's problems, and who constantly talk and write about religion in this vein while being very careful never to learn anything about it. The classic example is Richard Dawkins, who is constantly going on and on about how Islam is the greatest threat to the world, and has never read the Koran and never will and is freakin' proud of it. New Atheists are constantly discussing a fictitious story about early Christianity and the creation of the Bible, while being very careful never to read more than a dozen or so verses of the Bible specially selected for their awfulness, or to learn anything about the ancient Mediterranean world in which Christianity and the Bible first arose. They live in an echo chamber, only "learning" about the ancient Mediterranean world from each other, distrusting any and all actual experts.

I don't know whether Stephen Greenblatt is a New Atheist or has even heard of New Atheism, but how could New Atheists not love Stephen Greenblatt and his book The Swerve, which is so full of inaccurately hostile denunciations of Christianity?

I don't mind denunciations of Christianity -- I've written a few myself -- but I greatly prefer those which are factually accurate. Like this one, a positively furious book-length denunciation of Christianty which cuts much deeper than any New Atheists have dreamed of doing, although it is much less clumsily broad than their attacks: Der Antichrist,



written by Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche had been appointed a full professor of Classics at the University of Basel at the astonishingly young age of 24. He was very well-versed in the literature of the ancient world in which Christianity and the Bible arose. At age 44, writing Der Antichrist, Nietzsche referred often to the New Testament in the original ancient Greek, although he found the Greek New Testament to be very badly-written, and reading it to be a very unpleasant experience. Nietzsche never was interested in taking the easy path, or so his writings make it seem. He was a scrupulous author, concerned, to a very unusual degree, that the things he wrote made sense. He wanted to make sure that his book about Christianity contained no inaccurately hostile denunciations, only accurate ones.

Nietzsche wrote Der Antichrist in 1888, an extraordinarily productive year for him as a writer. (Was he hurrying because he felt the end of his sanity approaching?) This one book was written between the 3rd and the 30th of September, and then he went right on to other things, until the 3rd day of January, 1889, when he went suddenly, thoroughly and permanently insane, perhaps from the effects of a decades-old case of syphilis overpowering his brain at last. Or perhaps he went mad from exasperation at so many people who spoke and wrote on the topics he cared about, without bothering to be well-informed. Like the many people who've been glad to discuss Nietzsche with me, who've never read anything Nietzsche wrote. (What on Earth did they suppose they were discussing?) Like Greenblatt and the New Atheists, so eager to discuss things like Medieval monasteries and atheist philosophy, and so determined not to learn about them. What do they actually imagine they're talking about?

And what should I do about it? Simply avoiding New Atheism certainly has been comfortable. But maybe, ultimately, as thoroughly atheist as I am, I can't be completely comfortable just sitting back and watching religious forms of stupidity be replaced by equally stupid atheist ones. Maybe, as sweetly tempting as it is, I'm just not as Epicurean as that.

Gee, I hope this doesn't drive me completely and permanently mad.

Fiji Water and Vinyl Records

Those Fiji Water commercials are in heavy rotation on the TV stations I watch, the ones with the choirs of children singing in the background, symbolizing purity, while the child narrator, symbolizing even more purity, talks about purity even more, and how Fiji Water is "untouched by Man." I don't think it says anything good about my IQ that this crap is in heavy rotation on the channels I frequent. (Then again, it could just mean that advertisers don't know what they're doing.) Seriously, how dumb do you have to be to believe that water which is transported 10,000 miles to be put into plastic bottles and sold to rich hipster doofi* for several dollars a pop is "untouched by Man"?

*"Doofi" is plural for "doofus."

About as dumb, I think, as you need to be to believe that "vinyl sounds better." In fact, I think that in very many cases, the people who drink Fiji Water and play music on vinyl are the same individual people: people with too much disposable income and too little clue about reality.

I want these people to be tested: give them tap water which they see flowing from Fiji Water bottles, and Fiji Water which they see coming from a tap, and ask them to describe each sort of water -- assuming that we were able to get them to take a taste of the Fuji Water they saw come out of a tap. Blindfold them, and play them the same recordings of their favorite music: once on vinyl played on a $25,000 turntable, and then on a $10 mp3 player, both fed through the same equalizers and speakers. Ask them to describe their experiences.

The really infuriating part is that it won't work: do such tests, confront the stupid people with the results, and they will find ways to reject what you say and to disbelieve you, so as to remain stupid, drinking their bottled water transported from 10,000 miles away in the name of the environment and of opposition to Evil, and using 19th-century technology to achieve what they continue to believe is the very best possible home-listening experience. And just as with Fuji Water drinkers and vinyl listeners, so too with Republicans and people who pay psychics to read their palms and their tarots.

I want to help these people. There are those of us who want to help them, and those other people who want to rip them off, and they keep going with those others. How do we reach them?

"The Big Bang Theory" : Fake

I'm talking about the TV show, not the well-known theory in physics.

"The Big Bang Theory" is just fake "Malcolm in the Middle." They even have theme music by Barenaked Ladies, who are the fake They Might Be Giants, who made the theme music for "Malcolm in the Middle." "Malcolm" is made by and about authentic geniuses, including TMBG; TBBT is made by fake geniuses, and its characters are crude stereotypes of geniuses, just as BNL are crude imitations of nerds, and specifically, crude, inept imitations of TMBG. TMBG, besides being geniuses, are too nice to call BNL on this. I'm not.

The repeated guest appearances by Neil deGrasse Tyson and Stephen Hawking on TBBT do not refute my thesis; instead they show 1) that quality sitcoms are not Tyson's or Hawking's area of expertise, and 2) how desperate the producers of TBBT are to demonstrate (to themselves most of all) that they are really smart.

The presence of scientist and actual smart person Mayim Bialik in the cast (in a role as stereotypical and tired as the rest) does not refute my thesis. Let's see what you or I would do if offered that much money (reportedly Bialik receives half a million dollars per episode currently) after several years' worth of slowed-down career.

Our Deadliest Enemy: HUMAN STUPIDITY

This really happened to me, just now. On the side of a busy road, a sign said, "GARAGE SALE. Everything FREE!" with an arrow pointing down a side street into a residential area.

No, the fact that "sale" doesn't match "free" is not the stupidity referred to in the title of this post. I noticed the incongruity right away, but it didn't really bother me. In retrospect, however, it does seem to match what followed. Onward:

I was somewhat busy, but the announced pricing scheme was too tempting to pass up. There was no address on the sign, so as I walked down the street I looked all around for anything resembling a garage or yard sale.

The street curved and ended in a T-intersection. I still saw no sale going on anywhere. And there was no sign about any sale anywhere in sight, either.

And now I'm thinking about people so stupid that they literally have great difficulty giving stuff away. I hope there are people looking out for them who realize how special they are.

Yes, Macron Won

And that's great. But voter turnout was lower than at any French Presidential election since 1995. A quarter of the French electorate sat it out. Which means that a quarter of the French electorate can't tell the difference between Macron and Le Pen. Someone's been handing them a line of crap and they've been taking it. They can't tell their croissants from holes in the ground.

Yes, this is a great victory for France and the world. A great day for sanity. But we got lucky. We skated by, with that many people abstaining. Education has a lot of work to do, when that many people in France vote for freakin Le Pen, and about as many more don't vote against her. Yes, it's great. It should be sobering, too.

The Left In The US Handed The Presidency To A Fascist. Will The French Left Do The Same?

In the US Presidential election, 3 candidates stood out above all others in popularity: Clinton, Trump and Sanders. Very early on, it became clear that the election would be Clinton versus Trump. But, for months after it was clear that he was beaten, Sanders continued to campaign. He said, over and over and over, that his #1 priority was to ensure that Trump was not elected President. But there was one way, one way only, to ensure that, and that was to support Clinton, to do it as early and as enthusiastically as possible, therefore ensuring that the greatest possible number of his supporters voted for Hillary. Not only did Sanders continue a farcical campaign for months after he had lost; when he did finally endorse Hillary, he did it very feebly. Saying that she was not as bad a Trump: that's not a great endorsement. Continuing to talk mostly about himself and his unsuccessful campaign: that wasn't endorsing Hillary at all.

And so, in the election which Trump barely won, with Hillary receiving 3 million more votes than Trump, about 1 million voters wrote in Bernie. And about 100 million people who were eligible to vote, didn't. How many of those 100 million were Bernie supporters who picked up his bitterness against Hillary and lack of enthusiasm for her? We'll probably never know. Anyway, in case it wasn't already entirely clear to you, I blame Bernie Sanders, that egotistical, selfish jackass, for Trump being elected.

And the reason I'm writing about this again today is that something very similar might happen in the French Presidential election, which will be decided this Saturday and Sunday: a fascist could become President in France because of pettiness and sheer stupidity on the Left. The decision will come down to Emmanuel Macron, a centrist with severe charisma deficiencies who led the first round of voting with 24%, against Marine Le Pen, the aforementioned fascist, who got 21.3% in the first round.

Jean-Luc Mélenchon, who got 19.6% in the first round, claims that his top priority is to defeat the fascist Le Pen. Well, there's one thing he can do now to defeat Le Pen: endorse Macron. But Mélenchon says he will not endorse Macron. Mélenchon is either outright lying when he says he will do everything in his power to defeat Le Pen, or he's simply too stupid to see that to ensure that Le Pen is defeated, he must endorse Macron.

A poll of those who voted for Mélenchon in the first round showed that 40% intend to vote for Macron, 15% for Le Pen, and 45% intend not to vote.

Let's just leave those 15% aside, they're obviously hopelessly confused.

Let's look at the 45% who intend not to vote. Those are about 9% of the French electorate which Mélenchon could be urging, begging, pleading to vote for Macron, but he's either to stupid or to petty to do so, and so he's not doing everything he can to defeat Le Pen, not by miles and miles.

Remind you a whole lot of Bernie Sanders? It should.

This is one of those things which make me feel very helpless, because I don't know how to urge people to behave sensibly, not because the issue is complicated and difficult, but because it is so simple and clear that I can't understand how people are not understanding it.

Stubbornness

There's good stubbornness: the kind that makes a person work and work and work until he or she achieves great things.

And then there's the kind of stubbornness that's just stupid, where people who know give you sound advice and you just don't take it.

People often talk about intelligence as if an intelligent person is intelligent pretty much all the time. Is this accurate? If so, then I and my brother are unusual.

My brother is very, very intelligent. No really, he is. He's a rocket scientist. And I don't mean that as a mere figure of speech -- he has worked at Martin Marietta and TRW designing things which went into space. He's a mechanical engineer with 2 degrees from MIT. After the rockets, he switched to something he enjoys more: designing cars. Several Camero and Corvette desginers are part my little brother. At the present time he supervises other engineers. There's no doubt that my little brother has a very large brain.

And yet, sometimes there's that bad kind of stubbornness. Once, he owned a Jeep and was driving it over some dunes on the shore of a lake for fun. He hadn't driven on dunes very much at all. Several times during the course of 1 morning, actual experts in dune driving, people who'd been doing it all their lives, told him he had way too much air in his tires and was liable to break something if he didn't let about half of the air out. He good-naturedly dismissed all of this advice, and that afternoon, out on the dunes with tire pressure which right for paved roads and wrong for the dunes, he snapped one of Jeep's axles.

Why hadn't he taken the experts' advice and let half of the air out of those tires as they had urged him to do? I don't know any good answer to that.

Like my brother, I am extremely intelligent. Just look around this blog: I'm awesome. And yet -- for the last year or so I've been the same way with the stupid stubbornness. Is this genetic? Are a lot of wicked smart people really stupid a lot of time, or what? Is my behavior typical for old people with new technology, even if the old people are smart?

I've had my Galaxy 6 for about a year and loved it, but whenever it prompted me to hook it up to wifi, I said to myself: No, better not do that.

Why?

I don't know any good answer to that question. Same as with my brother and the tire pressure.

But today, I thought about the tires and axle of my brother's Jeep, and more to the point, I thought about all the times I had had to go outside during a phone call on the Galaxy because the connection kept breaking it up, and wondered whether there just might be some connection to my refusal to take the recommendations about the wifi.

I hooked up the wifi and sure enough: the call quality on my phone improved tremendously. Call quality had been my only big complaint about the Galaxy, and it's fixed because I did something the phone kept suggesting I do -- for a year. I suppose with my earlier smart phones somebody in Customer Service had done this for me.

Hopefully we've all learned something here, and are headed for a brighter tomorrow -- a tomorrow during which our huge brains will be in use more often.

Journalists Exposing The Plunder Of Politicians

Journalists are hard at work, exposing politicians who claim to be working for the little guy, while they themselves live in unimaginable wealth: the headline at foxbusiness.com:

Barack and Michelle Obama Are About to Get Even Richer

That's right: while You Know Who is busy running the country into the ditch, appointing billionaires to his Cabinet and selling as much of the US as he can to Putin at bargain-basement rates, and please let's not forget about how our new Treasury Secretary foreclosed on a 90-year-old woman because of a discrepancy of 27 cents on her mortgage check (I don't think I'll ever be able to forget that last one); while all of that is really happening, Fox Business is keeping a sharp eye on the wealth of those nefarious plutocrats -- the Obamas.

I wonder how wealthy the Obamas are in the right-wing parallel universe where he's a secret Kenyan Muslim. In the real world, it probably would be pretty easy to estimate their real wealth pretty accurately, given that they've publicly disclosed all the details of their finances going back decades. Unlike You Know You.

Nice to know that Fox Business is on the case, isn't it?

"I'm Not On Obamacare"

Now, if the GOP succeeds in doing away with the ACA, and can convince their supporters who were on ACA plans and are outraged that the ACA is gone, and who still think Obamacare and the ACA are two completely different things, that the ACA disappearing is completely Obama's fault -- well, I guess that would be just more of the same. And speaking of Holy Shit: the Republicans, not just Trump but Republican legislators, are talking about building that fucking wall. "Mexico will pay us for it after it's done." You'd figure at some point their BS would become too stupid to fly anymore. However...

Some Vegans Won't Understand This

Someone posted a video on Facebook of animals, cats, dogs, pigs, rabbits, other animals, all eating together out of one big pan. It looked very sweet and peaceful. The person who posted the video commented that humans have less capacity for peace than any other species. I reacted:

"Ich nehme an, dass es Menschen sind, welche diese Tiere fuettern und pflegen, und dass mangels dieses Fuetterns einige von diesen Tieren einige der anderen essen wuerden. Mann muss Menschen nicht hassen, um andere Tierarten lieben zu koennen." ("I assume that it's humans who feed and care for these animals, and that in the lack of this food, some of these animals would eat some of the others. You don't have to hate humans in order to love other species.")

Then I noticed that the person who'd posted the video announced that she was a vegan. (A German vegan.) So I figured, Eh, why try to point out the obvious flaw in her logic to a person who very likely doesn't want to hear it?

And that's why I'm sharing this with you instead.

But while we're all here, please do think about it: almost all (not all but almost all) of these sweet videos of animals of different species being friends are made possible by humans who feed and care for all of the animals involved. I love these videos, they're really great, but so far, they haven't stopped wild animals from eating each other. Human intervention has stopped it in individual cases. That is a plain and obvious fact.

So, vegans: we don't hate you because you're vegans, we hate you because you're incredibly stupid, and if you're not incredibly stupid, we don't hate you.

Afraid Of AI? You Got It Backwards

I'm not afraid of artificial intelligence. I don't see it coming anytime soon, for one thing. You disagree? Take the most advanced computer translation program you can find, use it to translate a simple 5-word English sentence of your choice into Japanese, take that Japanese sentence and use the same program to translate it back into English, and then we'll talk. As Stephen Root said in the 4th-season episode of "News Radio" entitled "Super Karate Monkey Death Car":

"I had a small house of brokerage on Wall Street. Many days no business come to my hut, but Jimmy has fear? A thousand times no! I never doubted myself for a minute for I knew that my monkey-strong bowels were girded with strength like the loins of a dragon ribboned with fat and the opulence of buffalo dung. Glorious sunset of my heart was fading. Soon the super karate monkey death car would park in my space. But Jimmy has fancy plans, and pants to match! The monkey clown horrible karate round and yummy like cute small baby chick would beat the donkey."

You can call that hilarious, you can call it great TV. One thing you can't call it, in my humble opinion, is evidence of the imminent arrival of artificial intelligence.

But even if I'm wrong, and AI is even now on the verge of happening -- it doesn't worry me. More intelligence? That would be great. That would be most helpful. The main threat to humanity is the very opposite, the same thing it's been for thousands of years: a lack of intelligence. Any threat posed by artificial intelligence is laughable compared to the constant threat posed to us by natural stupidity.

The most obvious current example? The moron who was just elected POTUS and all the millions of morons who voted for him. We were on the verge of cutting US dependency on petrochemicals in half, on the verge of getting a smart grid, on the verge of shoring up the social safety net, on the verge of making minimum wage a living wage -- but all of that and a whole lot of other very good stuff is just going to have to wait now, because of stupidity. Because of nothing other than stupidity. Artificial intelligence would be great right now. It could be a tremendous help with that question so many of us are asking: "What the Hell are we going to do now?!" It's not as if there's an overabundance of intelligence currently working on that one.

Another example of stupidity being the greatest danger to humanity? Hitler. Some say he was an evil genius -- to that I say, "Feel my skills, donkey donkey donkey donkey!" Hitler believed that the Soviet Union and international banking were united in a Jewish conspiracy to impurify the "German race." He actually believed that. He was a moron.

Artificial intelligence? Bring it on! Artificial intelligence, natural intelligence, hybrid intelligence, any kind of intelligence: we need it, we need more of it, we need much, much more of it, just as we have for thousands if not millions or billions of years.

How To Keep New Atheists From Annoying You

A few years ago I wrote on this blog that I had become so annoyed by New Atheists that I was considering converting to a religion, converting insincerely, just to spite them. And I meant it, I was considering it. But some time after that I found a very effective way to deal with the annoyance New Atheists caused me: I stopped hanging out with them. It is much easier than I had imagined to almost completely avoid them. Nowadays, every now and then a New Atheist will cross my path, but I don't engage with him -- almost always a him -- and pretty soon he's gone again.

Turns out they're not everywhere. Not even close. What a relief!

I have a lot less admiration for Bill Maher and Ricky Gervaise and Stephen Fry than I used to, because of their New Atheist tendencies. The last time I saw Fry on screen was in an Internet video of him debating with some churchman or theologian, who asked him to imagine that Heaven was real and that he had died and found himself at the Pearly Gates: what was the first thing he'd do? Fry immediately said that he'd ask God why He allowed suffering, launching into a very bitter and detailed description of some of the more horrible examples of suffering. And I thought to myself: Really! You find out, against your belief of what is possible, that Paradise is real and exists forever and ever, and the first thing you will do is complain. At that instant, I was completely done. The last ember of my patience for this kind of thing was ground out. I saw no reason at all to prefer Fry over the British churchman or theologian glowering angrily at him as he went on angrily about suffering and Why didn't God stop it. I just saw two angry, unreasonable old men, bitterly arguing about non-existent things, wasting their time and the viewer's time. It was as if I had come all the way down to the bottom of the slide which started at the top when I first heard there was this group called New Atheists, and was so excited, assuming that they were like me.



I have better things to do.

At least Fry and Gervaise still act, and Bill still often talks about things other than religion on his show.

And I still know of no atheist movement to which I can belong. But maybe that's not so bad. I'm not so annoyed at religion any more. I'm still an atheist, but now I have had extensive, exhaustive, thorough proof that atheism does not prove, at all, that a person is Bright. If you believe in God, that means that you and I disagree about one thing. We might agree about thousands of other things. Experiencing New Atheists up close day-in and day-out for years has left me much less bothered by religion, and much less inclined to make moderate believers responsible for the atrocities of the extremists. The moderates and I are both against the atrocities. I don't have to be a dick about less substantial things. Any more.

Before I met the New Atheists, I thought that there was a lot to say against religion. I'm not completely sure about that anymore. Seems like the New Atheists say five minutes' worth of stuff over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again.

There might be much more to say against religion. It's just that none of the New Atheists seems at all likely ever to stumble over any of it.

There is definitely quite a lot to say about religion, simply because it encompasses great portions of the lives of billions of people over thousands of years all over the world. I can have all sorts of rewarding discussions with people about religion. I can discuss religion for a long time with someone without having a clue whether they believe in anything supernatural or not. But if it's been a long and rewarding discussion, I know that the person I've been talking to is neither a fanatical fundamentalist nor a New Atheist.

We Try Too Hard To Put It In A Delicate Way

This Trump-won-because-people-ignored-the-Heartland stuff is nonsense. No one has ever ignored the Heartland. Ever. There's a particularly stupid piece by Ben Stein in The Norton Reader, 5th ed, shorter, copyright 1980, using an episode of "The Rockford Files" to supposedly demonstrate how liberal Hollywood elites were out of touch with the paradise of rural America. I've never watched "The Rockford Files," but from the way Stein describes it, it sounds unusually in touch, for a network TV drama, with the way that you can be ripped off and abused in a small town for the sin of being a stranger who needs help. Not all small towns are like that, naturally, but a lot are.

But the crap about not understanding the Heartland wasn't new in 1980: it goes back at least as far as Nixon's "silent majority" in his 1968 Presidential campaign, which was not a majority and hardly silent, but just a bunch of rubes who were afraid of hippies for no good reason, often without even having met any hippies. And I wouldn't be at all surprised if it went back much further in time than that.

Not only has no-one ever ignored the Heartland for one minute: also, many people in the Heartland voted for Hillary, and a lot of people in non-Heartland areas voted for Trump.

Very often, Leftists are much too easily led into feeling guilty for no good reason. We didn't cause the rise of Trump by ignoring the Heartland. The real explanation of Trump's success is much simpler: he's the King of the idiots.

Fake news readers are dumb as dirt. Trump voters? Idiots, end of story. Nazis? The lights are on, nobody's home. ISIS? A few clowns short of a rodeo. France's National Front? An experiment in artificial stupidity. The Alliance for Germany? All foam, no beer. The Brexit movement? No grain in the silo. American militias? The elevator doesn't go all the way to the top.

This is not good news, because stupidity is extremely difficult to overcome. But it's the truth. We can't solve the problem without calling it what it is. Calling it what it is, of course, will greatly upset the readers of fake news and the supporters of Trump. Nobody hates being called stupid more than stupid people. But it's time to stop tiptoeing around the truth.

Mein Beileid, Deutschland: Auch Ihr Habt Jetzt New Atheists

Ich sehe einen Link nach der Jungen Welt: Leute wollen Lutherstrassen umbennen, weil Luther war ein Juden- und Frauenhasser.

Jein: war er. Ich bin gar kein Fan von Luther.

Aber wieviele Strassennamen muesste man aendern wenn Judenhass und Frauenhass als Grund dazu ausreichte? Wieviele beruehmten europaeischen Maenner der letzten 2000 Jahren waren NICHT sexistisch und antisemitisch?

Ja, es ist gut, wenn man sich an die haesslichen Seiten Luthers erinnert. Und Juden- und Frauenhass war nur zwei von gar vielen haesslichen Seiten von diesem duenkelhaften, kruden spaetmittelaelterlichen Monch, dem das Christentum seiner Zeit gar nicht christlich genug war. Waere noch besser, wenn man, zb, sich auch erinnern wuerde, wie weitverbreitet solches wie Judenhass und Frauenhass zu Luthers Zeit waren. (Obwohl der damalige Vatikan, gegen den Luther wetterte und wuetete, mE sehr viel weniger haesslich als Luther war. Dieser Vatikan unter Leo X und anderen Paepsten war einer der Hauptmotoren der Renaissance.)

Aha: ich habe auf dem Link geklickt: Atheisten ­fordern[...] Auch ich bin ein Atheist. Gar viele von uns sind Atheisten. Aber Gott sei dank (regt Euch ab, es ist bloss eine Redensart) sind nicht alle von uns solche Atheisten von Beruf, die sich so sehr ueber Geschichtliches aufregen und dabei so herzlich wenig Geschichte kennen. Pfui Teufel! (Redensart!) Hier in den US wollen sie die Zehn Gebote aus oeffentlichen Raeumen bannen, und sie verlangen, dass Islam "seine Reformation endlich haben." Dort in D, wo es unmoeglich ist, so wenig ueber die Reformation zu wissen als dass mein einen islamischen Luther herbeiwuenschen koennte, wollen sie Lutherstrassen wegschaffen. Nutzlose Narren hier wie dort.

Schopenhauer, Twain, Nietzsche, Russell und Sartre, um einige zu nennen, waren Atheisten, aber sie waren auch vieles mehr.

Schopenhauer war leider sexistisch und antisemitisch, aber er war auch vieles mehr. Nietzsche uebernahm Schopenhauers Sexismus, ueberwand aber seinen Antisemitismus, und tat noch vieles mehr. Aber diese Grauzonen in Menschen erkennen und diskutieren, das viele Trotzdem und Sovielalsauch in auch den Besten unter uns, solche Subtilitaet war nicht nach Luthers Geschmack, und sie ist gar nicht eine Eigenschaft der Atheisten, die jetzt verlangen, dass Lutherstrassen umbenannt werden, weil keinen sinnvolleren Gebrauch ihrer Zeit ihnen einfaellt.

Straight Democratic Ticket, Is What I Recommend

At 4:02 today, Ex-US Representative Joe Walsh @WalshFreedom of Illinois tweeted:

On November 8th, I'm voting for Trump.

On November 9th, if Trump loses, I'm grabbing my musket.

You in?

About an hour later, having apparently suffered in a meantime a backlash over that tweet severe enough to alarm even him, Walsh explained in an interview that he was "talking metaphorically."

Walsh is an unbearable jackass.

Metaphorically speaking, of course. He's not actually a donkey. That part was metaphorical.

The part about him being unbearable was not. And I'm not the only one who feels that way. Walsh was one of the Tea Party freshmen Congesspeople voted in in 2010 and voted out again in 2012. He has repeatedly gotten into trouble for speaking in a racially insensitive manner and repeatedly had to explain that he was speaking metaphorically and so forth and that what he really meant was, and so forth.

Earlier this year, Walsh Twitter account was suspended -- not for the musket tweet, but for something much worse which Twitter deleted, which I won't repeat here. Walsh had to explain that he hadn't really meant what he said and promise to cut it out to get his account back. In an interview the next day, Walsh said of what was in the deleted tweet which he hadn't really meant that way:

That's crazy and stupid and wrong. It would end my career and it's wrong."

It would end his career -- AND it's wrong. Nice to see a man of integrity who has his priorities right.

My point is just to remind my readers, once again, that Trump didn't come out of a vacuum, that Trump really isn't even much of an anomaly in the GOP. As much as the Republican primaries seemed to be a complete cluster****, they in fact did not nominate him completely by accident.

Of course, for those of you who live in the many parts of the US represented by Republicans who aren't distancing themselves from Donald Trump, it's probably not even necessary for me to point out that Trump is not an anomaly. This is more for those of you watching all the Republicans running full speed away from Trump on the nationwide news and in places where he's messing up the campaigns of the local Republicans.

You know of any Republicans running for office or for re-election in areas where Trump leads Clinton in the polls, who are distancing themselves from him? Me neither. Isn't it a remarkable coincidence how closely bad poll numbers for Republicans and Republican moral outrage at Trump coincide?

No Republican politicians running for office anywhere should be considered completely free of association with Trump. The main difference between "moderate" Republicans and jackasses like Trump and Walsh is that the "moderates" have a better sense of when it's expedient to keep their mouths shut -- or, for example, to distance themselves from a colleague who's going down like the Hindenburg, or to pretend that they think Hillary is just swell and always have thought so. And, of course, the "moderates" are running for office in places where people like Trump and Walsh are very unpopular.