Lutherean Silliness

Martin Luther

Martin Luther is without a doubt one of the most important persons in the history of the Western Civilization and would rightly belong in any top ten list of the most important Religious figures in history however this doesn't mean he is not one of the silliest men in History.

Epstein's Folly

Sacsayhuaman

I have in the past discussed the woo writer and all round fringe thinker Graham Hancock1. Here I will discuss a review of Hancock’s latest woo-fest Magicians of the Gods2. The review by a Prof. Jon Epstein is a wonderful example of a Professional academic latching on to a woo claim in order to feel bold, daring and cutting edge.3

Evasions

De Man

and 

Avoiding Responsibility

Paul de Man

The late Paul de Man was one of the most influential Postmodernists.1 Paul de Man was born in and lived his early life in Belgium after World War II he moved to the USA where he taught at Yale University. Paul de Man's writing were rather turgid and difficult but beneath the verbiage we sometimes find stuff that is unintentionally revealing, such has this passage:

Yet without this moment, never allowed to exist as such, no such thing as a text is conceivable. We know this to be the case from empirical experience as well: it is always possible to face up to any experience (to excuse any guilt), because the experience always exists simultaneously as fictional discourse and as empirical event and it is never possible to decide which one of the two possibilities is the right one. The indecision makes it possible to excuse the bleakest of crimes because, as a fiction, it escapes from the constraints of guilt and innocence. On the other hand, it makes it equally possible to accuse fiction-making which, in Holderlin's words, is "the most innocent of all activities," of being the most cruel. The knowledge of radical innocence also performs the harshest mutilations. Excuses not only accuse but they carry out the verdict implicit in their accusation.2

Atlas Bored

to Tears

Book Cover

In My last post I made fun of a character in Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. Surely one of the worst written novels ever excreted by an author. Here I will just make a few points about the philosophical centre of the novel. John Galt’s truly horribly written speech.1

Lady Heather's Complaint

Lady Heather

(Melinda Clarke)

Lady Heather  was a character in the long running show CSI. She started out has a Dominatrix running a (legal) brothel in Nevada and ended up becoming a therapist. In the show she had various run ins with the regulars especially  head honcho Grissom.

John Galt is a character, Messiah, in that door stop of a novel Atlas Shrugged, written by Ayn Rand. The character is one of the ultimate Mary Sue creations aside from being one dimensional.

I thought it might be fun to have the two characters meet.1

Diluted

Delusions

A Very Brief Look at Homeopathy

In the late 19th century the German Doctor Samuel Hahnemann devised, or more accurately pulled out of his ass the pseudo medical practice of Homeopathy. Dr. Hahnemann decided by fiat that a substance that would cause the particular symptoms of a disease would if given in small amounts treat beneficially the same symptoms of an actual illness. The idea was that like cures like. Now so far it doesn't sound too outrageous even though it smacks just a little like sympathetic magic. But then the major woo started to be added.

The O. J. Simpson Fiasco 



Simpson Murder Scene
 

It has been 20 years since Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman were brutally murdered and the whole O. J. Simpson farce was started. If the coverage of this anniversary is anything to go by it appears that little to nothing has been learned from the media circus that was the O. J. Simpson trial.

Revenge Fantasy

The Left Behind Books Part I

The Background – Hating America

First Book of the Left Behind series

Almost 20 years ago Tim LaHaye and his writer Jerry B. Jenkins started putting out one of the most successful publishing successes of the 1990’s and early 2000’s. This was of course the Left Behind series of books which sold in the millions upon millions and helped to make Tim LaHaye a major player in the Evangelical movement in America. What is of interest in this series of books is that they are a revenge fantasy of murderous wish fulfilment.1

Waiting for Godot

The von Daniken Version

of the Mayan Collapse

Erich von Daniken

In a previous posting I briefly reviewed Erich von Daniken’s monumental best seller Chariots of the Gods? Of course I concluded that the book was incredibly silly, basically stunningly wrong, but great fun as a puff piece of absurdest “explanation”. Since then we have seen the creation and broadcasting of the idiotic Ancient Aliens, a show that uses the Ancient Space Aliens nonsense and puts the critical facilities to sleep. Von Daniken along with other “experts” has appeared often on the show promoting his idiocies. However the bottom line was that von Daniken simply didn’t and doesn't know what he was talking about.1

Freedom and Doublethink

A Note

Athenian Voting Machine

Freedom is possibly the most important political value we have in contemporary Western society and by definition one would think that the opposite of “freedom” is “despotism” and “slavery”. Sadly that is not the case for it is possible to “Doublethink” “Freedom” into its opposite and in fact that was done long before George Orwell.  Just how that was done is the subject of this essay.1

Going Nowhere

Ktesias - Conman

Conmen and fraudsters have been the bane of human existence for thousands of years but perhaps one of the most blatant is the explorer as a Conman. This is so because a faker who says he has been to place X who has not been to place X risks being found out by someone who does in fact get to place X and therefore exposed.

The reason is that if you’ve never been to a place you are almost certainly going to get something wrong and if the place is made up someone may find out that the place is in fact made up by not finding it where it is supposed to be.

Thus we get past historical accounts of places that turn out to be spectacularly wrong.

Perhaps the place to start in terms of Con Men talking about places that don’t exist is the fantasies of some early ethnographers. In some cases their accounts are so distorted that wilful distortion is obviously the case.

Thus we can start with the Greek Historian Ktesias, who should be some sort of patron deity to fraudsters and tellers of lying tales. Ktesias lived in the 4^th century B.C.E., and lived for a time at the court of the Persian King, as Royal Physician. This gave him an unparallelled opportunity see things from from the point of view of the Persians and of course access to a vast number of reliable informants concerning Persian history and affairs. Well Ktesias muffed it, it seems. It appears that his Persica is unreliable and too a large extent a series of melodramatic stories of harem intrigue and frankly extremely unreliable.1

“Witch Hunters” Manual

Book Cover

More than 500 years ago Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger wrote and published the Malleus Maleficarum which became the most popular manual for the ferreting out and prosecution of witches during Europe’s Witchcraze. During the Witchcraze in Europe at least 100,000 and possibly more than 200,000 alleged witches were killed. The craze possessed most of Europe and brought in its wake untold misery.1

The Killer Ape Part II

The Fossil Evidence 

 

Australopithecines at Home

In a previous posting I discussed the idea of man being a “Killer Ape” and pointed out the rather obvious fact that the idea owed much more to the concept of innate human depravity and the notion of man has some demonic, luciferian fallen angel than it did to any actual evidence.1

Original Sin Redux

The Killer Ape Theory

Part 1

Scene from 2001 A Space Odyssey

One of the most delicious of intellectual pleasures for Puritans is wallowing in their own sinfulness. We have had in the past thinkers like St, Augustine, who was merely the father so to speak, of generation after generation of people who wallowed in their sinfulness. The sort who constantly dwelled on their own wickedness over and over again; enjoying the narcissistic and prurient pleasure of heaping coals on their heads and luxuriating in the contemplation of their utterly wicked sinfulness.

Finding Odin



The God Odin



In several postings I have reffered to the works of Thor Heyerdahl and in particular I mentioned that he shortly before he died (2002) he published two books about his hunt for the “real” Odin.1 I also mentioned a devastating review that was published in 2002 shortly after his death, concerning Thor Heyerdahl’s efforts in this area. The review was originally published in Norwegian, but a English translation of the piece was put on the web. Sadly it appears that it is no longer obtainable on the web. I have therefore decided to post the piece in its entirety.

In a previous posting I quoted an author who said concerning Thor Heyerdahl:

Rather than classifying him [Thor Heyerdahl] as a pseudo historian it would be more fair and accurate to call him a careful scholar who sincerely holds some highly speculative hypotheses that are widely viewed as wrong.2

The idea that Thor Heyerdahl can be described as a "careful scholar" is actually quite risible as the following will show in abundance.

 

(In this piece my stuff is in italics, the rest in regular script)

Anonymous Idiocy

Anonymous Movie Poster



I do not review movies I’ve never seen. However in the case of Anonymous1 I have a few things to say about the plot and premise.

The following is a slightly reworked version of several postings I made in comments at the site Skeptical Humanities.2 What follows is a bit of a rant also.

Ender

Meets Hamlet

Book Cover

This is one of those WTF!1 discoveries that make life interesting and annoying at the same time. In this case the WTF moment was brought to us by Orson Scott Card (1951- ),2 Science Fiction and Fantasy writer.

Stupid Grammar Tricks

No Caption Needed

This short little note about grammar is not about the basic rules of language that regulate how language is structured so that what we say makes sense. It isn’t about Noam Chomsky’s idea about transformative grammar and so forth. It is not about the basic, apparently hardwired rules that make “The cat sat on the mat”, different from “The mat sat on the cat”. Those are actual grammar rules governing exactly how people express themselves in speech and language.

No what I’m going to talk about are what are called prescriptive language rules. These are rules created, supposedly to avoid, vague, and incoherent ways of expressing yourself by avoiding certain uses of speech.