Solving a Puzzle-- Understanding Some People's Reactions


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No I'm the hillbilly looking at the stars.

. . .

This is not about me, Michael. I am not interested in arguing an idea back and forth ad infinitum within the dialectic.

Seymourblogger,

At least one good thing can be said of your inner "dominating discourse." You have a most casual relationship with logical consistency, if not outright contempt.

You are correct about this Michael.

What kind of response is, "No, I'm the one who yada yada yada..."?

Are we in a kindergarten version of "back and forth ad infinitum within the dialectic" all of a sudden?

Joke, Michael, joke! I am the one in redneck territory now. And I have learned to have a lot of respect for them. They were on to NObama on day 2 of his taking office way way ahead of the neo-liberals.

Incidentally, I am literally a hillbilly--born in Wise County, Virginia and raised by hillbillies. I was born in neighboring Norton because Coeburn (where I should have been born) didn't have the medical facilities in to handle my mother's difficult delivery.

You're a hoot, though. I've never seen a person try to bluff about being a hillbilly as an intellectual plus.

Michael

You've been away from them too long.

Actually I think all the Snopes left Yoknapatawpha County and came to the Ozarks.

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I don't think you have one serious posting on your site that comes close to that number. Just one, not the whole site.

You are kidding, right?

Time to play "Mine's bigger than yours"?

Here's one thread bigger than yours and I just started looking. Is J. Neil Schulman justified (logically) in believing in God?

That one has 27,356 views as of this posting.

(This ain't rocket science and it's easy to go on, but I'm not going to spend all day on childish stuff.)

Michael

EDIT: Maybe I am childish. I couldn't resist including this one: Ayn Rand's favorite painting - Corpus Hypercubus by Dali which has 16,189 views right now.

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I don't think you have one serious posting on your site that comes close to that number. Just one, not the whole site.

You are kidding, right?

Time to play "Mine's bigger than yours"?

Here's one thread bigger than yours and I just started looking. Is J. Neil Schulman justified (logically) in believing in God?

That one has 27,356 views as of this posting.

(This ain't rocket science and it's easy to go on, but I'm not going to spend all day on childish stuff.)

Michael

EDIT: Maybe I am childish. I couldn't resist including this one: Ayn Rand's favorite painting - Corpus Hypercubus by Dali which has 16,189 views right now.

Where did I ever say it was a serious post?

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Here's the ROOT of the problem between you and me....There is NO ROOT to this problem.

Hmmm.... Those Foucauldians are a tricky tribe.

Ghs

... and quite versed in 'concept stealing' ('The root of the problem is that there is not root of the problem'). :D

For the background of my reply you would have to spend a lot of time with Foucaut's The Order of Things.

I have spent a lot of time with The Order of Things. In fact, I reread large chunks of it over the past few days. Given how you misuse Foucault's ideas, you don't seem to understand Foucault any better than you understand Rand. You merely throw around a few of his phrases here and there in an attempt to impress people, but you are not fooling anyone on OL.

My earlier offer to participate in a thread about Foulcault's ideas is still open. I will even start the thread for you, after which you can post of a summary of what you regard as his most important contributions. You won't do this this, of course, because you cannot do it. You are a fraud.

Ghs

You can start it. I might visit. Good idea.

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My purpose is to place Rand in the pantheon of post modern philosophers.

Where she plainly doesn’t fit. This is like listing Zeus among the Aztec pantheon, next to Quetzalcoatl. I might have to start posting more material from Foucault’s Pendulum just for illustration’s sake. The section on the typology of morons, cretins, lunatics, and fools comes to mind.

Rand will never have Objectivism taken seriously by serious philosophers.

Do you not realize that the person you’re addressing qualifies as a “serious philosopher”, who happens to take Objectivism seriously? Thus disproving your assertion, and/or qualifying it as an insult? Or do you have criteria for “serious philosopher” that GHS doesn’t measure up to?

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My purpose is to place Rand in the pantheon of post modern philosophers.
Where she plainly doesn’t fit. This is like listing Zeus among the Aztec pantheon, next to Quetzalcoatl. I might have to start posting more material from Foucault’s Pendulum just for illustration’s sake. The section on the typology of morons, cretins, lunatics, and fools comes to mind.
Rand will never have Objectivism taken seriously by serious philosophers.
Do you not realize that the person you’re addressing qualifies as a “serious philosopher”, who happens to take Objectivism seriously? Thus disproving your assertion, and/or qualifying it as an insult? Or do you have criteria for “serious philosopher” that GHS doesn’t measure up to?

Umberto Eco wrote Foucault's Pendulum I am referring to Michel Foucault. Two different people. Notice I didn't insult you for your embarrassing and ignorant mistake.

Geo Smith? I genuflected last night when Brant told me NOW and twice this morning. I wish I had an effigy of him to worship. Do you have one or could you tell me where I could buy one?

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I should have included Robert Campbell's The Rewrite Squad. This one has 26,046 views so far.
My Harriman thread has over 42 thousand. Me so tough! http://www.objectivi...ndpost&p=106683

Thread? where did I mention threads? Posts I said, posts. Just one post, that's all. One.

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Seymourblogger,

This is a discussion forum.

We don't have standalone posts except for technical things.

The real point is that we have an intelligent audience who reads the stuff here.

You do not have that. You come here because you don't have it there.

And don't tell me your blog posts are serious. From what I've seen, that's a matter of opinion. I don't consider spewing obscure jargon and namedropping amidst a bunch of loose connections and bashing famous people serious.

I'll give you Brownie points for effort, though. You do what you do what you do what you do. And there's a small public for that stuff.

But not OL's target audience. The only way you'll get in front of that audience is be here or go to other places they go to.

Michael

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Oh Lord,

She's.doing her rapid-fire one-liners-with-no-content again, but quoting entire posts to make them.

I'm not sure she will learn, but gotta give it a little time to be fair.

Michael

In case you missed this query:

MSK: whatever happened to the 5 posts a day club? Are they still accepting members? I think there are regulars who would like to enjoy breathing the Phil-free air, while it lasts.

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I checked out the rewright squad. For us bean counters.

1. It was posted in 09. So 26,000 (rounded) in 3 years.

2. My post 5 months and 12,000 almost 13,000 today.

I am assuming you are not math challenged in stats.

Let's see, he's watching how many lines I put in a comment. One is not enough. 2? 3? 4? Will that do I wonder. Hmmmmm. Maybe I had better post something serious.

I got yelled at for not respecting Geo Smith enough as a well-known philosopher. I went to wiki and read about him. He has worked hard and spent a lot of time with Cato Institute for which I.........never mind. And has had articles published by The Journal of Libertarian Studies. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_H._Smith

And he left college before he got his degree and he teaches at Tufts. all this is wiki-ing. Kinky? No no that doesn't belong in this thread tenaj.

Does this make him a world class philosopher? Hardly. He's a worker bee in the bosom of academia. Not that there's anything wrong with that. I've been there meself.

Post modern thinking doesn't rewrite history. all it does is put it in a different order: The Order of Things.. Foucault has frequently said he is NOT a theorists. He does not deal in theory. He has proposed a method, his Tool Chest as he calls it.

Nothing to make fun of. Just a different way of thinking. Doesn't mean you can't think other ways also. Just means you have more flexibility.

Whew! I escaped the one liner sort of ultimatum.

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Janet,

Where did you ever get the idea that I taught at Tufts University? You don't seem to be able to read a short Wiki article any better than you read Foucault. Moreover, I have been a free-lance intellectual my entire career. I have never worked in academia.

The meaning of "viral" is pretty elastic, but by no definition does 13,000 hits come anywhere close. A one-million minimum is widely accepted. Some would say half-million, but the rapidity of hits is a relevant factor.

Moreover, the number of hits on any Internet genre means nothing in terms of quality. Consider this YouTube video with over 62 million hits:

Perhaps you would like to give us a Foucauldian Reading of this video. I'm sure it would make as much sense as the readings you have given us so far.

Ghs

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Where did you ever get the idea that I taught at Tufts University? You don't seem to be able to read a short Wiki article any better than you read Foucault.

George,

I admit that I'm interested in seeing a mind work that is totally inverted. (But my interest is only up to a point.)

Facts mean nothing to this person. The dismissive gesture is all. Note that she frequently screws up the facts and gets confused when people correct her, but the dismissive gesture is identical in every case--and she gets pissed when it backfires.

It is conceit without substance. Gesture as an end in itself. The facts are not important enough to bother with before a "truth" of gargantuan magnitude--that the person belongs to the vastly superior Chosen Ones, those who are far above the riffraff.

This poster uses Nietzsche as validation for her conceit and constantly harps on some dialectic mumbo-jumbo to validate her lack of substance. But all this is merely window display so it will look good.

After all, where's the value in looking down on people if they don't look back?

I sometimes bring out a quote by F. Scott Fitzgerald in similar cases because this passage is where I first became aware of the lonesome vain stuffed peacocks among us. He was discussing wealthy people (from upbringing), but I think many modern academics fit the pattern perfectly.

There is a wonderful quote by F. Scott Fitzgerald that is particularly pertinent here. ... I had known the quote for a long time, but not the story. I just read the story (the full version). I am really glad I did....

Full story: The Rich Boy

Summary with commentary: F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Rich Boy"

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.

... I have met people who fit the above description to a tee. Even if they lose everything, they somehow imagine that they are innately superior to the rest of mankind. There is no merit involved in this sentiment, only upbringing. This gets really irritating to be around...

Especially if you have things to do.

They will piss your life away on trivialities if you let yourself get entangled.

(And I admit it. I'm a fool for this game. I constantly kick myself after I see I did it again. It's an ex-druggie thing, I guess...)

Michael

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Where did you ever get the idea that I taught at Tufts University? You don't seem to be able to read a short Wiki article any better than you read Foucault.

George,

I admit that I'm interested in seeing a mind work that is totally inverted. (But my interest is only up to a point.)

Facts mean nothing to this person. The dismissive gesture is all. Note that she frequently screws up the facts and gets confused when people correct her, but the dismissive gesture is identical in every case--and she gets pissed when it backfires.

It is conceit without substance. Gesture as an end in itself. The facts are not important enough to bother with before a "truth" of gargantuan magnitude--that the person belongs to the vastly superior Chosen Ones, those who are far above the riffraff.

This poster uses Nietzsche as validation for her conceit and constantly harps on some dialectic mumbo-jumbo to validate her lack of substance. But all this is merely window display so it will look good.

After all, where's the value in looking down on people if they don't look back?

I sometimes bring out a quote by F. Scott Fitzgerald in similar cases because this passage is where I first became aware of the lonesome vain stuffed peacocks among us. He was discussing wealthy people (from upbringing), but I think many modern academics fit the pattern perfectly.

There is a wonderful quote by F. Scott Fitzgerald that is particularly pertinent here. ... I had known the quote for a long time, but not the story. I just read the story (the full version). I am really glad I did....

Full story: The Rich Boy

Summary with commentary: F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Rich Boy"

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. They possess and enjoy early, and it does something to them, makes them soft where we are hard, and cynical where we are trustful, in a way that, unless you were born rich, it is very difficult to understand. They think, deep in their hearts, that they are better than we are because we had to discover the compensations and refuges of life for ourselves. Even when they enter deep into our world or sink below us, they still think that they are better than we are. They are different.

... I have met people who fit the above description to a tee. Even if they lose everything, they somehow imagine that they are innately superior to the rest of mankind. There is no merit involved in this sentiment, only upbringing. This gets really irritating to be around...

Especially if you have things to do.

They will piss your life away on trivialities if you let yourself get entangled.

(And I admit it. I'm a fool for this game. I constantly kick myself after I see I did it again. It's an ex-druggie thing, I guess...)

Michael

Here's where I got the Tufts info.


  • Department of Philosophy-Tufts University
    ase.tufts.edu/philosophy/courses/Cached - Similar
    You +1'd this publicly. UndoMiner Hall, Tufts University, Medford, MA 02155 | Tel: 617.627.3230 | Fax: 617.627.3899 | email ... 168-01, Newton's Principia, George Smith, 167 or consent, 12 ...

  • George Smith - Tufts University - RateMyProfessors.com
    www.ratemyprofessors.com › ... › MassachusettsTufts UniversityCached
    You +1'd this publicly. Undo
    See ratings and read comments about professor George Smith from Tufts University in MA.
    Evidently a different George Smith. A mistake but an honest one. I went back to wiki and didn't see anything so then I began to wonder if Gellen Mettle was right, that I was losing my mind and memory. Since I just did a google search, the page came up, and I opened up wiki not paying attention to the fact that Tufts wasn't on there. I remember wondering how he could teach at Tufts with no advanced degrees but let it go......I will never get anything but a zero at Trivial Pursuit.
    Glad to see how fast you all are at damning someone though, attacking their integrity, etc etc.
    Have any of you read Solzhenitsyn's or Herman's visits to the KGB department in the Soviet Union in Lubyanka? Jes wonderin'.
    Brant's right.

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Glad to see how fast you all are at damning someone though, attacking their integrity, etc etc.

Seymourblogger,

Why are you worried about integrity? Integrity means consistency to principles.

You're not supposed to have any of that little people stuff. You're supposed to be beyond good and evil.

Oh...

I forgot...

The thing is the gesture and the illusion, not the fact.

You need to give the appearance of integrity.

So saying it is ugly, huh?

Michael

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Seymourblogger,

This is a discussion forum.

We don't have standalone posts except for technical things.

The real point is that we have an intelligent audience who reads the stuff here.

You do not have that. You come here because you don't have it there.

And don't tell me your blog posts are serious. From what I've seen, that's a matter of opinion. I don't consider spewing obscure jargon and namedropping amidst a bunch of loose connections and bashing famous people serious.

I'll give you Brownie points for effort, though. You do what you do what you do what you do. And there's a small public for that stuff.

But not OL's target audience. The only way you'll get in front of that audience is be here or go to other places they go to.

Michael

This is exactly why I avoided all the Rand sites for "over a decade". Either nasty and aggressive or plain boring if they weren't. You have nothing on Diane Hsieh tho. But she is good about doggies and rescuing them.

It seems to be play with my marbles my way or take your ass elsewhere. There's less authoritarianism at solo, but it is insular. Here you have a few, a very few, very intelligent and/or funny people. You are not one of either category. No offense meant of course, as Mellin Swittle says.

Whether they are enough to keep me around, we will see. Perhaps if you tell them to ignore me that will work.

I'm now 78. You have no idea of anything I've done in my life and I am not here to offer a resume. When you are 78 I wonder if you will be excited about new things. Somehow I don't think so since you aren't excited about them now. A different way of thinking about things opens your mind in an amazing way. Obviously you are not interested, not that there's anything wrong with that. I, however, am incredibly excited.

The Discourse is changing in many different fields. It's speed is breathtaking. When you get old it can seem as if the world is whizzing past you because it's so different from when you were young. Old people tend to keep moaning about the good ol days and how the world is going to hell faster and faster. Well, it always has been. Nothing new there. But to be involved in learning something radically new feels like waking up from the fog.

Like Scarlet.

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Glad to see how fast you all are at damning someone though, attacking their integrity, etc etc.

Seymourblogger,

Why are you worried about integrity? Integrity means consistency to principles.

You're not supposed to have any of that little people stuff. You're supposed to be beyond good and evil.

Oh...

I forgot...

The thing is the gesture and the illusion, not the fact.

You need to give the appearance of integrity.

So saying it is ugly, huh?

Michael

Is that your definition of integrity. Holding onto absolutes. The best case for absolutes is in the fiction Smilla's Sense of Snow.

I guess we differ on that definition. Remember in the beginning, was it a week ago? how you were so eager to learn something new and I saw deeper into your surface meaning to know that I was being set up. Now the fury erupts.

When I taught I worked with learning resistances. The first day: What is it you want to learn?

Whadda ya mean. You supposed to teach us. Teach us.

I'd love to teach you, what do you want me to teach you?

Whatdda mean what do we want ya to teach us? You the teacher, you supposed to know what we need to learn. That's what.

And around and around the merry-go-round until they figured it out. Then we got down to real business and real learning. Not just stuffing heads full of rote mimicry. By the end of one semester a beginning college reading class could take a Freud case study and chew it to bits as well as what any of my analytic peers could do.

Better than anything I've seen around here so far.

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I remember there were lots of people I knew being joyous that the shah was going down. A mistake. Even the Iranian people acknowledged their mistake. Some of them. Foucault did too BTW, publicly. When he was wrong he changed his mind. Like Churchill. What do you do?

As I understand it, Foucault's basic point was that it is inappropriate to judge Islamic culture -- including its horrendous treatment of women -- by Western standards. Correct?

Ghs

Yes. Islamic countries are within the Sacred Order not the Order of Production, not a Secular order. You cannot judge them from within ours, tempting as that may be. I presume you are talking about genital cutting among other things. Stoning because of adultery, etc.

They are a culture that has a great fear of women. And women are the cornerstone of their culture /religion. Exchange and property. This is a total belief system. And I think you know about beliefs. You may suppress the behavior but you are not going to get rid of it. You may punish and try them as we do in the US, but thaat still is only going to suppress it, the belief will still be there. Maybe here after a few generations it will not happen. Ousmane Sembene's last film was on genital mutilation. He is a filmmaker, educated in France, from Somalia and has always done films on taboo subjects, exposing hypocrisy. It shows that other women in the village are the most adamant on the cutting, and the young girls want it as a ritual of feminine adulthood, otherwise they will not be marriageable and then what do they have if they cannot marry. It's complicated. Mothers often try to spare their daughters, but other women undermine them, grab their daughters and do it anyway against her wishes. Human rights belong to secular orders not sacred orders.

Then why do they judge our culture?

--Brant

Whaaaat! What kind of question is that? How would I know the thousands of reasons they do. They do because they do, just as we judge them.

A question well asked is one half the answer - Bacon

Really if you ask questions like that you can never find out anything or know anything.

I missed this one. I studied cultural anthropology in college. I didn't know you were a cultural anthropologist.

--Brant

why didn't you say so?

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Seymourblogger,

I don't have fury at you.

It's boredom and irritation at myself.

I've seen enough to know you are not going anywhere with your stuff other than to demean people, wallow in meaningless jargon with rhetorical booby-traps for the "look at superior me" payoff, and waste a crapload of time.

I was interested in your ideas at first. I thought maybe you don't have any answers I could detect, but you might have some interesting questions.

Then the patterns started repeating: the obnoxious snootiness, baiting people in order to go for the easy put-down, namedropping, getting all kinds of things wrong and belittling the corrections, your shallowness of delivery, added to all interactions airily dismissed with sophomoric jargon and gestures the moment you are called on to actually communicate something, started boring me.

Sorry.

I'm not easily bored.

I get irritated with me when I allow that to happen to myself.

Michael

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Integrity is doing what you think is the right thing in spite of the easier, seemingly less costly thing. Integrity is righting your wronging. Etc. Living by your principles reminds me of one character in Victor Hugo's Ninety Three who travelled about France with a guillotine or that guy (Javert) who chased the protagonist of Hugo's Les Miserables through the novel and the sewers of Paris. It's not that living by your principles is necessarily wrong, but that you may be wrong about your principles. So live by them, at least for the small stuff, to save time one might devote to not letting the blade fall.

--Brant

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I might have to start posting more material from Foucault’s Pendulum just for illustration’s sake. The section on the typology of morons, cretins, lunatics, and fools comes to mind.

So my fellow OLers understand why I use the term "loon", and that's short for lunatic, not meant as a putdown on Canadians and/or their fiat currency:

From Chapter 10:

Now then: cretins. Cretins don’t even talk; they sort of slobber and stumble. You know, the guy who presses the ice cream cone against his forehead, or enters a revolving door the wrong way.”

“That’s not possible.”

“It is for a cretin. Cretins are of no interest to us: they never come to publishers’ offices. So let’s forget about them.”

“Let’s.”

“Being a fool is more complicated. It’s a form of social behavior. A fool is one who always talks outside his glass.”

“What do you mean?”

“Like this.” He pointed at the counter near his glass. “He wants to talk about what’s in the glass, but somehow or other he misses. He’s the guy who puts his foot in his mouth. For example, he says how’s your lovely wife to someone whose wife has just left him.”

“Yes, I know a few of those.”

“Fools are in great demand, especially on social occasions. They embarrass everyone but provide material for conversation. In their positive form, they become diplomats. Talking outside the glass when someone else blunders helps to change the subject. But fools don’t interest us, either. They’re never creative, their talent is all second-hand, so they don’t submit manuscripts to publishers. Fools don’t claim that cats bark, but they talk about cats when everyone else is talking about dogs. They offend all the rules of conversation, and when they really offend, they’re magnificent. It’s a dying breed, the embodiment of all the bourgeois virtues. What they really need is a Verdurin salon or even a chez Guermantes. Do you students still read such things?”

I do.”

“Well, a fool is a Joachim Murat reviewing his officers. He sees one from Martinique covered with medals. ‘Vous êtes nègre?’ Murat asks. ‘Oui, mon général!’ the man answers. And Murat says: ‘Bravo, bravo, continuez!’ And so on. You follow me? Forgive me, but tonight I’m celebrating a historic decision in my life. I’ve stopped drinking. Another round? Don’t answer, you’ll make me feel guilty. Pilade!”

“What about the morons?”

“Ah. Morons never do the wrong thing. They get their reasoning wrong. Like the fellow who says all dogs are pets and all dogs bark, and cats are pets, too, and therefore cats bark. Or that all Athenians are mortal, and all the citizens of Piraeus are mortal, so all the citizens of Piraeus are Athenians.”

“Which they are.”

“Yes, but only accidentally. Morons will occasionally say something that’s right, but they say it for the wrong reason.”

“You mean it’s okay to say something that’s wrong as long as the reason is right.”

“Of course. Why else go to the trouble of being a rational animal?”

“All great apes evolved from lower life forms, man evolved from lower life forms, therefore man is a great ape.”

“Not bad. In such statements you suspect that something’s wrong, but it takes work to show what and why. Morons are tricky. You can spot the fool right away (not to mention the cretin), but the moron reasons almost the way you do; the gap is infinitesimal. A moron is a master of paralogism. For an editor, it’s bad news. It can take him an eternity to identify a moron. Plenty of morons’ books are published, because they’re convincing at first glance. An editor is not required to weed out the morons. If the Academy of Sciences doesn’t do it, why should he?”

“Philosophers don’t either. Saint Anselm’s ontological argument is moronic, for example. God must exist because I can conceive Him as a being perfect in all ways, including existence. The saint confuses existence in thought with existence in reality.”

“True, but Gaunilon’s refutation is moronic, too. I can think of an island in the sea even if the island doesn’t exist. He confuses thinking of the possible with thinking of the necessary.”

“A duel between morons.”

“Exactly. And God loves every minute of it. He chose to be unthinkable only to prove that Anselm and Gaunilon were morons. What a sublime purpose for creation, or, rather, for that act by which God willed Himself to be: to unmask cosmic moronism.”

“We’re surrounded by morons.”

“Everyone’s a moron—save me and thee. Or, rather—I wouldn’t want to offend—save thee.”

“Somehow I feel that Gödel’s theorem has something to do with all this.”

“I wouldn’t know, I’m a cretin. Pilade!”

“My round.”

“We’ll split it. Epimenides the Cretan says all Cretans are liars. It must be true, because he’s a Cretan himself and knows his countrymen well.”

“That’s moronic thinking.”

“Saint Paul. Epistle to Titus. On the other hand, those who call Epimenides a liar have to think all Cretans aren’t, but Cretans don’t trust Cretans, therefore no Cretan calls Epimenides a liar.”

“Isn’t that moronic thinking?”

“You decide. I told you, they are hard to identify. Morons can even win the Nobel prize.”

“Hold on. Of those who don’t believe God created the world in seven days, some are not fundamentalists, but of those who do believe God created the world in seven days, some are. Therefore, of those who don’t believe God created the world in seven days, some are fundamentalists. How’s that?”

“My God—to use the mot juste—I wouldn’t know. A moronism or not?”

“It is, definitely, even if it were true. Violates one of the laws of syllogisms: universal conclusions cannot be drawn from two particulars.”

“And what if you were a moron?”

“I’d be in excellent, venerable company.”

“You’re right. And perhaps, in a logical system different from ours, our moronism is wisdom. The whole history of logic consists of attempts to define an acceptable notion of moronism. A task too immense. Every great thinker is someone else’s moron.”

“Thought as the coherent expression of moronism.”

“But what is moronism to one is incoherence to another.”

“Profound. It’s two o’clock, Pilade’s about to close, and we still haven’t got to the lunatics.”

“I’m getting there. A lunatic is easily recognized. He is a moron who doesn’t know the ropes. The moron proves his thesis; he has a logic, however twisted it may be. The lunatic, on the other hand, doesn’t concern himself at all with logic; he works by short circuits. For him, everything proves everything else. The lunatic is all idée fixe, and whatever he comes across confirms his lunacy. You can tell him by the liberties he takes with common sense, by his flashes of inspiration, and by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars.”

“Invariably?”

“There are lunatics who don’t bring up the Templars, but those who do are the most insidious. At first they seem normal, then all of a sudden...”

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