As IF Times

Source: Iranian General Accuses Israel of Causing Drought by Stealing Clouds | Breitbart

Well this is a new one.  Over the past while, especially in the world of politics, no claim is too preposterous or accusation too unhinged to level  against ideological foes.  Stealing someone’s weather is actually quite novel and creative.  It hasn’t quite acquired the traction and mass hysteria concerning weather that Al Gore has wrought with his inventive and mercantile mind, but you know what they say about imitation and flattery.  But for creativity and the “way out there” factor, it’s a good one.

By now, invocation of the “N” word, that word being Nazi, to characterize anyone who happens to disagree with a preferred point of view, is as cliché as lisps and facial hair on hipsters.  That “N’ word is applied like cheap olive oil onto most every social and political issue.  Anyone resorting to that smear to silence their opponent has already lost the argument.  Closely following on the list of toothless barbs are the epithets of “racist”, “misogynist”, “sexist”, “Islamophobe”, “homophobe” all the way down the list to “anti-dentite”.

In my view, these supposed slurs expose two enormous and dangerous issues threatening  civilization.  The first is the obvious absence of originality.  It’s like calling someone a fatso. Rather than accurately portraying opponents in any articulate way, the smear industry lazily resorts to recycling tried and true monikers in their campaigns as if they were the next in the series of Rocky movies; or Star Wars; or Fast and Furious.  We know that numbers are important to successful films, you just don’t expect it to be the number in the film’s title.  It all becomes just noise, analogous to the cacophony of crying babies in a hospital birthing ward.  As we know, the entertainment industry is seemingly bereft of any new creative ideas and thus depend solely on retreads of the same tired franchises to pay the bills.  This represents an intellectual laziness that is also reflected by social justice warriors in their tired clichés and characterizations, contributing to the blunting of  intellectual thought.

Which brings us to the second fatal issue.  People willingly consume this crap. Like most Hollywood drivel and that includes the “music” industry, the wholly unoriginal social justice smear warriors can only exist if there’s an audience for their banalities.  We can postulate that there may be an almost chemical like dependency of a large swath of the population to consume the same drivel over and over again.  We expect to see this kind of behavior in adolescents, as epitomized by an entire generation hooked on video games and Facebook. But people generally grow out of this groupthink behavior as they mature.   Incredibly, large segments of the populace seem to be zombie-like  consumers of…crap.

Unfortunately, the present state of public discourse shows that lack of critical thinking, normally hallmarks of adolescents, has been pushed farther into adulthood than in previous generations.   People with wholly illogical and preposterous notions are given audience that rational people would dismiss as utter nonsense.  We are all familiar with the notion of the popularity of anti-heroes, but the embrace by much of the public of the moon bat ideas offered by many recent political demagogues is analogous to chickens embracing Colonel Sanders.  Right now, there’s a lot of willing chickens.

link Its not the end of the world when doomsday prophets get it wrong | World news | The Guardian.

There was no point in putting in the effort to comment about this until the fateful moment had passed.  So whew, here we are. Preacher Harold Camping was wrong.  Again. Good news for us.  Bad news for those who stopped bathing, brushing their teeth and who recently took out big loans.   It’s easy to dismiss this recent call for the apocalypse as just another quack job by some fringe nuts.  Until you read about how much money had been spent spreading the fear and the amount of people involved in the doomsday publicity.  From some accounts, over a hundred million dollars was spent to publicize the end of the world, not to mention the untold numbers of followers, new and old.

To most rational people, the level of interest in the campaign must have been a mystery.  Really?  One person was endowed  with the ability to foresee the future, or at least the end of the present?  As preposterous as this seems, how is it any different than any other religion?  Notwithstanding Stephen Hawking’s ruminations, whether  there’s a heaven or a hell may be up for debate, but it may be prudent to hedge your bets.  In the case of some faiths which promise a fixed number of virgins upon death, that claim may be iffier.  Certainly it would be discouraging for the women of that faith.

Still, even more preposterous is the idea that killing certain groups of people in real life will ingratiate you to the supreme poo bah in the next.  But in matters of faith, it’s hard to belittle anything that may give people structure and comfort.  Faith happens to be one of the good traits of human nature.

On the other hand, it’s hard to explain willful stupidity.  In matters of faith, proof is elusive.  In matters of ideology, the evidence is easier to discern.  At the moment, the ideological battle going on for the hearts and minds of the  U.S. voter being waged in the media  has never been more laughable.  Infinitely more stupid than the Rapture claims are the utterances from some media personalities who mysteriously still have jobs.  One of the more recent doozies is from Bill Maher, whose tenuous grip on sanity is slim indeed.  According to Maher, the GOP want a “misogynist, racist and homophobic presidential candidate”.   Hmm.  According to Democratic ads in support of the despised Obamacare program, Republicans want to dump grandma off her wheelchair over a cliff.  And how can we forget the articulate Alan Grayson who stated that the Republican solution to the health crisis is for people to die.  MSNBC talking head Dylan Ratigan says that Republican rhetoric is “based on abandonment of arithmetic and fact”.   According to an AFL-CIO union stooge named Damon Silvers, “republicans literally deny clothing to foster kids to give rich people tax cuts”.  We’re on watch now to see which GOP candidate will be accused of eating babies and small dogs. These are only some of the well known  loons that cater to the contingent of idiots who believe their pearls of wisdom…despite all evidence to the contrary.

Like the Rapture preacher, people are free to say whatever they want in a free society.  And like the Rapture congregation, people can believe what or whom they like when it comes to the media.  However, the sheer scale of naivete at best or stupidity at worst is frightening.  Even more frightening, they all get to vote.  Oy.