***
The reporter says, "Will there be war with Russia, Mahatma? Will Communism destroy the civilized world? Is the soul immortal? Does God exist?"
The Mahatma opens his eyes and compresses his lips and spits two long, red streams of betel nut juice out through his nose holes. It runs down over his mouth and he licks it back in with a long, coated tongue and says "How the f*ck should I know?" From Queer by William Burroughs.
To become a critical thinker, we must continually labor to counter our biases, to pay attention to the tendency to confirm rather than to disconfirm, and to imagine what information we might have overlooked. One way to do this is to submit assumptions to questioning. Shockingly, we often find that we must settle for the answer, "I don't know."
Unless you're a hack, of course.
Hacks Know Things, and they voice their views in stentorian rhetoric, and they don't care that they break every rule of critical thinking in the book. They are subject to The Bold Statement (which doesn't make a claim true), The Bald Contradiction (which they don't care about), and The Blatant Inanity. All that matters is the sound, and the fury, of their pronouncements.
Right in the midst of the week dropped three fresh examples the very Peak Doom hackery that I'd written about, like Moses' manna from heaven. Two examples issued from a video linked to The Oil Drum site, "Peak Oil and a Changing Climate," from The Nation magazine. The other was a comment and a link to a podcast called "Two Beers With Steve." They fit perfectly into the conversation about the bungled manner in which certain purveyors of the peak oil apocalypse make pronouncements and predictions.
I was eager to view The Nation video, for it features Noam Chomsky, and his statements in the film are simply awe-inspiring in their breadth (as usual). Sometime after Chomsky, though, James Kunstler, peak oil's Jeremiah-in-residence, suddenly gets all beady-eyed and becomes a rap star:
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