andrel wrote:
> There are some things that I wouldn't say that way, but the big picture 
> is something I am very familiar with. I still fail to see why you are 
> telling me, pretending I don't know. As far as I can see there was and 
> is no reason for that.
> Or put another way as, long as you are bringing up points in a 
> discussion while I think the issue is a metadiscussion we don't get 
> anywhere.
> 
Well, the point of the discussion was the whole 2012 thing, and some 
people's issues with the stupidity of the belief in it. The point some 
of us are trying to make is, well, I suppose there are two points:

1. Its probably profitable, but maybe not wise to keep/make the country 
stupid, by promoting the most absurd and mind numbingly idiotic ideas 
all the time, while, apparently, failing to really grasp how many fools 
will believe it is real, even after the date comes and goes, and nothing 
happens. Most of the modern world seems to have advanced from the days 
when Orson Wells scared people with a sci-fi radio broadcast. The US... 
not so much, and that is a problem.

2. Part of the problem, imho, of promoting the idea that some of these 
things are real, and I do think that running a web site talking about 
the lottery to get seats on the boat *is* getting too close to doing 
that, is that it feeds into a serious problem we already get. Its one 
things to generate an seeming real world, which people interact with, 
for something like the AI movie, which everyone "knew" was made up, a 
bit more of a problem when its something that their might be 10,000 
wackos some place that think it "is" real, and maybe a million people 
that are sort of thinking, "Ah, well, maybe all the rapture people are 
nuts, but I know, from my Bible, the world will end, and if the Mayan's 
said so, why not?" The problem is, too many people want to be fed 
"facts", but don't want to learn how to think with them.

There was an example of this, from a class on religions, where a student 
is trying to sue over, "Being presented with something he didn't study 
on the final!" This is shear BS, since a) he did study the religion in 
question, b) he was given the full quote he was supposed to analyze, and 
c) the expectation was not that he just *memorize* shit and regurgitate 
the information, but actually understand it well enough to say, "Based 
on that set of quoted lines, X, Y and Z would be the interpretation a 
believer in that religion would apply to it." Its telling that, as a 
comment in the thread discussion this silly situation, someone 
mentioned, "Every year, before I start teaching the *very specific* 
field of science, I have to tell my students, "If you just want the 
facts, go home and read books. You are here to learn how to think too.", 
and yet, a percentage of their students **still** fail, because they 
can't grasp the basic idea that they are supposed to be able to *derive* 
conclusions from the facts, not just barf the original details up, on 
command, like some sort of damn game show. There is an entire segment of 
the population that actually seems to think that this is what 
constitutes "learning", and "thinking". Its the same one that will 
imagine that movies like 2012 are "predictive" of what will happen, not 
just entertainment, and have, quite likely, been showing up in the 
thousands to sign up for the "lotto" to get their place on the super 
ships that will "save them all".

The problem isn't that people make such movies, its that they are more 
interested in making money off of the idiots that believe all of it, and 
those that merely get entertained by them, than they are at making more 
than vaguely superficial attempts to point out that its *not* factual. 
In fact, Disney, and their "Atlantis" special, and other similar 
stupidities, which have appeared over the last 10+ years, show the exact 
opposite trend. Don't just ignore the fact that some people think its 
real, count on the fact, and create an entire damn marketing campaign, 
based on promoting it ****as**** 100% real. You can see what happens 
when an entire political party falls for its own constant distortion of 
fact, with the mess we have in the Republicans. They can spin fictions, 
and as is being unsuccessfully argued right now on PZ's blog, their own 
news agencies can even get caught promoting, funding, or even creating, 
the news they want to report on, and the end result is:

a) They start basing policy not on the facts, but the BS they have been 
promoting.

b) When they find their BS conflicting with what the rest of the world 
is doing, they can't do anything at all, except whine about how the rest 
of the world is wrong, and work to undermine the opposition (even to 
their own blindly sad detriment).

The problem isn't a when a few hundred morons follow some wacko, like 
Lazar, the UFO conspiracy theorist. The worst you might expect from them 
is a lot of shouting at a space convention. But, what would thousands of 
believers in the end of the world do, if something happened that looked 
"even vaguely" like rapture, and they all thought they where "left 
behind", like in their damn worthless computer game and books? There is 
more than one kind of crazy, and some of them have the potential to be 
very dangerous, with the right push, further into the delusion. And that 
is without even bothering to deal with the result of (b) above, which is 
1) why so many manage to survive in the US, compared to other places, 
and 2) continues to undermine efforts, along with the promotion as 
semi-/total true- fact, of made up BS, for movies, TV shows, Discovery 
special, Ad promotion campaigns, and even political campaigns.

The tide isn't going to change, until the water stop receding, and only 
someone totally clueless fails to grasp what it means when the water 
**keeps** receding, instead of sloshing up and down the beach. Something 
bad is almost certainly following, and the best you can hope for is that 
the disappearance of the water is the result of a large "sink hole", not 
an approaching tsunami.

-- 
void main () {

     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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