Thursday, September 18, 2003

The Age of Ignorance

Technological hubris: The increase in mind-numbing ignorance (masquerading as arrogance) of citizens of 1st world nations commensurate with their growing and unquestioning reliance on technology. The inability to apply basic standards of logic to the questions and issues that people are faced with.

Human nature is for people to try to understand everything around them. How easily your questioning is satisfied and what you accept as truth regarding any issue highlights a person as either an empty-headed moron or someone interested in striving to learn as much about themselves and the world they live in.

If your choice is ignorance, absorb mind and soul-destroying hits from the glass tit that is the focal point of your squalid abode and attach yourself to as many sheep-herds as possible in an effort to insulate yourself from the necessity of thinking independently. If you wish to burn all remaining rational thought to the ground, latch on to a popular religion and choose to live your life with fairy tales as the guiding principle.

The enigma of death concerns all people and is a question that we should continually explore, ruminate on and devote as much energy to as possible. Once you've thrown up the wall of ignorance regarding the biggest and most complex question that every human being is faced with, erosion of your thought process on all matters is not far behind. That there is likely a high correlation between the number of white-trash bible-beaters that are also conspiracy-theory adherents is no surprise.

Due to a few high-profile, pseudo-documentaries regarding the lunar landing undertaken by the US in 1969, this seems to be the conspiracy of the moment. It has all the ingredients to satisfy the ignoramuses who gleefully lap up the modern-day version of burning witches at the stake. You can't understand or comprehend something outside the narrow confines of your atrophied, walnut-sized brain, so buy into a simplistic version of events that a) comes blazing out of the maw of the supplier of all of your facts and information in an entertaining and easy-to-understand way b) allows you to feel part of a group of individuals who are privy to the "real" truth and c) allows you to wear your ignorance as a badge of honour instead of it being the hindrance it has always been in the past.

What is so stunning about this phenomenon of fools claiming the landing never took place is what they hold up as "evidence" or some kind of ironclad "proof." These yahoos all claim it was a grand, multi-billion dollar hoax that was decades in the planning, with thousands of NASA employees involved, strangely none of whom have ever supported these asinine claims in public (probably being kept in line by the aliens who have been used by the US government for years to keep malcontents under wraps).

Their evidence?

A photograph that shows a US flag that was planted on the surface of the moon. A photograph that depicts the flag "blowing in the wind." Therefore, by these clowns' reckoning, this is the all-encompassing proof that it was all a staged setup. "There's no atmosphere on the moon," they say, "therefore this picture is an impossibility." What these asinine half-wits never stop to consider is the fact that it is a STILL-PHOTOGRAPH fer fuck’s sake!! No action or movement takes place in a god-damned photo!! Yes it can appear to be blowing, but that is all!

It doesn't occur to these meatheads that for an operation that took so many years and involved so many people, that of course someone considered the matter of there being no wind on the moon. The image-conscious yanks knew that a drooping flag would not be the best representation of their country, therefore they fashioned a realistic-looking flag made out of tin with all the furls and creases that would appear on a cloth version.