Tuesday, October 3, 2017

How To Deal With The Erudition Of The Internet Age

I need to make a sign and put it over my computer screen for whenever I'm trying to figure out what Simps and his cohort mean when they send the hate my way, it was something one of my fellow music majors said to someone who was trying to figure out why someone was being such a idiot, the advice was


THINK LESS HARD  

Or, as William Cobbett put it

The taste of the times is, unhappily, to give to children something of book-learning, with a view of placing them to live, in some way or other, upon the labour of other people. Very seldom, comparatively speaking, has this succeeded, even during the wasteful public expenditure of the last thirty years; and, in the times that are approaching, it cannot, I thank God, succeed at all. When the project has failed, what disappointment, mortification and misery, to both parent and child! The latter is spoiled as a labourer: his book-learning has only made him conceited: into some course of desperation he falls; and the end is but too often not only wretched but ignominious.   William Cobbett  1833

Only ignominy requires more of an effort than they want to put into anything and exposure of their babble to people intelligent enough to understand its status as silliness.  That's something they don't risk doing in the little cul-de-sacs they choose to inhabit. 

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