Silly Bird

As I write this, there is a silly bird that keeps attacking our window. I think it's because we have heat-reflective mirror film on the glass and he keeps seeing his reflection as another bird and attacking it. This has been going on on-and-off for a couple of months now. Is there a message there about how much time we waste attacking illusions?

I had an insight about what I was talking about yesterday. The Deniers, they are everywhere. You know the type, always saying something is crap, pseudoscience, against God, against nature, against the Constitution, you name it. They generally don't have any clue about what they are talking about, they are just "against." When you try and pin them down on precise facts, they squirm, evade, misdirect, and, if backed against the wall, simply deny any evidence in front of them.

If their objections are religious, they usually turn out to have a poor to laughably ignorant understanding of the theology they are purporting to defend. Westboro Baptist Church is a good example of taking the bible and twisting it into a pretzel to preach a message of hate, exactly the opposite of what Jesus explicitly said. In this paper: Finding Or Imagining Flawed Research? you can see an analysis of an example of scientists trying to distort and mislead in a effort to prove their preconceived notions

My insight is that these deniers are not important. They make a lot of noise, sound and fury, but in the end they signify nothing (with apologies to Shakespeare). I see them as people with no convictions at all that act as the enforcers for whatever ideology they happen to follow. By that I mean that they are so desperate to be part some "in crowd" that they adopt an idealistic, and often simplistic, version of what that crowd appears to stand for and wear it like a badge. They proudly tout their adopted ideology to let everyone know they are one of the "cool kids," and come down hard on anyone who doesn't toe the party line in order to prove their ideological purity. Enforcers. But these people are not important.

Why not? Well, they have no ideology of their own, so that can't be persuaded. They are simply the mouthpiece for some group's position. They can't think for themselves, for that might cause them to question. When the winds change, they must either change with it, adopting the latest fashion, or they get forgotten. Either way, the joke's on them, for those in the know, on both sides, know and treat them as the buffoons they are.

Battling them is a waste of time, they are merely a reflection. Like the surf on the seashore, they are neither sea nor land, but exist only as a function of the difference between the two. The smaller and less defined the difference, the more strongly they assert it. The last thing enforcers want is for the differences to disappear and put them out of a job. Let's not be a silly bird. Let's ignore the squawking loudmouths that only want to draw attention to themselves, and focus on solving the world's problems and eliminating imaginary differences.