Lunatic of the Day, or, Why I don't miss Usenet

[muckefuck]

Since I finally gave up on Usenet newsgroups some years ago, I've tried a variety of substitutes. That Mailing List, for one, followed by LiveJournal, and now the ZBB. The last of these is a bulletin board that zompist maintains in order to facilitate discussions of his website and issues related to it, chiefly constructed languages. I came for the linguistics and ended up contributing at least as much to the religious and political discussions. Like LJ, the population is scandalously young, but, in general, the tenor is more educated and polite than elsewhere. It kind of reminds me of sci.lang in the old days (only without the graybearded international experts).

So it's kind of surprising that, over the past two days, I've gotten caught up in a discussion that would not be the least bit out of place on Usenet. A question about the translators used by Christopher Columbus spawned a suggestion that his visit to St. Brendan's monastery had furnished him with valuable linguistic data gathered during the famous monk's crossing of the Atlantic almost a millennium earlier. Then someone had to go and bring up the Templars. The secret of their wealth? (Stop me, princeofcairo, if you've heard this one before.) Why, translatlantic shipments of Yucatan silver to La Rochelle, of course. It was Columbus' possession of an Templar nautical chart that...

But I hardly need to go on, do I? Needless to say, there is not a scrap of archaeological, historical, anthropological, linguistic, or epidemiological evidence to support any of it. I can't even find any record of silver deposits in Mexico east of San Luis Potosi. (Yes, I confess, I spent minutes of my life I will not get back looking.) The reaction we got when we pointed all this out was deadeningly familiar, down to the highly-defensive accusations of "flaming" and the litany of past examples of great discoveries made by similar speculative thinkers (at least Schliemann's a refreshing break from Einstein).

What I find most distressing about such cases--and always have--is the astounding ignorance of what constitutes basic standards of proof. I remember the words of an old sci.langer who said that the two misconceptions responsible for most of the nonsense on Usenet were (1) "If I read it somewhere once, it's true" and (2) "My opinion on anything is as good as anyone else's". The idea that it's not enough just to make claims, that you might actually be expected to back them up with something that would past muster in an 8th-grade debate competition, seems foreign to a disturbing number of people.

If I wanted to, I could throw in some of my father's observations on the astounding ignorance of science he encountred while practicing law and continue on to some self-satisfied tut-tutting about the implications for national elections and so forth. But I have no desire right now for ever more despressing (and vague) generalisations. I'd rather go the other way and figure out just what it is I can do to avoid situations where I'm dissecting for my boyfriend's edification the utterances of some raving loon who I wouldn't stand and listen to for two seconds on the street.

Comments

[lhn.livejournal.com]

On the other hand, Usenet newsreader software generally has a killfile that lets you make people like that more or less disappear from your view. (If people insist on responding to them, it's often possible to kill anything that referencees one of their posts.) Would that there were something similar on web-based fora. (Or, for that matter, real life-- the L, in particular, could use a killfile function, so that I wouldn't have to see or hear people who don't get that the public nature of public transportation should limit speech volume or behavior in some way.)

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

The problem I have with killfiles is that it's really not that frequent that everything a certain person says is ridiculous nonsense. The Templar fanatic, for instance, is perfectly trustworthy when he sticks to talking about his area of expertise, the Catalan language. If there were only some way for the killfile to recognise those moments when the poster has lost touch with reality and just engage then.

[fengshui.livejournal.com]

Surprisingly enough, the spam quotient on usenet has gone way down in the last few years. With more and more people using the net, the penetration of usenet spam just isn't enough to make it worth it anymore. Of course, there's still plenty of off-topic threads and the like, but the spam isn't the problem that it was in the late 90s.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I didn't leave Usenet because of spam. My problems were entirely with what theoretically consistuted signal.

[princeofcairo.livejournal.com]

As far as I can tell without wasting my own time on it, the "Templar treasure was Mexican silver" theory was originally French. It hasn't really made it into mainstream English-language Crazy Templar Studies yet, which I find quite frankly disappointing, because it's such a great crazy theory.

The Anglophone crazies are still rearranging Michael Bradley's (and Frederik Pohl's) research and pointing with alarm to the Sinclairs and Rosslyn Chapel.

I don't suppose your interlocutor gave a source for his crazy theory, but I'd be curious if it's an English-language one over a page or so.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Unnamed mediaevalist friends. He's a native Catalan. I suspect that the current wave of reappraisal of Catharism in Catalonia has its source in France, so I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that French Templar theories have crossed the Pyrenees as well. If I end up doing some websearches on "Templaris", I'll be sure to let you know what I find.

[danbearnyc.livejournal.com]

Galwegians maintain that Columbus visited their city, not to learn Brendan's linguistic secrets, but rather seeking navigational information. There is anyway a long history of wine trade between the city and Spain, though all that nonsense about the Armada and the Black Irish is nothing more than, well, nonsense.

And what does all this have to do with Simon Templar?

[bunj.livejournal.com]

And what does all this have to do with Simon Templar?

He's refering to the episode where Simon comes to a small Spanish town. The local police chief is certain that he's there to steal the exhibit of Columbus' silver from a local museum. In actuality, he's there to stop the real thieves. And there's a girl involved. And he beats up some nameless thugs. Then there's a closeup of Moore looking dashing and raising his eyebrow.

[danbearnyc.livejournal.com]

There is always a closeup of Moore looking dashing and raising his eyebrow - he was the producer. He has the whole self-as-brand identity thing down in a way that makes Martha Stewart look like a piker.