The guys over at BoingBoing are pointing out Mark Dery’s article on H+ magazine which talks about how full of bunk all the 2012 doomsday people are.
I used to get riled up about this kind of thing too, about how stupid people are and how easy it is to get crazed, unthinking followers to pay you money to spoon feed them bunk. I used to get angry at the shysters and the idiots that followed them… but now I am done with that. It takes a lot of energy to try to point out truth to idiots… and they never appreciate it anyway.
I can almost feel the dark side calling me now. I’m starting to respect the shysters… they’ve got a game everyone can play… they’ve got a racket that works… they are better that the idiots they lead. I recon if I put the same amount of effort into creating bunk and getting followers to literally buy into it, I’d be much better off than wasting my time trying to debunk the bunk makers.
If I were to turn to the dark side, of course I’d need to set some ground rules for myself first. So here are my hypothetical rules for a hypothetical life of bunkmaking:
– Never knowingly endanger someone’s life with my bunk (bogus medical cures, etc.).
– Never leverage public funds (pass laws, get funding, etc.).
– Never directly pressure anyone into buying my bunk, always let their own fear and ignorance guide them to me.
– Never bunk kids, they aren’t smart enough to know better. Let someone else teach them the hard way.
– Never bunk so hard you break the law. You’re not a con man, just stick to soft bunking like the 2012 douchebags do.
I think that’s about it for ground rules… pretty simple I’d say. I was going to say don’t bunk the elderly, but then I realized they’ve been around long enough they should be able to spot bunk.
With all that out of the way, I have to follow up on this 2012 business. Of all the 2012 posts I’ve seen today, this is the best one:
Ha! Seriously. Nice. I’m getting to that point myself. If people don’t want to be exploited, why do they go out of their way to make it so hard _not_ to exploit them.
“It takes a lot of energy to try to point out truth to idiots… and they never appreciate it anyway.” Completely true statement. There are a group of people that seem to flutter between natural disasters and the like that latch on to the next doomsday hoax.
I say, remove the warnings and securities and let the problem solve itself. I would hate to be the person who ‘okay’d 2012, just think about the max-exodus that could result from idiots fully believing the world is about to end.