At its best, The Onion is truly the funhouse mirror in whose twisted reflections we see into the darkest recesses of the human soul. A couple of examples...
FAYETTEVILLE, AR—Craig Schaffner, 46, a Fayetteville-area computer consultant, has earned the pity of friends and acquaintances for his tragic reluctance to embrace the unverifiable, sources reported Monday....
Coworker Donald Cobb, who spends roughly 20 percent of his annual income on telephone psychics and tarot-card readings, similarly extended his compassion for Schaffner.
"Craig is a really great guy," Cobb said. "It's just too bad he's chosen to cut himself off from the world of the paranormal, restricting himself to the limited universe of what can be seen and heard and verified through empirical evidence."
The most ironical thing about the paranormal--and I include religion under this penumbra, naturally--is its complete lack of self-awareness. It's the attitude so many people take, that rational skepticism somehow "cuts people off" from a whole big beautiful universe of human experience or that skeptics are "missing out" on something. These people very often seem to know very little about science, deductive logic, or empirical methods, which is hardly surprising as in our civilisation these are mostly the preserves of specialists and nerds. (Not being scientists doesn't make them terrible people!) What is surprising, though, is that so few paranormalists ever think of applying the old pot-kettle dictum to their loopy convictions.
What bothers me most about paranormalist thinking is that very often the proponents of such seem to assume that discovery is easy. That hearsay, wild supposition, wish-fulfillment, and unquestioned, uninvestigated, gut feelings can provide one with some kind of data about the world. In Norse mythology, Odin, father of the gods, had to sacrifice his eye for wisdom. Robert Heinlein similarly gave us the concept of TAANSTAFL: "There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch". Probing the hidden crevices of the world is hard. If you want to understand anything, you have to work for it. What bothers me about paranormalists (among other things) is that so many of them seem to have no respect whatsoever for the care, attention, toil, sweat, blood, and tears that scientists have spent over hundreds and thousands of years to give us the picture of the world we have now. It's glib and intellectually lazy to assume the scientific elite must have got things wrong or been blinded to the truth unless you're willing to put your money where your mouth is and sweat the blood it'd take to check.
I think it's another symptom of the general intellectual laziness of America these days, where, confronted with two sides to an argument, most people will just automatically assume that the truth must lie somewhere in the middle without ever bothering to, you know, check. That's how we ended up in Iraq, and that's basically how Republicans have gotten away with dicking our nation over for so long. It's not always the case that one side of an argument is 100% right and the other is 100% wrong, sure...but it happens now and then. You have to suck it up and check.
Study: Many Americans Too Fat To Commit Suicide:
"We've known for some time that obesity can cause heart disease, diabetes, strokes, and other potentially life-threatening illnesses," said report author Dr. Marjorie Reese, director of UCLA's Obesity Pathology Clinic. "But the fact that obesity impedes suicide is truly troubling. It appears that the more reason people have to die, the less capable they are of doing so. They are literally trapped in their grotesque, blubbery bodies."
Fat jokes will always be funny. On that, at least, we can all agree, rationalists and paranormalists alike.