House of Eratosthenes

And you have much more control over how ideas are shaping up, when you destroy whatever information is not compatible with what you want, compared to discovering/exploring/creating more of whatever might be compatible…

They start to eliminate ideas, under the guise of entertaining them. They mock, they interrupt, they distract by way of loaded phrases like “let’s move on,” they engage in all sorts of logical fallacies, they “debunk” myths that aren’t really mythical. They ostracize, or threaten to ostracize. What all these things have in common is: They seek to shape the emerging consensus by eliminating information rather than by gathering it, which is a tip-off that this consensus is being shaped by way of ignorance, rather than by learning.

How do you make a pencil pointy? You don’t add on a point, you silly goose; the right way to do it of course, is to remove everything from the end of the pencil that is not a point.

And they do that with people, too. “He isn’t getting on board, he can’t be in our club.”

Time after time, the banishers find themselves banished — by themselves. Time after time, they find all these people they’ve been kicking out of the club, went & started another club.

In times past, it has made such a deep impression on me, as to affect my dreams.

A left-handed blacksmith was caught pounding on a new horseshoe with his left hand instead of with his right hand. He was banished from the kingdom.

A farmer’s wife was caught harvesting eggs from the chicken coop, grabbing them by the pointy end instead of by the big end. She was banished from the kingdom.

A boy was caught cleaning the horse stables with gloves on his hands. He was banished from the kingdom.
:
A one-legged man was banished for limping wrong. A farmer harvesting corn was banished for wearing his harvesting bag over his right shoulder instead of over his left one. Another farmer was caught milking his cow by pulling on the teats in the wrong order, and he was banished.

Food became more and more scarce.

In desperation, someone finally decided to go hunting; and so, for the first time in a century or more, the villagers stepped outside the high walls of the great kingdom.

What did they find?

Our recent blindness is a bit worse than that, I’m afraid. It has become popular to sharpen these ideas, by way of banishing people who do not support them — even while babbling away with some nonsense about being more tolerant, and diversity being the source of our progress.

The inhabitants of my micro-kingdom banished themselves. They blinded themselves to what was going on outside the high walls, and in so doing, made it their daily effort to preserve suffering, poverty, blight and death, and in the end they discovered they were doing this while prosperity was all around them. But at least they understood their own methods, if not the ultimate effect. At least they knew that their vision was confined to the village within the high walls, and whatever was outside those walls was something they didn’t know, and didn’t care to learn. And at least they admitted that “diversity” had nothing to do with what they were trying to do.

When they ostracized somebody, they meant it. They didn’t make that guy do the long-walk and lock him out of the gates, in the name of “tolerance.”

These opposite-people absolutely fascinate me. There is much suffering going on with them actually running things, and I’m still not sure why that’s necessary. But at least, that way, it’s easier for me to study them.

Wow!
Did you just finish today’s Sunday NY Times too?
Was it just “the usual suspects”, following the script, on Sunday tee vee “chat” shows?
Perhaps another academic “Latest expert study shows…” from a school that’s not doing so well in
recent “sequester related” research cuts?

I recently un-banished myself from the wealth of things-I-apparently-didn’t-know, by virtue of contentment with dial-up . I’ve been surfing just scads of “important” opinion places
that NOW are easy to “access” (with all the appropriate auto- tracking/mining credentials of course).

I had no idea….
- CaptDMO | 09/01/2013 @ 12:24

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Banishing ThemselvesSaturday, August 31st, 2013

Banishing Themselves
Saturday, August 31st, 2013