Dec 04 2007
Urban Ignoranti
Jeffrey Quick points to what may be the best take-down of urban idiocy I have seen. You really should read the whole thing, but here’s an excerpt:
But the best… the best was her 12 year old son… See… he started yapping about rocks… special rocks… deep down under the ground… and there was all this heat down there… and after about 300 years of that heat under the ground… these special rocks became….
Bacon.
I shit you not. The kid thought bacon was a special kind of rock.
I’ve known more than my share of these people. One was a vegetarian. We were out eating pizza when we noticed she ordered pepperoni. “Are you no longer a vegetarian?” was the question. “Of course, I am,” came the response. Further probing revealed that she thought pepperoni was a plant, like a cattail. She doesn’t really count, though, because her response was, “I’m a city girl, what would I know?” So let’s take a better example, a man with a PhD who eats meat daily — but only if it’s boneless. Why? He doesn’t want to be reminded that his filet mignon used to chew his cud.
Seriously, how stupid is that.
Or how about the idiot who had been enthusiastically eating venison — until he found out what venison was. What cave did he spend his life in that he didn’t know what venison was? And what does he think God created Bambi for?
You have to wonder what rock these people grew up under. How do you get the idea that pepperoni is a plant, or that brown eggs are more “natural” than white eggs? And how would anybody get the idea that bacon is some kind of rock?
That these fools think themselves superior in every way to quaint, barefoot, rustic country folk has been a frequent source of amusement — and annoyance — to me over the years. You can always tell who was raised in the country (and who was not) by watching people on campus. The students walking across the grass are from the country; the students who walk twice as far as they need to because they only walk on the sidewalks are from the city.
I found out earlier today that raw milk is popular among the crunchy granola hippy-dippy-do set here. Why? Do they believe that pasteurization (or homogenization) makes milk “inorganic” in some way? The woman who told me this — very crunchy granola — had a bottle of raw milk in the refrigerator. Here’s the thing: She’d had it in there for days.
I thought all these naturalniks were into health. Not, mind, that I have anything against raw milk. I like raw milk. But I sure wouldn’t keep it around for days. I thought about mentioning this to her, but decided against it. When the stupid suffer from their own stupidity, it’s a Good Thing.
And that takes us to this left-wing faculty moron. You can get all the details at the link, but the basic summary is that this idiot thought he’d be cute and leave a comment which conformed with his smug, superior idea of those below the elite, and was arrested.
Owen — the blogger upon whom our Einstein inflicted his condescending idiocy — thinks it’s stupid that they police have arrested this moron:
I think it’s a gross overreaction for a comment left on a blog. Yes, the comment was idiotic and over the top, but it hardly constitutes a direct threat to anyone. It was explained to me that it was not believed that the commenter had any intent to harm anyone, but that the mere presence of a comment appearing to condone such violence had to be punished because it might encourage someone else to engage in violence against schools. I don’t buy that argument.
You know, if we were talking in the abstract, I’d agree. But laws like this come out of all this “safe space” horse manure liberals love to spread around, and it’s always good to see their pet laws bite them on the ass. Fulfilling, in fact. Like when the Huffingpo kids suddenly figured out that “campaign finance reform” might be applied to them — and after cheering for it, suddenly started wailing. Or that idiot I used to be on a mailing list with, one of these feminuts who pushed for a “comprehensive” sexual harassment policy that defined sexual harassment as anything that makes somebody uncomfortable. One of her students brought sexual harassment charges against her for some writing assignment she gave them on gay something. Sure, it’s a horrible policy, but hey, she wanted it, and she got what she deserved for it. And then she complained about it.
Breathtaking stupidity abounds.
10 responses so far
10 Responses to “Urban Ignoranti”
“Do they believe that pasteurization (or homogenization) makes milk “inorganic†in some way?”
Uh, yes, pretty close:
http://www.realmilk.com/
Re the “naturalness” of brown eggs, I think I know where that came from. Most of the dual-purpose chicken breeds, the ones you’d get to forage, lay eggs, and eventually be soup, lay brown eggs. There’s not a lot of meat on a white-egg-laying Leghorn, and I don’t believe that battery-house layers generally end up in the food chain (at least not as chicken you can recognize as such). Since, generally, brown egg birds get to forage, and white egg birds don’t, in the aggregate brown eggs might be a little more nutritious than white eggs. But that’s entirely a matter of culture; there’s nothing in brown (or in BLUE, if you have Araucanas) that’s intrinsically better than white. Fill a battery house with, say, Buff Orpingtons (which you wouldn’t do as they take more room and eat more per egg layed), feed them standard layer mash, and the resulting eggs will be nutritionally identical to white eggs.
But don’t tell that to a city slicker; he’d have to think about where his food comes from, and that might hurt.
We had a Hindu kid in my Scout troop when we were kids. He happened to be from a sect which was vegetarian, so when we went to the commissary at camp to pick up our food supplies, we asked for a vegetarian protein alternative for him. The idiot behind the dutch door tried to give me a stick of pepperoni.
I thought it was a unique example of ignorance and idiocy, but now I have to wonder if this is some sort of common misconception.
Epitomizes my ‘the conspiracy of ignorance masquerades as common sense.’
Either we are equal or we are not. Good people ought to be armed where they will, with wits and guns and the truth.
What I like to call cidiots (city + idiot).
Actually, the longer raw milk is kept, the more it naturally sours. And that creates even more beneficial bacteria.
Don’t taze the milk, bro.
I think in some cases it’s not just a lack of connection to the natural world; it’s a lack of connection to history. Vide the parents who won’t immunize their children because they believe vaccines contain “dangerous chemicals” (never mind that thimerosol, the main “baddie,” has been absent from most vaccines [the flu shot still has it] since 2000 or so).
I grew up among older aunts who raised their children in the pre-polio-vaccine days. I really think that parents who wish to forego vaccines for their child because they think it’s “dangerous” should be required to spend an hour talking to someone who raised kids in the era when polio was common, measles and mumps (which can have serious sequelae, including sterility and blindness) were a fact of life. Oh, and for good measure, tell the parents what childbirth and common childhood infections were like in the pre-antibiotic era.
It’s kind of like the people who are aghast at chlorinating water. They never think about cholera and what it did because it’s not part of their historical context.
That would be true if there were only beneficial bacteria in milk, but that is not always the case.
Seriously, how can anyone get the idea that bacon comes from rocks? That is way strange. Where’s the bacon mine?
[…] can only deduce that for the morons who stop at this place, raw milk is “organic” milk, or free range milk, or fair trade milk, or something other […]