A Few Good Memes

Ironic that the company that you used to be able to buy an entire house from via a catalog can’t manage to get a dishwasher delivered and installed. I ordered a dishwasher at sears.com. 2 weeks, 8 phone calls and 2 emails later, all I could deduce was that Sears must be managed by a bunch of lobotomized squirrel monkeys. Luckilly, I was able to cancel the order. I called HH Gregg in Lafayette, Indiana and they bent over backwards to help me, including waiving the policy of not allowing appliance orders over the phone. Not only were they extremely pleasant, they pointed out that the upgraded dishwasher actually saved me money due to a special on free delivery and installation. From now on, I go to HH Gregg first.

I’ve been trying to crystallize this idea for years now and it appears that Esquire has done so with great aplomb:

The rise of Idiot America is essentially a war on expertise. It’s not so much antimodernism or the distrust of intellectual elites that Richard Hofstadter deftly teased out of the national DNA forty years ago. Both of those things are part of it. However, the rise of Idiot America today represents—for profit mainly, but also, and more cynically, for political advantage and in the pursuit of power—the breakdown of a consensus that the pursuit of knowledge is a good. It also represents the ascendancy of the notion that the people whom we should trust the least are the people who best know what they’re talking about. In the new media age, everybody is a historian, or a preacher, or a scientist, or a sage. And if everyone is an expert, then nobody is, and the worst thing you can be in a society where everybody is an expert is, well, an actual expert.

It’s all the dumb kids in school who want to get back at the smart ones for actually being able to understand biology, calculus, and physics.

Thankfully, the bible has nothing to say about the theory of relativity, number theory, or electromagnetic theory. Though they are apparently working on gravity