Thirty five minutes of rambling stoner gibberish
Did you follow the Al Gore link I put in yesterday’s post? No. Of course you didn’t. See, this is why we can’t have nice things.
Well, I just listened to the full 34 minutes and 57 seconds of Al’s address to Oxford, and I’m half dead of bullshit poisonining. I tried writing some of it down, but it doesn’t sound half as crazy in print as it does in Al’s inimitable lisping, halting, rambling stream-of-consciousness, bizarre emphasis on the wrong syllABLEs, crazy-ass numbtarded fucknut delivery. What a maroon.
I think I can translate: if we can scare people enough, we have a fantastic opportunity to take shit away from rich bastards and give it to poor people. (Don’t believe me? Listen to the damn thing yourself). Uncle B and I differ on whether he’s dumber than he is dishonest, or crookeder than he is dumb. I’m on the “dumb” side of the argument.
I know stoner bullshit when I step in it: this is the voice of a dumb guy who hangs around science nerds long enough to pick up a few phrases to impress his fellow dumb guys. Here, have some:
We have to connect the soils with the trees and the vegetation and the energy sources the built environment and the human system including population. Population is a success story. It’s a success story in slow motion. But we are bending the curve and the old models of what people once thought worked to stabilize population have thankfully been discarded in favor of a model that works. It’s a common system that shifts from one equilibrium to another.
Aw, see…that’s a lot funnier when Al says it. Though, come to think of it, some of this gobbledygook is probably because he’s talking to people who already know what he’s talking about, and he doesn’t want anything leaking to the straights.
No. Dumb. I’m still going with dumb.
The part of our consciousness that feels and expresses and acts upon urgency is tied to the recognition of those ancient threats and when one of those appears then that part of our consciousness that is aroused and alerted can instantly activate the reasoning process and we can respond instantly and then we can respond in a more deliberative way. But when the threat itself can only be perceived with the instrument of reason, pushing that recognition into that part of our awareness that activates urgency is an entirely different proposition.
Had enough? Ready to confess?
The connecting lines between the amygdala and the neocortex are asymmetrical. The flow of information from the urgency center to the reasoning center is quite robust, but the flow in the opposite direction is just a little footpath. And that really is at the heart of the problem. But it is for us as a civilization the aggregate bandwidth that really matters, because when enough people make that connection and when that connection with all its import is held in common, then consciousness can focus on the danger we face and the solutions that are available to us.
I think what he’s saying is, if you scare somebody you can get him to reason, but if you reason with somebody, you can’t scare him.
Only a man who never had a mortgage could believe that shit.
July 8, 2009 — 7:37 pm
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