The Maelstrom Of Infinite Pointlessness: A Short Course in Scottish Presbyterian Optimism, chapter 1

Tuesday 17 September 2013

A Short Course in Scottish Presbyterian Optimism, chapter 1

Thomas Carlyle "The World is a republic of mediocrities. And always was".

Historian, essayist & one-man-comedy-festival supreme, Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) genuinely regarded himself as a cheery, optimistic fellow. By our Scottish standards, anyway.

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We've all done it. Entered into interminable exchanges with the internet's seemingly inexhaustible supply of religious zealots, homophobes, misogynists, bigots, homeopathy-pushers, "scientific racists", libertarians, and multifarious others who persist in their wrongness in spite of any or all evidence which contradicts their deeply-cherished dogma or prejudice of choice.

Thus we find ourselves sucked deep into The Maelstrom of Infinite Pointlessness.

Resistance is futile. As is contesting the precise definition of what constitutes "resistance", complaining about the methods used to arrive at this definition, claiming a higher authority (invisible or otherwise) gives you the right to ignore the definition, denying the existence of the definition (or the involvement of humans in causing the definition), protesting that the State ensures (unfairly) that others are less bound by the definition than you are, or professing to have knowledge of the definition's associations with whichever global conspiracy theory is currently trending on Twitter.

Contributions to The Maelstrom are welcome, but may find themselves subject to arbitrary censorship without warning...