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From: Colin Bennett Date: 09/23/05 16:07:56 Subject: Re: Rita
In my opinion (and one only says this kind of thing perhaps once in a lifetime) a massive psychic attack is being launched on America, and there are no prizes for guessing where it is coming from. It may not look like it, but we in the West are at war and we must secure our communications, build our defences and watch our backs. If we don’t do these things, within five years or less, we will all be wearing night shirts and head towels and be chanting “OM” a thousand times a day, or whatever programmatic crappola the Islamo-fascists chant to. It goes almost without saying that if that happened, the kind of anarchic freedoms expressed on lists such as these will disappear off the face of the Earth. Colin Bennett Author, London
From: michael ibison Date: 09/23/05 18:44:56 Subject: RE: Rita
Dear Colin
Please keep paranoid racist psychobabble off this scientific discussion list
Michael Ibison
to which Colin Bennett replied:
Ibison, I beg your pardon? You don’t run or own this list. You're just a one-off nobody from a provincial university. Who the hell do you think you are, sir? By the way, did you say science? Have you taken a look at your beloved science recently? It had reduced the planet to ashes – poisoned land sea and air, billions of animals tortured to death in the name of “factual truth.” Would you mind keeping this lower middle class rationalist chatter off this ists? Facts are for grocers like you sir, slit-mouthed KGB apparatchiks who cannot (because science is not an education) enter into complex liberal debate, if only because looping through Shakespeare via TS Eliot and Coleridge is not possible for the conformist corporate managerial class you and your colleagues represent. Socially applied science has been a planetary disaster. In any case, as Shakespeare tells us sir, the world doesn’t work that way. The world works by image symbol, metaphor, and cultural performances striving for prime time It is corporate lackeys like you have divorced Mind from Nature. Trying to find out “how the universe works” sand grain by sand grain is a tragi-comic laugh worthy of Rabelais. All you do without spirit and symbol is build a house of cards, and Einstein himself would have agreed with that. Given Isaac Newton intense “psychobabble” with alchemy, he would probably have agreed also. Away with your weighing and your measuring, your angles and times, take them back to the grocer’s shop where you (judging by your schoolmaster's tone) and they came from. If you want more stick sir, there’s plenty more where that came from. Sorry– I went to a much older university.. Colin Bennett M.A. (Oxon) Author London
to which Michael Ibison replied:
Dear Colin
Your erudition, class, and scholastic heritage put me to shame. The best thing for me to do is quietly disappear.
Please remove me from your mailing list.
Most Sincerely,
Michael Ibison
to which Colin Bennett replied:
Dear Michael, I don't want you to disappear. I think you have a lot to offer, your ideas are very interesting. It was just the rather pompous nature of your initial remarks that caused my reaction. Others on this list have paid a similar price for a similar foolhardy venture. You scientists may think you are absolutely bloody marvellous, but you represent a culture that has to take its due place in the cultural chow-line. The scientific view of the world is but one menu. Science, as a rather callow new kid on the block, historically speaking, has to run alongside the world view of Shakespeare and Sophocles, if you do not mind. People such as yourself tend to wear the rather Maoist badge of "science" stuck like a pouting anus on your bourgeois lapels. Speaking as a five-book prize-winning biographer sir, I can tell you now that the Victorian Station Masters on this list have a very hard time. As mechanical "solutionists" every time I hear the word "scientific breakthrough" or "technological advance" from you, I grow another hemorrhoid and wish the commercial breaks of your profession were of a lot better quality.
It is far too tedious for me to remove your name from the many different lists here. The best thing for you to do is put my email address in your reject spam folder. This will give you great satisfaction, and you will not see such palsied thoughts as these again, unless quoted by others. You will then be able to join in the Rubik Cube game without any interruptions from doubting pirates such as myself. I remain sir, yours truly in Triumph and Tragedy in the Year of the Green Chicken. Colin Bennett, Author, London 2005 PS for Rick Doty: You don't get entertainment like this on other lists, so stay tuned!
From: Amara D. Angelica Date: 09/23/05 19:26:23 To: 'Colin Bennett' Subject: RE: Rita
Michael Savage!
to which Michael Ibison replied:
Dear Colin
I don't like racism, however well-connected or allegedly well-educated the source.
You letter is full of suppositions about me. I am no standard bearer or representative for science. I have never, nor do I intend to, spoken of "scientific breakthrough" or "technological advance". I dislike the scientific self-importance implied by these phrases.
The scientific profession, just like many other professions - literature for example - it is populated by egos keen to make their mark. A redeeming feature for me is that in science, supposedly at least, comfortable opinions and imagined worlds must take a back seat to the facts of nature. Occasionally then, we get a rest from the personal and can contemplate the impersonal.
In any case, there is too much traffic for me to deal with these exchanges, so this is a good time to retire from this list.
- Michael
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