With my chief expert on the lam and
only commenting on the things he's most interested in, I've had to go
over his head and contact Ovaltine Goose-Shredder's sociologist
colleagues myself for news on the Firestone migration. According to
eyewitness scientists, the leading edge of the massive human
migration is currently 400 km north of Mexico City in the province of
San Luis Potosi. The mass crossed the Mexican/American border over
the last week of April and had shockingly few hiccups going through
the process of 2 million bag checks and questionings. The scientists
did observe one couple from Maine who were dismayed to find they had
forgotten their passports and had to turn back. They'll probably snap
out of their passive-aggressive monotone conversation around
Tennessee.
The bottle-neck created by the border
crossing has broken the migration into towns, each consisting of a
couple thousand people. Breaking up the migration into smaller chunks
of humanity is putting less strain on local amenities like
restaurants and truck stops, and is generally making the travel more
enjoyable for those involved. Further divisions beyond the towns are
noted, as there are neighbourhoods of people sharing resources and
utensils, but the neighbourhood divisions are harder to pinpoint and
tend to shift from hour to hour. When you start tracing the
associations through individuals, it's hard to say where one
neighbourhood starts and another ends, as all borders drawn are
borders crossed.
Along the roadsides, makeshift vendors
and soup kitchens are set up by folks in front of the Firestone
migration who want to help the acolytes but don't want to fight a
broccoli-headed bio-weapon themselves. The soup kitchens will set up
and begin doling out food to as many people as they can until they
run out, often causing the family providing to go hungry for a few
days. It's the kind of goodwill among humans only a common enemy can
bring about. The sociologists think this is why there are so few
issues throughout the Firestone migration. Pack together 2 million
people in a stressful situation without a common goal and things will
get dicey in a hurry. But if at the end of their journey they will
have to rely on the stranger beside them in potential life or death
combat, they'll make sure they don't offend them on the way to the
battlefield.
And now on to the things Ovaltine
Goose-Shredder is most interested in, namely people calling his
colleague Neil deGrasse Tyson a philistine. The backlash against
Tyson is because he said people should avoid pondering “deep”
questions with no answers on the Nerdist podcast, and a bunch of
philosophers stopped pondering questions with no answers long enough
to get riled up about it. The following is Ovaltine Goose-Shredder's
e-mail. I've changed a few pronouns so he addresses the wider public,
instead of just me.
Neil deGrasse Tyson is taking entirely
too much shit from philosophers. It's shitty to watch someone with
such stellar answers taking flak for the questions he didn't ask. He
still ended up a scientist and a humanist. Leave Neil alone. He's
doing fine. He just told other people how they could do fine like
him. See? Everything's fine.
No matter what,
curiosity is the evolutionary feature that keeps all species
exploring and chasing ideas. To say that a person could not ponder
deep questions without answers is impossible, we can't avoid it.
We're relentless ponderers. Why a scientist and a philosopher can't
see that this is a useless argument, that curiosity will go on
spinning us out beyond the fringes of our answers regardless of
anyone's opinion of it's merits, is kind of perplexing. You're both
equally valid. Just chill and operate as you will. Neil can do fine
not philosophizing, and other people can do whatever the fuck with
their philosophizings.
As
Massimo Pigliucci noted, this isn't the first time Neil has talked
some smack about the Philosophy of Science. What Neil mentioned previously, and what is probably his main reason for derisively
mentioning the philosophy of science, is that the field has not made
a measurable contribution to physics since the 1920's, and
no one has a rebuttal for that.
If you're interested in results, Neil kind of has a point. If you
want everyone off your back while you think the thoughts you want to
think, I'll shut up now.
With
love,
OGS
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