Tuesday, September 16, 2008

Fuller crap...

I'd read Steven Fuller's The Intellectual a couple of months ago (almost entirely while sitting in KL traffic jams, I might add) and was left with a bad taste in my mouth. After wading through a veritable quagmire of erudite gobbledegook, mostly directed towards glorifying the intellectual based on his own narrow definition of the word, I closed the book, and the lasting impression was as follows:

What a lot of sanctimonious, pseudo-philosophical masturbation!

I dug around a bit for more information on him, finding on his Wiki entry that he defines himself as a 'social epistemologist', which, in empiricist circles, I understand translates best into common parlance as 'poser'. I bunged the wretched book into the arse end of the shelf o' books I'd never read twice, though admittedly I felt kinda bad about putting that waste of paper next to Tolkien*.

So it was that this evening I found out on Panda's Thumb that the irksome goit had been debating for the cause of IDiots, going so far as to fill a book with irrelevant nonsense entertaining his infantile theistic fantasies. Happily enough, A C Grayling rose to the challenge of tearing down this silliness with a brutal book review, which Fuller duly responded to in the manner typical of theistic debaters everywhere: straw men, sidestepping and misdirection with a further deluge of irrelevant rubbish. Oh, and ad hominem attacks. Grayling replied with a vicious volley, his words dripping with the condescension infidels worldwide save for either theists or extremely stupid and wilful small children.

At first sight, I'm inclined to disapprove of adopting such a tone in matters of intellectual debate - why should good infidels sink to the level of arrogant, delusional theists? Then I realised after a while that, given the content of theistic silliness, it's actually impossible to tear down articles of faith without sounding condescending, which is something of a Catch 22 as this makes the more open-minded theist that much more repelled by the infidel's arguments. Quite vexing!

But long story short, I'm just bitchin' here. I'm grouchy that I've wasted precious hours of my life reading The Intellectual. I'm annoyed that Fuller continues to waste everyone's time with his epistemological wank. A word of caution to the wise: Don't waste your time with Steve Fuller.

* Tolkien's got skills and everything but really, I can't be arsed to wade through his descriptions of scenery twice in this life, however poetic.

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