Thought for the Day: Every Group Has its Crazies

"The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments."
Friedrich Nietzsche QuotationsPage.com

Reading anti-Communist, anti-war, anti-whatever, screed has sometimes made me wonder if whoever wrote it was serious: or was a dedicated fifth columnist, set on defaming cause he or she apparently supported.

I've talked with a variety of intensely sincere opponents of communism, war, spy satellites (they cause wars, I was told), and other deadly threats to all right-thinking (or left-thinking, as the case may be) people. Sometimes, I just listened as they explained how nuclear winter, global warming, communists, or fluoride, would kill us all.

They were sincere. Possibly a bit nuts, but sincere.

Odds are that the wild writing on these and related topics, lightly rooted in the world we know, is quite sincere.

Wrong, but sincere. Someone might, very sincerely, believe that rocks fall south. It's 'obvious:' maps always¹ have north at the top. 'Logically,' he would tell you, rocks fall south. That chap's sincerity wouldn't make him right.

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¹ Obviously, this fellow lives in the Western world. And, doesn't khow that 'north is up' is not a universal convention on maps.