the epic skeptical beat poem is let loose
If you read this blog as well as its siblings in the blogosphere, you know about Tim Minchin’s outstanding viral beat poem Storm, featured by many skeptics, myself included, for it’s down to earth scenario. So when it was announced that Strom was slated to become an animated short and the trailer appeared online, I have been impatiently waiting to see the results. And now, the wait is finally over and we can enjoy this cartoon in entirety, thanks to the hard work of the team that spent nearly a year bringing it to life and the power of YouTube…
Again, the reason why I love this poem so much is how realistic its setup really is and how it speaks to many skeptics’ desires to just let loose at some obnoxious proselytizer of woo in polite company, especially about that infuriating part in which they condescendingly dismiss what we actually know for a fact about the universe as mere, close-minded, insignificant opinion. We know how to eradicate diseases, calculate problems with a set of tools able to execute billions of instructions per second or run our entire cities, fly above the clouds and soar into space, and observe the dawn of the cosmos with precisely calibrated mirrors on Earth and out there in orbit, floating hundreds of miles above our heads. And what do so many disciples of woo love to blather on about most of all? How they’ve figured out some key to magic health and supernatural powers of the soul with some bastardization of quantum physics! How unbelievably, spirit-crushingly boring and self-absorbed.
Listen to the most popular woo out there. It’s all about me, me, me. What’s in it for me, how can I make myself happy, how can I have a pure body, how can I live forever, and how can I supernaturally make all the simple or inconsequential crap I want appear on my doorstep? Who do I pay to answer all these questions for me and get what I want while expending the bare minimum of effort? How about you work for it, my woo-addicted, self- indulgent friends? Humans who relied on knowledge, science, and cold, hard facts have built our world into a pretty damn good place, and helped some of us set foot on another world. Maybe you can put away the piles of vacuous, ignorant exercises in inanity from post-modernist hipsters who pretend to be deep thinkers while coughing up pseudoscientific garbage and semantic gibberish, and join the rest of us in building a better and more advanced Earth with your hands and brains rather than your promises to think really hard about it with a lucky charm in tow and some totally awesome meditation routine you read about at HuffPo?
