Sunday 19 February 2017

Writtinge lik its 1609

     I'm done editing our version of Shakespeare's Sonnets (I still have to work on A Lover's Complaint -shshhhhhhhh!), and it was astronomically interesting.

     After making a discovery about denialists in the introduction I wrote, I may have solved a puzzle that was generated by a massive misprint. I shan't pretend that I am right, but I will declare that my conclusion makes a lot more sense than anything that was corrected before.

     A thing that I realized, as I was fighting with the original texts in the Quarto, is that most of the spelling mistakes that are made today look like the way things were printed in 1609! "It was better then I thought" and other oddities like that.
It's fascinating to see that the rules that took so long to be created have almost disappeared since people started texting and using the Internet!
Perhaps the spirit of George Eld (the printer of the Quarto) floated inside the heads of too many people...
Modern typos are still weird, but the parallel with 1609 is properly nutty.

I just thought I'd share...

Wednesday 1 February 2017

Varieties of Denialism

Bipeds that cannot accept facts because they don't fit their agenda, beliefs, or whatever have a way to make my blood boil.
With the film Denial coming to our screens, the number of Holocaust denialists has become more visible with these decerebrated bipeds flooding forums and comments threads.
Just this morning, I've seen a bunch of village idiots doubt that the Holocaust happened; one even found it fishy to not be allowed to doubt the evidence - and the testimonies of the survivors! There were also idiots adding the Holodomor to their list of denials.
As a historian, I understand that we can doubt that the battle of Agincourt happened exactly the way it is reported in archives - but we can dig up testimonies and get a fair idea of what happened. All one needs is hard work - and a working brain.
What I cannot understand is the collection of village idiots, from all over the rock, who can read all the documents we have in archives, and who can meet survivors or read their testimonies (be it about the Holodomor, the Holocaust, or even the sex slaves for the Imperial Japanese army), and who say, 'Nope! I don't believe it! It just can't be true!'.
They make me want to yell and make them sit down and educate themselves until their two and a half brain cells have a spark of illumination.

My introduction for the publication of Shakespeare's Sonnets for Éditions Aikyō is dealing with all the varieties of denialists about Shakespeare.
I ended up dividing contemporary denialists into two categories: prime and secondary.
Secondary denialists are the collections of village idiots who might well doubt that our planet orbits around the sun if it became fashionable in their circles to think so, or who do not have enough brain cells to understand facts and the truth. They're infuriating, but I fear most of them are just too stupid.
Much worse and twisted are the prime denialists. These are bipeds who, I think, do understand the archives and the testimonies, but who have decided to not believe them. These bipeds have decided to spread lies (not "post-truth", not "alternative facts" - let's call a spade a spade: they're LIES); maybe they're doing that to enjoy the chaos and pain their words will generate, and/or maybe they have some hidden agenda to promote - be it hatred for one subdivision of humanity, or be it to promote their own work.
If we take into account the scary number of secondary denialists, the prime denialists have a lot of quarterwits (I do fear we're talking about creatures way below the average halfwit) who are ready and willing to pay to buy their books or watch their films or documentaries.
We have ignoramuses and simpletons falling into the cunning traps of manipulators and profiters who would say and do anything to make money and become famous.
Both categories annoy me, but I have some compassion for secondary denialists... Prime denialists, not so much, as I see them as liars and dubious, devious, and unethical creatures who would deny that their own mothers gave birth to them if they could gain anything from spitting that lie.

I do believe that "Knowledge is power", and I will always fight against prime denialists who try to pervert what decent people know to be truths.