Originally posted by caitlinfae
Originally posted by eniac
Moreover, the failed, drink-soaked shyster who first dreams up these theories (not the OP-- I don't doubt his/her bona fides, though I believe them
profoundly misguided) laughs all the way to the bank. Which I find offensive.
You do know that Terrence McKenna is dead, don't you? What do you know about him that persuades you to label him with this description? Again....pass
on your sources and we can discuss.
I had no idea... how could I? Why would I know who he is?? Why would I waste energy on this stuff?? Why would anyone, is what I can't figure out.
What sources do you want?? An academic paper, perhaps, refuting a theory which selectively takes events of (Western) historical significance, then
searches a specific timespan for anything which remotely resembles it. You don't need a paper to refute that- common sense will suffice.
The theory affirms itself. If you want to find 'evidence' for correlation between wars, you won't find many periods of given time in human history
where there haven't been wars. Same with plague. Same with innovation. Same with all general 'events'.
And besides, what is an 'event'? Is the Space Age an event? The Nuclear Age? When was the defining moment for the latter-- perhaps the date that
Radium was isolated, or the date that some German chemist first crunched the numbers to figure out the potential for nuclear energy. Or maybe it was
the day that the first prototype exploded in Los Alamos, or the day that the Little Boy went down.
I'll tell you the defining moment that a proponent of this theory would cite: whichever coincided best with whatever remote event they wanted to
correlate it with. And we're spanning the thick end of a century there.
In any case, it's up to the proponents to win around the skeptics by citing successful predictions/correlations, not the other way around. Otherwise
we'd just swallow anything. Which some people around here seem to do anyway. Asking me for 'sources' to refute the theory is getting the whole
thing backasswards.
Sorry-- it's a Fail. Big time Fail.