Last Week's Lost Weekend Posts (I)
Philosophy Cornered

Sorry to go all meta on you - well no, not really - but I've been putting a bit of thought into the question why do so many bloggers and blog commenters write so much crap? This led to some reflections on the nature of human reason which, while nowhere near as detailed as Hume's Essay Concerning Human Understanding, nonetheless yielded some valuable insights that are worth sharing with you lot. That about does it for the dilatory opening remarks - you can consider yourselves bloody lucky to have got any at all - let's hop into the argument.

I. Gummo Trotsky is perfectly rational in all respects.

I see no need to defend this proposition - it strikes me as intuitively obvious. I know that there are a lot of you out there for whom it's not intuitively obvious, but this post isn't addressed to you. It's addressed to the few readers I have who are sufficiently rational to recognise the obvious truth of the proposition. The rest of you may as well piss off and read something more suited to your intellectual capacities - like Winnie the Pooh.

II. All disagreements between Gummo Trotsky and others are caused by their failure to be as perfectly rational as Gummo Trotsky.
Corollary: you lot are only rational to the extent that your opinions and beliefs agree with Gummo Trotsky's opinions and beliefs. With one exception. Obviously anyone who is not Gummo Trotsky but who holds beliefs identical to those of Gummo Trotsky believes themselves to be Gummo Trotsky and is therefore delusional - and, eo ipse dixit dominus domino theorem, not rational. Got that? R D0 I HV 2 SA IT A77 AGN N TXT?

III. Perfect rationality is only attainable by someone who is identical to Gummo Trotsky in all respects.

I know that's going to be hard for a lot of you to take but really, I have thought very hard on this. Once I realised that I was perfectly rational, I naturally turned to the question why me? How did I get stuck with this appalling burden? The simple answer is that it's partly an accident of birth, partly the result of my upbringing, education and experience. And the bad news just keeps on coming.

IV. Only Gummo Trotsky is identical to Gummo Trotsky.

That's an empirical fact, but it's also demonstrable a priori. Even if I did have a monozygoticly* twin brother (which I don't) his upbringing and education could not be identical to mine in all respects. Neither could his life experience; in fact whatever potential he might have would have been hopelessly warped by living in my shadow, always aspiring to be someone he couldn't be - me. On the whole, he's lucky he doesn't exist. It's probably better for the rest of the world too.

Conclusion: The only perfectly rational person in the world is Gummo Trotsky.

As far as I can see, that conclusion is incontestable. Quod erat demonstrandum and all that. If there's any smart arse out there thinking they can refute the argument by the simple expedient of substituting their own name for mine throughout, think again. If you really were the rationality hot-shot you think you are you would have come up with the whole thing for yourself, before I did. You didn't**.

* - Incidentally, if every human life begins at conception, every pair of monozygotic twins includes one entity which, by definition, isn't human. Bit of a puzzler that.

** - And don't forget, either, that I came up with this a week ago. So if you've just come up with a similar argument and posted it on your blog, you're still stuffed.