[FRIAM] The next Heterodox University faculty member

[Stephen Guerin]

Glen, your wingnut footnote put me in the mood to chase down the origin of
"batshit crazy". Here's one that makes sense:


https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=batshit%20crazy
A person who is batshit crazy is certifiably nuts. The phrase has origins
in the old fashioned term "bats in the belfry." Old churches had a
structure at the top called a belfry, which housed the bells. Bats are
extremely sensitive to sound and would never inhabit a belfry of an active
church where the bell was rung frequently. Occasionally, when a church was
abandoned and many years passed without the bell being rung, bats would
eventually come and inhabit the belfry. So, when somebody said that an
individual had "bats in the belfry" it meant that there was "nothing going
on upstairs" (as in that person's brain). To be BATSHIT CRAZY is to take
this even a step further. A person who is batshit crazy is so nuts that not
only is their belfry full of bats, but so many bats have been there for so
long that the belfry is coated in batshit. Hence, the craziest of crazy
people are BATSHIT CRAZY.





On Tue, Nov 24, 2020 at 10:19 AM uǝlƃ ↙↙↙ <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> http://www.quantumthom.com/LetterToFerrisCommunity.pdf
> https://fsutorch.com/2020/11/18/science-professor-denies-science/
> > The account’s other tweets in regard to COVID-19 say things such as:
> > “Guess what the covid stunt has failed. You won’t get your leftist new
> world order.”
> > “Covid19 is another jewish revolution.”
> > “F— this evil wizard,” in reference to a video of Dr. Anthony Fauci.
> > “Stand up for yourselves people, and stop falling for this corona virus
> hoax!”
> > “I’d say covid-19 is fake. An evil medical system just killed a bunch of
> old people.”
>
>
> From the Amazon page for his book:
> "Thomas Brennan is a professor of physics at Ferris State University in
> Big Rapids, Michigan, where he's taught physics and astronomy since 2014.
> He completed his PhD thesis on the topic of sonoluminescence in 2009 at the
> Illinois Institute of Technology. He also received a BA in Physics from the
> University of Chicago and an MS in Physics from UCLA. His research
> interests include both experimental and mathematical physics as well as
> astronomy."
>
> I continue to marvel at how someone seemingly intelligent can fly off the
> bolt [⛧] so easily. As one who regularly expresses my opinions about
> non-professional things, I consistently wonder how/when it will or has
> already come back to bite me, not to assert that I'm seemingly intelligent
> or anything. It also questions the coherence of the "public intellectual",
> best exhibited by people like Chomsky, or Pinker, or Tyson. We need them
> ... but they put themselves at great risk. So thanks to all those people
> who manage to speak outside their competence, but do so without flying off
> the bolt.
>
>
> [⛧] Yes, I'm aware that "wingnut" is often understood as a nut who sits on
> the wing of a political spectrum. But I prefer to think of it as someone
> who's easily "spun up", spun on, or spun off. This fits nicely with the old
> saying that there's a fine line between genius and crazy, it's only a
> difference in chirality. That batsh¡t old man who spends his lifetime in
> his basement working on his time machine exhibits the same dedication as
> the non-batsh¡t microbiologist who spends his lifetime in the cancer lab.
> They're both easily spun up, wingnuts on a different spectrum.
>
> --
> ↙↙↙ uǝlƃ
>
> - .... . -..-. . -. -.. -..-. .. ... -..-. .... . .-. .
> FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
> Zoom Fridays 9:30a-12p Mtn GMT-6  bit.ly/virtualfriam
> un/subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
> archives: http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/
> FRIAM-COMIC <http://friam.471366.n2.nabble.com/FRIAM-COMIC>
> http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20201124/16d7427d/attachment.html>