[FRIAM] The next Heterodox University faculty member

Tue Nov 24 12:56:54 EST 2020

Mmmmm!

I always assumed that it had to do with diseases (rabies?) associated with bats.  People who cleaned belfries got sick.  Kind of like, “mad as a hatter”.  What is wonderfiul about all of this is that how our attempts to understand metaphors that other people use leads to new meanings of the metaphor.  Surely “spin up” and “spin off” arise from totally different realms of discourse.  Shirley? And “spin” in the political sense arises from a totally different realm, entemology: i.e., to “spin a web of deceit.”  

Nick 

Nicholas Thompson

Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology

Clark University

 <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com> ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com

 <https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/> https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/

From: Friam <friam-bounces at redfish.com> On Behalf Of Stephen Guerin
Sent: Tuesday, November 24, 2020 11:42 AM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <friam at redfish.com>
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] The next Heterodox University faculty member

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 <mailto: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

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