Hell in A Handbasket

[Hax]

I also am going to have a smoke.

In my generation (4-5 years older than you kids) I've noticed a lot of overestimation. For example, many Dutch people exaggerate how well they speak foreign languages. Last year I was in Berlin with a couple of friends and we encountered a plaque or whatever and some of us wondered what it said. One of us said he'd translate it and boasted about it. I knew/know just enough German to read it most of the time and know the most common pitfalls for Dutch speakers. What he was telling us was almost the exact opposite of what the plaque actually said. Since the guy in question is a wiseass in general I remind him of this episode every now and then.

That's actually pretty hilarious, and to be fair, it sound familiar enough. It reminds me of something else though, albeit in a different fashion: last monday, I went to the local "arthouse" movie theatre in Leiden, where they were showing the movie "Habibi", which is about the myth of Layla and Majnun set in modern-day Gaza. The movie itself was pretty okay as it showed how different Palestinians in Gaza dealt with trauma, stress, and alienation. Afterwards, there was an opportunity to ask questions to one of the people involved in the film, as well as to my professor of Persian studies (who had introduced the story). One of the first persons to raise their hand started going off on a tantrum, roughly saying that: "Palestinians are a brainless mob that don't allow for love or independent thinking". I was with six other students of Arabic and we were kind of flabbergasted, not so much at the fact that these people exist, but the fact that this particular man expressed his opinion like that. He didn't even allow for the guests to finish their sentences. It demonstrated a lack of basic decency and respect.

I think that we have to distinguish between 'all humans are equal' and 'all humans are to be treated equally'. Although the difference may seem insignificant, I think it's actually quite big. We appear to have reached a point where we try to treat a self-styled witch doctor and a fully-trained professional doctor equally. This is insane. I'm not saying literate people are better than illiterate people, and that academicians are more useful (or better) than a construction worker. I'm saying that people should be more cautious in screaming their opinions without carefully considering the full impact and implications of what they're actually saying.

I don't know anything about maths. I don't know anything about physics, native American religions or languages, or Bach. I know that I don't know anything about them, and that's fine. Heck, when you literally don't know anything about a subject, it's fine. I think it starts to get messy when people know a little about something, and assume that they know everything about anything.

So it's not so much a lack of knowledge that I find troubling; lack of wisdom and properly contextualising knowledge is far more dangerous.

Yes, I hate people as well, because I am much more mature than the masses. It shall be a pleasure engaging in this elitist thread, with you fine gentlemen and intellectuals.

This is probably the most elitist post in the thread so far.