shooing lemmings toward the sea

DANIEL.DAVIES at flemings.com DANIEL.DAVIES at flemings.com
Wed Oct 27 05:37:15 PDT 1999


Steve wrote:


>my periodic efforts at shooing the
>pomo lemmings toward the sea.

Doubtless aware that this was exactly what Disney's cameramen did while filming "The Wondrous World of the Lemming" or some such. Lemmings don't actually commit suicide, apparently, and only run off cliffs in unusual circumstances, when there are too many of them running in one direction to turn round.

So, if you're on a deadline and need some footage of lemmings doing what they're famous for, the only practical solution was to catch a load of lemmings, put them in sacks, and throw them off a cliff by the sackful, filming them as they hit the water from a boat below. What a bloody job, I ask you.

I had a point when I started writing this, but I suspect it was not compelling.


>witness those academics
>who came out of the woodwork to whisper their thanks
>to sokal and bricmont for *fashionable nonsense*--
>they sounded like '50s reds (or pre-stonewall gays)
>who'd been too frightened to venture out of the
>closet.

Were there any such? It always strikes me that for the last twenty years, people have been loudly decrying postmodernism, while simultaneously claiming that they are incredibly brave for having done so, because the "postmodern elite (fnord fnord)" have the power to censor all criticism, except theirs because they are so utterly fearless. I don't understand the issues at all, but when one side is guilty of such transparent intellectual dishonesty, I know where my sympathies lie.

Unless the phenomenon you're describing is the inadvisability of telling ungifted but politically powerful academic colleagues that they're talking bollocks, in which case I would think that the economics department would be a good place to start.

cheers 'n' beers

dd

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