![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sirandrewJust finished watching Nostradamus 2012 on the "History" channel.
Has human reason developed so little over the last 10,000 years that we still believe this drivel? Are we so little removed from our ancestors who cowered in mud huts and feared incubi coming in to suck out their breath and threw people who could read on fires? I am flabbergasted by the sheer absurdity of every bit of dreck that my television is spouting at me right now.
It's not only the absurdity that people think that a French doctor and some Mayans might be able to accurately predict the end of the world. My brain was bent absolutely backwards by the revisionism in Nostradamian interpretation. For example, what once was a prediction interpreted to be an asteroid strike in the nebulous future has now been revised to global warming. Predictions that were intrepreted to be about the great depression (and actually more aptly describe that event) are now apparently about the modern day. Best of all, a supposed "Lost Book of Nostradamus" apparently predicts the end of the world in 2012, this being the basis for the special. Never mind the fact that the book WAS NOT WRITTEN BY NOSTRADAMUS and was in fact a book written 300 years before he lived predicting the lives and trials of future Popes. The "History" channel special of course decides to omit this fact, as do all of the crackpots they gave television time on the program.
These people clearly have no concept or understanding of history either. One of the crackpots pointed to a "Crusade in Messopotamia" that apparently ends in disaster as having to be the Iraq War, because, in his words "There has never been a crusade that has targeted what is modern day Iraq." This was significant they say, and predict massive world catyclysm in 2012 because apparently this crusade would meet with defeat in the middle of time of colossal turmoil and worldwide warfare.
Oh ho! Has there not been a "crusade" into Messopotamia sir? I think you just MAY be mistaken. You see, there was this little conflct that occured between 1914-1918 that you might have heard of called World War I (though I prefer The Great War). In said conflict, the Ottoman Empire was wooed into the Central Powers by Germany. In an effort to inspire their muslim subjects to fight in this massively unpopular war, the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire declared a Jihad against the Allied Powers, making the war an official holy war. In a response to this, the British Empire cooked up an invasion of the Ottoman Empire from its vulnerable back door, via the Persian Gulf into Iraq. Now, to those that claim that this was a successful expedition, you aren't looking at the initial invasion in which a force of 31,000 British troops under General Charles Townshend was repulsed from Baghdad, surrounded at the city of Kut and annalhiated by the Turks in December 1915. A later, much larger invasion took Baghdad from the Ottomans in 1918. Seriously, didn't these doofuses ever see Lawrence of Arabia?
Of course, Nostradamus' prediction concerned neither of these events, because he was about as clairvoyant as my pet cat.
The most gargantuan horror is that there are people that are watching this and buying every little thing that's said. It's like when someone gets a chain mail telling them that they were forced to buy a $50,000 cookie recipe from Sears and they forward it in indignation to all their friends without even making the most insignificant attempt to find out if the mail was actually true.
Now they're talking about Edward Cayce, oh boy, it's going to be a long night. Amazing Randi, please live forever.
Has human reason developed so little over the last 10,000 years that we still believe this drivel? Are we so little removed from our ancestors who cowered in mud huts and feared incubi coming in to suck out their breath and threw people who could read on fires? I am flabbergasted by the sheer absurdity of every bit of dreck that my television is spouting at me right now.
It's not only the absurdity that people think that a French doctor and some Mayans might be able to accurately predict the end of the world. My brain was bent absolutely backwards by the revisionism in Nostradamian interpretation. For example, what once was a prediction interpreted to be an asteroid strike in the nebulous future has now been revised to global warming. Predictions that were intrepreted to be about the great depression (and actually more aptly describe that event) are now apparently about the modern day. Best of all, a supposed "Lost Book of Nostradamus" apparently predicts the end of the world in 2012, this being the basis for the special. Never mind the fact that the book WAS NOT WRITTEN BY NOSTRADAMUS and was in fact a book written 300 years before he lived predicting the lives and trials of future Popes. The "History" channel special of course decides to omit this fact, as do all of the crackpots they gave television time on the program.
These people clearly have no concept or understanding of history either. One of the crackpots pointed to a "Crusade in Messopotamia" that apparently ends in disaster as having to be the Iraq War, because, in his words "There has never been a crusade that has targeted what is modern day Iraq." This was significant they say, and predict massive world catyclysm in 2012 because apparently this crusade would meet with defeat in the middle of time of colossal turmoil and worldwide warfare.
Oh ho! Has there not been a "crusade" into Messopotamia sir? I think you just MAY be mistaken. You see, there was this little conflct that occured between 1914-1918 that you might have heard of called World War I (though I prefer The Great War). In said conflict, the Ottoman Empire was wooed into the Central Powers by Germany. In an effort to inspire their muslim subjects to fight in this massively unpopular war, the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire declared a Jihad against the Allied Powers, making the war an official holy war. In a response to this, the British Empire cooked up an invasion of the Ottoman Empire from its vulnerable back door, via the Persian Gulf into Iraq. Now, to those that claim that this was a successful expedition, you aren't looking at the initial invasion in which a force of 31,000 British troops under General Charles Townshend was repulsed from Baghdad, surrounded at the city of Kut and annalhiated by the Turks in December 1915. A later, much larger invasion took Baghdad from the Ottomans in 1918. Seriously, didn't these doofuses ever see Lawrence of Arabia?
Of course, Nostradamus' prediction concerned neither of these events, because he was about as clairvoyant as my pet cat.
The most gargantuan horror is that there are people that are watching this and buying every little thing that's said. It's like when someone gets a chain mail telling them that they were forced to buy a $50,000 cookie recipe from Sears and they forward it in indignation to all their friends without even making the most insignificant attempt to find out if the mail was actually true.
Now they're talking about Edward Cayce, oh boy, it's going to be a long night. Amazing Randi, please live forever.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-05 07:09 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-05 07:10 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-05 03:00 pm (UTC)The quatrain that they quoted reads:
The great host and sect of the crusaders,
Will be massed in Mesopotamia:
Of the nearby river the fast company,
That such law will hold for the enemy.
As you can see, this is at the best vague. It only gets really "scary" when you connect it to all his other quatrains about a great war in the Middle East that will involve much of the world and will require the "Two powers of the poles" (Interpreted to be Russia and the USA) to eventually stop. Firstly, connecting it to those quatrains is a stretch, because he deliberately jumbled his predictions up. Secondly, the quatrain above and many of the others could just as accurately describe the massive middle-eastern campaign in the first world war as it could some impending future doom, no one goes that route because that's just not salacious and doom saying enough. Thirdly, the entire thing is hogwash because Nostradamus was clearly making an enemy out of the Turks of the 1600's, who at that time were the most feared nation in Europe who had only just recently been turned back from the gates of Vienna itself. It surely, in that environment would seem pretty clear to Nostradamus that one day some massive cataclysmic war to stop the unbeatable Turk was coming. What's funny is that he didn't forsee the Turks declining after defeat at Vienna, becoming the "sick man of Europe" and eventually being destroyed by a mere portion of the strength of the British and Russian Empires in 1918.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-05 07:11 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-05 02:41 pm (UTC)I got that one in the distant past, I researched it and mailed everyone in the chain a link to a n article disproving the myth. The thing that gets me is that I was able to discover the chain letter was a hoax with about 30 seconds of pre-google internet searching, a task that was too difficult for hundreds of people previous to me.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-01-05 03:53 pm (UTC)