Sunday, July 3, 2011

"Parental Choice" or "Adventurees in logical fallacies"

Today, while sitting at my post at the OES rummage sale, a family came by. They came by in various configurations. First the mother with the 4 week old infant. Then the father with the 5-6 year old child. Then the mother with both children. Then the father with the boy again.

The child was...moderately ill-mannered, but I've seen far worse. Very careless of the objects he was investigating (I was manning the bake sale/kids toys table venue). The child picked things up, threw them down, a bit too violently or casually for someone like me who has well-loved and much-used toys and clothing from 45 years ago that are still in "nearly new" condition because I was taught to be careful of objects, clothing, people, and myself.

So the boy starting looking at the books, and decided he wanted the dinosaur book. The father took it from him to inspect it and make sure it was suitable (the book was something like The Mightiest Dinosaur, written for kindergartners/first graders). So dad is reading it, and says "Well, that's a lie." Turns another page. "Another lie." He then explains to me that "...all of that stuff about dinosaurs and extinction is a lie. They didn't die from some inability to survive in a changed environment. Humans hunted them to extinction." So then he tells me about this Eskimo carving of men hunting dinosaurs "that I have seen myself," and about carvings in the Yucatan Peninsula from only 1000 years ago showing people hunting a dinosaur, "So people were hunting dinosaurs as recently as 1000 years ago."

Then he explained to me that the world can't be millions of years old, citing Einstein and how the circumference of the sun reduces by 5 inches every year, and that if the earth and the sun were as old as evolutionists claim we would have been occupying the same physical space. And then he brought in the moon, which is moving away from us at "X" [I forget the number he gave] inches per year, "and if the earth was as old as evolutionists claim then the gravitational pull of the moon when it was as close to the planet as it would have had to have been then would have been so strong that it would have ripped our entire atmosphere away. And that is why my son doesn't go to public school--because they teach him all those lies which science proves are lies." Then he started to go on about this tail on bacteria "(that is only visible with an electron microscope) that rotates at 40,000 rpms," and how you couldn't make pulleys and gears to do that, but fortunately his son was getting restive, and the baby had woken up, and the wife wanted to feed the baby. But his son really wanted two books. The dinosaur book, and another one.

"No. You can't have them." Looks again. "Wait, maybe this one." So he took the other book, looked at it, flipped through it. "How much?"
"Twenty-five cents."
"Okay," and starts to hand it to the child, then stops. "Oh, wait." Turns to the wife. "Do we have this one?"
"Yes. Well, no. The one we have has scratch and sniff pages. So not that book. But that story."
He turns to the boy. "We have this at home. Why do you want it?"
"The other one has smells, but not this one."
"Okay. For 25 cents you can have it." And they walked away with the book. Without paying.

And the book it was okay to have, because it didn't have any lies?

It was about a talking rat, who saves a chef's career in a French restaurant in Paris. Ratatouille.