Good Advice from Mark Shea

Commenter Nate thinks the quote he references is funny, and it is, considering the source is Mark Shea. But I think he would agree that it is very sound advice. Here is the pull quote from an article Me. Shea wrote in 2010:

"If somebody questions whether you know what you are talking about, you don’t deal with the question of whether you know what you are talking about. You simply say, “So! You want to make excuses for the murder of innocent people by religious bigots!” in the same tone you use to say, “You left your soiled underwear on my coffee table.” For, of course, at the end of the day, it will remain the case that some number of people (46 million? Several thousand?) were put to death… well, not by the Inquisition exactly but certainly by the secular authorities working with the Inquisition. So the story is close enough for horseshoes and hand grenades and that’s all that matters. The idea is not so much accuracy as truthiness: the sense that you have righteously scored off bad guys. And if they are bad guys, then they don’t really deserve to be spoken of accurately, do they? They should have thought about that before they started killing off their millions, or however many it was. The point is: I am righteously angry and when I have righteousness on my side, I don’t need to know what I’m talking about so long as I land some good hard punches on the jaw of Evil.”

The full article is available here for context. But if the pull quote is a little too long for you, I shortened it even more in a nice meme/quote image, suitable for sharing. I suggest people posting it in your office, or maybe on the bulletin board at your parish for reasons which should be entirely obvious.

Pseudoknowledge is a good technical name for what Mark Shea is describing here back in 2010. However it never seemed to get a lot of traction as a descriptive word. Fortunately we have the perfect word to describe it in 2018:

Fake News.