“Never seen anything like it” is rapidly climbing my list of top most annoying phrases. Why is your set of “things I’ve seen” worth anything? Without qualification of scope and earned experience, “things I’ve seen” sets are like assholes. Everyone’s got one.
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Only time the phrase is merited is when you’re the world’s most experienced in an area of human experience that’s younger than living memory. Like astronauts and space imaging experts can say that about photos taken from space. That’s a meaningful statement.
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The pandemic sparks this a lot. From people who haven’t yet bothered to even look up Wikipedia about the Spanish flu or Black Death, let alone try to read books or talk to historians. Particularly annoying since closest reference event is just past living memory (102 y).
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Yes people HAVE seen things like this before. They just happen to be almost all dead. Your friendly neighborhood know-it-all is not the limit of collective memory.
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Egotism is overindexing on your own experiences and imagining them to be exceptional by default. Lake Wobegon effect on steroids. A: “What’s the world’s highest waterfall?” B: “I think it’s in South Amer...” C (interrupting): “I once took a piss off the Motel 8 roof”
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There’s a version of this parochial scholars are prone to, which amounts to “if nobody’s ever talked about it in my narrow field, it’s new to the world” “Never seen anything like these forest fires in medieval military history” effectively. Different species of egotism.
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Aside, Cthulhucene is a Donna Haraway term https://www.e-flux.com/journal/75/67125/tentacular-thinking-anthropocene-capitalocene-chthulucene/ …
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End of conversation
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