Science or witchcraft?
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I don’t think it’s a healthy thing when the Newspaper Of Record publishes a long feature (gift link) on how rich people holding destination weddings are increasingly (no stats of course) hiring various witches, shamans, mystical healers, white guys pretending to be some exotic combination of whatever etc. to bring about world peace keep it from raining on their wedding ceremonies:
Jim Graywolf Petruzzi, a shamanic practitioner in Arizona, officiates weddings and stops rain for out-of-town couples seeking to wed among Sedona’s red buttes. He claims to have recently cleared the skies for a wedding after three consecutive rainy days. “As we stepped out of the car, the rain stopped,” he said. “Partial sunny skies broke through. It held for about an hour and a half, and then we were done. Within 15 minutes, it was raining again.”
The event designer Preston Bailey, whose clients include Serena Williams, LeBron James, and Anant Ambani, whose lavish wedding in India made headlines last year, planned a destination wedding for a Jakarta-based couple at Kaliandra Resort in Surabaya, Indonesia. He recalled the bride’s parents were adamantly against a tent, and insistent on hiring rain stoppers.
“I think it was at least five of them, all of them blind, and they came in the day before the wedding and they got into some kind of a ceremony and prayer,” said Mr. Bailey. “That morning it was drizzling, but by the time the event started, we got the most beautiful weather. And you know, I was blown away.”
The influencer Jaz Smith recently went viral on TikTok after hiring a witch to prevent rain at her wedding at Oheka Castle on Long Island, in New York. “When you’re spending six-plus figures on a destination wedding, a little spiritual insurance never hurts,” said Josh Spiegel, Ms. Smith’s wedding designer and founder of Birch Event Design.
That a bunch of far too wealthy for their own good morons are lighting money on fire to pay for superstitious bullshit would be of no larger significance, if it wasn’t for the fact that this is all part of a crazy quilt that includes the destruction of vaccine science in America by people seeking oneness with nature, Aaron Rodgers Doing His Own Research and telling Joe Rogan all about it, fundie lunatics taking over all of the Republican party not controlled by Silicon Valley Singularity Gurus who plan to load their consciousnesses into Chat-GPT 17, etc. etc.
Men have believed that they could make the rain; why should not a king be brought up in the belief that the world began with him? And if [G.E.] Moore and this king were to meet and discuss, could Moore really prove his belief to be the right one? I do not say that Moore could not convert the king to his view, but it would be a conversion of a special kind; the king would be brought to look at the world in a different way.
Wittgenstein, On Certainty
How to get people “to look at the world in a different way” under present cultural circumstances seems like a pressing matter, given where we appear to be heading.