Update: My own semi-feud with Deepak’s fans

Somewhat appropriately, two of Deepak’s fans engaged me in a brief semi-feud after reading this recent post about a semi-feud between Chopra and physicist Brian Cox. Anyway, you can look it all up in the comments section if you want – do tell me if I was too harsh. You can also look the discussion up on Twitter, since both individuals felt compelled to write their own full length responses and then push those responses through their various social media networks all day. Would it be absurd to remind them that I’m a stranger musing on things for fun and hardly worth scribbling out responses to? But I guess we humans are lonely.

What really gets my goat about the whole thing? How tantalizingly close I was to being tagged by the guru himself on Twitter. Look here, so close!

How could he miss it?! Flabbergasting when you consider how regularly he tags the entire internet on his tweets.

If you do decide to track the littler of the little feuds, keep in mind that the second commenter – that’d be the physics student from Canada – seems to have retired his internet presence. As of today I can’t find his blog response to me anymore, and his Twitter account has been deactivated. I hope he comes back – I offered to let him write a blog post on why he thinks a singularity is essential, as opposed to some physicists who argue that it’s probably not necessary. And I meant it too – I’d be happy to let him post. Though I did make the offer before seeing this over at Why Evolution is True:

Now, if you’re a Deepak fan reading this and thinking about responding, you know what my advice is? Relax. Be content in the cosmic consciousness. Life’s too short to write a response that no one will read. And if you remember nothing else, remember this: knowledge results from the doorway to bliss.

(Just kidding on that last part – it’s from a Deepak Chopra random nonsense generator)

If you must say something, be warned that this will likely be my response:

Deepak Chopra/Deadbat Chopstick semi-feuds with Brian Cox on Twitter

If you follow “spiritual” guru Deepak Chopra on Twitter, you know how annoying he can be, especially when he feels challenged. He regularly gets into social media semi-feuds with actual scientists, and I say semi-feuds because most of his opponents don’t bother to reply. That leaves Deepak by his lonesome, furiously spitting out 8,000 (mostly nonsense) tweets with no response. It reminds me of grade school, when you could watch a bully self-destruct in real-time as his victim employed the effective tactic of simply ignoring his oppressor.

Jerry Coyne’s website brought the most recent Twitter semi-feud to my attention yesterday, this time between Deepak and rock-star English physicist Brian Cox. I’m a big fan of Brian Cox – he’s almost a perfect meld between Dawkins and Sagan in that he’s especially adept at expounding the wonders of science (ala Sagan) and equally intolerant of nonsense, woo, and superstitious thinking (ala Dawkins…also, Cox is British). Anyway, Cox ends the feud with a knock-out blow, what I believe the internet calls a “pwn”. Here’s the summarized feud (though you should check out some of the responses from followers of each):

1pm on the 19th, Deepak posts some of his regular science-sounding nonsense:

The next morning, Brian Cox, an actual scientist, decides to correct Deepak with this tweet:

Which unleashes a rapid pack of “Deepak crazies” who swarm Brian’s twitter feed (if you think Deepak is defensive, you should see his followers):

And all the while Deepak is of course tweeting out 9,000,000 of his own responses:

And tries to throw the hammer down with this one:

Which sets him up for this wonderful pwn: