Zig-Zag-and Swirl.

October 22, 2021 7:42 PM

Fantastically Wrong: The Inventor of the Airliner Also Invented This Hilariously Absurd 'Science'. Alfred Lawson and 'Manlife' Documentary Explores Lawsonomy & Its Last Crusader
posted by clavdivs (20 comments total)

Zig-Zag-and Swirl
Don't care if I hurl
Zig-Zag-and Swirl
Don't care if I hurl
Forgot all the crashes,
Give Lawson Airlines a whirl
posted by Greg_Ace at 9:17 PM on October 22, 2021 [3 favorites]

I'm down with the suction and pressure idea, I think.

Unless we're talking about two different things.
posted by mule98J at 9:33 PM on October 22, 2021 [3 favorites]

Here's the ToC for Lawsonomy Vol 1.

An excerpt from chapter one might give you a good heads-up for the intellectual rigor involved here:

Theory, as espoused by so-called wise men or self-styled scholars has no place in Lawsonomy. Everything must be provable or reasonable or it is not Lawsonomy.

[...]

Truth is simple and easily understood but falsity is complicated and misleading. A few words, sentences, paragraphs or pages are sufficient to tell the truth but it requires ponderous books and whole libraries to prop up falsity.

In a broad sense, one might say that these days Lawsonononomy is actually having a Golden Age.
posted by glonous keming at 10:11 PM on October 22, 2021 [20 favorites]

Wow. It's pretty amazing that he was able to design airplanes without anything like a reasonable grasp of physics. I mean, lots of jokes to be had, but I was pre-engineering for almost two years and understand a lot of the math he seems to be ducking and there's no freaking way I could get a plane in the air. So hat tip for that, I guess. Not as cool with the whole cult thing though.
posted by Cris E at 10:14 PM on October 22, 2021 [3 favorites]

Donna Kossy (who had almost-exclusive popular coverage of things like this until the internet picked up that gig) featured Lawsonomy in her superlative fringe book Kooks.. As profoundly wrong and even silly as Lawsonomy was and is, this particular bit from Lawson's Wikipedia entry, regarding the final disposal of the last University of Lawsonomy campus in Wisconsin, is somewhat ironic:

In 2018, the Town of Mount Pleasant paid $933,000 to purchase the property on the northbound side of Interstate 94 for the Foxconn project. All remaining buildings were demolished and removed.

Yes, that one. Even if you believe that fringe belief systems are inherently harmful, they're not quite on the level of that boondoggle.
posted by Halloween Jack at 10:46 PM on October 22, 2021 [13 favorites]

“before being called before a Senate committee (and not in a good way)”

ah yes, unlike most people who are called before Senate, who come to testify before the Senate Committee for the Recognition of Good Eggs
posted by Kattullus at 1:12 AM on October 23, 2021 [6 favorites]

It's pretty amazing that he was able to design airplanes without anything like a reasonable grasp of physics.

"...found a wealthy backer in Milwaukee and enlisted a brilliant team that included six engineering specialists and aeronautical engineer Vincent J. Burnell..."
posted by StickyCarpet at 1:30 AM on October 23, 2021 [5 favorites]

The Dollop podcast on Lawsonomy
posted by Nutri-Matic Drinks Synthesizer at 6:34 AM on October 23, 2021

I first read about Lawson and Lawsonomy in Martin Gardner's Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science. Apparently Lawson also tried to found a Lawsonian Religion, complete with its own hymns, one of which had the stirring refrain "Alfred William Lawson is God's great eternal gift to Man." I have to watch these podcasts.
posted by Epixonti at 8:22 AM on October 23, 2021 [2 favorites]

This pseudoscience sucks and blows
posted by Pronoiac at 9:04 AM on October 23, 2021 [5 favorites]

Fucking magnets how do they work? Well it's obvious now. Should a magnet have more female particles than male, “it will have the power of suction,” while a magnet with more male particles produces pressure to “push matter away from it.” Simple!
posted by Obscure Reference at 11:36 AM on October 23, 2021

IIRC, Lawson held sway in a small town, to the point of having control of the school system, and ending up with a generation of schoolchildren who were “educated” exclusively in the local magnate's form of homespun ignorance. Which makes it a lot less cute and whimsical and more horrific.

This would make a good basis for a horror film: small-town authoritarianism, only here even the facts of science are taken away from you, replaced with the idiot babble of the wealthy and powerful man who runs the town with an iron fist, and his toadies who have their own reasons to parrot his yurblings. The horror would come from it being transparently obvious that the doctrine is nonsense, and yet there being no escape from it because power says that it is true.
posted by acb at 12:40 PM on October 23, 2021 [4 favorites]

acb: They already did that movie, it's called Footloose
posted by Saxon Kane at 2:21 PM on October 23, 2021 [5 favorites]

It needs more psychoceramics, with the authority figure being obviously, floridly cracked. And if they can go back in time and get, say, Klaus Kinski to play him, all the better.
posted by acb at 2:39 PM on October 23, 2021

Proto-Pinker
posted by spitbull at 3:01 PM on October 23, 2021 [1 favorite]

acb: Your story sounds like a Republican wet dream.
posted by njohnson23 at 3:30 PM on October 23, 2021

Except that the Republicans have a suspicion of anything too imaginative, and a conformistic herd instinct (as the saying says, liberals fall in love, and conservatives fall in line). Lawson was sufficiently cracked to let his freak flag fly, and in a horror setting, him doing so and ruthlessly punishing anyone who failed to salute it with sufficient vigour would work. Think Turkmenbashi meets folksy Old Weird America.
posted by acb at 5:21 PM on October 23, 2021

This would make a good basis for a horror film: small-town authoritarianism, only here even the facts of science are taken away from you, replaced with the idiot babble of the wealthy and powerful man who runs the town with an iron fist,

Halloween III but with baseball zombie laded fokkers.
posted by clavdivs at 7:41 PM on October 23, 2021

.

For the untold number of penguins who have waddled too close to the giant anus at the South Pole and been cruelly farted out by the earth into the very ether of space.

Never send to know for whom the earth farts; it farts for thee.
posted by inflatablekiwi at 4:27 AM on October 24, 2021 [5 favorites]

Interesting. I'm looking forward to seeing the film.

(For those who like their history spoken by comedians, The Dollop's episode on Lawson is also fun.)

Edit: ah, I see that's already been mentioned. Sorry.
posted by eotvos at 2:03 PM on October 26, 2021