Obviously there are the silent and probable majority who only use Facebook to promote their business or share photos of sunsets.
Looking back on yesterday’s entry, it was the sunshine after all. According to the feedback I received and tonight’s announcement (by An Taoiseach) we are still on course for cataclysm. A salutary lesson in letting feelings override the higher brain. I might have felt good yesterday, but the world was still going to hell in high water.
And while our leaders might be ahead of us when it comes to information and frighteningly they admit that the ICUs are nearing capacity.
The USA has lost control completely with 100,000 cases, more than China, if we are to believe the country that denied operating concentration camps for Uigher Muslims. Trump has proven inept, surprisingly. Although it’s not solely on him. Covid has proven how fragile the system is. There is a chance it could collapse, which might prove helpful if we learn quickly enough, because as bad as it gets we have bigger disasters hurtling towards us.
So I was wrong. I’m wrong about too many things to not be open to all eventualities. It makes me a skeptic in the philosophical sense of the word. Anything is possible. Even the inconceivable. God, faeries, computer simulated realities, Liverpool winning the premier league, all of it.
It’s a way of admitting that, on the grand scale, I know nothing. Whether I believe in something or not, skepticism allows me that freedom. There are things I know nothing about that I could learn if I wanted, such as economics or playing the piano. Things I know nothing about that research would allow me to guess at – how did the neolithic people build the pyramids so square? Things I know nothing of and never will with these finite senses, like what came before the big bang, or where did I lose my provisional truck license?
And I find myself in many internet quarrels over the nature of such things. Such is my ego. Facebook is awash right now. Right now it is the rise of authoritarianism, which is actually happening, whether it is a temporary and benign or malignent and permanent type is the only question right now.
On one side of the debate we have the people who think 911 was deliberate. They say: What we are seeing now is the beginning of end times as the freemasons finally reveal their nefarious hand. They like men more than women. You can identify them when they argue that “mankind is not altering the climate but is manipulating the weather.”
Facing them are those, who dismiss all theories as tinfoil. They say: No way would the nation that lied to start a war lie to start a war. That there is no-one behind the scenes planning history in advance. They like women more than men. You can identify them when they argue that mankind is not manipulating the weather but is altering the climate.
Obviously there are the silent and probable majority who only use Facebook to promote their business or share photos of sunsets. They don’t let their political identity decide whether they accept or reject an idea and don’t have a favourite gender because they have meaningful sex lives instead. All they know is that it rains a lot more than it used to.
Then there are people like me who, because of childhood rejection issues, will argue with anyone about anything. My mind is like the singularity in a black hole believing in all of it and none of it in any given fraction of a moment.
I stay open to everything because, in my time, many bizarre accusations of a conspiratorial nature have been answered affirmatively:
– Did modern democracies lie to start a war that killed hundreds of thousands?
– Did oil companies fund environmental scientists in top institutions to obfusticate science even if it meant global destruction?
– Were leading children’s TV presenters paedophiles?
Every piece of investigative journalism ever started off as a conspiracy in some reporter’s fertile mind. The phones of protestors are most certainly tracked. Extraordinary rendition does happen in Shannon. Wikileaks is a real thing. Just because officials deny something doesn’t make it not true.
With our freedoms becoming more and more curtailed things, social media is humming. All kinds of arguments and counter arguments – I suspect with increasing ferocity as lockdown takes its toll – are going to make it to the surface. So with nothing better to do than wait for the aliens to take me away I want to hear them all.
