Much less time has elapsed since the internet came into our lives with the same grace as salmonella at a wedding party. A steroid for every knee-jerking, half-thought dancing in tandem with selective world views through the overworked neurons of foil hat wearers – the static bikes of intellectualism. A subset of a subset of a subset of ridiculous specialists in nothing who, if they ever stumbled across a fact, would have to square it with their own views first. So defying of categorisation, a Venn diagram of overlapping magisteria would require a spirograph and narcotics to come even close. With a probability no greater than pure chance of ever getting anything right and bolstered by well selected echo chambers, it is the final frontier of narcissistic, self-indulgent stupidity. It represents the opposite of Ocram’s razor, the scientific method, the balancing of probabilities and pretty much all the road markings that have guided us to where we are today. A clusterfuck of mental dwarves claiming to see a more distant horizon than anyone else. An ant’s eye view of the world rejoicing in a panorama birds could but imagine. For the world to appear, much less be as they would have it, depends on infinite universes in which any physical law can be suspended at will in service of the next neuronal spasm.
The Moon landings happened and whatever feelings arise on watching a YouTube video saying they didn’t, are just feelings nothing more.
There are few things clumsier to witness in conversation than a layperson with feelings on the moon landings explaining why they didn’t happen. The shadows are pointing the wrong way is a go-to standard for many and was best dismissed by actual physicist and educator Neil deGrasse Tyson when he asked how they would know. Have they been there? Other chestnuts include the need for a bar to hold the flag up and the Van Allen belt. These are summoned up like a trump card in a kind of gotcha moment for the simpleton. Both turd nuggets are revealed as just that by simply typing them into Google and seeing the countless explanations available from reputable scientists.
The problem as subscribers are wont to explain, is that the internet is run by the government to keep us dumb and you really have to go down rabbit holes only known to the earnest investigator. Once again the stopped clock is wrong, and probably because it takes time to read, understand and challenge deeply held nonsense, it runs counter to its uptake among the self-convinced. Unlike the pre-digested convenience of hoax supporting gibberish found on any number of sites, a reasonable variety of news channels and sites will, perspectives aside, paint a reasonable picture of the world. The dank festering corners of nonsense are soon cleared up with daylight.
Those who use terms like ‘rabbit-hole’ and ‘sheeple’ to intimate that they and a wiser–than-you, select few have access to real facts about how the world is run, might do well to consider that ‘if’ (no font size large enough) they were actually in possession of the classified information they claim to be, then an android-apple, AI, 5G, flying GMO monkey bee drone would have droned them by now to keep the Bilderberg group etc, safe from prying eyes.
This and the fact that the internet isn’t the best place to hide anything might be food for thought were thought on the menu at all. If one should be judged by the company one keeps, then the frequent overlaps with anti-Semitism, white-power, home-schooling religious nuttery and end-times preppers should sound a few alarms. It’s almost as if the same structures and hierarchies found in sects, cults and religions have been re-purposed to serve yet another ridiculous end.
It is a fairly useful, though rudimentary rule of thumb to assume that countries employing the words democratic or people’s in their full name are neither democratic nor run with the people’s best interests at heart. The same is often true of many websites purporting to be useful, informative or truthful. The bastion of lies and disinformation called Natural News is as misleading a title as the fevered minds at its helm could come up with. The website ‘infowars’, fruit of the mind of drooling, self publicist and all round pedlar of lies Alex Jones, is only truthful as a title if we assume the war is against information of any corroborable form. A mental buffet of junk food and seeping effluent sold as haute cuisine that contaminates everyone who swallows it.
These are loudhailers of ignorance or vested interests in selling something you’d be wiser not buying.
More insipid versions of anti-science like homeopathy and acupuncture have been getting a free ride on the back of anecdotal evidence and the placebo effect for centuries. The plural of anecdote isn’t data it’s just anecdotes. The truth as Hegel said, lies in the whole.
How many times are we asked our horoscope when meeting new people?
It’s always a temptation to pick one at random then listen as you are reverse engineered into the middle of the wrong hole. It is remarkable by its rarity that anyone ever says what you are and then gives a list of reasons why. It’s so often the opposite as they stab around in the dark until by process of elimination, they stumble into your star sign on the 5th to 7th attempt out of twelve and then look knowingly as if it proved anything at all.
None of this ought to really surprise us in a world which has bent the knee to all manner of religious nonsense throughout human history. As a balm for suffering, it may feel soothing but it’s still fake news and snake oil with all the curative properties of a placebo.
The cognitive overhead necessary for the suspension of natural laws is enormous with talking serpents, the Moon cut in half by a man on a flying horse, good god, bad god, indifferent god, genocidal maniac god and parting seas god pummelling the credulous into mental submission to make anything possible. If only it were possible for people to keep it to themselves but they feel compelled to evangelise their delusion. In fact they even demand you respect it and join in as well. But to quote Christopher Hitchens, “Compulsory love is a grotesque idea”.
Flat earthers who have to fight with every breath to keep their fantasy aloft have dealt themselves an especially tricky hand. Just trying to explain their concept of the world puts them at complete odds with the entirety of human knowledge.
Not so much a cognitive overhead but a burden heavier than Atlas bearing a disc/globe. It isn’t worth any consideration at all and listening to one really sucks all the life out of language. Perhaps they ought to have the courage of their convictions and travel in a straight line to see one of two things happen. The curious fact that it has a decent number of subscribers to its anti-knowledge just shows that they walk among us like lizards in people suits do in another offshoot of crazy.
The list of intersecting spirograph-like subsets of deeply and wilfully misinformed people is a parallel universe in which anything goes. There are no yardsticks and everyone is the high priest of their patch. Schism leads to schism like infinity mirrors and embodies ‘the Narcissism of Small Differences’ in ways that would have left Freud astonished. Truly the high kings of circle-squaring with tools of communication that their forbears the soothsayer, lunatic and mystic couldn’t have dreamt of despite their prognosticating powers. Economist John Kenneth Galbraith once saw a similar tendency in Marxist scholars, “It has been the acknowledged right of every Marxist scholar to read into Marx the particular meaning that he himself prefers and to treat all others with indignation.”
Medicine, unlike homeopathy, works and will keep improving over time. Any problems that exist within the medical world come from factors beyond the actual science of medicine. Like radio, it is neither good nor bad, that judgement corresponds to its use. The motives behind any dark movers in the pharmaceutical industry are much more likely human than scientific but it would be unrealistic to expect capitalism to slam on the brakes in such a money spinner of a market.
The so-called anti-vaxxer movement has two critical mistakes at its core. The first is that it’s wrong about everything it claims, and the second is that it breaks the simplest of spelling rules in English about doubling a consonant on a single syllable word. At least the second is easy to correct, the first part being somewhat harder. It should be remembered that people who subscribe to this nonsense have often put their kids up as test subjects in their own mental laboratory. They are heavily invested in the idea and don’t take criticism lightly. The real world outside their opaque, magic bubble can’t prove them wrong unless they lost a child and no sane person wishes that. The defence of their position partly depends on their kids not getting really sick although if they do, there will be some snake-oil on offer to sooth the pain and blame outside agencies. Herd immunity and the growing number of cases of diseases once considered dealt with, seem unable to breach their defensive positions and even cause them to become further entrenched. The belief that in some past time we didn’t need immunisation and that some natural lifestyle was a panacea for all ills is so wrong it beggars belief. The average lifespan of a person living in Madrid at the turn of the last century was 36 years. Not all died of disease, with nutrition, hygiene, infection and even dentistry taking huge tolls. Giving birth was high risk and child mortality kept the average low until relatively recently. Most of the improvements in raising this number up into the 70s and 80s are due to scientific advancements not prayer, self indulgent hocus-pocus or an angry rant at the government. If the assertion of this dangerous cocktail of anti-progress and revisionist reading of history is ongoing and not addressed, I would be happy for all spaces in which children congregate to demand proof of vaccination from parents. A better solution would be to take the best interests of the child into prime consideration and make it an obligation. Like Jehovah’s Witnesses, they don’t get to decide if their child requires a transfusion, doctors do. It’s bad enough to play dice with your own children; that dubious right shouldn’t be extended to others.
Given the state of air quality found in most urban environments, it is a risible to arrive at a conclusion that says the government is using aeroplanes to spray us with chemicals to geo-engineer the planet or shorten our lives. There are many tools for that which would be much easier to deploy. The white spray produced by aircraft flying overhead is condensation which is easily looked up if the truth was a real concern. Aircraft produce exhaust fumes too and like cars play an ever greater role in our lives. Any government that wanted to gas its own population would do well to leave that task to the population itself. Selfish in energy consumption and quick to demand change from everyone else, we gas ourselves willingly. Like the moon landings, any such conspiracy depends on the continued silence of the thousands involved and this is something humans are not especially good at in any numbers. You don’t need a Myth busters TV show for that, just some functioning critical faculties.
GMO is the globally used term of many to describe foodstuffs of the type sold by companies such as Monsanto and their controversial patenting of life. However, your dog is a GMO, most of the food we have eaten for centuries and even millennia are GMOs and so are you.
Selective breeding is genetically modified/enhanced life. Darwin explained evolution through natural selection which is nature doing its own GMOing. Poodles and Great Danes are both dogs, a cow isn’t a natural animal and neither are most livestock or crops. There are probably much greater dangers found in processed food than so-called GMOs, yet obesity and diabetes conspiracies haven’t gained anything like the same traction.
What makes an uninformed anti-this or that person so knowledgeable on the subject that even breeding plants to be more drought, pest or disease resistant represents a threat?
If anyone whose world view maps onto the anti-knowledge written about here has actually made it to the end and feels it is me, not they who are deluded, they’d be well reminded that the onus is on them to prove their nonsense. What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence and even if 911 seems suspect, you really ought to have a clearer idea of what did happen before filling in all the gaps with whatever suits you. Everyone is ignorant about the things they don’t know.
The launch pad of the Apollo missions was truly a launch pad for some of the finest advancements in the modern world and scientific research continues to provide answers where nonsense once prevailed with claims beyond its reach. The iPad and other such devices may be used in ways synonymous with the Apollo missions in learning and extending the reach of scientific understanding. However, it is also the launch pad for the cobbled together, clattering heap of space junk that is dangerous and lazy thinking.
Interesting and funny post! thanks David