Saturday, December 02, 2017 2:05 PM
Not Very Worried (2017Dec02)
We need to get back to a practical attitude about truth. Yes, truth can be debated—but it can be debated beyond the point of meaning, as well. We can debate whether a dawn with snow on the ground is proof of an overnight snowfall—but when the debate is over, someone still needs to plow the driveway.
Likewise, we don’t really know much about the nature of electromagnetism—nevertheless, an electrician can tell you, with absolute precision, whether a certain circuit-diagram will power your new home—or burn it to the ground. Doubt-mongers can honestly say that humanity knows very little about the full nature of electricity—while they sit in a house with a generous supply of safe, handy three-prong outlets, charging multiple devices while making toast.
I’d prefer not to get sidetracked just now, talking about the dramatic back-and-forths of politics and media. The most important thing about the truth isn’t ‘fake news’—it is in how we perceive our world, ourselves, and our place in it. After all, it is ‘We, the people’. Neither politicians nor talking heads can brainwash any of us, unless we let them, plopping ourselves down in front of a screen and swallowing every word we hear. If nothing else, we should be given pause—and more than pause, by the fact that some news outlets tell different stories.
That creates an environment where some outlet or outlets indeed must be selling psy-prop fake-news BS—and because of Freedom of Speech, the government can’t decide for us which media outlets are at fault. We have to use our personal judgement now—more than ever before. We must be leery—we must be suspicious—we know now that there are groups out there, working at the new profession of cultural corrosion by misinformation.
And when we look for an enemy, we shouldn’t allow Russia alone to fill our binoculars. In many ways, modern Russia is just a subset of the super-wealthy of Capitalism—Putin and all those oligarchs are just the foreign version of our own fat cats, Trump included. America is the Capitalist’s target because its riches only have one drawback—those pesky peasants, still thinking they have freedom—no matter how much they’re overworked in their cubicles or starved in unemployment.
So Trump helps Putin, just like all fat pigs help each other, all around the world—not very worried that the rest of us might wake up some day. He attacks our rights and freedoms, because those are obstacles to commerce and control. He stands for commerce and control because he is jealous of Putin, Duterte, and Assad. He whines, “Why can’t I shoot someone in the middle of 5th Avenue? They can!”
I don’t care about the legalities anymore—I am long past caring who said what to whom. All I know, for an absolute fact, is that Trump is an enemy of the United States of America, as much as an enemy of the Truth—yet it is against the law for me to suggest what I’d like to see happen to him.
