It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.
— Attributed to Mark Twain
Anyone wanting to know the truth would not behave in ways that ensure they never will. If you abandon your critical thinking skills the moment you even perceive a threat to your interests — doesn’t that bring those skills into question?
Taking on the entire country is worlds away from what everyone else is doing. Explaining America’s decline over decades of delight in the Gutter Games of Government — is apples & oranges as it gets when compared to the transactional nature of news and social-media norms. Understanding how seemingly unrelated events impact one another takes time and effort to digest.
Thanks to the internet and the cable clans paving the way for the onslaught of the utterly absurd — everything is poisoned by perception and hypocrisy now. America’s in perennial pursuit of ideologies — warfare waged with galactic levels of baggage & bullshit bolstered by . . .
opinions lightly adopted but firmly held . . . forged from a combination of ignorance, dishonesty, and fashion
— Theodore Dalrymple, Life at the Bottom
We could do something about that, but you’re busy . . .
You’re always busy
If I came into this cold — I’d already be able to establish a great deal on what this person told me without telling me. I coined “cable clans” over 10 years ago to capture the media in the same way I bucket both parties into “two sides of the same counterfeit coin.”
There’s no party-line loyalty in that any more than Gutter Games of Government or anything else above and across this site.
You care about politics — I care about problem solving. Believe it or not, you can do both (though the former will forever hinder the latter). But you’ve allowed politics to cripple the possibility of any problem solving at all.
Shallow thinkers do not think beyond the immediate and the observable. They usually take information at face value and only look at immediate consequences. They are not capable of looking at all sides of an issue or think deeply about the issue before making decisions or drawing conclusions . . .
They also believe that their opinion is based on deep thinking because they genuinely believe that their opinion is based on truth and facts. Whereas, deep thinkers look at the whole sequence of events and the consequences.
When we dig deeper, we understand better. We can compare different outcomes, examine, tear apart, and make cognizant judgments that are derived from different mental models.
Left and Right, I’ve yet to find a single person who digs beyond the depth of their immediate domain of interest. In our entirely transactional times, America endlessly rehashes topics of today — never once considering the totality of events that created them (or even having a notion of the need to).
With the issues I address — you might as well be saying the Civil War wasn’t germane to the assassination of Lincoln.
V for Victory — How Fitting . . .
A world where you can win an argument without even knowing what the issue is about. How you behave in denying the undeniable daily would be unthinkable for me to do ever.
Imagine America as an engine and you come along with a cross-section of it to explain why it’s not working. Since your audience shares your concerns, you’d think they’d be interested in understanding the internals of the problem. But they spend all their time talking about parts made by people they don’t like — never considering the defects in their own parts.
And even though you’ve got a rock-solid idea for how to fix the engine (or at least make it run on reason): They’d rather spend the rest of their lives complaining about problems than take responsibility for their part in creating them.
I fail to understand how you think we can solve anything in a country that can’t even get the self-evident straight:
“Wut?”
In my youth, I could not have imagined a world in which even people with PhDs would act like imbeciles in the face of information they don’t instantly understand. That an entire country could take satisfaction in insulting your own intelligence on a daily basis just astounds me. And there is no measure for how preposterous it is that people who can’t even connect the dots This Does Not = That:
Have the bottomless gall to belittle me on making correlations in 3 dimensions while you wallow in one.
What do you mean by 3 dimensions?
Now that would be a good question — and you’d be amazed at what you’d see if you’d started asking some.
As for what I mean . . .
What do you think this means?
It means that defending the indefensible in the former helped create the conditions for the latter. It means you harmed your own interests by the manner in which you pursued them — like all of America does every goddamn day.
I’ve always thought there’s something wildly out of whack with pursuing values in a manner devoid of virtue. In one form or another, inevitably there are consequences for convictions unguided by conscience.
Look around!
Marching to Black Lives Matter with the first black president sitting in the White House — was that a smart move? The answer should be abundantly clear and yet the question is not even considered. I’ve been blocked on Twitter for just politely suggesting that BLM is a counterproductive cause.
Instead of considering how you could fight for justice more intelligently — you act like I’m saying you shouldn’t fight for it at all.
Was that smart move?
It’s a sign of the times that people fail to understand the premise of such a simple question.
What’s more, they make it nearly impossible to explain it to them — as detail has a way of complicating the narrative. Even if drawing attention to a problem produces some positive activity, the concept of unintended consequences entirely escapes those consumed by what they see only in the moment.
A lot of that goin’ around
Speaking of detail and denying the undeniable:
The Right wants the Left and the black community to get its act together on matters deeply woven into the fabric of America’s long history of brutality and disgrace: Slavery, Jim Crow, lynchings, murder, decades of civil rights violations, questionable shootings, and so on.
While the Right won’t even look at the material properties of a tube. What’s wrong with that picture — and this one?
Hmm, so the dimensions exactly match the tubes used in Iraq’s history of manufacturing the Nasser-81 mm artillery rocket (a reverse-engineered version of the Italian Medusa)
It seems we have all the time in the world to promote the false — but not a second to spare for the truth. “A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on” — a quote that’s been around in various forms for over 300 years (evidently the original being from 1710):
Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it; so that when Men come to be undeceiv’d, it is too late; the Jest is over, and the Tale has had its Effect.
This image is especially fitting for the times — since it’s a myth popularized by Washington Irving and others.
According to The Flat Earth Myth: The real myth is the idea that anyone ever believed in a flat earth:
Essentially no one during the Middle Ages believed the world was flat. Of the many myths about the Middle Ages this one is perhaps the most widespread, and yet at the same time the most roundly and authoritatively debunked.
In fact, the evidence is so overwhelming that refuting this myth is like refuting the idea that the moon is made of cheese.
Same on WMD — and then some!
“Bias” gets all the press
When prejudice is paramount to the problem. If it were just bias, convincing you with overwhelming and irrefutable evidence might still be difficult — but you’d be willing to be convinced.
Prejudice doesn’t roll that way. In fact, it doesn’t roll anywhere — as you don’t budge one bit, and take pride in it, no less.
As a friend comically put it:
It’s not “Pride and Bias”
Fact:
truth verifiable from experience or observation
Which means most of America is delusional by definition:
- A delusion is a mistaken belief that is held with strong conviction even when presented with superior evidence to the contrary
- Characterized by or holding idiosyncratic beliefs or impressions that are contradicted by reality or rational argument
- Something a person believes and wants to be true, when it is actually not true
And the only way you can pull off the above is with the prejudice below:
Prejudice:
- An attitude that always favors one way of feeling or acting especially without considering any other possibilities
- An adverse judgment or opinion formed beforehand or without knowledge or examination of the facts
- The act or state of holding unreasonable preconceived judgments or convictions
- A partiality that prevents objective consideration of an issue or situation
There is no market for what I do. But there wasn’t one for PCs at one time either. We could revolutionize the world too — just by using the tools we were given from the get-go:
That’s that lump that’s three feet above your ass!
Think of what you’re saying
You can get it wrong and still you think that it’s alright
Think of what I’m saying
We can work it out and get it straight, or say goodnight . . .
It astounds me that even sharing something in hopes of a human connection — that maybe having something in common could connect in a way that undeniable evidence doesn’t: Even that is mocked and conveniently taken as “weakness” in argument.
So in the Face of Centrifuge Physics
On a matter of world-altering consequence (that shaped everything you see today): Belittling my “disjointed” & “juvenile” website with “irrelevant music & movies” is the best ya got?
When you have absolutely no idea what’s going on here, on what basis are you so doubt-free?
And in a world that no longer allows for this quaint thing called conversation — “Think of what you’re saying” could not be more relevant.
So I will ask you once again . . .
Try to see it my way
Only time will tell if I am right or I am wrong
While you see it your way
There’s a chance that we might fall apart before too long . . .
Ah, the “Have you seen The Social Dilemma?” crowd:
Viewed in 38,000,000 homes within the first 28 days of release
So why don’t ya Tweet about it some more — because surely the reason it didn’t work is insufficient exposure for a documentary damn near everyone in America knows about. If you advertise your concerns enough — surely that’ll magically make a dent someday.
And if it doesn’t, at least you got your fix for feeling like you’re participating in addressing a problem you’re perpetuating by the very nature in which you participate.
All day, every day
By all means, Tweet your message — but the idea to act on those concerns when an opportunity comes along to do so. Searching “Social Dilemma” delivers no shortage of concern about the state of society — but ask ’em to do anything to address those concerns that takes time & effort to think it through . . .
But would work precisely because it demands something of your mind:
A rare response of reasonableness on Twitter (or anywhere, for that matter):
Your documentary was ahead of its time
Six years ahead of The Social Dilemma — which was “viewed in 38,000,000 homes within the first 28 days of release.” Educational and enjoyable — but accomplished absolutely nothing. I could have told ’em that before they wrote one word.
Then again: Do these people really wanna solve problems anyway? Do you?
Man is at least as much a problem-creating as a problem-solving animal. Better a crisis than the permanent boredom of meaninglessness.
— Theodore Dalrymple, Life at the Bottom
Conventional efforts with no specificity that’s personal — don’t have a snowball’s chance in hell at making a dent in today’s trench warfare between armies of unreachables. How many zeros you think would drop off that number if their doc drilled into all of America?
With Surgical Specificity That Cuts to the Bone:
Perhaps the single most lucid, succinct, and profoundly terrifying analysis of social media ever created for mass consumption.
— IndieWire
It’s not that difficult to be succinct when you deliver no detail that hits home — and hard! Same goes for lucid when the line is linear. My efforts don’t compute in a culture that craves information formatted to your liking:
- Nice and linear
- Easy to swallow
- Short and simple
- Effortless to spread
Bonding in Bumper Sticker Branding
One Voice Became Two 