Diluted polemic? What do you dilute it with - Kafka-esk?
Yes, you can you use that, but I find the quasi-upturned Kafka-esk to be a bit less salty.
Thanks for that, now I understand.
My cooking is no longer thwarted, just add a bit less salt. The rest can go over my left shoulder.
Just for you Alan (even though I chose my words specifically for ironic effect with regards to reading age reflecting the difference between the Sun and the Times for example) data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7:
It's more a desperation to retain some sense that the world hasn't ended and we aren't existing in a quasi upturned kafka-esk nightmare where authority has been replaced by fake news driven polemic opinions that seek to cause any attempt at reason to be thwarted and followed by ever more dilution of any shared context, understanding or sense of a basal reality.
as dumned down as I can make it:
I fear that I might be in a bad dream where some 'thing' is changing the rules of the game we are all playing so that what ever you do you loose. The 'thing' is not really a thing at all, it's the lack of any 'thing' acting like a referee or a judge setting the rules of the game. We all make up our own rules as we go along because that is what people seem to feel is what they want.
The game makes no sense unless you stop trying to make sense of it.
a simplified middle of the road translation:
It's more a desperation to retain some sense that the world hasn't ended and we aren't existing in a nightmare that is like having some authority or agency designed system that purposefully makes the process of communicating valid or good information and ideas harder and more convoluted simply to frustrate(1). In this case though, the authority or agency is in fact the move towards a lack of any authority or controlling agency(2) by an apparent lack of willingness by everyone or anyone to accept or accredit any one system of rules or authority.
This gives the appearance of a force or agency directing change but there is no agency or force(3) in any tangible sense(3).
We started with religion and ideological control of facts and evidence in an absolute sense. If we wanted to make sense of the world, the church provided answers and direction.
Then we discovered science and the scientific method. That changed the way we view and evaluate the world and how evidence is weighed and valued. It also removed the idea of absolutes and replaced it probabilities, nothing is absolutely certain, but we can be pretty damn sure if the criteria are met.
Now however, we seem to be moving somewhat away from valuing the scientific method as being the defined 'standard' of establishing truth. Moving into a post modern world where an individuals sense of reality and truth is given as much credit and validity as facts and evidence established by the scientific method.(4)
In this post modern world, we are returning to a more ideological and belief based sense of reality, but without the generally agreed authority of one dominant religion to oversee and arbitrate what is and what is not the truth. Some would like to think and feel that means we are taking the best of both, but I strongly suspect that it is in fact leading to the sum of their weaknesses and failures.
The results in my view are having moved away somewhat from the Mary Whitehouse and Victorian moral standards dictating what we can and can't do or say for a brief period in history, we are moving back towards it but with the additional issues of having a multitude of other Morality controlling agencies attemping to dictate how we should live our lives.
No longer have we just to put up with the prurient morality police wanting to stop us watching anything remotely sexual or offencive to their beliefs, but we also have groups wanting to force us into treating everything equally even when they are scientifically proven to not be.
If we don't agree with them, we are immoral, sinners or racists, bigots and part of the white male privileged Patriarchy.
(1)Kafka-esk bit
(2)Upturned bit
(3)Quasi bit
(4) the dilution of any sense or standards of basal reality(5)
(5) the accepted or agreed frame work of what is real and how we go about establishing it. No agreed frame work = no possibility of establishing what is agreed to be true in any comparative sense.
My view of people of the world (HELLO WORLD), the media and governments of the world are evolving all the time; sort of maturing with age.
Giving people, the media and governments the benefit of the doubt (coloured with a background suspicion), unless proven otherwise, has generally worked for me.
For example: I thought obtaining media news meant reporters going to war zones and broadcasting by the front line so they are actually giving the viewers an overview at the scene or near the scene of battle. However, I found through personal experience in Uganda, Nicaragua, Lebanon and several other interesting places that many reporters hire locals to obtain footage of firefights and deftly add their speak-over in a crouched position somewhere else. Most foreign reporters and their crew spend their time at the bar in a 5-star hotel organising their crafty manoeuvres.
Not to put too fine a point on it: words are one thing but experience is another. As far as I'm concerned, when it comes to the media and their doings, the expression 'teaching grandmother to suck eggs' springs to mind.
This is not about judging people or individuals on the basis of my opinion on who and what people intrinsically are, but about social and cultural trends that effect or affect humans as a whole or in significant numbers.
Like for example the advent of social media changing how people seem to comunicate and derive information - not everyone of course, but a significant amount.
That is not a change in the intrinsic nature of humans, it is a change in a cultural and social trend.
It those social and cultural trends in and amoungst large groups of people that my comments are related to, not a 'people are getting dumber' or my opinion of people is that they are dumber than I thought they were.
It's an area I have 'personal experience' in having studied social anthropology related to human communications and behaviors from a cybernetic view point (system view).
As an example of what I mean, take a random sample of 100 people from anywhere in the world or at any time in the last 1,000 years as babies and raise them in the UK society.
They will most likely as adults be reflective and comparable to any other random sample of 100 UK citizens.
That is because in essence, humans are much of a muchness, the difference is in social and cultural environments we grow up and live in.
100 18th century citizens from the UK will generally have different social and cultural norms, consider different sources of information, expertise and how to establish the truth or reality in different ways from 100 12th Century people or 100 current UK citizens.
It is what shapes, changes and dictates those cultural and social differences I am discussing - an area that is well studied and highly debated - and at the centre of the fake news, ethics and morality etc debates and issues.
data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7 data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7
I was really hoping he would have taken @neilios suggestion with page 3 rather than 3 pages. Ah well.
I'm off to the pub mentioned earlier.
Again.
How ironic in a thread about whinney self righteous people trying to brow beat everyone into ignoring the Daily Mail because they take umbridge at it's opinions and how it expresses them ......
Maybe you should all start a campaign against the use of all language, concepts or arguments other than good old plain and basic speech, over simplistic ideas and things that don't require any education or study when discussing politics and the economy.
If it ain't summat we can all mumble and grumble about over 5 pints and a vindaloo, then it ain't right ! Bloody elitists, intellectuals, them liberal lefties n'know it all's telling us "It's all more complicated than that" ... what do they know .... I've had six kids, 4 wives and 3 heart attacks and barely a day off driving the buses ... those workshy 'academicalist' types with their 6 months of holidays and golden pensions cryin about not getting paid loads more to do the job they are supposed to do .... bloody kids always lookin on their phones .. it's like it's glued to their edds .... that's what they are teachin em nowadays, all I had was a pen and a jotter an a compass and them calculators .... remember when they made them rulers with calculators in ...... if you typed in some numbers is said boobies ..... 118 118 or someink .... 80805 or someink .... bloody pin numbers and now this touchy thing .... where u just touch it with your phone or you card or something .... I need a piss ..... get us another popodom an a kingfisher .... hold up ... I need a piss ... back in a sec...