Quit your monkeyin' round

Gibbon half a chance, they’ll be locking us down again. But sit down, have a capuchino, and let the chimps fall where they may. The folks at Davos will soon be feasting on their meringue-utans and can-apes and smoking their cigorillas - and the WHO will quickly declare another health lemur-gency. Are we going to have ape-symptomatic spread again this time?

Any dissenting voices will be dismissed merely as primate change deniers. I think we’re going to need lawyers to sort all this out - I hope they’ll work pro bonobo.

In more disturbing news it seems that extremists are breeding a new species of monkey to wear bomb vests. They’re called babooms.

I’m sorry - really I am. The whole world seems to have gone bananas (sorry, again) and it has gotten way past the point where even trying to engage in a serious argument is self-defeating. To argue is to enter their world of make-believe and absurdity as if it deserved any other response than ridicule.

You know that gender stereotypes are a bad and constrictive thing - but Robert is really a Roberta because he plays with girls’ toys.

Right.

There is no way to argue when logic and reason is swept away with every new wave of woke that crashes on the beleaguered shores of sanity.

This new world order, this Build Back Bonkers, is continuing apace and covid has accelerated humanity’s decline into absurdity

Take this recent tweet

I’m sure I don’t need to point out how ridiculous this is - not to mention sad. And this is a medical professional (at least I think so - hard to know these days with so many parody accounts). Presumably this person would want, worldwide, for something like 20 billion tests to done every single week because of covid.

To keep us all safe.

Of course there will be food shortages - because all those people who used to produce food, or deliver it, or stack shelves, are now employed in covid testing labs, or test-kit manufacturing plants, to cope with the volume.

We’re not allowed plastic straws these days - just those paper ones that go all soggy and useless within a few minutes. But we are, it seems, more than willing to throw away enough covid-inspired plastic each week to furnish the entire world with several months’ worth of workable plastic straws.

We can also save the planet by switching to electric cars - although we will have a lot more lawsuits as people trip over the charging cables on every street. We will, of course, need to cut down more trees to make way for the exponential rise in wind turbines required to produce all the electricity needed to charge those cars and stem the rise in carbon dioxide.

It seems we’re entering into a world of poverty when over the last hundred years or so things have been steadily improving. We’re going to see more financial poverty - that’s a given after governments broke the world to build things back better for the few. But we’re going to see a rise in food poverty - until we all get used to insects or lab-generated synthetic sludge. We’ll have increasing energy poverty too.

I also think we’re seeing a rise in intellectual poverty. I touched on this in my last article, but I think it is a serious problem. Whilst the internet can be a wonderful thing, it is also a place where you can very quickly get ready-made opinions to slot into your worldview. I think the speed and ease of the internet might not always be a good thing.

There is a certain utility in having to spend time working stuff out for yourself. It’s important to do this. It’s important to keep doing this on a daily basis, instead of just letting the information flow in an uncontrolled and unexamined way. But “they” don’t really want you to do this - you need to trust the Experts™ and not worry your pretty-little pink and blue hair-do about any of it.

Many of my students (at a technical/engineering university) became insanely reliant on their calculators. It was horrific to witness them reaching for their calculator to divide 4 by 2. But this kind of thing happened. All the time. I really wish I was exaggerating - but I’m not. Even during a post-graduate exam for advanced maths techniques I witnessed, whilst invigilating, one student type 7 X 1 = into their calculator. Seven times one?

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that we’re helping to build a generation of trained monkeys. People who can only follow ‘recipes’ and do and think what they’ve been told. People who do not control the tools at their disposal, but who let the tools control them.

I don’t know why we seem to be monkeying round with so many things these days. But, as the saying goes, we should be stuffing all of this nonsense where a monkey shoves his nuts.

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