Received Wisdom

There are several strands whizzing around my head this morning centred around what we ‘know’ and how we ‘know’ it. I’m not yet convinced I’ll be able to draw them all into a coherent piece. Will I end up with a faggot, or just a loose collection of random sticks?

Doing a quick sanity check (more often needed these days) I opened up the Search Engine from Bias Hell™ (and you all know of which I speak) to check on the traditional meaning of faggot and it told me there’s a technique in embroidery in which one joins things by faggoting. Well I never.

I have, this very morning, received some new wisdom.

There’s a whole branch of philosophy (professional navel gazing) known as epistemology, which to my crude, juvenile, and laddish nature sounds like something you do on a Friday night at the pub. I generally try to steer clear of philosophers, being somewhat of the “what have the philosophers ever done for us?” school of thought.

Academics of the non-STEM variety tend to mostly talk shite these days. These proud specimens gave us GenderWoo. Enough said. It’s part and parcel of the overall degradation and derangement of those once noble subjects we call “Humanities” which should be relabelled as “Insanities” today. Or maybe even just call them the Inanities Department.

Don’t believe me? (Rhetorical question because I know you do). Let’s see a list from a recent article by Nathan Winograd in which he picks apart recent academic ‘works’ in which the crackademic loons argue for utterly crazy shit like this :

• Defend dogfighters like Michael Vick, arguing that they should avoid prosecution because they are “victims” of “white cis heteropatriarchy” that enables “toxic masculinities”;

• Criticize placing dogs who survive dog fighting in caring, family homes because “they were effectively segregated from Blackness”;

• Call for permitting dogs to be left on chains 24/7 so as not to “criminalize people of color who have pets”;

• Argue that shelters should kill animals or leave them on the streets instead of rescuing and placing them in family homes so as not to promote “settler-colonial and racist dynamics of land allocation”;

• Defend backyard breeding as promoting “queer affiliations”;

• Criticize the use of technology, like wheelchairs, to give disabled animals mobility, claiming it “erases” disabled people;

• Promote defunding the police and releasing all prisoners convicted of animal neglect and abuse from incarceration, even in cases of torture and killing, because anti-cruelty laws are “racist” and support the “carceral” state;

• Legitimize the harpooning of whales and clubbing of seals because of “native cosmologies”; and,

• Advocate for “pansexual” relations with animals — the rape of dogs, horses, and others — in the name of “queering the human-animal bond.”

These ‘academic’ nutjobs left Planet Sanity a long, long time ago. And that’s just a few examples from a very, very, very, long list of academic ‘research’ papers I could draw from.

These people are certifiably bonkers, yet they have enjoyed a wholly undeserved status as thought-leaders and intellectuals. A status which is, thankfully, beginning to decline quite sharply over the last few years (there were some positives to the loopy covid response, after all).

What’s even worse is that most of these deranged fuckers receive tax payer money to produce the gibbering drivel they write.

If we can’t trust the Academy to produce ‘knowledge’ any more, then who do we turn to? The general antidote, much derided by The Experts™ because it threatens their fragile sense of superiority, is to “do your own research”. Experts™, like Bianca’s Boner in the lady’s locker room, need continual stroking to prop up their egos and to validate their assumed mantle of superiority.

That self-reliance of ‘doing your own research’ (DYOR) is all well and good, and thoroughly recommended (by me), but there’s a bit of a problem. Where do we get the raw material that eventually gets processed via DYOR? How do we ‘know’ whether the ‘knowledge’ we’re drawing upon is (a) correct and/or (b) reasonably complete (or complete ‘enough’) for a sensible conclusion to be drawn?

GIGO is just as true for humans as it is for computers or mathematical models. It’s the information equivalent of the old saying “you can’t polish a turd”. If you were some evil megalomaniac intent on ruling the world, with a penchant for stroking white cats and tipping people into pools full of piranhas, then controlling ‘information’ would be kind of close to top of your “to do” list, if not top.

If you were not Bond-villain evil but just your average run-of-the-mill authoritarian do-gooder practicing your tyranny with a smile and looking down upon the great sea of plebs so far beneath you, we might end up with something like the EU and Queen Ursula. Your radiant magnificence, your divine wisdom, would shine forth and you’d know, you’d just know, what was best for the seething masses who need to be controlled. And, just like the EU is currently doing, you’d also want to control the flow of information.

This assumption of the divine mantle is, I suspect, closer to the globalist WEF-type model. I really do believe they see themselves as the ‘saviours’ of humanity - whilst holding utter disdain for the non-elite class. No good farmer is cruel to their livestock, after all.

Their model, which I think is what they might actually genuinely believe, is that they will have everything and the non-elite will have nothing, and everyone will be happy. Tell you what, I definitely want some of what they’re smoking.

The WEF people probably have a better understanding of human nature (on average) than that clueless cretin called Marx who had wet dreams about ‘perfecting’ the human race through revolution and ‘class consciousness’. That tosspot was working from a hopelessly inaccurate model (garbage in) and the result was untold misery and death for millions and millions of people. His ideas, useless for making humanity happier or improving their lot, turned out to be very persuasive and useful for a certain type of controlling murderous tyrant who could just use the envy of the rich bit of it to get the masses all riled up. They just replaced one unjust tyranny (things like monarchy) with another (the bliss of Communism). They changed one yoke of oppression and simply just swapped it with another.

The WEF folk are, essentially, wanting to move us to a modern form of the old feudal system, mediated and controlled by technology. That’s the way I see it, anyway. But, of course, I may be thinking all that, coming to those conclusions, based on entirely false and misleading information. Or, coming to fallacious conclusions based on correct information - with any combination thereof also being a possibility.

And this is the crux of it. How do we ‘know’ what we ‘know’, or think we know?

Some things we can know with a fair degree of certainty. When I returned to the UK from my decade long gig in another country back in early 2021 I made a prediction that POTATUS, the vegetable-in-chief of the US, one Joe Biden, would not last the year as President. I happened to be wrong on that, but what I wasn’t wrong about were the obvious (utterly, completely, overwhelmingly, obvious) early signs of serious cognitive decline. Whilst he wasn’t yet quite away with the fairies at that point, he was definitely not someone you’d want with his trembling finger over the nuclear button. Not that his carers would let him anywhere near it, of course. Duplicitous, Machiavellian, and manipulative though they were, they weren’t that stupid.

It must also have been obvious, even more so, to those closest to him. Think about what that implies for a moment. These people knew that Biden was not fully capable of taking on the role of President. They perpetrated a fraud on the American people. When POTATUS finally had a cognitive breakdown on live TV watched by millions during that debate, the reaction was more of ‘surprise’ than anger. That level of mental mush doesn’t just happen overnight, you know. Yet the mushiness had been deliberately covered up until it was no longer even remotely possible to do so¹.

So what have I just done there? I may not have gone to any great depth, admittedly, but I’ve taken a fact - something that can’t be properly denied (Biden’s mental decline - observable and objective) - and thought about what that means. The implication, the conclusion, is inescapable - Biden was, effectively, merely a puppet who was ‘handled’.

Remind me again who the ‘threat to our democracy’ is supposed to be, would you?

Since, as we’ve been recently told, the US has no kings, the parallels/contrasts with the madness of King George might be a little too on the nose. And even the DEI understudy had to wait her turn to be given (without any primary) a chance at powering the US with word salad and vibes.

Isn’t ‘democracy’ such a wonderful, glorious thing?

And keeping with the theme, what about the 2020 election itself? As it turned out it was the best thing to have happened for Trump. In the intervening years he had time to greatly sharpen his approach and to assemble a much more competent (and loyal) team. Yet, in my mind certainly, there are significant doubts about the accuracy of that election - there is no doubt in my mind that the election was a joke from a security perspective (whether or not the security vulnerabilities were exploited). Here I am less certain about the facts. It is still possible, although in my view really quite unlikely, that the 2020 election result was fair and accurate.

Any conclusion I might subsequently draw from that is also correspondingly less certain.

What I’m trying to outline here is an approach to processing ‘information’. It might be cack-handed, naïve, or shallow in the way I’ve done it - but the general approach is essential. We might call it an application of the scientific method (observable facts and the conclusions about ‘reality’ we subsequently draw from them) or just ‘critical thinking’, but in the current information landscape where so many competing ‘facts’ are claimed, it’s the only viable way of trying to figure out the truth.

The truth is definitely out there whether we know it or not. But none of us can operate from a position of omniscience. We have to take a set of potential ‘facts’, which by necessity will be incomplete, and run with them. We have to rely on others having done the same thing because our lives are not infinitely long and there are only 24 hours in each day. We cannot know everything in detail ourselves from DYOR and so we have, to some extent, to trust the expertise of others.

So we do have to pick and choose our sources of received wisdom, too.

I wasn’t much of a political animal back in 2017 when I first encountered the woke movement stuffed with Grievance Goons™. In the years between that and covid I became more and more aware of a festering psychosis driven by emotions and feelz and precious little analysis that was taking over everything. And then the Great Cough of Calamity™ struck. In full display, before our eyes, was the craziest set of illogical and inconsistent injunctions dressed up as The Science™. It broke us. For many of us it broke our whole ‘relationship’ with governments, Experts™, and the institutions that we assumed were designed to serve us.

Some of us it broke into a kind of maniacal hypochondria, and for others, as I’ve said, it broke whatever sense of ‘trust’ we had in our governments and institutions. It was pitifully easy to dismantle the official covid narrative - and many tried to do just that - but those voices were vigorously silenced. Yet all along those who were (eventually) proven to be right were accused of spreading ‘misinformation’. Who can forget one Prime Minister, Ms Horsey McHorseFace of New Zealand, saying that her government was “the single source of truth”?

Wow.

And so we’re left with the current dilemma. Where do we draw the raw material for our intellectual ‘product’ from? We can no longer be assured of the quality of supply and there is indeed, as many politicians state, an awful lot of misinformation out there (along with the dis and mal varieties of information). The answer, according to the politicians, is to let governments decide what is ‘true’ and what is ‘not true’.

One might even begin to suspect that the current climate of confusion about what is true and what is not is one that has been deliberately engineered so that people themselves will call upon their governments to step in and sort it all out. We must resist that particular temptation at all costs.

I don’t know what the answer is at an ‘institutional’ level - I don’t really see one anyway, to be honest, because institutions are too easily corruptible and currently far too swayed by ideology - but there’s lots we can do at a personal level.

It’s going to be difficult with Junk and Joke Science™ being promoted in schools - things like CRT and Gender Woo being promoted as ‘fact’, for example - so that restoring any semblance of ‘critical thinking’ for the future is not certain given the current state of ‘education’ and the indoctrination centres we call ‘universities’.

But broadly speaking here’s what we can do when trying to figure out things. We need to ask ourselves things like

• Do the facts make sense?

• Are they consistent with other facts?

• Is the story being woven around those facts credible?

• Is the story self-consistent?

• Is the story consistent with other stories we have been told?

One of the most important techniques I tried to impart to my students was that of performing regular consistency checks. You’ve generated a page of squigglish and arrived at some formula. Does it make sense? Are the units correct? Is the formula consistent with things we already know? Stuff like that. It’s fairly straightforward for introductory physics and maths - not quite so easy when you get to the boundaries of our current knowledge. But it’s a useful tool to apply in everyday life. Just seeking consistency and verifying consistency is a powerful tool. When inconsistencies are found we can be suspicious about what we’re being told. We might not arrive at the ‘truth’ but we will, at least, know in many cases we’re being sold some dodgy goods.

One of the things we can, and should, do is to retain some degree of humility - and this applies across the political spectrum. It is possible to be wrong, and that, to be honest, is not always a bad thing. It may sound like weakness to some to caveat our conclusions and attempt to bound them with some kind of ‘confidence level’, but it’s not really. It may be the only way we can collectively get ourselves out of this horrible partisan mess we’re in.

If more people do this it will be seen as the ‘right’ way of doing things - at least eventually. That’s what I would, perhaps naïvely, hope for.

Some things are, of course, non-negotiable. Humans cannot change their sex, for example. I will remain almost 100% convinced that there is no such thing as a ‘gender identity’ in any objective sense until someone presents me with credible evidence otherwise. I have no idea what ‘evidence’ would convince me, the form that would take, but I will admit there’s tiny, tiny, tiny, chance that such evidence exists.

But we have to be allowed to be wrong. That’s why free speech is so very important.

As the great physicist John Archibald Wheeler is paraphrased as saying :

“You only learn by your mistakes. So make as many mistakes as you can, as quickly as possible”

1. There was an impending election with Mr Potato Head at the helm. They had to get him out of the way without too much fuss - which is exactly what happened. To me it has all the hallmarks of a carefully planned exit strategy. They deliberately put POTATUS on that stage in sufficient time to install a successor. I suspect they didn’t want Ms Word Salad in that role, but couldn’t avoid it. I don’t know too much about US political laws, but isn’t there something known as the 25th Amendment? Why wasn’t it invoked when it became obvious on national TV the President was less coherent than a David Lynch movie?