What Went Wrong?

Is it just me, or do other people wake up in the morning, catch up with news, and struggle to understand what, in the name of She-Hulk’s wobbling cheeks, is going on?

I remember having discussions in the past about things like Socialism, wealth inequality, the Iraq war, religious extremism, and so on. Sometimes those debates were vigorous but, even when there was serious disagreement, the worst that was thought was that our ‘opponent’ was being dumb, or naïve. Here’s what counts for political discussion in some quarters now

Back in the day, you almost never got the feeling that you’d been dropped into a Monty Python script. Although, if anything, these days I’d like to be living in the middle of a Monty Python script because it would make more sense.

Am I just suffering from Grumpy Old Git syndrome, or are things really rapidly heading over WooWoo Waterfall?

It seems like we arrived at around 2015 and someone flipped the woo switch.

The woo, and the surrealness, have only grown - more exponentially than covid in an Imperial College model.

Two gay men are now fighting for their health insurers to stump up part of the cost for them to have a baby. IVF treatment is expensive. They obviously haven’t got the memo that men can get pregnant because they’re going down the surrogacy route and want their health insurer to pay for the IVF element of that. They feel that, as gay men, they are being discriminated against. I think one of them is a lawyer, so that sounds like the sort of sophistry we might expect from the stereotypical lawyer. There is a reason for the existence of lawyer jokes.

What’s extraordinary about this, though, are the comments of Heather Mallick, a journalist for the Toronto Star, who seems to think the question “why aren’t women’s bodies cheaper to rent?” is a good one.

We’re living in such completely warped times that a, presumably, intelligent woman can write this without, apparently, even the slightest trace of irony. Call me a bigoted traditionalist, but isn’t that one hell of a misogynistic question to ask? I get the need to generate clicks, but there are limits, surely?

Perhaps one of the lawyers should consider taking cross-sex hormones?

Once they’d got over their period pains they’d be popping out little lawyerettes like nobody’s business.

But really you women y’all need to stop focusing on biology.

All that bioessentialist violence you commit. You need to stop focusing on your vaginas - that’s what straight men are for.

Or maybe lesbians. But only the bigoted kind of lesbian.

The question I really want to ask is whether liberal women possess a vaginx?

It’s becoming increasingly difficult to figure out why (some) people think it’s OK to write what they do. I’m not talking about ethics here, although there is that too. It’s the absurdity of some of these ideas and how seemingly intelligent people can consider them to be correct. I never did have a good insight into why people think the way they do. Heck, I can’t even figure that out what’s going on in my own head some days. But things have simply degenerated into farce.

I’m not even going to try to pick apart what’s going on in this guy’s head.

One of the things we have hypothesised about is whether this accelerating descent into absurd farce is deliberate. Disconnect the tethers to rationality and you have a brain ripe for believing any old shit. Malleability is a very desirable trait if you’re an authoritarian control freak.

Get someone to think that 2+2 = 5 and you can make them believe saying just four words in an hour increases the spread of covid by an order of magnitude!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I really need more exclamation points. Lots more.

This rancid and risible new ‘reality’ is being promoted in schools.

So, there you have it. The reason you didn’t get a good maths grade is white supremacy. But we do have to be careful because, like all natural resources, there is a finite supply.

I’m not sure where I stand on the issue of climate change from a scientific perspective. I simply haven’t done enough reading on it, or thinking about it, to have formed an opinion I would trust. The excessive promotion of it as an existential threat does concern me, however. The various ‘solutions’ certainly make little sense. If you’re worried about climate change from CO2, build nuclear power stations. Job done. Stop fucking about with all this nonsensical ‘renewable’ shit.

We should bear in mind that this is a Vice article, but even so, it’s representative of the fear that is being deliberately stoked by almost every media outlet. But there’s useful advice here. People are dropping dead of “increasing urgency” - so pop down to your local Jabbattoir and get vaxxed against urgency.

The good news is that I do think a reckoning is coming. The media and Twitter promoters of this drivel are becoming ever more shrill and ever more reliant on abuse and name-calling instead of reasoned argument. I see signs that ‘normal’ people are waking up in far greater numbers than before. We kept giving them rope, and it’s just starting to get long enough.

I hope I’m right in that perception, but even so we’re still going to be left with a sizable number of people whose heads and ability to think seems to have been fubarred.

If I’m wrong, and this headlong stampede down Batshit Bonkers Boulevard continues, then we’re fucked. Seriously fucked.

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