As IF Times

Recently, I had the misfortune of dunking my mobile phone into a lake.  Not on purpose of course; the phone was in the pocket of my swim trunks and I’d forgotten that it was there when I waded into the water.  I’m sure I’m not alone in having these kinds of mishaps with their cell-phones.  The aggravating part is not so much the moisture permeating the phone and causing it to not work.  It was the reality that without access to the information and features on the phone, I was somewhat handicapped from doing everyday things that I’d taken for granted.

Who amongst us can easily recall the actual telephone numbers or co-ordinates of our regular contacts….much less casual friends or especially of business contacts? We’ve all programmed the phones to access them via voice or key strokes.  What about access to doors whereby we wave our phones over a Bluetooth sensor?   Don’t forget the most important function of all phones these days and which is responsible for their high cost….the camera.  Once that’s out of commission, our everyday shortcut for recording events is no longer available.  Of course, without camera phones, how does one eat food or take vacations? Girls would be helpless. It’s like the old chestnut about preventing an Italian from driving by breaking his middle finger.

Our dependence on such devices has been such that people are more anxious without their phones than they are about almost anything else.  That’s rather frightening to think that our lives are tethered to a 3 by 5 piece of plastic and silicon. This transition has been gradual, so gradual that we’ve failed to notice our increasing dependency on our phones.  Like all consumer items, the hook is convenience.  Who doesn’t want more convenience?  The issue with convenience is that our minds naturally ignore the processes involved in finding a solution and we become dependent on ‘things’ or others for decisions.  Once routine things are taken care of, we presumably turn our mental efforts to more worthwhile things.

Except that this doesn’t happen. If anything, we are likely to become lazier.  Why go through the trouble of researching anything in depth when by merely clicking a few keys, a ‘source’ will provide the information for us.  The onset of Artificial Intelligence will only make this worse.  We have as a society, offloaded lots of our critical thinking to sources that make our minds up for us.  The advent of the phenomenon of social media has created an entirely malleable generation of people whose opinions are shaped by prolific posters.  The veracity of this claim is proven by the amount of money that corporations are willing to throw at ‘influencers’, in order to shape views and opinions and of course, hawk goods.

To be sure, corporate television and media still exert their influence, but distrust of them has grown so much that few take any media utterances seriously any more.  They have collectively become America’s version of Pravda or Xinhua. For those that have outsourced their critical thinking of major issues to media, their ability to grasp simple realities withers and suddenly their ability to logically assess situations disappears.  They may have positions which they parrot on any given issue, but not the ability to defend them critically.

The real wake-up call for people is that people whom have been relied upon to provide rational responses and opinions have been outed as being utterly incompetent or incapable of rendering any views at all.  They are like a virus; their stupidity has the ability to infect untold naïve minds.  For example, recently, a politician offered an idea to fight rampant crime in her famously violent city of Chicago.  Her brainstorm: ask gangs to only shoot people at night.

In a previous post, I postulated that a school child will tell you that 2 plus 2 equals 4; not so much because they can prove it, but mostly because the teacher told them it was so.  It’s a rather frightening thing to agree to a set of beliefs just because it’s convenient to agree with everyone else.

Source: The Post (2017) – Rotten Tomatoes

Observing the massive conflagration of liberal properties has been entirely amusing of late.  We refer not to the California fires of course, but to the majority of news outlets that purport to offer straight up reportage.

When I first began to make comments on the subtleties of bias that permeated most of the popular media’s offerings of news, those threads of bias were not always obvious.  As the years have passed and with the widening political divide in America, any pretext of objectivity has yielded to full blown whoppers and knee slappers on the part of many heretofore unimpeachable sources.  Like him or not, the election of Donald Trump has poked through the thin veneer of credibility of such outlets as CNN, NBC and ABC, not to mention the more foamy at the mouth MSNBC and the Washington Post.  He has exposed these outlets for their nakedly partisan skews.

It’s not that all of this now properly labeled “fake news” originates from these outlets.  Sometimes, it’s just a matter of reporting on the crackpot utterances of someone famous.  However, the fact that they give voice to the rants of the more logically challenged people of society, mainly ‘celebrities’, makes them complicit in their dissemination of fake news.  Just the other day, Chelsea Handler (who?) expressed that the massive fires in Southern California were somehow orchestrated by Donald Trump.  Of course, that’s preposterous.  We know that only Kim Jong Un can control the weather.

Recent revelations of galling hypocrisy and malfeasance within their own ranks is the most rapturous bit of schadenfreude that could be offered to the rational public, now hopefully awakened to the dangerous tilt that these outlets have all subscribed.  This tilt was recently best depicted by David Frum who recently opined in an interview that:

“…The mistakes are precisely the reason people should trust the media. Astronomers make mistakes all the time because science is a process of discovery of truth. Astrologers never make mistakes or at least they never own up to them because what they are offering is a closed system of ideology and propaganda…”

It hardly gets more Orwellian than that.  By the way, replace the word Astrology with Global Alarmists next time someone brings up that bit of fantasy.

It is therefore all the more galling that an upcoming film depicting the noble activities of the Washington Post will soon be offering their version of moral courage to the unwitting public. More amusingly, Meryl Streep and Tom Hanks, those two pillars of liberal  sanctimony are cast as the sympathetic protagonists.  That would be like a film on how Pravda provides the truth and exposes corruption to the Russian people.  It’s assured that the film will be reasonably successful, if only because of the fan base of the title stars. It will however, compete with that other blockbuster film, also in the fantasy space, only slightly less believable,  the next installment of Star Wars.