Never be a spectator of unfairness or stupidity

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June 23, 2017 – Seems to be the storyline of my life at the moment…..

I loved Christopher Hitchens’ writings and the way he looked at the world.

I also love Etsy, and there is an Etsy shop that I have purchased a few handmade pieces of jewellery from. So I recently contacted the artist and asked if she would make me a custom silk wrap bracelet with this quote on it. It arrived a few days ago and I love it.

And it seems appropriate to wear of late.

So much stupidity in the world these days. We are a society with so much amazing information available to us, and yet the population seems to be getting stupider and stupider. We ignore the rational and accept the irrational, usually because the irrational often ives better with our own cognitive biases.

Christopher Hitchens was a brilliant writer. I have several of his books and a few years ago I have to admit that I took perverse deilight in reading “God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything” on the airplane to Mexic. The cover is bright yellow and the title is boldly emblazoned across it. Nothing like advertising your view of the world blatantly while demonstrating the power of science high above the world in an airplane streaking across countries spread out below.

Christopher Hitchens makes the ultimate case against religion. With a close and erudite reading of the major religious texts, he documents the ways in which religion is a man-made wish, a cause of dangerous sexual repression, and a distortion of our origins in the cosmos. With eloquent clarity, Hitchens frames the argument for a more secular life based on science and reason, in which hell is replaced by the Hubble Telescope’s awesome view of the universe, and Moses and the burning bush give way to the beauty and symmetry of the double helix.

It’s an excellent read.

It also dovetails in with what I am currently reading: “No News is Bad News: Canada’s Media Collapse and What Comes Next” by Ian Gill.

It used to be that you could rely on journalists to bring you real news. Now we eschew newspapers in favour of the internet, and we do so at our intellectual peril. We say “Pah, I can get my news for free on the internet”, but at what cost? Bloggers are respected more than real journalists. And, as a result, we are fed a diet filled with pablum and conspiracty theories that barely frame stories in reality.

And we lap that shit up!

Just look at how many people think Gwyneth Paltrow has their best interests at heart and think she can offer them more intelligent advice than their doctor can.

Look at how many people think Food Babe offers moe sound information than nutritional scientists. People hang on the musings Food Babe and consider the writings in highly respected journals the likes of Science or Nature to be false offerings from covert governments trying to control their lives.

Writing is terrible, spelling and grammatical errors abound, and the journalistic grasp of factual writing has slipped away in the need to sensationalize information in as few characters as possible because we are rapidly becoming a society that doesn’t want to bother reading anything more Than a few sentences. We are increasingly reading to know what is going on, but not to actually understand it. That takes too much effort.

And as a result more newspapers face losing battles to stay afloat, more excellent journalists with decorated careers are losing their jobs, and we continue to become less and less knowledgable about what’s going on in the world while we think we are becoming more and more informed.

I find that I am becoming increasingly intolerant of unfairness, stupidity, ignorance, and blind acceptance.

Question everything, but put in some quality effort to learn how to differentiate between quality information and what you “want” to believe. Suspend your need to find evidence to prove your point and explore the other side of any issue.

Read at least one thing every day that completely opposes your personal opinions on a topic. But more than that, read it and ask yourself why this point of view could be right and yours wrong? Don’t outright dismiss alternate opinions if you haven’t made the effort to understand them and why they could be right.

Stop believing so much “woo”. And maybe, just maybe, your brain will start to work as a critical thinking machine.

Maybe.

In the meantime, here are some birds riding bicycles….but that’s another story……

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