One of the things that’s always interested me is how people can sometimes use a perfectly reasonable line of argument and then suddenly leap to: “And therefore, you must agree with me on the next fifty points because otherwise you’re just not being reasonable!”
For example, I remember reading a book put out by a religious organisation… I have a tendency to read most things before I totally dismiss them. I know, I know, I should be like the people on social media who read the headline and then immediately start attacking the article because they already know that there’s no other possibility than what they already believe and that there’s certainly no possibility that the headline could be misleading. Anyway, the book made some perfectly reasonable points about the inconsistencies of certain Christian churches when it came to the Bible and how they were just ignoring the bits that they didn’t like. Then suddenly they’d jump from that to: And therefore our church is correct about everything because the others are wrong!”
Conspiracy theories work like that too. I mean if you start from the premises that politicians lie and that you can’t trust the media, you’re starting on pretty solid ground. The trouble with conspiracy theorists is that they overlook the fact that politicians don’t lie about everything and occasionally even mainstream media is accurate. The challenge for the sane people is maintaining a healthy cynicism while not chasing Alice down the rabbit-hole.
Over the past few years, we’ve had conspiracy theories about all aspects of the Covid pandemic. Of course, one of the major problems with dealing with a conspiracy theory is that the lack of evidence is often further proof of how they are stifling all the evidence. it’s possible to derail all possibility of agreement by asking a group of conspiracists to define who they is. (No, it shouldn’t be “who they are” because they in this case is a singular group acting in concert.)
When people talk about taking the blue pill or the red pill and either go on living in a fantasy or waking up to reality, I can’t help but wonder if they get the irony that they’re in fact using a metaphor that comes from a film that was a work of fiction… at least I think it was. Perhaps I’ve taken the wrong pill…
The trouble with so much of the Covid stuff is that it’s possible to find statistics to back up any theory you want to advance. For example, I’m pretty sure that you’d find that more vaccinated people died in a car crash in the past six months. Mainly because over ninety percent of the population has been vaccinated. Similarly, you’d probably find that more vaccinated people contracted an STI or won the lottery. There is not necessarily a correlation but if you want to go around looking, you’ll find something that matches your confirmation bias.
So putting all the confirmation bias aside, I was intrigued to read something accurate from Cory Bernardi. He pointed out that, when it comes to climate change, we shouldn’t be saying that the science is settled because science is the contest of ideas and it’s a matter of challenging them and building knowledge through these challenges. So far so good. The problem with this is that the same people who say that then turn around and say, “So this is why I’m right and we shouldn’t trust the scientists and there’s no such thing as climate change and the climate is always changing and besides CO2 is good for us.” It’s sort of like when climate deniers attack Greta Thunberg because she has no expertise after years of listening to Alan Jones.
Which brings me to Peter Dutton and the Liberal Party who aren’t opposed to the Voice they just have some questions. They want more detail. Ok, there’s several hundred pages of detail but that’s too much detail for busy people like them to read. They just want enough detail that they can find something to ask about and say that there isn’t enough detail on this particularly point so could we focus on this until there’s so much detail that people get sick of it and we move onto something more interesting like “The Bachelor”…
It would be wrong to suggest that the Liberal Party is racist. Ok, they’re being led by Peter Dutton who did walk out on the Apology, but he acknowledged that he shouldn’t have done that because people keep bringing it up and he has to argue that it’s only the African gangs who are calling him racist. And it was the Liberal Party who argued that the Apology wouldn’t solve the practical issues and wouldn’t help to close the gap and that practical solutions like sending in the Army is the way to improve the lives of the ordinary Indigenous man and by helping men you’re also helping women so don’t you dare say that we’re sexist.
Obviously when you see that the Liberals opposed the Apology and now are questioning the Voice to Parliament on the grounds that they would do nothing to actually improve things and that they’re largely hollow gestures, you have to ask why the Coalition haven’t done a lot more about improve things.
To be fair, the Coalition has only been in power for twenty of the past twenty-six years.
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