I also fear we may be heading for some sort of crisis because the systems that keep the world functioning are getting ever more complex, while the people who operate them are becoming generally less competent and diligent. Obviously, anecdote isn't evidence, but I for one have stopped asking more than one or two questions in an email because the majority of the time, the person I'm writing to (often a highly qualified professional) will simply forget to answer the 3rd and 4th questions onwards. I suspect this is due to information overload and too many diversions, so while they are responding to my email they're also breaking off to have a look at WhatsApp messages, another email, Instagram, Twitter, a Ducati forum..... In depth conversations are becoming a thing of the past because everyone is always glancing at their phone, meaning that you have to say your piece quickly before they get too distracted. People also flit between roles and jobs on a much more frequent basis as the related concepts of job security and loyalty to an organisation are now effectively non-existent. IIRC, the average length of time between changes of employer is something like 18 months, and as it takes (I reckon) about 3 months to properly learn a new role and when someone is looking to move on they're not firing on all cylinders, that means a third of the workforce is either finding their way or coasting in neutral. In addition, people seem to be maturing at a slower rate in the crucial years between their teens and mid/late twenties and they end up existing in a sort of suspended adolescence until their early thirties. TLDR: Idiocracy has turned out to be a documentary rather than a satire......
Have to love how anyone who doesn’t toe the line is considered a brainless moron. Yet amazing how many times govt and industry have been proven to lie and manipulate the populous. Remember, smoking isn’t harmful. Painkillers aren’t addictive. Covid jabs stop spread of disease and are safe for all.
If Covid taught us anything it's that IQ/inelegance has no bearing on how different people can be convinced of a thing. Wasn't there an experiment sometime ago re. hypnosis? I can't recall the exact numbers, 40% will go under straight away. 40% take a bit more effort, but will go. 20% simple will not. Critical thinking is dead or dying. One doesn't want to become a cellar drewelling tin hatter, but it doesn't hurt to be circumspect about what one is told, certainly by MSM.
Unfortunately being circumspect about the things that are important to be circumspect about doesn't make good copy in the aforementioned (online) MSM.
I also believe it goes back to our ancient tribal/survival instincts. Most would rather be wrong and remain in favour with the tribe than stand against the tribe and risk isolation and banishment .
Totally, Germany comes to mind (not going any further on this though!). Everyone loves a quick, decisive person, who knows exactly just what they are doing, particularly a male maybe..
Whoa! Zhed – loads of interesting discussion points raised there…. Tell me about concentration spans. I am a pre internet guy but still find myself flitting from one task to another. Although, now in retirement, I endeavour to take my time on each task and give it the respect it deserves. I’m even starting to do cryptic crosswords again… do such things even exist online? It’s not so much the paucity of personal knowledge that is disheartening but rather the paucity of desire to want to be knowledgeable. Especially with sciences/technical topics where the inability to grasp seemingly simple concepts is seen as a badge of honour but not knowing who some turkey toothed false boobed ghastly personality is, is laughed at. The media over egging itself I fear. Maturing at a slower rate is summat I reckon that comes from being continually indulged starting at an early age. Marketing & sales love this because if you can get someone to behave like a child they will spend & buy tons of crap like a child. My professional life before retirement was as a software test engineer and in the latter years I was testing a network optimisation application that utilised AI. It was a very crude early version of AI compared with today’s stuff but roughly the same principles applied. A massive database of information & an algorithm(s) that guided the path through it but it was still ‘number crunching’ just done at such speed on such large quantities of data that I always preferred to call it “Appearance of Intelligence”. (Btw it is always said crims & porn utilise new technology first....) So add quantum computing to AI along with these prevailing mindsets and it is difficult to not foresee anything other than a dystopian future. No doubt we will get it the wrong way round again and let the machines do the work & the humans do the checking which is exactly what each are worst at doing. Gawd… that was more than a little downbeat so I’m gonna wheel the Darmah out, tickle his carbs, fire him up and take him out for a 1970s biff…. Ha!
As opposed to a vague, inconsistent, unreliable, woolly-minded person who never keeps their promises. Sure.
I imagine that when humans lived in tribes/clans and survival often hinged on collective action and uniformity of belief, non-conformists represented a genuine existential threat to the group. Although the structure of society has changed a lot in the past few thousand years, our psychological make up, formed by hundreds of thousands of years of evolutionary pressure, has not caught up yet. People are being infantilised. In the media, men in particular are routinely presented as hapless, helpless overgrown children, while marriage and family life is something to aspire to only in your mid-30s or 40s, with your 20s and early 30s being a period of irresponsibility to be spent partying, travelling and collecting experiences. You only need to look at the number of adults playing games like Candy Crush and Angry Birds on their phones, or the sat nav app Waze, where the icons look like something from a Mario Kart game and in an earlier version, you could collect candy or coins as rewards for completing tasks such as reporting roadworks, or the tone of voice adopted by the narrators of ads which is more appropriate for a nursery school teacher speaking to a group of 4 year olds. Another example of this trend was the Scottish Police's "Hate Monster" advert, which looked like something you would have seen on Sesame Street in the 80s, but these days is what passes for legal guidance for grown men (and it was clearly men, and only men, it was aimed at). And don't get me started on those Tik Tok videos where ADULTS are lip syncing to a song or a piece of film dialogue. Tbh, I'm convinced Tik Tok is a means by which the Chinese intelligence services intend to render the West so incapable of defending itself that they don't need to wage a war of conquest and they can just walk in and take over while we're all obsessing over the latest dance craze/challenge or arguing about pronouns. And yes, I do I realise that makes me sound like a retired colonel writing an indignant letter to the editor of The Telegraph.....
Men constantly being depicted as useless/brutish idiots, and it's only a woman to the rescue (Homer Simpson style) is now systemic in TV and film. The strong male role model hero of old is all but extinct. As for Tic Tok...Pleasure is a weapon.
To make it worse people seem to like & want to be infantilised - back packs on 30 year old men in suits like kids going to school no doubt after eating a bowl of Coco Pops for breakfast.... wtf is that all about? As for Tik Tok the only place you can't access TikTok is... yes you've guessed it in, the mass surveillance capitol of the world, China. They have their own version, Douyin, which in addition to time & age limiting users also collects a lot more personal information like the MAC address of devices. It can also perform silent background updates And yet people still buy tons of crap via apps from AliExpress, Shein & Alibaba etc... well it's cheap init? Hmmm... so is the powerful new computing technology best left to the market place or the government to utilise or control?
China is playing very long term game, as their government is not changed every few years. So whatever plans they come up with, don't need fulfilling before new set of politicians come along, and change their vision to the complete oposite. Their surveilance is unreal. Cashless society. Everything is payed by an app. They will eventually roll over the world, no doubt. All the companies investing into 'their own' factories over there, just handing over their know how, and machinery willingly. The only thing keeping them at bay for now is the united states, as they are still few steps ahead of them on the technology front for warfare. Should China ever get hold of Thaiwan, and TSMC, they would have the most advanced hardware chips to make. There would be the point where USA would start loosing the advantage. God know what will come next. Sorry few donkey bridges away from the original moon, but hey
I recently watched an interview on youtube where Chris Williamson interviewed this chap, which led me to his other essays. The one linked below covers TicTok as well as an insight into Wang Huning's tour of the USA. Worth your time reading IMO. https://www.gurwinder.blog/p/tiktok-may-be-a-chinese-bio-weapon Sun Tzu had it sussed over two thousand years ago.
The guy who wrote that article must be reading my WhatsApps, as I’d also made the connection in a message I sent to my brother that Tik Tok might be the modern day version of how Britain debilitated 19th Century China by flooding it with opium. I also agree with his hypothesis (and have previously said so on here) that social media is being used by hostile state actors to sow discord and division in our societies in order to weaken us from within. Hence, all the platforms are toxic sewers of never ending vicious invective - progressives against conservatives, blacks against whites, women against men, young against old - day in day out. The result - a real risk of civil war in the US, deteriorating race relations, plummeting birth rates and intergenerational disharmony. We’d always thought it would be thermonuclear war or a giant asteroid that would end western civilisation. Turns out all it took was fitting video cameras to mobile phones…..
Yep.... and they haven't always played by the rules. In my field, telecomms, & I quote "In 2001 Nortel identified knockoff products circulating in the Chinese market, where they did not compete." Malware was discovered in their systems traced back to Chinese IP addresses none of which, of course, are related to the rise of Huawei or ZTE in the telecomms market.... I read an article recently on Chinese students in western institutions who maybe critical of the Chinese government being harassed & intimidated with their mainland based relatives being targeted. https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/n...ance-in-campaign-of-transnational-repression/ And yet we, that's we as consumers not we as the 'west', still continue to buy pretty much everything from China... well it's cheap init. They are pretty much on the cusp of drowning the electric car market with products. All this may well be a few donkey bridges from the original moon bull but this isn't bull and it is happening now right in front of our noses.
There’s also the fentanyl crisis in the US, where (allegedly) the Chinese are supplying the chemicals to the Mexican cartels to manufacture the product.
