Memories of the 28th Century
Is the World Getting Stranger?
by , 11-06-2014 at 09:28 AM (1756 Views)
There’s strange **** coming down in Babylon.
It’s hard to tell, but it seems that the news has been stranger this year than in any other time in the last few centuries, but I can’t be sure about that. It is possible that I have just noticed strange news stories more than in earlier, and it is also possible that reporters are reporting stranger things. Consider international news.
Around the end of last year it looked like there would be fewer wars for a while, but I was disappointed. The first real strangeness of the year may have been the video of Russian military whipping an all-female political theatre group, Pussy Riot, in Sochi during the Winter Olympics. I should have found that to be an omen of things to come. If Russian men whip women, then who knows what else they might do. In February the Ukrainian government collapsed, which was unexpected for a place like Ukraine, but there had been some verbal battling about whether they would be a European country or another piece of Russia. That is a battle that has been going on since the Mongols invaded in the thirteenth century, and it isn’t over yet. Russia annexed Crimea, which wasn’t messy; although it did show poor judgment on the part of Putin. But then the Eastern Ukraine rebelled. That was insane, but that’s still going on, and Putin is still supporting that, which makes a strong comment about him.
With going on in Europe, ISIS, which had seemed to be just another piece of al-Qaeda, started moving and trying to conquer Iraq. They moved fast, but it appears that ISIS is simply too small to do what they are trying to do. The biggest thing they had in their favor was the ongoing rebellion in Syria and weakness of the central government in Iraq. Both left power vacuums into which ISIS is still trying to step. We probably won't get all of the details for several years, but there seems to be something of comic opera about that organization. They claim to be Muslim but act contrary to the tenets of Islam. I have gotten the impression that there are large numbers of Chechens and others from unhappy places; if that is so, then it might explain some of the oddities.
One of the oddest things about ISIS (or whatever they are this week) is their custom of beheading people. And even odder is the reaction that Western people seem to have to this. Beheading is not all that painful, unless someone takes half an hour to do the job, but a simple cut through the throat and breaking the neck and cutting through that would barely be felt by the victim, because he would lose consciousness when blood pressure on the brain plummeted. Regardless of that, the people fighting against ISIS are making a mess of it, and they refuse to cooperate with others fighting ISIS. And the Western governments still refuse to settle the situation in Syria, so that the Syrian army could make hash of ISIS, and after these years of fighting all those rebels, hash is what they would make.
Then there is this outbreak of Ebola. All of the earlier outbreaks have been contained with a few hundred cases, but this time that have been thousands of cases and thousands of deaths. It almost looks like it will spread through more countries, or did look that way, but now it appears to be settling down. Next time the disease may move faster.
I wonder whether things are being reported differently. For example, have there really been more murders of women, or have they been more widely reported? I get the feeling that the latter is the case. Reporters report what they think they understand, and murders are more interesting than factory closings. I have seen the actual statistics regarding school shootings, and there really were more in the 19th century than there have been in recent decades, but they used to be local issues. Controversy sells papers used to be a saying among newspaper people, and I expect that they have just changed it to reflect that the readers are looking online, rather than buying a newspaper.
On the other hand, maybe there hasn't been good news. I made the mistake of sending a message to Obama, so now I'm on the White House's email list. If that had happened a few decades ago, then I would have gotten some news, but all I have gotten have been poorly written campaign handouts, and he isn't even running. I ascribe that to Obama having incompetents on his staff, which would help to explain the poor policy that this administration has gotten into.
As a whole, it's almost as if the collective intelligence of humanity has dropped by twenty-five percent. There's also the problem that logic is not taught in schools, or even in college; that has resulted in plenty of decisions being based on opinions without a shred of evidence to back it up. The Climate Change thing is the most extreme example of a lack of intellectual capacity, but the policy in the Middle East also shows a great lack of intelligent analysis of the facts to determine what course of action would be most advantageous.
There is another possibility that I didn't want to bring up now but will. Much that passes as news is actually hoax, fiction written as a joke, hoaxes, made up for humor or to keep the unemployed amused, and lead them to think that there are other people who are trying to help them, so they don't need to riot,
There is only one cure for the problem. Alas, it is unlikely that I will be appointed emperor in the immediate future.
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