Let this sink in

 See how it works yet? Let that sink in. I’ll wait. But you knew that, right? The social media shorthand for “Even though I know nothing about you, I’m confident I know far more than you know… about everything.” is getting tedious, amirite? But seriously, I was once told that if you are under thirty and hold a firm political opinion, that opinion is almost certainly not your own. The polarisation of politics lends itself to this thoughtless accepting of the ‘facts’ belonging to your side of the argument and rejecting all others.

The same laziness occurs with language; it is far easier to simply repeat what others have said than to craft original sentences of your own. We all do it. We do it with headlines, with jokes, with pithy phrases, no matter how ludicrous, to the extent that the dictionary people now contend that literally doesn’t have to mean literally… literally. And superlatives are flung around carelessly, rendering them worthless.

We inhabit a linguistic world of repeated and regurgitated slogans and soundbites, often deployed clumsily and inappropriately, and almost always without considering how it makes us look. It’s as if people now speak in the language of the Super Soaraway Sun’s headline gagsters. Footballers have been mangling the language for years, but some of their gaffes of previous decades now rank as deep philosophical commentary in comparison to what social media has done to our communication. Sick as a parrot. Literally gutted.

Add to that the effortless ability to believe contrary things, just so long as they sound like things we should believe in and you get the idiocracy that is the developed world. Daft ideas, illogical ideologies and plain stupid assertions go unchallenged because they are couched in the language of instaneity. Accept and move on; even better, add your own borrowed understanding – it’s the science, stupid – and pretend to yourself that ‘your’ opinion matters.

You can't both be right.

As a result of all this, threads on social media rapidly descend into simplistic garbage whereby everybody appears to know exactly what the other side is really thinking, and everybody appears to have a quick-fix solution to every problem. Thus it is apparently possible to fix the economy by both spending more while spending less, by contracting the state and by expanding the state, by limiting immigration and by throwing the borders wide open.

I can read Twitter, but I can’t engage with Twitter, which means that, no matter how much my urge to wade in with my two-penn’orth, I have to sit back and just watch the threads play out. And what an education that has proven to be. From the sidelines you really can see the inanity which both sides bring to any discussion. If only I could force myself to exercise such a taciturn position in face-to-face discussions I would seem the wisest man in the room. See how it works, yet?

PS: It seems I can no longer even read Twitter now. 🤷‍♂️

I'm all right Jack

9 photos that prove…

Don’t you get fed up with all those posted links that promise to reveal shocking or funny or sexy ‘facts’ without which your life would have less meaning? Ten scary diseases, funniest photo ‘fails’, the top 10 worst celebrity wedding dresses ever and so ad-infinitum. Or those news stories, reported in social media, via other social media sites, which incorporate the item into their own advertising-riddled, bandwidth-heavy pages. What is wrong with people? It’s a form of Parkinson’s Law in operation; data will expand to fill the bandwidth available. Whatever happened to the Spartan days of the nineties when everybody was trying for optimal download times and Google emerged as the only effective search engine which was clean and tidy and actually delivered what you sought?

Serial offenders tweet and re-tweet the links as if to say “Look at me! I have nothing to say, but look at me anyway!” And until you recognise the ploy you’re tempted by these intriguing links and onto their fancifully ‘moneytised’ sites and then wonder what personal information of yours you divulge as cookies dutifully clog up your system and they earn a few tiny fractions of pennies from the deal. It’s all about me, me, me, because few of the rabid insidious click-baiters seem to ever engage with any other users.

Then you have the other extreme whereby the whole of the new media is there purely for fragile egos to seek support for their whining causes. And there are few whinier causes than the train-wreck that is ‘Dr’ Jack Monroe; forever setting herself up as the victim following the reactions to some ill-judged outburst. Yesterday she set a small part of Twitter alight by tweeting some bollocks about how her five-year old had seen one of the hate-tweets she exists to attract and how she had then had to explain it to said child.

Perfect. Perfect because this then elicited a heap of responses as to why she was exposing her brat to her online hell and this sort of abuse is pretty much the reason she gets out of bed most days. In her warped, entitled, self-centred world everybody else is using her child as some form of punch bag and she seems utterly oblivious to everybody’s genuine outrage that she has, once again, used her child to talk about… Jack Monroe. Sorry, I should say ‘Doctor’ Jack Monroe because she somehow managed to blag an honorary doctorate for services to lesbian victimhood. A pity she didn’t also manage to snag the class not to flaunt it.

We all like a bit of attention but some take the piss. One of the most selfish things you can do is to bring a life into the world without asking yourself if you are suitable parent for that child. So when people have the nerve to express doubt about her very public lack of credentials she gets to have her daily Violet Elizabeth Bott episode until everybody else is sick. In the mind-set of the illiberal left of course, expressing a dissenting opinion is hate speech of the worst kind. Bad parenting is beyond reproach but reproaching bad parenting demands the full attention of the law.

Dr Jack - the world's best parental example...

She continually sets herself up as Aunt Sally and then sets her fellow be-tattooed lesbian attack dogs on those who dare throw missiles her way. As for using her very publicly state-funded fatherless child as a punch bag, what about her constantly using that same child as bait for the psychological self-harm of attracting opprobrium?  More selfish than bringing into the world a child without thought? Bring a life into the world and then use that life to continue making it all about you. That, Jack, is the bit you never seem to understand.