The Daily Offload #6

Well, maybe not daily. More like, when I am inspired and have a bit of time.

Priorities, priorities. As I looked over Twitter this morning with more than mild distaste, it occurred to me that I was sick of all the sheer insanity, at least in my feed, much of it emanating from Europe:

• The Paris 2024 closing ceremony seemed rather satanic (like the opening ceremony) and bonkers in any case.
• There are many stories of people sick and tired of all the unregulated, nay, encouraged and out-of-control illegal immigration in the U.K., and the failure to do basic policing (Pat Condell’s commentary here is pure gold); it seems that if you complain too much, in a way that can be interpreted as “racist,” then you’re much more likely to be arrested than an illegal immigrant actually committing a serious crime.
• The problem is also with the U.K. judiciary, of course. As one tweep puts it, “Almost every judge I’ve identified as being involved in the rapid prosecution and incarceration of individuals who participated in the Southport riots has a history of letting convicted pedophiles walk free with no jail time.”
• Pointless debate about whether the crowd meeting Kamala Harris’s airplane, in a photo, was enhanced (or created) by AI. I mean, who cares?
• “X” has changed its algorithm lately, with a lot of messages from people I disagree with. This might be OK if they weren’t so insufferable and stupid.

Etc. When the problem isn’t pure evil or extreme idiocy, it’s unwitting promotion thereof—which, I participate in (I promoted that satanic closing ceremony too). Over the years, I have often felt like saying, “A pox on all your houses, I wash my hands of all of this!” Now matters are even more difficult because we know how much competing propaganda operations seek to twist everything for their own purposes.

The bottom line, however, is that we would do well to remember that some things are a lot more important than other things. Protecting freedom of speech is absolutely paramount: doing that is time well spent. Revealing the constant involvement of the Establishment in the occult, as icky as it is, is sadly necessary; let’s just say that we have so many questions, and we must get them all answered. The notion that power is wielded in secret, and that some very powerful people are controlled by blackmailers, is also something that should be pointed out whenever it comes up. But there are a lot of distractions we would best not spend so much time on.

An argument for education. I said the following to my boys yesterday: “You will never stop learning throughout your life. This is because, however you feel now, there will come a time when you will really, really want to understand the world; all interesting and intelligent people want to. The people who get a relatively early start, getting a good education while they’re young, tend not only to understand the world better, they also tend to get better jobs. So you should read lots of books and get serious about your studies now, not later. If you don’t, then later, you will kick yourself that you did not learn more when you had the freedom to do it full time.”

On reading “boring” books. I might go on to my sons (and anyone else who needs to hear this): If you avoid reading books because they’re “boring” you doom yourself to being undereducated and, ironically, kinda boring. But let me clarify. I don’t mean to say you’d be boring if you don’t read any books at all. That’s probably the case. I meant to say you’d be kinda boring if you avoided books you deem to be “boring” just because they’re “boring.” Diving into difficult, challenging material is essential to getting truly educated, to stretching your mind, to learning new perspectives deeply, to having a mature and well-grounded perspective on almost anything. Besides, “boring” and difficult classics (if you’re ready for them) frequently turn out to be really interesting by the time you’ve finished them. Not “entertaining,” perhaps, but profound, fascinating, important, enlightening, or edifying. My point is that as lot of people seem to expect everything to be entertaining, but some of the most worthwhile things are not “entertaining,” per se, at all.

LarrySanger.org is a free speech zone…for smart people. I mean, I’m free to say whatever the heck I want, but commenters are not. They (a) must be reasonably intelligent, (b) must not come across as drunk or on drugs, and (c) must not insult me and my friends (I’m too old to put up with such game-playing; I did that quite enough in my Wikipedia days). All that said, I will gladly post intelligent responses that strongly and even pointedly disagree with me.