Diatribes 10-12

Diatrtibe 10

How dare they presume to speak for me. I’m not talking about politicians who, even if I did not vote for them, are obligated to be my representative. I’m speaking of an insidious and disgusting creature known as the tabloid press. They, and you I hope, know who they are. They do not reflect public opinion, they create it. If it serves their masters to vilify and demonise certain segments of our society, or even certain activities, then they will blast headlines into the conciousness of the masses and the masses will believe. This is an abuse of the public trust. We the public have been conditioned to believe that what is printed in newspapers is important. Through the tabloid press we are led to believe that things which have no importance should have our attention over and above things which are really important. Frankly I couldn’t care less if Kate Moss takes drugs or Heather Mills was a prostitute. Its really none of my business. This trivia only serves to distract us and feed our desire to be lifted from our mundane little worlds. The issue is not privacy, though these people obviously have as much right to that as anyone, the issue is purely that there are far more pressing matters which we should be concerned with. For instance; where is the mess of legislaton enacted by our government leading us? Should we really be cowering in fear because of the “Terrorist Threat” or should we be standing up and saying en mass “We will not be threatened.”? What are we going to do when the oil runs out? How should we prepare for the worst that climate change is going to do to us? Why are we not yet among the stars?
These small minded journalists seek to blinker us to the important things by confounding us with trivia. No more I say. Destroy their presses, burn the drivel that they produce in a bonfire that will act as a beacon bringing forth a new enlightenment. Let us leave this dark age of ignorance and embrace a future where we are allowed to think.

Diatribe 11

The mob is in control. Our government has become reactive rather tham proactive. It jumps to appease public opinion which is invariably that of the lowest common denominator. They have made a populace which cannot reason for itself and now they reap the whirlwind. The populace has no opinions of its own, they think what the tabloids tell them to simply because they have no idea how to do it for themselves. We are spoon fed rubbish partly in an effort to make sure we don’t realise what a mess we’re in and how fast its getting worse, but mostly because rubbish is all our feeble reasoning can handle. What has diminished the ability of people to think for themselves? It is the fault of many, not least the government with its fanatical pursuit of an economically viable workforce trained to jump through educational hoops rather than think. Exam results are given far too much precedence in our educational system. Just because someone can remember the right things to write in an exam doesn’t make them clever or intelligent it just means that they are good at passing exams. I can not remember any teacher telling me to think about something for myself. We learned by rote form answers which were in no way individual or distinctive. Not once in an exam was I asked “What do you think…?” We should be encouraging our offspring to think independantly of authority, reason is the most powerful tool at our disposal and we have relinquished it for easy answers. There are no easy answers. There are no higher authorities we can appeal to, and we should not seek one out. We should learn to rely on our own faculties and not give up our minds simply because we believe “They know best.” They are just as fallible as we are and are desperately trying to hide that fact from us.

Diatribe 12

People make me sick. Stupid, ignorant, parochial, narrow-minded, and selfish people. They want so much and yet are willing to give up nothing to get it. They want clean, cheap, reliable energy but they dont want the means of generating it built anywhere in sight of them. People balk at having a windfarm built a few miles from them but are quite happy to live next to a nuclear power plant. The stupidity of the mob enrages me. What enrages me more is that fact the the mob is in control. As much as a mob can be said to be in control of anything. It can barely control its own impulses let alone run a country for the good of the majority.