Re: The joy of FORTRAN

On 20/10/2024 20:04, Peter Flass wrote:

That may be true, but often their thinking is informed by a collection of
unhinged conspiracy theories. Their thinking may be logical, following from
that, but they seem incapable of separating truth from fantasy.

The problem is that once you catch your government lying to you on one thing you know a lot about,  it becomes easy to assume they are lying to you about everything else.
Why for example might you believe that that oh - people really landed on the moon - when every Hollyood scifi movie has people landing on other planets that look a lot more convincing.
And your government told you that none of them ever took bribes. No sirreee bob!
The only difference between conspiracy theories that you believe, and ones that you don't, is that the former fit with your innate prejudice and the latter do not.
Plus the Bandar Log-ic of 'we all say it, so it must be true'
If you look deeply into the philosophy of inductive logic, it is simply not possible to disprove or prove many things that are apparently manifestly true, like saying 'the sun will rise tomorrow'
Just because it always has in the past.
Conspiracy theories are only unhinged from a personal perspective, so for example some dude in Utah gets told the North Koreans are attacking Ukraine and says 'who? So what? Not my problem? Probably not even true'
Which from his limited perspective is a perfectly reasonable position.
Just as the Islamic fundamentalist in the middle east gets told 'The Americans bomb us for no reason', believes it and you have 911.
Which is then spun into controlled demolition by the CIA to excuse  a war in Iraq, of all places, which had nothing to do with it.
My point is that its pretty much all a tissue of lies propaganda, ignorance, incompetence and so on.  And as the Left has been saying 'reality is a social construct' for years it now comes back to bite them, as the Right says 'well here's OUR social construct and shove it up your Blue liberal asses'
Which is why the Lefts insistence on moving politics away from pragmatism towards moralism is so fucking dangerous. As is their spinning of every single thing into an extreme point of view. The Left feels *morally justified* in what they do, and there is nothing more dangerous than that. Ask any Jihadist. Do you think 911 was 'morally justified' and the answer will be 'hell yeah!'
You cant argue with facts, but you can argue all day over right and wrong and fair and unfair.
--
WOKE is an acronym... Without Originality, Knowledge or Education.