I like to question things and not take everything at face value
Please maintain that cautious selectivity. Seriously. It is
the fundamental Fortean characteristic.
I've a long way to go before I get to Ermintruder-level
My pile of questions grows higher every day, and I rarely find absolute answers to anything. But realising that there
are questions in the first place, that do require answers, is sometimes the most-important part of the puzzle.
Be very-careful about opening the Pandora's Box of permanent doubter, though. It become almost a form of extended atheism....(I suppose that might almost be nameable as antitheorism, a active disbelief in beliefs, and a step beyond mere atheorism).
what is your take on Musk/Zuckerberg/Snowden/Trump et al?
Well- as I said, I (and, I believe, all of us mere humans) can and should...
detect first. Distinguish differentials. Try to decide. Then, ideally define. And if I can't define, or decide, I continue detecting
We should all be sensitive to anomalies of represention, in this information age of disinformation, where baselines are not nearly as fixed as many of us trust them to be.
Consider a scenario. You are indoors, and you hear what sounds like a massive crash outside. Someone comes in and tells you, they think there must've been a crash, but they're not sure exactly what's happened, because of the crowd/cordon/smoke. It's mundane, in a sense, because it happened close to you, almost in your back yard.
Later, you see news video footage on tv, and pictures in the late papers (by this I really mean you see on your tablet a couple of online newsclips, and a few popup pictures on Facebook). Hey, that's your street. You make that familiarity fit, the territorial ownership of recognition and personal contextualisation take immediate control.
Ok, it is so sad that the King of the World was killed in a road accident just outside your house, today. And tomorrow, there will be a new king crowned.
And then those pictures. Of places, or even faces that are as familiar as the back of your own hand. Wait...do you
remember that Bus Stop sign, there, over by the junction? You look out the window, there is no Bus Stop sign, and there never was....or was there?
Artificial (or tactically-amended) depictions of actual realities, or artificial representations of mundane apparent realities, are
still artificial.
Where the agendas are clear, and the coronation:assassination cycles are obvious (or at least conceivable) then an arc of intent may be inferred...at least within the confines of a shared plane of narrative continuity (societal/historical/whatever).
It is simply not acceptable for anyone in the world, today, to hide behind the ramparts of
cui bono incredulity or apply the weak counter-case of proportionate improbabilities. Nor is it any defence to deflect and deny via the application of group-learnt lables ('conspiracy theorist' being one of the most over-used tar-brushes of all).
We as Forteans owe it to ourselves (and our slumbering fellow citizens) to alway see when we are looking, and actually listen when we are hearing.
Mods: I apologise for having taken this Elon Musk thread somewhat off-topic.
But I make no apologies for continuing to identify that there is an
undeniable similarity of unreality in much of what is presented to us, via various media channels, as being real. And it is (to me) frequently a bigger puzzle as to why certain depictions of reality are so
overtly false, rather than that committed action itself (ie the 'how so?' outweighs or equals the 'why so?')
Oh, I think there are
many somethings else...I stress, I'm not even sure that there
are answers. But there are many valid questions.