Sunday, July 9, 2023

A foolishness wrapped in ignorance inside illogic and unreason

A bit strident but it is a real issue.  From News stories don't even make sense anymore by David Strom.  

A local paper pushes Climate Change and Indigenous people narratives in a news story in the Sports section.  It is not about whether they have mustered a good evidentiary argument.  The problem is that the architecture of their argument is itself self-contradicting.

The issue is forest fires.

The underlying issue is poor forest management practices which lead to worse forest fires than would be normal. OK, fine. Public policy problem.

But the framing?

“Climate change virtually ensures future fires…”

Uh, what? Without climate change, there would be no forest fires. Is that what they are saying?

Yeah, well, no. Not exactly. Because forest fires are “something Indigenous people survived for eons.”

So forest fires have existed for eons (obviously so)…

In which case WTF does climate change have to do with anything? Absolutely nothing, of course. Not one damn thing.

But climate change has to be in the story because…climate change has to be in the story. In the sports section.

So my local paper writes a story about bad fire management practices in the sports section because the Boundary Waters Canoe Area (BWCA) is used by sportsmen and finds a way to bring in both climate change and Indigenous people–two of their favorite topics–for no apparent reasons.

Most mainstream media stories are like this these days.  Regardless of what the actual story might be, there are layers and layers of interpretation via Woke lenses - women victimhood, systemic racism, indigenous people, systemic inequality due to capitalism, etc. etc.  The story is buried beneath the ideology and the ideology is unmoored from either facts or, as in this example, logic and reason.  

Kind of tedious but it does expedite sorting the intellectual wheat from the chaff.  Those spouting the various mantra might have some cognitive capability that has just been misapplied but they certainly are not worth paying attention to.  They are not serious people trying to solve real problems with real solutions.  

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