What a week! A tragic comedy of events and a deluge of emotions. The demise of the OceanGate built Submarine, in such a violent and sudden way, the shock, the horror! Also, the true tragedy of the unsuspecting and innocent passengers lost to an ideological dream.
Well, the bank came to cash the check, and evidently choosing the people that you work with should be based on merit (obviously). I was in the unsuspecting position that hiring based on merit was simple common sense. Sure, there are always cases of nepotism and situations where friends are doing friends favors, but for the most part, people who aren't up to snuff work pretty hard to get there quickly, and they certainly aren't engineering vehicles to explore a deadly, hostile environment that is more dangerous by an order of magnitude than outer space.
It amazes me when I stand back and remove myself from the information river to see how much inversion and perversion has taken place in the public perception. I must be careful to remember that what the media portrays as the new way of thinking, or the way to think, is not what people in our societies are actually thinking, even though it seems that it is a majority position. The authority of television and newscasters has been meticulously crafted and molded into a source of information that we very much see as the authority, which, remember, was by design for all intents and purposes.
However, the advent of the internet and the democratization of media creation have created a new, more interactive, and accessible reality.
The Shift in Public Perception and the Authority of Media
You could say cracks are showing in the foundations of the monolithic news-prevailing institutions. You could also say they are experiencing a Richter 9 earthquake and about to be glassed by a nuke simultaneously. They lied about Iraq, they lied about 9/11. It's unfortunate Greta's prediction didn't come true two days ago, which marks the five-year end-of-the-world prediction she gave five years ago... I guess she was lying too. Of course, these people will never admit to lying and will instead claim she was just a kid or she didn't have all the information or basically any and all excuses except for blatant lies.
Was anyone slightly less than well-behaved in grade school? Well, I admit I was. When I was in the third grade, I found a way that I could help myself to the janitor's secret stash of tennis balls. He had a milk crate full of excellent quality tennis balls that had become what we used to call "roofers" in the janitor's secret toolroom office space. I figured out how to pick the lock using a card and help myself to the tennis balls, which brought me to great heights of third-grade society briefly, and I also used it as a hiding spot in some of the most epic games of manhunt we ever had. No one thought to go into out-of-bounds areas to win the game.
Then I got caught. In the act.
I was summarily sent to the principal's office to begin the interrogation and sentencing. I simply didn't realize I wasn't allowed in there; there was no sign indicating I wasn't allowed in there. I was very careful not to disclose that I had learned how to get past the locked door, and I didn't actually see any harm in reviving our once lost beloved tennis balls and returning them to the playground games.
The liability the school faced of me somehow cutting my own head off with the janitor's wood saw was lost on me. High-pressure, high-temperature pipes were in there, possibly flammables, all kinds of chemicals for making bombs, expensive things that kids probably, on the whole, should not play with, which I, of course, had much experience with by that time. But I mean, why would I be liable for, frankly, four fingers the special kid?
I knew I was in trouble, and that they probably wouldn't share my all-access pass sensibilities, so I pleaded that I simply was a dumb kid who saw tennis balls and thought I could use them without asking. I was very apologetic and might have even mustered some crocodile tears to add to the performance. Of course, they figured that they had traumatized me enough and let me off with a warning, which I ignored for a crime that I continued to commit.
I was talking with my father about it when I was still young and the tennis ball operation was well underway. You could say a fledgling cartel. He explained to me that the janitor could lose his job, and he wouldn't be able to feed his family if I kept going in there and picking the lock. He also explained that other kids could see what I was doing and copy me, and if they weren't very bright, they could cause a lot of damage or get injured or steal something. That was a lot more likely and, again, would result in the janitor getting in some serious trouble. It was only when he expressed the true potential consequences of my actions and the possible damage they could cause.
The benign yet somewhat devious scheme I had going, which was acquiring and trading tennis balls, I now saw as not really worth it anymore. If only the principal had cared to explain the true liability of the situation to me, rather than simply flexing the authoritarian model of "do what I say or else," I may have ceased doing what I was doing sooner.
I don't think big media has a father like that anymore. Anyways, the point of all that was to distract you from this:
Read the papers on our telegram channel here, tell me what you think is going on here…
Article Written by Sean Allman
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