I’m having a day off from everything today. Well… I say everything, but I’ve filled the washing machine three times. Who knew that chores are a great excuse to avoid getting on with other things?
I’m half expecting somebody to notice the title of the post, and write an acerbic email about J K Rowling without reading far enough to find out the post isn’t about Harry Potter. Maybe I’ll attach a picture of Hogwarts to tip them over the edge. It’s almost like an angry minority spend the greater part of their free time searching for opportunities to vent their fury.
I’ve always found it interesting - how the “social internet” seems to amplify minorities, rather than sizeable majorities - about all sorts of things. It seems the louder you shout, and the less you appreciate any view or opinion other than your own, the more your nonsensical rants become amplified.
People with an axe to grind preach to their favourite echo chambers online, and the rest of us have to put up with their noise as we might a noisy neighbour - mostly because we’re busy getting on with our own lives. That doesn’t mean anybody in particular is right or wrong - or that we should take more notice of this or that happening - it’s just that we all have our own battles - our own challenges.
I can’t fight everybody’s battles.
Now and again something happens, and I can’t help noticing how it re-factors what is seen as important. Mass starvation, civil war, or the rise of a dictatorship tend to re-calibrate the news cycles - rather than circular arguments about the importance of using the correct pronoun.
Anyway.
How on earth did I get from listening to tunes and hanging washing out to tip-toeing around the edge of gender politics and hate speech?
I guess it’s difficult to ignore the news at the moment - especially when so many friends are affected by their own friends and relatives “fucking around and finding out” at the ballot box - or things not turning out the way they might have wished, and spending the next few years spouting anger and bile at anybody that will listen.
It’s happening everywhere - not just in the US - where the most vocal presume the rest of the room is on their side while standing atop self-made soap-boxes spouting poorly informed nonsensical rubbish.
Maybe artificial intelligence could not only check spelling and grammar, but also estimate how much anybody might care about what’s being written? That it would refuse to publish this blog post is not lost on me.