By G Murphy Donovan
It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so. – Mark Twain
I don’t understand the rap against X (nee Twitter) for “controversy,” or “misinformation,” for that matter. X is platform that was created for “opinions” about so-called “news” or so-called “facts.” Opinions may be wrong but they are still facts.
An opinion is just another fact.
Calling some Mountain View or Cupertino nerd a “fact checker” is hogwash. Everybody brings a point of view to the dinner table – and to the marketplace of ideas.
Truth is always a philosophical question anyway.
That’s where Marx went astray. “Objective” fact may be a goal, but it is not a final destination. Immutable reality or static worlds are chimeras or fantasies.
Pie in the sky is the real lie.
Elon Musk understands this well, even though his censorious free speech poseurs do not. Methinks it’s why he bought Twitter. Before Musk, Twitter was just another Left Coast platform cooking woke books. No one, especially dot.com mandarins like Gates or Zuckerberg, have a monopoly on facts, no less truth.
Truth is what folks believe; a variable not a constant.
Engines like Google manage and curate our “truths.” Mountain View is like the doctor that only gives you the bad news when you are tottering on the abyss. Indeed, Google only allows us to see what it wants us to see. Given the “fact” that Google controls the vast majority of the search market, Google is a very big dog among global thought police.
Search results are weighted towards legacy sources; indeed a “fact” which probably explains both legacy demise and the massive confidence and credibility gaps at political cloisters like BBC, PBS, and the New York Times.
It’s no accident either that all those media mandarins seem to be on the same page.
Nevertheless, there’s nothing more personal than what we believe or accept as fact. The purpose of all debate and science is to challenge those facts, find a better understanding. When my opinion and your “truth” lock horns, that’s the real world doing what it should; finding another or better, albeit, ephemeral, truth.
Not only does every night present a new world, but if we keep our heads out of our arses, every dawn might bring a better world too. All sensible folks know, Musk included, that we all “see through a glass darkly.” It’s how we learn. It’s why we change. It’s how we evolve.
Indeed, truths, if we can use a floral analogy, are ironic and ambiguous annuals, not perennials.
And like a blind man, truth always wears shades.
G Murphy Donovan writes about the politics of Intelligence and national security.
