The other day I wrote a post about how much we rely on the media for information, and how it might be easy for them to fake a pandemic like this. I was very careful to try to make it clear that I wasn't talking about this pandemic though. It's not that I necessarily think this pandemic is fake. But if I were to be fully truthful, there's no real way to know.
As Rene Descarte said:
"I think therefore I am."
All of reality is questionable really, except for our existence in some form, since we think. Though it is possible that we aren't actually even thinking. We could be a digital book of source, being read from a database somewhere, our entire reality just a story.
We could have all been scooped up years ago and put into a simulation and not know it.
Do I actually think this? No. Do I think it's a possibility? Yes, however remote of a possibility it may be. Maybe something in the order of 0.01% or something. Which actually is pretty high. Would definitely explain some of the weirdness in our reality, if we were in some kind of simulation.
I think the chances of us being in a simulation is probably higher than that. Maybe the universe is itself a type of simulation.
Anyway, I digress.
Anyone that doesn't think our news media is some level of propaganda is kidding themselves. The question is of course how much.
During the Iraq war there were various incidents where we possibly bombed civilians and the news media never really held us to account.
I'm sure there were tons of incidents in Afghanistan.
Hell, we're at near constant war, undeclared, and the news media always decides not to focus on such things, because they'd rather talk about useless stories.
Every story they choose to cover or choose not to cover influences people dramatically. They choose to propagate certain stories while ignoring others. And it certainly seems like there's some sort of coordination, a conspiracy so to speak, behind the scenes, as to what gets covered, and what doesn't get covered.
They even seemed to all work together to completely ignore a certain presidential candidate this last election, to a degree that I would argue was criminal.
But there's something else hidden behind the words in society that causes us to pre-censor everything we say.
In that post I was writing the other day I had to make it overly clear that I wasn't saying this pandemic was fake. I was just talking about how much we rely on the news media, and how dangerous it is, and how easily it would be to control and spread false information. I've always known they do to a certain degree, but it's quite frightening how strong that control is, as we've seen with this pandemic. But we can't possibly say anything that's conspiratorial, because society frowns on that. We don't want to ever be even seen as saying anything that might be frowned upon in that way.
The reality is though that there actually are quite a few conspiracies going on all the time. Not all of them are nefarious. Some are.
Companies work together all the time to do various things.
Government employees talk about how to do various things.
My idea that there's some kind of manipulation of the news is very conspiratorial. But it's just trying to explain observed effects. They choose to cover certain stories or not cover them. What causes that? Who chooses? Does someone email their list of stories to someone? Does someone have access to a server for editing? Is it less nefarious and perhaps just another form of self censoring?
We know that with the Edward Snowden incident there were people from some organization accessing the computers of the news personnel involved and actually editing their stories, as they worked on them. That's some brass balls bullshit right there.
See, there's all these different levels of things going on, all the way from reality, that may or may not be believed by various people, to conspiratorial fiction, that people really don't feel comfortable talking about, and perhaps maybe even wonder if they might be assassinated discretely for talking about.
And really, in some ways, censoring yourself is far worse than others censoring you, because often the level that someone would step in and censor you for something is far different than how you would censor yourself.
It may be that society is manipulated to encourage self-censorship, so they have less work to do.
It's all really quite sad.
And I have to worry about you thinking I'm crazy for talking about things that I've seen evidence for, or think have a remote possibility, but you have dismissed or just don't know about.
The worst thing about censorship by Tyler Menezes (source)
Taken on June 27, 2008
Used under CC BY-SA 2.0 License