In today's world, facts have become nothing more than roadblocks, slowing down, but not stopping the steamroller of opinion. We live in a time where feelings and beliefs trump evidence and reality. Social media is rife with opinions spreading like wildfire, not because they're true, but because they're loud and everywhere. Complex issues get dumbed down to simple arguments, where truth is a casualty and an afterthought.
The real loser here is the truth itself. Facts used to be the cornerstone of sensible opinions, but now they're bent and twisted to suit whatever story people want to tell. This shift is dangerous because it tears apart rational debate and weakens democracy, which relies on well-informed voters.
When we stop caring about facts, we can't tell what's real and what's made up. This makes us easy targets for lies and manipulation. To fix this mess, we need to put facts back in the driver's seat and push back against the tide of baseless opinions. It's the only way we'll get back to making sense of the world and having honest, meaningful conversations.
However, mistruths can be easily spread with just a few words, whereas factual rebuttal requires more and nuanced verbiage, as well as an attention span longer than that of a gnat, and so, in the days of the short Tweet, the odds are stacked against truth. This is why Twitter (no-one calls it X) is the preferred tool of the populist liar, as a short mistruth gets halfway around the world before real truth has even got its pants on.
Oh, and before Trump supporters suggest divine intervention saved him from assassination, they need to consider parallels to historical examples of other equally contentious individuals who survived assassination attempts.
Consider Hitler, who survived the infamous Operation Valkyrie plot I mentioned yesterday. If we were to apply the same logic, should we then conclude that a higher power endorsed his actions and deemed them worthy of protection? Such reasoning becomes absurd when considering the atrocities associated with his regime.
Similarly, Stalin survived several assassination attempts during his reign. If divine intervention was at play, would that imply a celestial endorsement of his brutal purges and the millions who perished under his rule?
Even on a smaller scale, notorious gangster Al Capone dodged numerous assassination attempts. Should we then infer that his criminal endeavours were under divine protection (a protection racket)?
Applying the same logic to any such scenario reveals the flaws and biases in attributing survival solely to divine intervention. Survival can be influenced by numerous factors, including luck, incompetence of the would-be assassins, or effective security measures, rather than an endorsement from a higher power. Attributing Trump's survival of an assassination attempt to divine intervention suggests a selective and convenient interpretation of events, one that fails to hold up when applied universally to historical contexts.
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