The stuff in this topic is so very like the stuff in similar on-line places or even pub & dinner table conversations these days - composed of various fashions of mass media opinion with their scuttlebutt repeated like a mental tape recording by various fanboys of those various mass media comics and their comedians.
It used to be just "the red & blue clownshow" of left vs right but now there are dozens of weird klowns with mad stories about "what's really going on". These days, the whole puddin' is leavened with 1001 mini mass media channels found about the interweb, of every flavour, shade and toxicity.
But how much do any of the scuttlebutt relay stations spouting in a forum or on faecespuke really know about anything - from their own direct experience of everyday life rather than from reading The Hate Mail, Torygraph, New Lunacy or "This is the true truth" website by Cletus the swivel-eyed loon? In fact, how many even have "their own" everyday experiences, rather than the allocation of various personal events into their ideological taxonomy as installed via the main mass media and other mass media prattle-gabble sources pouring into their eyes and ears every minute of the day?
Really, most of us know nowt but what we're told. We are told all sorts, all of it mediated by axe-grinding editors of various ilks & tittles. And who puppets them? And who or what motivates the puppeteers? The fact is, we will never know, despite being told everyday by a newspaper or website that we can know if we just believe them and no one else.
In the modern world it's become impossible to know anything much about causes, main-movers and other zeitgeist-generators with any level of certainty. Our brains are filled with so much inchoate cultural noise from birth, from so many channels, that avoiding cognitive dissonance and vast internal structures of self-delusion is impossible.
Personally I find myself avoiding conversations other than those about very specific matters of which I have significant personal experience. I have even become ultra-sceptical not just about the "information" out there but also of my own assumptions and beliefs about the wider (especially political) world - which are likely not
my beliefs but were installed over the past 70 years by a hundred agencies, many of them mad; many of them with all sorts of agendas nothing to do with my welfare.
Do you recall British History as it was taught in schools of the 50s and 60s? The glorious British Empire bringing myriad benefits to the various native chappies (not exploiting and murdering them willy-nilly in the process at all. Ha!).
A sad state of affairs, in one way, to become so sceptical that it borders on cynicism. From another perspective, it removes an awful lot of angst about machinations in the wider world that one can do nothing about and which don't really impinge on most of us in any serious way .... yet. But perhaps the often draconian and apparently arbitrary imposition of Covid rules is the beginning of something that's long been brewing in circles of power ever since Jeremy Bentham advocated his panopticon?
Of course, an inability to know about "now" in any coherent fashion means no ability to control the future. But personally I believe that it's just human hubris to believe that anyone has such control or ever had. We act out of deep and hidden motives generated deep down in our flawed human nature, making up stories to justify what we (and others) did well after the fact.
But blether-on, chaps. It's all good entertainment.
Eshmiel