Reality exists offline. It’s really there. Countries, people, wars, armies, soldiers, hospitals, schools, bricks, pavements, the sky, air, water, fingers, mobile phones, shoes, socks, feet, tadpoles. Objects to touch, plants to smell, food to taste and brains to perceive things even if reality is a version of reality in our shared experience as the human species. .
Yet consumers online discuss issues based on abstract notions and speculate randomly with such self-assured certainty and there will be people reading this who will argue that reality does not exist even as they talk and act like it is by typing their thoughts out on the screen. They have faith in reality even as they claim they don’t. Otherwise why reply.
And all opinions aren’t of equal validity. Some people know less about a subject than others. I know less about science than a scientist. Less about medecine than a doctor. Less about the French language than a speakers of French. It’s not all a matter of opinion. If you are of the opinion that I am writing this from an office in Prague you’re wrong. I’m in England. That’s the truth. Or at least a better version of the truth.
Vladimir Putin is the dictator of Russia. Political opponents languish in prisons. If you base your research on professional journalist outlets who base their research on people who physically research then the elections are fixed to make sure he wins.
If you read the comments below this based on speculation of conspiracy based on others sources of speculative conspiracy online then the UK is a dictatorship and all governments are the same. But they’re patently not in reality and it isn’t.
You might think that people might question their own perspective but the change of pespective I got from the war in Ukraine was to realise how little people actually know and understand about the world when you read their opinions online.
For the first time in my life I began to full acknowledge what it is to be an unrealistic, idealistic know-all, too arrogant and lazy to learn the facts before spouting an opinion. I realised what I was like in my past as an over-confident adolescent rebel. I realised what it feels like to be a grown-up and be aware of how little you know yourself compared to people who work in the area you want to know about.
Nobody in the world gets 87% of the popular vote without rigged elections and they never have. Vladimir Putin is a former officer in the KGB, a Soviet police force dediacted to policing political dissidents within a repressive country. The Soviet Union had an Empire stretching across Eastern Europe and the people threw out their puppet governments by force, by weight of numbers, and set up democracies in the late 80s. Ukraine held their free and fair elections in 2004.
ok so here comes reality.
Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. It was unprovoked. Ukraine was not a member of NATO and had not applied to become a member of NATO. This is not a dispute caused by NATO. Putin said in a speech to the world that he believed that Ukraine had no right to exist and is part of Russia. There is no evidence to say that Ukraine is run by Nazis and its elected president is of jewish dissent anyway. Put simply, they elected a leader who wasn’t pro Putin (as previously).People in Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania are getting ready to defend their democracies in case they are next.
Meanwhile, its undisputed that Russia has been using social media to promote pro Trump, pro Brexit, anti vax and anti Ukraine arguments as part of a campaign to destabilise Europe and the US. How effective it has been has not been measured. Knowing their intent should tell online users of social media enough.
What changed my understanding of reality is the way in which online conspiracy theorists and far left activists took up the cause of Vladimir Putin and denied reality by unwittingly spreading arguments which justified Putin and had no basis in reality. I realised that online arguments were being made by people who apparently had no knowledge of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall. What it was , what it meant, what had been happening in Russia since the revolution of 1918 and the eventual take over by Stalin.
They had read nothing about it, learnt nothing about it, made no reference to it and even suggested that people who believed that a democracy has a right to defend itself against invasion was not to be supported on the basis that – all war is wrong.
Again – with no reference to Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939 and how we were supposed to defend ourselves back then in similar circumstances.
I was reminded of people I’d known who looked down on meat eaters as immoral while buying their drugs from a business supply chain which relied on torture and murder to secure profits. High minded principles based on an abstract idea of yourself which could easily crumble under any honest self-scrutiny.
The Ukraine War changed my perspective forever because I realised how deep the misinformation was on the internet. How I was on the side of the grown ups and not the online rebels. Finally. Teachers, journalists, scientists, centre left and right politicians, hospitals, schools, all of it. People who actually worked at making a better world rather than simply chatted on social media platforms. I feel grateful for them.
Mike Kneafsey Guitar 