I realise that I can often come across as being abrasive, insensitive, and sometimes even confrontational. This is largely due to the problem I have accepting people who deliberately set out to either confuse, or spread misinformation, in the furtherance of an unstated, or even unacknowledged, agenda. I encounter many people, and not just on GAG, who seem to believe that reality is somehow whatever you want it to be, or that it's more important to refrain from upsetting others with the truth, but why does it have to be this way?
We seem to inhabit a bizarre world where feelings are considered to be more important than objective facts, where we always have to tip-toe around subjects of importance to us because someone may, at some point in time somewhere on the planet, become "offended" by the truth, or even by just an expressed opinion. Accuracy in journalism seems to have vanished entirely, and it no longer seems to matter to those who work in that particular field whether or not a story is actually true, as long as it gets people's emotions going and makes a lot of money for the "news" outlet in question. People seem to be afraid of their own shadow, and it's often very difficult to determine whether or not an online story, for example, is actually a parody or not.
It's been pointed out to me more than once that GAG has a feature that allows me to block whomever I choose if I happen to believe that person is giving me grief for any reason, and I am grateful for this feature, but that's not really the point. People who have false views of the world need to be challenged, because what they promote (i.e. lies) is harmful to all of us, especially in the long run. Society is damaged by those who believe that which is patently untrue, because they then act according to those beliefs, and this is why we have, for example, people who oppose vaccinations because they believe they cause autism, and others destroying 5G towers because they think they cause cancer, or are in some way connected to the current coronavirus (which makes absolutely no sense no matter which way you look at it).
The strongest argument against censorship is the often overlooked fact that bad ideas need to be exposed to the fresh air of debate, and that even attempting to suppress an unpopular view in the name of 'political correctness' just causes the idea in question to become in some way legitimised and given credence, even if none is due. I will apologise to someone if I inadvertently make the mistake of, for example, employing an ad hominem argument, but I will certainly NOT apologise for expressing a view that they, for whatever reason, cannot cope with. Misinformation is now ubiquitous, but apart from unreasonable calls for the overt censorship of clearly wrong ideas (ex. holocaust denial), no one seems to quite know what to do about it. I do not understand this, because the simplest and most obvious way to challenge and stop the spread of bad ideas is to simply demonstrate why they are wrong, in an open and free forum. What could be easier than that?
I often react negatively to the views expressed here simply because I care. I care about where the world is going, why all of this is happening, and in large part that is due to the acceptance, for whatever reason(s), of beliefs that are clearly harmful, because they are false.
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