Crossed wireless media do not lead to Progress

I haven’t posted until now today, because I’ve been busy setting up further channels through which The Slog can reach more and more new users.

Actually, I haven’t really been what I call “busy”: mainly I’ve been variously going round in circles, frustrated, confused and amazed. Trust me, it takes a lot to amaze me in 2020. But Baby I’m Amazed.

Here’s the first thing I need to tell you. Wifi – compared to a good old-fashioned wire connected directly into the router – sucks. This won’t bother most people, on account of them being receivers rather than broadcasters. But if you want to communicate live with any sound or picture quality that reveals other human beings you can see or hear and vice versa, then have a landline made of solid wires….and for perfect reception, plug directly into the router.

If you have a satellite connection, plugging into the router will deliver something more than pixcellation into your home, but you’ll have to keep on saying “over” like some 1950s radio ham, and then wait an hour or three before the recipient responds.

If you don’t have 20 million Jodrell Bank dishes attached to carry messages through the air, wires work fifty times better.

Now whoTF would’ve thought that?

Trouble is, we’ve all been conditioned over the last ten years to believe that mobile wifi with yet another digit after the G is it, and wires are just so last century, dahhhling.

Here’s the second reality I’ve observed: artificially intelligent software (AI) is struggling hard to reach the level of Homo erectus in terms of 0.00003% of intuitive cognition in relation to what you might need or want. That is to say, it goes “Ug!” alot, and if you don’t get it, than a blunt instrument to the head is your reward.

But 0.00003% is more than enough for the 3% of gated silo dwellers, whose sole aim is to keep you at arm’s length while yodelling “We wanna hear from youdle ooh ah doodle doo” in the foreground.

And another thing. Are you, like me, sick to death of corporate virtue signalling desperately offering you credit while taking the credit for stuff regulators impose on them?

“You told us you were worried about plastic in the oceans, so we’ve switched to paper bags”

The paper bags are cheaper and involve scything down entire Scandinavian forests, but hey – we have a zero tolerance policy towards exploitative suppliers.

In my case today, it went like this:

“We have a zero-tolerance policy towards those who reject multicultural inclusivity”

This last was Facebook. To illustrate their policy they showed a cartoon in which various people were frolicking about in an enormous stretched limo. They were all black. It was a kind of inclusively black African multiculturalism….which does exist – just not outside Africa.

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Most of those who follow this site regularly will know by now that I would dearly love to be free of not just the EU, but also the ridiculous illusion that we have a ‘Special Relationship’ with the US.

The latest dust-up between Washington and Tehran is the sort of development that supports my case.

In the medium term, it isn’t the Americans who will suffer the consequences of Trumpian macho goaded gun-slinging….it is their NATO allies. It is a great deal easier to get into the EU – or organise Jihadists already in France, Germany, Belgium and the UK – than it is to enter the US under The Donald’s understandably stricter immigration rules.

Trump and the Unelected State that surrounds him made this move (1) without telling anyone in NATO-supporting countries, and (2) with infantile tweets just begging for escalated retaliation. While my experience of most Main Street Americans is that they are polite, generous and genuinely friendly, they have a naive level of conformist patriotism I find worrying……and a low awareness of Alt State agendas that is rarely less than alarming.

While the reaction of a Corbyn Government to Islamic atrocities in Britain would have been craven appeasement to get votes, the reaction of BoJo’s government will be equally craven willingness to do pretty much whatever Washington wants.

To his credit, Dominic Raab has called unequivocally for de-escalation. The Corbynista reaction has, of course, been pointless condemnation of Trump…and a call for yet more marches in favour of endemic Islamist violence.

Much of this is like wireless communication: it keeps breaking up, it echoes, but electorates seem to find criticism of the whole charade difficult.

There are times in this lark when I feel like the one-eyed man in Henshaw’s Blind School. And then I remember that there are millions like me – biting their tongues, suffering in silence, and going to bed angry.

It’s not the stuff of which contented civilisations are made.