Food for Thought

There are 31 posts filed in Food for Thought (this is page 1 of 3).

Question Time

Noise, generating noise. It’s ambitions are no higher than something like the Jeremy Kyle show. A bottom feeding wind up that polarises the audience instead of informing and holding power to account.

They are no doubt delighted when it kicks off and generates outraged comments. All helps the viewing figures.

It’s a sly, underhand way of providing nominally informed debate regarding issues, irresponsible as it operates under the pretence that it’s audience is deeply interested in politics and will have looked at issues in depth from other sources. Irresponsible as it refuses to acknowledge that it may be the only way some, if not most people engage in politics.

Thus a populist like Farage can spout lies (I remember an audience member calling him out on this on one occasion) and they are given an opportunity to make claims that have no evidence to support them.

It is going to be interesting to see how they provide balance on climate change, something they are focusing on. Will counter arguments be backed by evidence, or just someone pandering to the ignorance of the audience?

u/Farnellagogo

Look at that dot.

 

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.

Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan