Published on 12, July, 2020
Causality has always been a fascinating subject to me. A fun thought exercise I like to do is trace back events that needed to happen for things in my life to exist as they do now, and see what's the most obscure thing that was vital to that series. That and the understanding of the probability of any given individual's existence has made me appreciate how intricate every single life is. We're all products of a specific series of events, consisting of a near incalculable number of nuances and distinctions that we might never hope to fully understand and appreciate.
I learned in recent years the concept of Laplace's Demon. A hypothetical being capable of observing every particle of the universe and its current momentum, if I recall it right. That such a being, with a sufficient intellect, could accurately predict the future if it could calculate where every particle has come from and in what it's present momentum is.
Thinking about these things has given me the opinion that chaos is just our inability to fully calculate the momentum of all of the contents of the universe. That every single thing that happens, could not have possibly happened any other way, because the series of events that lead to every moment were put in motion from the instant the universe was created.
I'm not an individual. I don't have free will. I don't make choices. Everything I do, I was always going to do exactly as it pans out. And any element of it that goes unpredictably is simply my lack of awareness of all the elements contributing to whatever comes out of it. But that even then, those elements were always guaranteed to come into play at that moment.
It might sound like I'm trying to absolve myself of responsibility for my decisions. But if I'm right, then I was always going to come to these conclusions, so who's to say what's right and wrong?
But in all things I try to keep an open mind. What do you all think?
What exactly has happened under this hard-right Tory rule? I'll break it down into a succinct, fact-based reality check (and I'm leaving a lot off this list to be polite):
- 13 years of austerity- A mass poverty crisis (the UN toured the country in 2019 for two weeks to determine the extent of the extreme poverty)- The near destruction of the NHS- Food bank use sky rocketing- Hate crimes sky rocketing- Crime rates sky rocketing (Theresa May removed 21,000 police officers off the streets as part of yet more Tory budget cuts)- 800+ libraries have shut- Local councils are on the brink of bankruptcy- Schools are collapsing on students- PM after PM in a totally undemocratic process- Truss almost collapsing the entire economy with her ultra-Conservative economic plan
And throughout all of the above? The right-wing stance is zero accountability. The left is to blame (and immigrants). It's not the most convincing argument, I'm afraid.