And the not entirely so grim

as, once again, Canada persists in celebrating the Spy's birthday a couple of days early and the Excited States a day late. 'Course, both have been at it a tad longer than he, so he extends best wishes that both will outlast him, despite at least some indicatiors to the contrary.

Truth and Consequences

There was a time in the increasingly distant past when the truth of one's statements was considered non negotiable, for it had to founded on actual repeatable and experimentally verifiable facts. That is, it had to reflect the reality of the physical world, past or present, and be verifiable as such. In the same vein, an "honourable" person was one of integrity--(s)he could be counted on to tell the truth, to accept same as reliable from other persons of honour, and to faithfully carry out commitments. One's word was as good as one's bond.

Today, promises made are not even meant to be promises kept (especially the political), and there are numerous instances of the widespread refusal to accept manifest truth, to insist on falsehoods as alternate reality. Indeed, many purveyors of falsehood have discovered that more people are likely to believe egregious whoppers then mere distortions. When the Spy writes alternate history science fiction, he has no expectation that people will believe it to be literally true--the point in his case instead being to explore the ethics of technology development and adoption in a fictional context--to think and to entertain. But fantasy, though a useful medium for floating ideas, has no time and space correspondence to reality.

For instance the reporting of general non-acceptance of recent election results in a variety of third-rate countries has led many to assume that the Excited States has now joined that company. There is a difference, however between the Soviet-style "elections" conducted in many parts of the world (why are they oxymoronically termed "Democratic Republics"?) where the dictator jails his opponents in for treason and wins nearly unanimously, even though few people vote, and on the other hand, a tightly run, carefully scrutinized election in a modern Western country where both sides garner tens of millions of votes, and one wins by a healthy margin. The extraordinary claim of "rigged election" may not need much evidence in a place where even raising the issue can result in torture and a death sentence, but in a real democracy it does require extraordinary evidence--enough to convince at least one judge somewhere not to throw out the claims as vacuous and frivolous for lack of proof. But against all evidence, some believe the most fntastic lies.

The same is true of vaccine and COVID deniers

who for similar reasons can be compared, say, to Holocaust deniers (and there is a strong participant overlap). Europe had a population of many millions of Jewish ethnicity and/or faith before WW II, and very few afterward in those regions that had been under Hitler's boots. Those who deny the concentration camps and gas ovens existed, or claim fraud, need to explain hard evidence. Where did they all go? On vacation and forget to return? Really? And the remains of the actual death camps were...luxury resorts? What of the eye witnesses who survived? The soldiers who liberated them?

Millions today are dead of COVID-19, just as tens of millions died of the flu in the early twentieth century, and far more in previous pandemics of smallpox and the plague. The disease crisis was and is real, the graves and medical records genuine, and the vaccines are working--just as those for smallpox, polio, mumps, whooping cough, yellow fever, chicken pox, measles, and others work and are safe. Vaccines save millions of lives and, incidentally, have been proven with exhaustive real world studies not to cause autism.

People who irrationally believe fables to the contrary create a real and present danger to themselves and others. Why do they not rather choose to believe they are potted plants, that the second world war never happened, that Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Mao, and Churchill never lived, that science and mathematics don't exist, that China and Russia are benevolent populist democracies that encourage free speech, or that there is no reality and we are but actors on a stage for an audience of invisible manipulative aliens? Wait. Perhaps there are people who believe some or all those things.

The worst tragedy is that a subsequent wave of the virus driven by a far more transmissible and much deadlier variant mutation will cause a horrific death toll among the very people who deny the efficacy of vaccines and refuse to accept one that would save their lives. In anticipation of this possibility, a new false story is now circulating that no virus has ever mutated into a more deadly form, only into a less deadly one. Unfortunately with the deniers who play fast and loose with their own lives and those of others, this too is utterly false. Every virus that has jumped from an animal or bird population has done exactly that to the human one. Point proven. Q.E.D.

To cite other cases of false beliefs,

apparently some give irrational credence to a story now circulating that the blood lusting January sixth rioters who broke into the U.S. Capital building seeking to kill those they hated were merely tourists doing a little sightseeing. Tell that to the security people injured or dead in an effort to NOT welcome the destroyers and would-be murderers.

In several places (look them up) the Old Testament mocks those who believe in and worship idols of wood, stone, and metal--pointing out that a piece of wood of which some is burnt to cook a meal and the rest carved into a god to worship, has neither mouth to speak nor legs to walk, and can do a person neither any good nor any harm. Apparently, believing and trusting in the blatantly false is nothing new. Neither is worshipping another human, even if, especially if that person tells dangerous lies.

The Spy does not deny

the necessity to resolve open questions, such as the actual origin of COVID-19, the explanation of as-yet-unidentified objects in the air, or to expose more clearly the details of historical events known to have happened, but perhaps reported on thus far only in a biased or incomplete manner. There is always more to a story, more truth to be discover, more myths to be debunked. Moreover, it is certainly the case that the "winners" initially write the history of a conflict, not the losers. But such cases amount to filling in details in a narrative of why and how, not of whether. (A scenario in which the losers actually won a war is fantasy, not reality.) Scientists also refine and expand upon their work. But when something is demonstrably proven to be true and this is verifiable by repeatable experiments and/or multiple open examination of actual data, fraud can be ruled out and the fundamental truth remains. Only minor details need polishing.

Part of the big-picture problem may be that truth

can be extremely ugly, not merely inconvenient. Take the history of slavery, for instance. In ancient times it was practiced in a straightforward bloodthirsty and vengeful manner by nearly every civilization in every portion of the globe--vanquished peoples were enslaved by their conquerers and bent to hard labour.

But in an evil twist in more "modern" times one of most despicable beliefs of many Western nations was to justify slavery under the darwinistic-derived lie that some groups of manifestly human persons were instead a kind of "lower" intermediate form between the animal and human line, and therefore could be owned or otherwise treated as mere property or goods.

This falsehood survives today under the widespread fabrication that people of one skin colour are superior to those of other colourations. However, neither science nor the Bible (both get falsely cited) support this idea, for on the one hand, genetics manifestly demonstrates there is only one human race, (the human race, with mere trivial variations), and on the second, the Bible makes no such distinction, instead clearly proclaiming that all human beings are treated exactly alike by God, that their status before Him has nothing to do with the modern invention of so-called race and everything to do with His grace and their faith manifest subsequently by behaviour.

Thus, despite obviously false beliefs, skin colour is of no more significance genetically or spiritually than eye colour, hair colour, the shape of one's toenails, how one ties one's shoelaces, or the preferences of one's taste buds for tea over milk. We humans are all in this together, without distinction.

The Spy admits that in one of his novels he chose to mock discriminatory absurdities by positing a society that did indeed discriminate on the basis of hair colour. He was brought up short on the matter by a colleague who informed him some people are in fact prejudiced on that very basis. Really? This is nuts. He left the material as he wrote it however, as his own parody of complete and utter irrationality and of the blind and dangerous refusal to give credit to the obvious. There is something pathologically wrong with anyone who considers that colour is worth hatred.

Indeed, specific and obviously ugly reminders of past history have been unearthed in both Ireland and Canada in recent years that bring similar matters back out from under the rug and into the spotlight of truth where they belong. In both cases, it involves the discovery of bodies roughly where they had been known by many to exist. In the former, they were the bodies of women and infants on the former grounds of homes for unwed mothers-to-be where they were brutalized instead of being cared for, and in the latter, the bodies of aboriginal children taken from their homes ostensibly for an education, but instead brutalized and starved with extreme cruelty, often to die of neglect, abuse, disease, and hunger. Past governments established or tolerated these practices, and several institutionalized "church" arms carried them out in utter cruelty. Cautionary note: No institutionalized church was established in the New Testament, just a kingdom upon human hearts. A church as an institution is entirely a human idea. It may be useful as such, but it may have all the flaws of the humans who assume authority over it.

The one thing that the Spy finds rather astonishing is that no one thought to look for the proof of what was known to be true by many, but ignored by those with vested interests. The bodies were, after all, there all along, dead proof of what had been done to them. The institutions of other countries have a reckoning yet to come, and the evidence for it will be found on similar grounds. But, good on the technology of ground-penetrating radar for "unearthing" actual hard evidence of the truth, and a rare win to both the tech and the people who finally thought to rent the equipment for the purpose. No hidden truth (and no open lie) will fail to be fully revealed for what it is--eventually.

What has all this to do with the relationship between technology and its social context (the reason this column exists)? The salient issue, as mentioned several times in this space, is that the instant communication enabled by the Internet, far from promoting cooperation and understanding among peoples to expand and unite communities, has as long ago predicted here, done quite the opposite--create echo chambers for the reinforcement and spread of dangerous falsehoods in the service of prejudice and hatred. "Free" speech is in theory the bulwark of democracy, but too many, in turning it into a codeword for hatred and threatening speech wopuld have us all forget that true freedom requires honour and entails responsibility.

Democracy by its very nature includes a paradox. In allowing any and all forms if dissent, it permits to some extent speech that would destroy itself. So, is there a solution to the problem of dangerous false speech short of the demise of democracy? Unknown at this point, but nothing bodes well when lies are so often given more credit than obvious truth. Second, and at least as important to someone like the Spy who nearly died of the mumps as a child, the efficacy of vaccines to save lives is a proven fact critical to multiple millions of lives--undermining confidence in vaccines could make one responsible for untold deaths. People who do or abet and enable this are a threat to others as surely as are violent sexual pedophile predators and racist haters. They need to be held accountable when, not if, their lies kill others.

Embrace honour and the truth it implies. Forget the very idea of "race". Get the vaccine. Encourage others to do all three.

QES

(Quite Enough Said.) The Spy is meanwhile experimenting with more stable and longer lasting (hopefully) backup and archival systems, but rather than attach the mundane to the critically important, will postpone that review to next month, as will he some speculation on Apple's possible (or not) electric car intentions, and further comments on the cancer saga.

See you all again next month--DV.

--The Northern Spy

Opinions expressed here are entirely the author's own, and no endorsement is implied by any community or organization to which he may be attached. Rick Sutcliffe, (a.k.a. The Northern Spy) is professor of Computing Science and Mathematics and Assistant Dean of Science at Canada's Trinity Western University. He completed his fiftieth year as a high school and university teacher in 2020. He has been involved as a member of or consultant with the boards of several organizations, and participated in developing industry standards at the national and international level. He is a co-author of the Modula-2 programming language R10 dialect. He is a long time technology author and has written two textbooks and ten alternate history SF novels, one named best ePublished SF novel for 2003. His various columns have appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers (paper and online), since the early 1980s, and he's been a regular speaker at churches, schools, academic meetings, and conferences. He and his wife Joyce celebrated their fiftieth anniversary in 2019 and have lived in the Aldergrove/Bradner area of B.C. since 1972.

URLs for Rick Sutcliffe's Arjay Enterprises:

The Northern Spy Home Page: http://www.TheNorthernSpy.com

opundo : http://opundo.com

Sheaves Christian Resources : http://sheaves.org

WebNameHost : http://www.WebNameHost.net

WebNameSource : http://www.WebNameSource.net

nameman : http://nameman.net

General URLs for Rick Sutcliffe's Books:

Author Site: http://www.arjay.ca

Publisher's Site: http://www.writers-exchange.com/Richard-Sutcliffe.html

The Fourth Civilization--Ethics, Society, and Technology (4th 2003 ed. ): http://www.arjay.bc.ca/EthTech/Text/index.html

Other URLs of relevant interest:

BC Government COVID site: http://www.bccdc.ca/health-info/diseases-conditions/covid-19

TWU COVID Info: https://www.twu.ca/covid-19-information