nonsense in discourse

 

Checking out a Fox News website last week, I come upon an article about unexplained mutilations of cattle which have been taking place in various parts of the United States over the past fifty years.

The Fox News team were speculating that the mutilations might have been carried out by extra terrestrial life forms from another planet.

Ah yes.

The aliens dunnit.

I don't think so.

The Fox speculation amounts to an insertion of nonsense into a story whose most probable explanation is devil worship activities,

Why would a professional news organisation prefer the alien angle?

Presumably because it makes for more pleasant reading.

Nonsense is regularly inserted into discourse for a variety of reasons.

Misplaced delicatesse is one of them.

With Fox I'm suggesting we're dealing with a form of frivolous incompetence and a desire to entertain at the expense of a more obvious and more troubling explanation.

Nor are other major media groups averse to such behaviour.

Ten years ago when a Malaysian passenger jet disappeared off the radar with the loss of all passengers and crew, no less an outlet than the august news broadcaster CNN, speculated that the plane might have gone through a black hole,

CNN was inserting this nonsense in the discourse because for ideological reasons and reasons relating to lack of integrity, CNN was unwilling to state the truth, ie that a Jihadi pilot and his accomplices deliberately murdered the 227 passengers on the passenger jet by crashing it into the ocean.

The misplaced delicatesse of CNN resulted in puerile nonsense about black holes being inserted into the discourse on a matter that was far too serious for such bumf.

Other motives for such insertions are more frankly malign.

During the supposed Covid 19 pandemic of 2021 and surrounding years, a so called Doctor Carrie Madej claimed to have discovered artificial life forms in the vaccines which she said had attempted to raise themselves up from the slide under her microscope.

When I saw Carrie Madej's claims I knew they represented yet another example of a deliberate insertion of nonsense into public discourse.

If there were artificial life forms in the vaccines, it would be very quickly demonstrable that they were there.

Such a thing was never demonstrated.

So Carrie Madej was engaging in a vexation.

But what was her motive?

There were several legitimate and correct reasons to repudiate the vaccines being forced by governments on the public during the Covid panic.

Firstly, the vaccines were made out of aborted babies. Secondly, the vaccines were untested. Thirdly, the vaccines were unlikely to work as we had never been able to control a respiratory virus outbreak through mass vaccinations before. Fourthly, there was no real pandemic.

In trying to explain Carrie Madej's wilful insertion of nonsense into  a discourse about the dangers and moral implications of Covid 19 vaccines, I would suggest she was running pass defence for pharmaceutical companies, governments and other promoters of the Covid panic, and that her nonsense was intended to discredit the legitimate critiques of the vaccines which I have just listed.

But of course she may simply have been a mischief maker, or a chaos merchant working for the resovietising Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, or a devil worshipper, or something else not on my map.

Whatever she was, my analysis is that she was not a genuine contributor to the public discussion about the vaccines she pretended to oppose.

Meanwhile in Ireland a well known journalist called Gemma O'Doherty has on at least one occasion attempted to insert nonsense into public discouurse.

As editor of The Irish Light newspaper she has in my view been substantially correct in her opposition to the Covid vaccines.

She has also (again in my opinion) made some worthy attempts to debunk the notion of climate change.

But as part of her climate change debunkings in her newspaper, she posited the nonsensical howler that governments had found ways to control the weather and were deliberately terrorising their own populaces with extreme weather events.

This was a clear attempt to insert nonsense into discourse and if we exclude the possibility that she has had a mental breakdown, we must consider the possibility that she did it to promote chaos.

Interestingly enough, Gemma O'Doherty has also used her newspaper to campaign for the release of cop killer Aaron Brady, a member of a faction in the drug dealing, people trafficking, child abusing, mafia concatenation of tinker gangs, styled the IRA.

But ah.

That's another story.

The Catholic Church as a world wide institution is yet another target for nonsense in discourse, usually placed by people posing as proto Catholics.

I suggest that in the Americas, internet commentator Taylor Marshall is the prime exemplar of this while a strong case can also be made against Michael Voris who sings from the same hymn sheet as Doctor Marshall, and was the driving force behind the ludicrously vituperative Church Militant website until last year when he resigned suddenly.

Taylor Marshall famously claimed to have had a mystical experience informing him that there is no salvation outside the Catholic Church.

This seems to me to be a particularly manic misstatement of the Catholic Church's claim to pre eminence. Furthermore Doctor Marshall's habitual clenched teeth pronouncing of the word sodomite with peculiarly vehement loathing also seems to me to be distinctly un Catholic.

We may have reservations about sinful behaviour but we do not hate the sinner.

I still have hopes that John Henry Westen with his Lifesite News website is not merely yet another peddlar of divisive vexatious nonsense speculations as I have deemed Doctor Marshall and Mr Voris to be, but those hopes are growing less.

Mr Westen is much agitated by the Church Administration's attempted limitation of the use of Latin mass rituals. His advocacy on this matter looks a bit like arrant factioneering. I don't know for sure.

The other reservation I entertain re Mr Westen, Mr Marshall, and Mr Voris, is that each of them appears to have a more than passing fondness for Russian dictator Vladimir Putin.

That's a dealbreaker as far as I'm concerned.

Being concerned about World War Three is legitimate.

Justifying Putin's smash and grab on Ukraine is pure bastardy.

For the record vis a vis the ancient church, my own cards are on the table, as having stated that I consider the present holder of the office of Saint Peter to have attained his position through a coup d'etat.

Enough about the Catholic Church.

We can also find examples of nonsense being slipped into public discourse decades ago.

Back in the 1980s a former BBC television presenter called David Icke having declared himself to be God, also declared that Queen Elizabeth the Second of Great Britain was in fact a shape shifting lizard from another planet.

What is it with the aliens!

They get such a bad rap from nonsense mongers.

At least he never alleged that aff Queen was draining the blood out of cows at scattered locations around the United Kingdom.

We should be thankful for small mercies,

I suggest that Mr Icke had drawn his nonsense from the television series entitled "V," a silly 1980s American confection which involved very attractive aliens trying to take over the earth. The aliens were eventually revealed to be lizard type life forms in human body suits.

The deliberate insertion of disruptive nonsense into public discourse inspired by intellectually redundant television shows, seemed a relevant consideration to me this week too, fully four decades after Icke pioneered this form of bollocksology, when someone showed me a news item about former Fox News presenter Tucker Carlson.

Mr Carlson is claiming that a demonic force left scratch marks on his body while he was sleeping.

He says some of his family dogs were on the bed at the time and his wife was sleeping next to him.

Ho hum.

Well at least he's not claiming it was aliens did it.

Mr Carlson noted that he had never heard of such a phenomenon before.

Objection m'Lud.

Are we to believe that Tucker Carlson never watched the vile horror movie which featured precisely that plot twist?

And are we to believe that Tucker Carlson never saw the more innocent comedy movie starring Eddie Murphy entitled The Golden Child which again features a similar dream based demonic assault with Eddie waking up to find scratch marks on his arms?

I think the former Fox News presenter doth protest too much.

More specifically I think it's unlikely that Tucker Carlson missed either of these movies from which he clearly drew his nonsense claims to have been assaulted by demons in his sleep.

I also think we may entirely exonerate his wife and the dogs and any aliens who may have been passing near his ranch at the time he inflicted the wounds on himself in order to boost his internet profile now that he no longer works for Fox News.

Thank you for your time.