Thank-you and Merry Christmas from the IT Skeptic

Xmas reindeer
In this holiday season I'm sending out special thank-you to all the loyal followers of this blog
and of my Twitter, G+, and/or facebook accounts: Merry Christmas (or your preferred holiday observation) and a Happy New Year. Thank-you for following and contributing to this community.

Please keep your objectivity and reason in 2015. 2014 was a good year.

They are all good years, and have been for over a century.

I don't usually talk much politics on this blog, but at this time please forgive me if I do. I believe it is time to recover optimism. Let's shake off the misery, guilt, and reactionary rejection of science and reason that characterised the latter half of the 20th Century. The forces of post-modernism have destroyed our sense of objective value, inherent quality, integrity, rationality, and respect for expert knowledge.

Let's recover pride in our species, enthusiasm, and the momentum of Progress. We have it within our reach - we are on course - to raise the entire human race above a minimum standard of living for the first time in the history of our species, if we can shake off the endless grinding whine of anti-science, of those who would have us re-embrace the Stone Age.

In order to bring us close to that amazing state of universal freedom from real absolute poverty it would help to

  • bring education to those denied it, with special mention for all the women crushed under misogynistic cultures
  • continue the battle against disease, through sanitation and vaccination
  • free the world to trade and prosper across borders
  • rein in those abusing the capitalist system by locking up wealth within a privileged few
  • foster freedom and enlightenment, and resist the forces of superstition and regression. Put science and rationality at the forefront of our thinking.
  • reject the Hollywood story that every problem can be solved with force and violence, and moments later everybody is laughing and hugging (which appears to be US foreign policy: imagine if half the money spent on war in the Middle East had been spent on education)
  • reject our miserable, hysterical, ignorant, pandering mainstream media, and develop new ways to communicate reality to the masses
  • address the toxic streams of hatred and pseudo-science emanating from the internet
  • rediscover honour, honesty, morality, courage, integrity, authenticity and hope

I may be a skeptic, a cynic and a critic, but I am always an optimist. We all have reason to be. By most objective measures, the world is getting better and will continue to do so in 2015.

Meantime I'll be in the mountains for a week which - by Murphy's Law - means this blog will break while I cant do anything to fix it. Fingers crossed!

See you next year.

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