Completely circular reasoning here. If one spends one's life deeply immersed in a particular field, then it will of course affect one's worldview.
Surely the aim should not be to bring our baggage on board with us, but to try lo leave it behind before entering discussions on important topics.
Well Jim was replying to my comment. I think the remarkable thing about recent times, as Jim has pointed out, is that there are two versions of current affairs reality on offer at the same time - absolutely poles apart. What we should be doing, is thinking about what particular pieces of supposed news really mean.
I mean, in the context of both the original Mueller inquiry and the indictment of twelve Russian citizens, it is surely worth asking:
Assuming there was no tampering with the ballot (which I think has been ruled out), what exactly does it mean to 'interfere with
an election'? Is it a crime at all, whether you are a US citizen or a foreigner? Did I 'interfere with the BREXIT referendum by helping to campaign for it? Would it have been illegal for a foreigner (such as Obama!) to try to influence that vote?
In order for 'collusion' to be an offence, does it have to be shown that at least one actual offence was being planned?
Could any citizen sustain a relentless effort by law officials to find them guilty of something? Normally it is taken for granted that people in a free society are not subjected to a sustained inquiry simply to determine if they have committed an unspecified crime. Doesn't this apply if the guy happens to be president?
Can anyone give a hypothetical example of what a Russian could have done that would be illegal? Would the illegality depend on that person being Russian, or just being a non-US citizen?
In normal times a decent journalist would obviously laser in on these questions, but nowadays you can actually hear them deliberately avoiding tricky questions of this sort.
These questions are very much analogous to those you might ask a die-hard materialist. The conventional view of NDE's, is to call them illusions - just avoid probing into the facts. But even when people do try to probe deeper, they are met with obfuscations of various sorts. For example, can anyone supply a materialistic explanation as to why NDE's often view the medical emergency from above? Instead they concentrate on something different - the possibility that the NDE is fabricated by the brain after the event is over.
If you listen to a debate about some ψ phenomenon in the MSM, you see the same lack of reasoning - just skate over anything that smells of careful logic!
I would see the same approach is generally taken to issues of climate change. For example, if someone talks about climate change, are they talking about all climate change, or only that portion attributable to rising CO2? When a drought or a flood is attributed to climate change, does that mean that nothing comparable has happened before the era when climate change was supposed to have started? Does it mean anything definite?
I am amazed at the extent that debates seem to happen without even basic logic being applied.
I related that to the scandals in medical science. I mean, you will get one senior medical researcher demolish the standard medical advice for diabetes (say). The response from the other side is to simply ignore this and carry on as before. Sometimes the response is of the form, "Well the important point is that guidelines haven't changed", or "Recommending Y instead of X will kill patients!" In other words the learned response doesn't even begin to address the original carefully reasoned criticism! Again in normal times, journalists would zoom in on the non-sequitur, and dig into the subject more carefully.
When we talk about consensus reality, we usually mean the distinction between private experiences (e.g. dreams) and public ones - but maybe the current state of politics is illustrating that larger process, and showing that consensus reality is more fragile than we usually imagine.
David