What Could Be

There is an awful lot of twaddle on Facebook, and of course on social media in general. That’s because, of course, they depend on the general public to contribute content and generally the general public likes to talk a lot of twaddle. Most people are far more willing to venture an opinion and debate the various merits of which Hogwarts house they belong in than, say, a flat tax, UBI, or modern monetary theory.
I would love to see a site where a piece of twaddle, once introduced, could not be introduced again, because it starts to feel like spam after a while. But, that is just a dream.
There were two particular twaddlish items this morning that I was, indeed, guilty of responding to. One was an article from LGBTQnation.com, and the headline said “California was Named After A Black Lesbian Queen” which sounded interesting, until you got about 3/4ths of the way through the article and came across “While Calafia isn’t explicitly lesbian in Montalvo’s novel, modern historians like gay historian Bill Lipsky…” and you knew right there the whole thing was rubbish.
The other was something I’ve seen many times already, about how the whole universe could be a simulation. Well, sure. The whole universe could be a piece of marshmallow, floating in the bowl of some massive super being 7 year old’s Lucky Charms, the universe could be one of 17 trillion multiverses, the universe could be a hallucination in the mind of somebody IN SOME OTHER universe, and anything could be anything, really. That’s kind of what the word could means.