essell

The internet has made a lot of people armchair experts happy to offer their perspective with a degree of certainty, without doing the work to identify gaps in their knowledge. Often the mark of genuine expertise is knowing the limitations of your knowledge.

This isn't a social media thing exclusively of course, I've met it in the real world too.

When I worked as a repair technician, members of the public would ask me for my diagnosis of faults and then debate them with me.

I've dedicated the second half of my life to understanding people and how they work, in this field it's even worse because everyone has opinions on that topic!

And yet my friend who has a physics PhD doesn't endure people explaining why his theories about battery tech are incorrect because of an article they read or an anecdote from someone's past.

So I'm curious, do some fields experience this more than others?

If you have a field of expertise do you find people love to debate you without taking into account the gulf of awareness, skills and knowledge?

To elaborate...

The UK has always favoured centrist governments, when the Conservatives get too nasty they're unpopular, Labour only wins when they do Thatcherism-Light, etc.

We now have a choice between a relatively moderate conservative prime minister, who is admittedly being dragged to the right by his party and others, and a relatively moderate labour leader who has purged the extremism from his party to pursue a centre left agenda.

In both cases, what I see are two people who believe in principles, compromise them for politics sake, who are fundamentally in favour of the status quo rather than revolution and prefer to win through being seen as competent.

Fine, this has been the case most of my life. It's why I've been relaxed about politics. Whatever happens, things will largely stay the same with small incremental changes.

The difference now is about the fringes. Not a day goes by recently without a headline grabbing policy coming out of the government press machine making a virtue out of being a bunch of ****s.

The ridiculous culture war stuff, the politicisation of fear and anger. Pointless, ineffective policies that are intended to win a few votes regardless of the harm they cause. Sickening stuff a lot of the time, born out of selfishness of behalf of those in power to try and keep that power and get as much as they can for themselves. It feels like they be the ones looting the Titanic as it sank.

So whilst Labour are not likely to usher in a revolution, a golden age or fix things overnight. I'll take centrist middle aged dad running the country if it means an end to this nonsense. An end to a government attacking it's own citizens in the name of defending the people.