They come and go

Published: Sun, 05/26/24

One piece of advice I was given about email marketing was: ‘If you are not getting some turn over of subscribers then you are not really achieving anything.’ The idea is that your posts express who you are and what you stand for. Some people will be drawn to you and what you have to say. Some will be repelled by your personality and your beliefs and feel compelled to un-subcribe from the list. My main list hovers around 200 subscribers and each post seems to add one person and lose another, and that is how it is supposed to work. Sometimes people even tell me why they are leaving. I had a message from a lady in the USA who has been on the list for several years and she has commented on my posts from time to time. Now she says that she wishes me well but she no longer wants to hear my criticisms of Israel. On the one hand I am sorry to lose a loyal reader of my posts (and I don’t have that many of them to start with!). However,
a second piece of advice was: ‘Any complaint about your messages will almost certainly give you an idea for your next post.’ So...
In a world dominated by false narrative, anyone who sees through the propaganda and seeks to bring attention to the reality which is being deliberately obscured is going to upset the people invested in the narrative. Different people are invested in different narratives. The lady who messaged me after my last post seems to have been okay with everything I have posted for about the past 5 years (maybe longer). Even if she didn’t agree with me she wasn’t so offended that she needed to un-subscribe from future posts. However, questioning Israel proved to be her red line and from the stats it seems that nearly all my posts cross someone’s limit of acceptable discourse.
It is not that I deliberately want to offend anyone, I just can’t help noticing discrepancies between narratives and reality. I also follow other writers and commentators who suffer from the same compulsion and who draw my attention to the contradictions which have aroused their interest. Does this mean that I follow ‘Conspiracy Theories’? A conspiracy theory is just asking which group might be benefiting from a particular situation while not drawing attention to who they are, or the benefit that comes to them. As far as I know the term goes back to the aftermath of the JFK assassination in 1963. Intelligent people asked if it was really likely that a lone nutcase would, or even could, kill the president of the USA? Or, did a group of powerful people conspire to kill Kennedy, and how did they benefit? Valid questions then and now.
I do however apply three rules to any ‘Conspiracy Theory’:
1: Conspiracy or cock up? There are already theories circulating that the Israelis killed Ebrahim Raisi the president of Iran and Hossein Amir-Abdollahian his Foreign Minister on the 19th of May. Or maybe it was just a very old helicopter flying in very bad weather and the pilot crashed into the side of a mountain? Sometimes an accident is just an accident until there is good reason to believe otherwise.
2. Just because it is obvious you are being lied to doesn’t mean that your preferred narrative is the truth. All recognising a lie means is that you don’t know what the truth is. I could suggest examples here but I would just be presenting the kind of alternative narrative which proves my point. Often we just have to accept that we don’t know the truth, and that is okay.
3. When the same media that pushed a narrative that is now obviously false starts offering an alternative version of events you are being misdirected. Someone said: ‘The media can’t really tell you what to think, but it will tell you what to think about.’ There is still a lot in the media about the Post office IT scandal and now the ‘tainted blood’ that was given the hemophiliacs 30 years ago. Both maybe wrongs which needed to be righted I am sure. However, no mention of the next stage of the Covid inquiry which was going to look at the vaccines. I will predict that in the early 2050s there will be a massive, public, and very expensive investigation into the harms done by the covid jabs, until then there will be plenty to divert your attention.
Compared to previous generations we have access to so much information that we like to think that we can understand the world. However, all second hand information has been processed in some way and for some purpose. Even if that information is presented with the best of intentions it has still been edited and it presents a selected version of events, never the whole picture. In the past 24 hours it has been announced that the UK will hold a general election on the 4th of July. I am happy to accept the date of the election as a fact, and that is as far as it goes. We now face six weeks of being bombarded with conflicting narratives and improbable promises as our votes are sought after. I will be applying my three rules while remembering what Mark Twain said a long time ago. ‘If voting really made any difference they would not let us do it.’
What does make a difference is raising consciousness, and the fastest way to elevate your awareness is noticing what does not make sense, asking the right questions, and accepting that we can truly know very little. And don’t be offended when your certainties start looking a bit shaky, that is the first stage of expanded wisdom.
I wonder who will un-subcribe following this post? I think my three rules of conspiracy theories are quite useful, but I know I can’t please everyone.
regards
Graham
PS We are not far off Mid-Summer or Baldersvaki now and there will be a midsummer camp at Silver Forest on the 20th to the 23rd, two weeks before Stavcamp. I will be helping with the organisation, particularly the activity time table as well as doing a talk or two. I can give you more details if you are interested or you can join the group on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/groups/209664148525916

PPS For actual hardcore Stav training of course you want Stavcamp 5th to 7th July, full details here http://stavcamp.org/


Graham Butcher
21 Beaver Road
Beverley East Yorkshire HU17 0QN
UNITED KINGDOM

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