Humour on Politics Jersey

This rather nice spoof was posted on Politics Jersey.

But you can't please everyone!

One person complained that it was "a stain on the memory of Freddie Mercury and Queen", and evidently took it very seriously, but it is clearly supposed to be humour, no more denigrating that the variously subtitled versions of clips from "Downfall".

Nick Palmer said: "I think it is brilliant humour, and I don't often say that of stuff. Apart from anything else, they do a very good job of reproducing the Queen sound."

And also commented:

"Of course, the reality is that there are hordes of people online possessed of such monstrous egos that their peculiar opinions have become completely incorrigible, no matter how many mountains of evidence one can show them to prove that they are wrong and that their opinions are bunkum. I think it is a major sickness of modern online society that somehow many seem to act as if everybody's opinions are of equal value. That is just insane, not to mention potentially pathologically dangerous."

To which Mike Dun replied:

"How many people in a horde?"

I answered: I think Ghengis had about 50.

To which, getting in the swing of things, Mike replied:

Mike Dun: "About the same as the States Assembly - but he did remarkably well it seems without computers. A lesson for us all perhaps."

Various other exchanges rambled on by other posters on a more serious vein on the nature of opinion and fact (in the Middle Ages, this lot would have been arguing about how many angels could fit on the point of a pin), in which this gem popped out:

"Everyones opinions are of equal value"

And

"You can’t prove your opinions anymore than anyone else. There are simply opinions of no value whatsoever. Analysis by moral philosophers would undoubtedly favour you? Really? That’s just imaginative thinking."

And

"An Opinion based on facts are demonstrably worth more than an opinion based on the opposite of facts. Therefore Opinions have value dependent on what they are based on."

I thought the exchange was getting too serious again, as well as remarkably loopy. Online exchanges often have a rather tenuous relation to the real world, so I shoved in my tuppenceworth again:

Can we mention Godel's incompleteness theorem at this point?

Mike Dun came back with another bit of rather nice humour:

"Thanks for that reference - I thought Godel kept a dairy herd at St Mary for years - but apparently Genghis and his horde used to play "fact or fiction" around the camp-fire along similar lines to this "link"... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4ndIDcDSGc. Those who postulated a fact had to prove it and if they failed were tied to a tree and used for target practice. Unfortunately the policy tended to encourage silence and that was why they never did manage to invent the computer..."

And there we must leave it... but my thoughts, for what they are worth - and there's a fair debate about opinions, moral philosophers, facts, the merits of different brands of coffee and Brexit still going on - is that while there are people who can enjoy humour, like Mike Dun, and not take everything always too seriously, there is still hope for the human race.

"The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up. And one of the games to which it is most attached is called "Keep to-morrow dark," and which is also named (by the rustics in Shropshire, I have no doubt) "Cheat the Prophet." The players listen very carefully and respectfully to all that the clever men have to say about what is to happen in the next generation. The players then wait until all the clever men are dead, and bury them nicely. They then go and do something else. That is all. For a race of simple tastes, however, it is great fun."

― G.K. Chesterton, The Napoleon of Notting Hill