Informant38

Either the Arctic (or more technically the northern polar ice cap, since the Arctic is a region and will still be there no matter what happens) is melting, or it isn't. Either last year was the warmest in recorded history or it wasn't.
These aren't things I personally am able to verify. It's very hot today where I am, and the hills in the Cleveland National Forest outside Los Angeles a little to the south are on fire, and the smoke from that is in the air here.
Still that's anecdotal - this is central California, where people complain when the temperature gets below 50 degrees Fahrenheit. So even though current conditions make it easier to accept, I don't know these things. They exist as assertions made by what seems to be a consensus of professionals.
I can't verify the credentials of the scientists making the assertions, or even if they themselves exist as real people with real lives.
So somewhere in there I take it all on faith, a relatively blind faith.
We can reduce that to a set of geometric shapes if we want - me a little dot here, the Arctic a toroidal thing over there, the climatologists and their public representatives other little dots scattered across a grid of latitude and longitude.
Getting something to represent the temperature increase forces us to append graphs and other visual displays.
But what we have at the end is trust, not facts. The interconnections of integrity and human willingness to believe; out of necessity, yes, but there's an optimism in that as well. An innocence too.
By itself that complex of assertion and trust would be a stressful thing, considering the subject and its implications, but adding in the immense campaign of disinformation and political obstruction, and recognizing the responsibilities of cause and the need for the culpable to keep that causative linkage obscure and diffuse - to keep the fact of the change in doubt, and then as it becomes unavoidable to shift the causative blame onto the victims and away from the responsible, which is pretty much where we are at this moment - that places the faith and trust of the individual - on the graph, me; in the world, me and you, us - in a context of near-combat, a kind of war of trust and faith, with the body count measuring those fallen to doubt and cynicism.
So I sent a link to that "cell phone egg-cooker" story, from a link I got somewhere, to a friend who's got a certain amount of faith in me as a source of credible information.
And then yesterday I sent her a link to an interview with the original perpetrator of the hoax that story actually is. Being a responsible friend.
OK. So, against a background of stability, and the expectation that barring unforeseen circumstances tomorrow will be much like today - in other words the world as it was, but not as it is - that kind of hoaxing can be a healthy reminder that your biases will convince you of things for which the evidence alone is not sufficient. Knee-jerk reactions. Prejudice.
This is not a background of stability.
This is a world where soft lambs are carried into the tender gaze of children, Frankenstein creatures grown in open-air laboratories linked directly and complicitly to the hell-cages of primate research.
Prejudice as recognition.
I could go on. I will a little. The genetic vandalism that has defaced human agriculture forever, the still unremarked-on fact that automobile crashes kill more children in the US than anything else does, the complete devaluing of the aged in a culture that purports to revere life - you get the idea.
Not trusting technology in that environment is at worst a forgivable reaction, and steadily gains purpose as healthy mistrust.
Believing that the processes of invention and delivery of new technologies no longer have goals in common with, or any interest in the well-being of those who receive them - that's not Luddite hysteria, that's coming out of the data.
Crafting that cell-phone hoax in the year 2000 is one thing; disseminating it now - with fire and great anxiety present and growing all around - isn't the neutral fun thing sophisticated rational skeptics wish it were.
It's this contextual shift that's so hard to get, that refutes the hard and fast letter of the law, though it does honor the spirit.
Tricking people who don't know what to believe or who to trust and making them even more anxious - that's aggression, intellectual assault.
It's why "fire in a crowded theater" is so accessible and popular as a term of discourse.
It's why those Danish cartoons that everyone wants to place in some universal and eternal box of either right or wrong won't fit there.
Laughing at someone's obvious and irritating superstitious absurdities - when they aren't being beaten to their knees in front of you - that's one thing.
Laughing at them when they're weeping and digging in the rubble of their homes for their relatives is another.
People can understand that. It means freedom has responsibilities, it means what you do isn't happening in a vacuum. Even now.