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An Interesting Time

Entry 2424, on 2025-12-28 at 19:06:07 (Rating 4, Comments)

The end of the year is approaching so I guess it is time for a summary of 2025. Of course, what are the most important events of the year will depend on the person making the appraisal, so these are just my thoughts. Feel free to share yours in the comments.

First, it was a good year for Trump. He still has plenty of critics, but I have started to get the feeling that a lot of the whining coming from them is more out of habit rather than anything involving genuinely individual thought or fair commentary on his actions.

What we have long suspected: that the media are inventing stories to make him look bad, has been shown to be real, with the revelations of the creation of apparently deliberately misleading stories at the BBC, and if you think it is limited to just them then you are showing an embarrassing level of naivety.

His work to improve the situation in Gaza has been recognised even by some of his harshest critics. One prominent and intelligent person with TDS (Trump derangement syndrome), Sam Harris, has even suggested he deserves a Nobel Peace Prize, even though he still thinks he should not be president.

The US is also progressing relatively well with border control, the economy, and a limited control over the rabid fringe of extreme leftist hysteria, including LGBT issues.

Second, AI continues to become part of our everyday lives. I specifically use it several times every day, and it is also built into many functions I have used without AI enhancements in the past.

Whether AI will progress to the extent its supporters believe, whether it will ever rival humans in general intelligence, and whether it will ever become an existential threat is more uncertain. There are credible people who think it is just another tech "bubble" that will burst like so many others, but there are others who think it will revolutionise society, not necessarily in a good way. I tend to think it will continue to improve and that we will have major changes in our lives because of this within 10 or 20 years.

Third, there appears to be less of what I have been recently referring to (somewhat unkindly) as "hysteria". In this context I mean totally exaggerated claims of imminent disaster, often as a result of the actions of what might traditionally be thought of as the "good team" (the Western world, Israel, capitalists).

My first example of this is COVID. There is no doubt that this was a serious disease and well worth paying attention to, but the over-reaction by leaders, including our own repulsive tyrant Jacinda Ardern, was pure hysteria. At least COVID is no longer much of a source of interest to the vast majority of people.

I must admit that I still see people wearing masks, even though we know they do almost nothing and might even be more trouble than they are worth. Why? I guess because it marks the wearer as a "good person" who follows the rules, even when the rules no longer exist. There will always be a few people more retarded than most, I guess!

Then there is the "climate crisis". I think climate change is real and worth being aware of and taking reasonable steps to either avoid or to adapt to, but it is not a crisis, nor an emergency, and it certainly isn't an existential threat. Many countries, including New Zealand, are backing away from climate commitments, and I think that is a good thing. Targeted spending on adaptation seems like a better choice than the useless nonsense organised in the past by the world community.

I have noticed a lot less activism around the Palestine conflict recently too. Even the idiots in the Green Party seem to have stopped talking about it since the Sydney terrorist attack. Maybe they know that by implicitly supporting terrorism they were part of the reason that atrocity occurred. Maybe they will back off from the hysterical claims of genocide and other nonsense they have been pushing in recent years.

In general I am a bit more positive as this year closes than I have been for a while. There does seem to be a genuine push back against woke-ism and other irrational hysterical ideologies. The leftist leaders who remain (Starmer and Albanese in particular) seem to be the subject of a lot of ridicule and distrust.

Where it will go, who really knows, but it's going to be an interesting time.

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