I have been seeing videos that have been served up on various social media platforms that are trying to say that CERN (or HAARP) is to blame for all the calamities that we've been having recently: the flooding in China, the earthquakes in Venezuela, Canadian wildfires etc. It's so goddamn disappointing when the answer is just fucking boring climate change. People are too fucking stubborn and too stupid and filled with magical thinking and conspiracy bullshit to understand that we've just done this to ourselves with climate change.

I guess when you throw an outlier in there, like an earthquake, then people need an alternate reason when they bundle it all together under one bag, as opposed to climate change. Plus, earthquakes fucking happen all the time. Whatever, people are so fucking dumb, and it's so disappointing to me that instead of getting more and more upset about climate change, people are coming up with these weird magical conspiracy bullshit explanations.

I am far more upset about this than I should be. I just don't know why people are like this. I even conjectured that they would do this years and years ago, but now we're here and they're actually doing it. For fuck's sake, ughhh, what is wrong with people?

Rather than this just be a typical Monday rant from a grumpy dude who's disappointed in humanity, I want to share a concept I came across recently that I think is very helpful in realizing partially why people are so stupid. That is the notion of a hyper-object.

Like most people's inability to understand statistics and its implications, hyper-objects are beyond the grasp of many normal mortals, and climate change is definitely a hyper-object.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Morton?wprov=sfti1

I guess this notion is dangerous, as it gives me an excuse to forgive my fellow humans for their willful ignorance. It also detracts from obvious aspects of this phenomenon, such as:
- the need to differentiate through capitalism on social media platforms, driving people to posit crackpot theories to individuate their presence online and gain followers
- the willful use of propaganda by Russian disinformation campaigns and fossil fuel companies, etc.

Still, it's a worthy idea. At least, if it doesn't explain or excuse the promulgation of these ideas, it certainly explains why people are so susceptible to them.