(no subject)
It used to be one could get a feel for the world. Charles du Gaulle knew as a teenager--as a teenager!--that World War I was imminent. Chiang Kai-shek could see clearly that War (the second world war) was on the horizon, hoping it would pull the Japanese out of China.
But today, trying to make any prediction about the world gets complicated quickly. Is Iran's government unstable enough to fall? Is it untrustworthy enough to attempt a prevention of their nuclear program? It depends who you listen to. Facts are replaced by opinions; and I find one major difference between the clear past and the murky present in the sheer number of people talking. Maybe back then, you could perceive the important facts, and today the background noise drowns it out.
Because as soon as a prediction is made, some person somewhere will counter it with a supposition of their own. And while this makes for a very broad spectrum of ideas, it crowds out truth.
I guess this isn't really anything new--yellow journalism and all that. Maybe it's a frustration people have always had to deal with. The people who know what's going on can never be heard over tumultuous crowing of misbegotten opinions.