I got them all right, (thank dawg), but it’s pretty depressing to see the wacko percentage. Having read this board for umpteen years you’d think I’d have been educated a bit on that … but it’s still discouraging.
I will say there were a couple choices where I immediately knew the factual one, but one of the others I considered not fact or fiction, but more like highly-possible-but-unproven.
In any voluntary public survey with any publicity behind it you have to assume many (half?, most?) of the respondents are trolls trying to screw with the survey results. I have no idea what sort of statistical adjustment would be required to filter out the troll vote. Making WaPo look bad and making the Establishment biddies swoon in horror is high sport for those folks.
And that’s just the ordinary self-motivated 4chan-style anarchist-a**hole trolls. The latest modern state-sponsored or AI-driven trolls are a whole 'nuther kettle of fish on top of the good old familiar 4chan sort.
[aside]
When 4chan trolls are considered part of “the good old days”, you know we’re in deep kimchee.
Agreed. For example, I don’t think Republicans “stole” the 2000 election, but I don’t think they won it “fairly” either. It was handed to them by a Supreme Court that never should have gotten involved.
In my employer’s online training quizzes, usually the right answer is the longest one (or maybe “all/none of the above”). Unsurprisingly, the longest answer in this quiz was correct in 4/6 of the questions and one answer was “none of the above”.
I got them all right but reading through the correct answers afterwards hardly paints the picture of a healthy society. Other than “None of the above,” of course.
Critical thinkers would issues with those questions. Just like the child asked “Who discovered America?” in school might know the answer was supposed to be “Christopher Columbus” while knowing better.
I’m tired of seeing the Tuskeegee experiment on lists of conspiracies. It wasn’t widely known, but it wasn’t hidden as part of a conspiracy. Results were published.
So, skepticism about government means we must take any conspiracy theory seriously, no matter how wacko?
I think that was the point. It sounds like something people might think would have been a conspiracy, but it wasn’t. If you’re ignorant of history it might sound implausible. But as you said, it was published, not hidden, and there was a time when the government and a significant number of people in this country thought such a thing was acceptable.
It is an article of faith in much of the black community that the C.I.A. was running crack cocaine into Los Angeles in the 1980s and 1990s. At the time I heard these stories I was dismissive. Now? I dunno, Not a whole lot surprises me these days.