My wife is on Facebook, where tonight she saw an article proclaiming that Pope Francis had endorsed Donald Trump. Of course, it was 100% pure bull shit.
And it’s not a matter of politics. I’m a solid Democrat and if I saw an article saying that the Pope had endorsed Hillary, I’d know it was crap.
How fuckin’ stupid are these people?
All of it.
People on Facebook need a direct link to Snopes.
[Farnsworth]And Fry, you’very got that brain thing. [/F]
[Fry]I already did! [/Fry]
Trump supporters aren’t fact people, they are belief people. They want things to be true, they believe them to be true because they want them to be true, and they are not interested in any further thought.
It’s not surprising that Trump attracts such people; his entire schtick is to tell people exactly what they want to hear, regardless of consistency, facts, logic, or anything else.
And I should add, not only do these people believe things to be true because they want them to be true, they refuse to believe anything that would contradict what they want to be true.
If you think blindly sharing Facebook memes regarding of whether they are even remotely connected to reality is limited to one segment of the population, you need to get out more.
On my list of “How could I improve the critical thinking skills of the general populace if I ruled the world?”, shutting down Facebook would be near the top. I mean, I spend a lot of time on it as well but man, is it a major vector for ignorance and idiocy.
I took a complete break from FB for a few months and recently returned with a limit of 15 minutes a day (imposed by site-blocking software because I don’t have any discipline.)
I’m already feeling stupider.
One of my favorite recent ones was a friend of a friend who posted some anti-vax claim, and said, ''I don’t care if it’s true or not, I’m never vaccinating my kids and that’s final."
You don’t care if it’s true?
What? I’ve seen a lot of unintentional ignorance spread, but when you actively resist learning new things, that is total WTF territory.
Oh Lordy, I have relatives who take the “I don’t care whether it’s true or not” approach. Truthiness reigns supreme.
It’s times like this I miss Brass Eye. Who could forget DJ Neil Fox earnestly and cluelessly explaining that “paedophiles have more genes in common with crabs than they do with you and me”, adding “Now that is scientific fact—there’s no real evidence for it—but it is scientific fact”.
This is the thing that confuses me. A goodly portion of Americans are college educated, right? It’s not like these people didn’t learn critical thinking skills… right?
My mother has a degree in mechanical engineering for Og’s sake, and shortly before we cut off contact it seemed she was devolving more and more every day into this totally anti-scientific, completely credulous frame of mind.
I’ve come to the conclusion that logic and critical thinking is not a one-dimensional scale of ability, where some people have it and some don’t and some have a bit of it. It is actually a very complex mixture of mental processes whereby a person can be highly logical and critical in one area of life and completely, stupidly credulous in another.
There are people who are highly skilled doctors, quite versed in the scientific method, who have cheerfully fallen for Nigerian scam emails, as illogical and insane as those things are.
There are people who have little education or training in scientific rigor and who suck at math who hear Donald Trump’s claims and say “that is obviously a lie.”
There are people who would never in ten bazillion years fall for a Nigerian scam email who will fall for any pyramid scheme you put in front of them.
There are people who would not fall for Nigerian email schemes OR pyramid schemes but who really believe vaccines are a conspiracy to poison kids.
There are people who laugh at Donald Trump’s insane claims… but will refuse to believe anything negative about their candidate or party of choice, no matter how strong the evidence.
There are people who think the moon hoax conspiracy theory is silly nonsense but totally believe the Loose Change video.
There are people who won’t fall for any of the above thing but who become gambling addicts. There are people who… well, I could go on all day.
The world is not divided into Spocks and idiots; EVERYONE is both a Spock and an idiot. Some people are more one than the other but humans have a remarkable ability to slot some things into the logic category and some into the emotion category, and which is which isn’t a predictable thing.
I just blocked someone on FB who wasn’t even friended.
My friend posts a thing about Trump. This woman afflicted with Terminal Clinton Hysteria goes off like a bomb on his page, spamming it with anti-Hillary comments, beginning with their ‘corrupt’ charity.
Sorry, that charity gives more of its donation to works than the United Way. It is considered a ‘Gold Standard’ charity. If you claim otherwise, it is clear to me that you’re buying the Republican fear and outrage, not dealing with actual reality.
As I said, the post is about Trump, talk about Trump. When the post is about Hillary, you can spread your bullshit and we’ll laugh at you.
Some of it is a lack of critical thinking, but some of it is simple ignorance. There are a lot of people, probably more than you think, who simply don’t follow current events. They wouldn’t know what is or isn’t appropriate or credible behavior for a pope, because that article they shared (and probably didn’t read beyond the headline) is a shockingly high percentage of what they (think they) know about the Pope. There isn’t much common knowledge.
It should also be pointed out that these are the people who delight in saying that they don’t believe the media.
When I saw the title, I didn’t know which bunch of stupids the OP was talking about, or the specific stupidity the’re stupiding, but yes, they are that effin’ stupid. Stupider than that, even.
Conversation I once had with my boss, a college-educated, professional woman who happens to believe every bit of scarelore to come down the pike, from Food Babe-ish nonsense about “chemicals” and “toxins” to stuff like:
“I just read on Facebook where a little boy was kidnapped at Walmart, and the kidnapper changed his clothes and dyed his hair in the bathroom so no one would recognize him! I can’t take my girls to Walmart anymore! What if that happens to them???”
“Boss, that’s been going around forever. That’s just an urban legend.”
“IT IS NOT AN URBAN LEGEND! It just happened in [I forget where she said]!!! They changed the boy’s clothes and dyed his hair right there in the bathroom and the only thing they didn’t change was the shoes because shoes are hard to find!” Because god knows Walmart doesn’t sell shoes… :rolleyes:
At that point I just kind of wandered off, but I wanted to ask her, you’ve had your hair dyed, right? It takes a while, right? You have to put the dye on, and let it sit a while, and then wash it out, and then dry and style it, right? You have two young kids, right? How much do they like having their hair washed? Not at all? You think they’d sit there with smelly itchy dye in it without screaming the roof down, crying, struggling, smearing dye all over the entire store and a few in the next state? All of this sight unseen in a fucking Walmart bathoom?
But I didn’t, because it would have just pissed her off without changing her mind, given me a headache, and possibly gotten me fired 
I used to reply to wacko Facebook posts by giving a Snopes link. People got so pissed off about it that I stopped doing it, and I just unfriended the worst offenders. It absolutely drives me nuts that people don’t check to see if something is true, before they pass it on.
There are some thread titles where I don’t even have to read the first post to answer yes. Titles like “Am I being scammed?” or “Should I tell my wife I an dying because I was raped in the ass by a cactus - a cactus with AIDS?”
This thread falls into that category.
They feel no responsibility because they are just passing it along, and any attempt to correct them makes you a “hater”.
Hasn’t the pope endorsed every Republican candidate, ever?
Yep. I got criticized for linking to Snopes in response to one of the more asinine CTs. The person mocked me for “blindly trusting Snopes”. I believe my “unfriended” list is now about 3 or 4 times the number on my friend list. Thanks to the upcoming election, I expect the “unfriended” number to rise exponentially.