But then “shocked” doesn’t mean much to me anymore. More “bemused” nowadays.
Sometimes the really shocking thing is who believes it, i.e., it doesn’t shock me that some people believe in astrology and base life decisions on it, but it DOES shock me that a former coworker, who I regard as very intelligent and who seems to have a good grasp on reality in most things, actually believes in it and (for instance) won’t date Leo males because it’s not a good match for her.
I had a friend who, at a campfire discussion that turned to extinct animals, asked “So what’s the deal with unicorns? Are they actually fully extinct now or just endangered?” As we stared at him silent and open-mouthed, he very clearly realized for the first time in his life that unicorns were make-believe and he had just made a total idiot of himself. Watching this play out on someone’s face in real time is a memory I’ll always cherish. 
A cow-orker didn’t know that meat was animals’ muscle tissue. He just thought that “meat” was something that animals had inside them that had no other function than to eat.
Harold Camping.
I am shocked that you believe there are no masons in Australia and Europe
A woman in my class seems slightly off kilter in many respects so ‘shocked’ is definitely not the word.
Class discussion some weeks back and the topic came up on the Mayan calendar, December of this year and the ensuing End-of-it-All.
This woman asserts with all seriousness, that we might not see the End of Days but that there will be mass suicides prior to and just after December 21. She thinks that folks will create suicide pacts just before the 21st so as to not have to experience whatever horror is in store for us. Then if nothing happens, those left behind will be so saturated with humiliation that they too will off themselves in large number.
No one in class questioned this peculiar form of logic nor which option she would be exploring some months from now but instead furtively exchanged the dubious smiley look.
My coworker still believes that Browns gas works for dramatically increasing gas mileage and the evil oil companies are paying off the car companies and government to hide this from the public.
I’ve shown him numerous articles from reputable sources that it’s a load of crap:
Car and Driver, Motor Trend, Time, Consumer Reports, etc. According to him they are in on the conspiracy as well.
Otherwise he’s a fairly intelligent guy, or at least he seems like it.
It’s an admittedly controversial stance but I believe that studies currently under way will bear out my hypothesis.
My parents believe anybody who drinks any amount of alcohol at all is an alcoholic. They live on a farm by a road that doesn’t get much traffic, and so assume that whenever two or three cars drive by together that somebody must be having a drinkin’ party.
And what is so wrong with being a Marxist? Marx got a lot right, IMHO. Lenin was a wild distortion of Marx and, as for Stalin, Mao, Hoxha, the Kims, and all the rest, they are simply monsters.
Incidentally, Adam Smith got a lot right too. He felt that unbridled free markets wouldn’t work and that government regulation was needed to prevent them from becoming monopolies. I suspect there would be a lot of agreement between him and Marx.
Also: “A fool will always find a greater fool to admire him.” (I wish I knew who said this.)
My personal shocker was an old friend of my wife. Intelligent, witty, sharp. In her mid-20’s she and her new husband became Scientologists. We were aghast at some of silliness they would relate to us, but we kept politely quiet.
Finally, after 20+ years (and tens of thousands of dollars, by their own estimate), they decided they’d been fools, and left “the church.”
And became “clients” of a channeler. We told her exactly what we thought, and haven’t heard from her since. Must have been 15 years ago.
.
They left the Church of Scientology? Ouch. From what I’ve heard about those folks, if you leave them, the financial loss will be the least of your problems. Scientologists seem pretty damn vicious.
I’d need to write a book to document the silly ass things my brothers and sisters believe in, it depresses me no end to realize how ignorant they all are. I do not know why, but some people escape the thousands of stories told to us by our family and close friends. Is there a skeptical gene? If there is I am the only one in my family to have it.
I am from a small tobacco farming community in East TN where churches outnumber gas stations and if we export anything it is pure ignorance.
I didn’t say the professor was wrong, just that it was surprising to find a Marxist. I’d never encountered one before-- haven’t really since, either, not offline. Michigan may be a blue state but I found it conservative. It was a conservative time as well. Even one of the deadheads I knew was a Republican.
But really, I’m still puzzled why an obviously intelligent person with political freedom would subscribe to such a discredited theory so late in the game. Marx made a bunch of predictions that simply never came to pass. When attempts were made to put his theories into practice, time and again, people died. It seems misguided to teach that crap.
I can see why you might think that, if you equate “Marxism” with “Soviet-style communist dictatorships”. But in the world of academic social sciences, “Marxism” has a broader definition. It’s more of an outlook, a way of seeing things in terms of class struggles and so forth. A few are more “hard-core” than that, true.
It is true that there are fewer self-described “Marxists” on US (or British, or Canadian, or Mexican, or Danish…) campuses than there were, say, in the 1970s, but there are still a lot of them, to one degree or another. While sometimes they get mired in gobbledygook, by and large they are very smart people who know a whole lot about how the world works (or some parts of it or aspects of it, anyway).
To just name some human geographers, Marxists of various stripes could include the brilliant David Harvey (Johns Hopkins U), the insightful Don Mitchell (Syracuse U), and the perceptive Linda McDowell (Oxford U). Plus quite a few pie-in-the-sky blowhards, that’s true. But no need to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
I figured out long ago that no matter how patently absurd the proposition, you can find at least 2% of the people will accept/believe it. So no, not much shocks me in Human Belief anymore. Humans are incredibly arrogant, stupid and cruel.
I read an article in Skeptic that was talking about how the longer we hold onto our beliefs, no matter how illogical, the more emotionally invested we become in them. In other words, a big part of your own personal security/sanity comes from accepting something as being true. To try to abandon that throws a big part of your own belief system into question, and I guess some people are just too emotionally invested in something to give it up even when it is shown to be untrue.
Yes, every time I look at Free Republic someone says something preposterous and dozens agree with him.
I know someone who had the electricians building their home design some sort of kill switch circuit upstairs so they can shut off electrical flow to their bedrooms at night to protect the children from its harmful effects.
Also, a friend once told me that she had a slightly crooked mouth because her grandfather was shot in the face during the war. Obviously that can be passed on genetically. :smack:
A family member once believed that boilED water, even when cool, retains the same germ-killing properties as boilING water. Surprisingly I only had food poisoning once from her cooking. :rolleyes: