That brand of ignorance tends to fight back. I recently tried, and failed, to fight one’s ignorance of remote controlled airliners.
As Ron White said, “You can’t fix stupid.”
Among the very, very many wrongheaded things my former boss believed, was ‘drinking water causes sweating’.
I needed the job, so I didn’t bother trying to correct him.
There was also his apparent belief that Ontario Power Generation gets tax money, and thus their at the time too-high rates justified his not paying taxes.
My buddy who is a carpenter claims he invented an alternator for an electric engine that once started will keep the car going forever. He can’t figure out why something so simple hasn’t allready been thought of.
She, actually.
Ignorance defeated.
Amen to this!
I was cubicle neighbors with a flake who was saying something about activated charcoal removing toxins from tooth enamel. :rolleyes: The scariest part - she had managed to reproduce, and she intended to do it again.
Haha. When I saw that thread I just kept right on going.
The OP was about randomly overhearing strangers claim there’s no such thing as bedbugs as they rode by.
I find it highly unlikely that she doesn’t know that bedbugs exist, nor that it’s her own lack of knowledge that stopped her from chasing down the kids and correcting them.
I had a co-worker who thought there was no such word as “cannot” and I couldn’t think of a polite way to convince her otherwise.
I met a rabid Reagan supporter in the 1980s who insisted the amendment preventing the president from running for a third term was the result of those “bastard Democrats.” I knew it had been a Republican effort in response to FDR’s four election wins but could not recall any details, and thus I was the stupid one for believing what he clearly considered to be tripe. And this was pre-Internet, so I couldn’t just go look it up. I since found out the person largely responsible for pushing it through was President Taft’s son, Robert Taft of Ohio, the preeminent Republican conservative of his day. But I never saw the guy again, although I could have, as his wife’s path and mine crossed quite often. (She was not nearly as crazy as her husband was and indeed just seemed to “go along” with her husband’s rantings.) I’m not sure I would have bothered to engage him, on anything, if I had met him again.
Actually this may be a common problem. The average person does not study up refuting young earther/9-11 truther/moon-landing hoax talking points while dedicated ideologues will often memorize the entire corpus of the vast literature available. So how’s a rational person supposed to counter it when he know its to be false but cannot offer any decent talking points beyond appeals to authority and popularity and some relatively simple arguments that said ideologue will always have a counterargument prepared against?
We’ve got these radio DJs here in Dallas that have a segment called: “Did You Know?” .
I don’t know what website they are getting their information from, but man, it’s embarrassingly wrong a lot of the time.
This. It’s usually the stupidest things that are the hardest to fight, because I generally do not waste my time learning to counter ridiculous arguments.
But you can take them down with an electric cattle prod.
I WISH!
Here in Bug Tussle, the local Tea Farty is harassing Muslims who are building a mosque.
They have used every crummy stunt they can to legally block this, plus arson.
They described a kiddies wading pool as “an aquatic terrorist training facility”, apparently confusing Mecca with Atlantis. :rolleyes::smack:
And I can’t talk anybody down from the edge of the cliff.
My mom went to Australia a little over twenty years ago, and some random guy told her they had found a cure for HIV there, but the medical industry was keeping it under wraps. She stood by this belief despite all evidence to the contrary, because she heard it from some guy once. :rolleyes: Never mind that a cure could make the industry billions of dollars.
This anti-vax moron. Also I was at a work conference a few years ago during the anniversary of 9/11. I was in NYC at the time. I was talking about the situation with a friend. Another co-worker kept interrupting us to explain how it was an inside job. I only escaped him by running with her into the ladies room.
I am absolutely amazed that there are still people who believe OJ was framed. Yeah, right.
I had a co-worker once who would simply not believe that an owl was a bird. Dictionaries and encyclopedias had no effect whatsoever.