Stunning examples of willful ignorance

In My Humble Opinion
1

Not long ago my father was in the hospital. Visiting him with my sister, we happened to discuss flu vaccinations. Given my father’s mid-70s age, I was in favor of his getting one; he was ambivalent. Having been raised in a rural Mississippi community and been obliged to leave school around fourth grade or so, he doesn’t really understand how vaccines work, and said as much. I pointed out that researchers do, well, research–clinical tries, chemical analyses, and so forth. This prompted my sister to say,

Don’t worry about it, Daddy. Nobody knows how vaccines work. I don’t think they work anyway. It’s just another thing the white medical establishment tries to force on people. They don’t really know anything about anything. It’s all in God’s hands.

This remark left me agog. My sister, you see, is not an uneducated woman; she has a master’s degree in social work. Moreover, we had the same high school biology teacher, a woman whose intellectual rigor was truly stunning. Surely, I thought, my sister must have gotten some basic idea of biology back in ninth grade. So I said,

That’s not really true, Dad. The basic idea behind vaccines is simple. Your body learns how to fight diseases by experience, by being exposed to a given germ. That’s why people don’t catch chicken pox more than once, or measles. A vaccine takes a weakened or dead sample of a germ and puts it into you so your body learns to recognize it and fight it off. Occasionally people get a little sick, but it’s almost always better than being exposed to the real deal without any immunity.

To which my sister replied,

That can’t be true. How come there isn’t a vaccine for the common cold, then? None of that stuff is in the Bible, so I don’t believe any of it. Vaccines are crap. It’s all just doctors making up stuff. Vaccines are crap.

I stared at her for a moment, then said,

Yes. You’re exactly right. That’s why I have all these smallpox scars and five hundred thousand people died of rabies last year .

Then I changed the subject.

Which brings us to the question of the thread:

What examples have you encountered, in the real world, online, or somewhere in between, of truly stunning willful ignorance?

2

I don’t think you’re going to find a better example of willful ignorance than that. Think of all the knowledge you’d have to discard if you didn’t believe anything that wasn’t in the Bible!

3

At the risk of seeing this thread get moved to GD or The Pit, I’d have to nominate the organizers of the Creation Museum in Northern Kentucky.

4

Gee, Skald, does your sis not believe in cars, TV, computers, and air conditioners? I don’t think any of those are in the Bible either.

I don’t know if this qualifies as willful or just an overglurged brain, but I know an individual who seems to think that there’s a direct connection between death and birth - if one person dies, another has to be born. I’m not sure how she reconciles the increasing world population…

5

I’ve heard that one too, with two answers to the conumdrum: one paranoid, one scary. Paranoid is that their is no population increase, and reports of same are government conspiracy/deceits of Satan. Scary is that the 1 birth= 1 death equation only applies to persons with souls, and that many persons (Jews, f’instance) don’t have souls and thus can be killed without guilt.

6

My father, a very intelligent man (and a militant atheist) didn’t believe in evolution because “babies don’t bounce”. He thought that evolution would inevitably have developed some sort of protection against people dropping babies, or people and animals falling off cliffs. No matter how many times we tried to explain to him that that’s just not how evolution works, he would not accept it. Truly bizarre.

7

Mr. Kat’s SIL thinks it’s illegal for a woman to keep her name after she gets married.

8

Only the boys do.

9

I met a men involved in post-natal care who was sure a baby would instinctively grab a branch if dropped from a treetop. Now if someone would only let him test his theory…

10

No soul? Well, I guess that explains why I can’t dance worth a damn…

11

I’ve posted this before, but I used to know a woman who decided she needed to lose weight. She hit a gym for an hour then came home and weighed herself. She was up by a pound. Her inevitable conclusion? “Exercise is BULLSHIT, man!” I tried to explain how it all works, and that she would have to go to the gym several times a week for months or years. Nope. “I’d weigh a million pounds if I did that!” She was firmly convinced that exercise caused immediate and permanent weight gain. She could not be convinced otherwise.

On another occasion I was explaining the concept of urban legends to her. I mentioned, as an example, the one about the CEO of Proctor and Gamble being a satanist and that 10% of profits go to the Church of Satan.
“Really?”

“No. That’s the point it’s not true.”

“But it could be true.”

“But it’s not. It’s been disproven.”

“He’s probably just hiding it good.”

“No, it’s not true.”

“Satan lies. I’m never buying their products again. And I’m going to tell everyone I know not to.”

Headdesk, headdesk, headdesk.

12

Didn’t God drive Adam and Eve out of Eden in a Fury?

:wink:

My former next-door neighbor thought that the reason she was so sore after her hysterectomy was that the surgeon had hung her upside-down by her feet.

13

A friend of mine didn’t believe in binocular vision. This came to light when I overheard her telling someone that it didn’t matter if you lost an eye, because you’d still see the world in the same way, and only lose about 20% of the horizontal span. When I said you’d lose 3D, she told me I was talking crap, and there was no difference. She absolutely refuted the difference. When I pursued the subject, it became clear she had no idea what 3D vision was.

I got out an encyclopedia to show her diagrams, but before I could present them to her, she got upset and told me I was talking shit, and that I always picked on her by correcting her (which was true - she did talk a hell of a lot of bullshit, sadly).

The weird thing: she was a stage designer. No idea how she managed. Or maybe her designs all looked a little flat.

14

. . . upside . . down . . by . . ?

Did she give any reason for this conclusion? I don’t blame you if you didn’t want to ask.

15

My Grandmother once told me about a time that she kept my Uncle’s car from breaking down. Grandma was a great believer in premonitions. While Uncle was taking her to his place for a visit, she just ‘got the feeling’ that his car was going to break down and leave them on the side of the highway. Uncle wasn’t a big believer in premonitions, though, and wasn’t that put out by the idea of car trouble, either. He just smiled and nodded and said he’d deal with it if it happened, but he wasn’t going to stop and get a motel room.

But Grandma was worried. She stewed. At the next rest stop ‘it just came to me’, and she laid hands on the car. Later she described to me at great length what it felt like and how at the end of it, she was sure that she had changed the future for the car. And sure enough, there was no breakdown. The car kept running for years. She was very proud.

16

An ex coworker of mine was convinced that AIDS was spread by the flu vaccine, but only to black people.

17

Quite a lot of people don’t have binocular vision. I don’t know that I do. If you close one eye, does everything suddenly snap out of 3D and become flat? If so I’m missing out, because it looks much the same to me…

On the wilful ignorance note, a former co-worker of mine insisted that the Nile was a mysterious river because it flowed away from the sea. Because look here on the map… the sea is at the top, and the river flows down to the south, away from it. Because all rivers flow south, right?

18

My grandmother (may she rot in hell forever) told me when I was a child that if you fell asleep with your arms over your head, you would die.

I was terrifed, to the point at a sleepover I told my friend she needed to put her arms down by her side when we went to sleep or she would die. I guess it sounded scary enough that she believed me.

My mother also tried to tell me that they shear sheep in the summer, so by the time winter comes, the sheep would be nice and warm with their wool. I told her, no, they shear sheep in the winter, because the wool is thicker. (I learned that from reading The Thorn Birds, so if that’s wrong, please tell me) Her jaw dropped as she realized the logic…sheep are nothing more than wool-producing machines.

19

Do you have two working eyes? If so, you have binocular vision. It’s not a ‘snap’ out of 3D, as the brain does compensate the missing depth perception to a certain extent, but you’d be very unusual if you didn’t see in 3D. To test whether or not you see in 3D, close one eye and then walk into the kitchen try to make a sandwich or a cup of tea or something. If it’s more difficult, it’s because you’ve lost your true depth perception.

20

Everyone who can see out of both eyes has a certain degree of binocular vision, but it’s not the only way that depth is perceived. I remember back from my perception class in college that there are something like 6 or 7 cues that people get to perceive depth. I can’t think of all of the cues, but as a for instance, one of them is relative size…we learn that objects farther away a smaller, and this helps us to know what is closer to us and what is farther from us. This is why people who lose vision in one eye can still, for example, drive a car, but might have trouble with tasks that require more specific spatial judgement, like hitting a baseball.

Part of the reason I remember all of this is because I have terrible vision in one eye, and excellent vision in the other. This screws up my binocular vision royally. Without my glasses, I can drive a car perfectly well, but my tennis game sucks.