This is jumping a little off of the “Weird thing you’ve personally witnessed” thread. And by “weird” I mean a misheard or misunderstood idea they really believe. I’m not counting religious beliefs unless they’re apparently out of the “mainstream” such as “The Pope is secretly immortal.” And I’d prefer to avoid political ideas unless they’re again very unusual (which I’ll admit can be hard to judge at times these days). I’m not sure how to exclude these two areas properly.
For example-I recently tried to persuade a young man I’m working with that it was untrue that “Radiation doesn’t give you AIDS.” Not that “radiation might weaken you and then you get AIDS.” Just flat “Radiation gives you AIDS.” I still don’t know where he came across this idea, but he was wedded to it.
A former coworker wouldn’t eat pork of any kind because “pigs don’t sweat.” He wasn’t religious and ate other kinds of meat, including beef, and cows don’t sweat either. But only pigs were bad.
I was in college when AIDS became known to the general public, and researchers had identified connections between HIV and similar viruses which occur among African monkeys and apes.
There was a guy who lived in my dorm, who was an asshat in so many ways (an overt bigot, extremely misogynistic, etc.), but he also stated, as fact, his belief that AIDS came into being because gay American men traveled to Africa, and had sex with monkeys.
Indeed. While I’m sure that my particular asshat got the idea from someone else; it’s still at the top of my list for the particular subject of this thread.
I remember seeing a post here on the boards many years ago where the poster said they had a relative who believed that all dogs were male and all cats were female.
How about the COVID vaccine was designed by Bill Gates to inject a microchip into every American so they can be tracked by the Government. Sounds perfectly reasonable to me… and yes, lots of people believe it.
I worked with one guy who believed that buying life insurance would somehow bring a death curse on the person insured. It scared him enough that he refused to even talk about it.
Another guy, a black guy, believed their were no gay black men. The idea was laughable to him. It was laughable to me,too, because I had met some openly gay black men. This was in the '80s. It’s hard to imagine anyone believing that today.
Being a yarmulke wearer, I’m very familiar with false beliefs about Jews-
We’re all Zionists
Orthodox Jews can only have sex through a hole in a sheet.
etc
But, this post on this very board took the cake “The religious followers of Judaism purposely avoid reading certain parts of their text (they consider it forbidden) because the Messianic references align very closely with the life of Jesus.”
This is in stark contrast to the reality that any Jew who can read Hebrew is strongly encouraged to read the whole of the talmud, and that the whole Torah is read to the congregation aloud every Jewish year.
No, it’s “all dogs are boys and all cats are girls” Example: if you see a cute dog you are likely going to ask it “who’s a good boi?” If you are taking it literally, the problem might be you.
The Pentagon/Department of Defense has to approve ALL American fictional media or foreign media that’s imported before it’s released to the general public, to ensure that their own pro-military propaganda is allowed and that there are no opposing viewpoints. When I asked the person how this could possibly work and how nobody else online seems to know anything about this, he claimed “Stolen Valor” laws allowed the US military to do this since the Government could sue a Hollywood film that uses a military outfit without permission for “Stolen Valor”. How this also applied to works that had nothing to do with the United States military he didn’t elaborate, but he made a point of saying EVERYTHING had to be approved.
Another weird one is “Black people invented hot sauce”. No nationality or specific ethnic group, just “Black people” were the creators of spicy food and everyone else is “stealing” “their thing” when they eat spicy food.
Punch line-Just don’t slap me as hard as you did the monkey. I would have to say the maga. I know, he believes the vaccine is injecting diseases into people and they’ll die, but not all at once, that would be too obvious.
I had a fellow Physics 101 student say that “the acceleration of gravity is UP because we feel the earth pressing UP against our feet.”
I held out a pencil and let go - and asked the fellow student which way it was accelerating.
(Actually, the statement is rather subtle. The soles of the feet DO feel the earth pressing up upon them, and the body pressing down upon them. And a body at rest…)
I can’t tell if this was ignorance or hyper nationalism but I had a Professor from my University who was of Chinese descent who objected to a comment I made about how China (at the time) was experiencing massive obesity problems. She told me with the tone of talking down to a toddler that “You’re wrong, everyone in China is skinny because they just eat rice and ride their bicycles everywhere, believe me I know I’ve been there.”
