One of my favorites is that Simpson's character (the naive fat kid who sounds very childish for his age. The cop's son. I can't remember his name.) Anyway, it's a gif of him he's sitting at his computer with google pulled up claiming, "I'm a resurcher!"Another portal of attack for the Anti-Vax crowd, on Twitter with the meme of #COVIDIOTS.
And the lemming's are running with it.
Oh no CDC: “characteristics of a superspreading event” Sturgis Motorcycle Rally 2021.
Hmmm,.. the reporter has no mask..
Hold on. Dammit... A picture's worth a thousand... Here it is:
Okay. -I have sympathy for people who need these kinds of memes to express on their behalf, to be clever and succinct where they don't feel adequate. Many here will have to stretch far back to be able to remember, (I barely can), but there was a time long ago when the world was very big and very confusing, when it was simply impossible to consider that we might be smart enough, good enough, strong enough to grapple with its enormity. That we might deserve to interface with knowledge.
I recall the realization of it being possible to read through complicated tracts of text and to not only extract understanding, but to actually see flaws in the claims and arguments presented there. I was in my late teens when I first realized that modern scientists and doctors and other very smart people could be wrong and that my mind was in fact worthy of disagreeing with them. That I might be able to see logical pathways which were obscured to others. Wow!
While this might have been an inevitable bit of growing up, I almost wonder if it was really just a lucky break. -That it was just chance I should have come upon this discovery; that if I hadn't one day been bored and decided to just read something beyond my comprehension (in an old Scientific American magazine I found in a stack at the back of a classroom) and tried to grapple with it, I might have remained just another bumper car in the game of life. In recognizing that speed bump, and how much effort it took to get over it, and feeling the rush of acceleration I did upon doing so.., it was very evident that it was indeed An Important Barrier.
I suspect many people simply never learned how to overcome that barrier, or that the barrier wasn't merely another piece of solid wall but in fact a heavy door... That they were also allowed to have and to use their own minds.
For such people, Consensus Opinion, herd-thinking, really IS the best way to determine what reality is and how to navigate it. -Because they have never experienced the breaching of that Important Barrier, they have never learned that it is POSSIBLE to take responsibility for their own thoughts and discoveries. It's not that they don't want to. It's they can't comprehend the possibility of ever doing so. -And so those who they observe disagreeing with authorities, regular people who do not wear lab coats or stand at the fronts of lecture halls with badges and hats but who nonetheless refuse to be obedient, those people really DO seem to have something wrong with them.
But it gets worse! -And this is the revealing part. When some authority figures start claiming that other authority figures are wrong, are liars.., then there is no way to know who is telling the truth. -Because the humble Wiggums never breached the Important Barrier. They don't believe they are allowed to interface with knowledge, or that knowledge can arrive in some other way than pre-digested and handed to you from authority.
For such people, determining which authority camp you are in becomes very important. A matter of survival.
Tim Pool has pointed out numerous times that Liberals tend to only listen to Liberal news sources, while Conservatives are more likely to listen to both Liberal and Conservative sources. I find that very interesting. I think it indicates something about how knowledge itself is approached and understood.
I wonder if it is possible for people, as adults, to crack out of the relationship boundaries they have built with knowledge. To get over that speed bump?
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