Fighting Hate, Ignorance and Hipocrisy
Saturday, February 20th, 2010Hate, ignorance and hypocrisy… I’ll just label this as stupidity. So how does one fight such a powerful foe? How does one defeat such a resilient enemy? If you don’t think stupidity is a prevalent and dire disaster in a bottle, just try to talk to some people, watch TV and/or listen to the radio. There are people that listen and believe these public personalities just because they’ve been brought up to never question certain things. People will fight you hand, tooth and nail defending the most ridiculous ideas spawned from mere speculation and confirmation bias just because it’s said with confidence.
How does anyone fight confidence? The biggest problem is that these radio personalities are bluffing… bluffing that they know what their talking about, bluffing that the majority of people will call it out and bluffing with a big bank against small fries. Of course they can fail many hands while the greater public goes all in and loses. You want change? You want things to stay the same? You want us all to jump into a time machine to find a long lost past that only truly existed in your diluted memories from infancy? Well it takes more than “I want the country the way it was when I was growing up” and other appeals to emotion. It takes reason well founded on the best evidence available, obtained without a course of action derived before researching.
Of course I’ve said nothing to help this problem. Seeing the world for what it is, throughout all known history… we as a human race have come far, so I have no doubt that we won’t reach the lofty goal of enlightenment, reason and peace one day… I just think we all can speed it up a little. Question authority. That is all it really takes… well that and listening.
Of course merely questioning authority isn’t enough just as that, there are some guidelines. Question all authority, it’s not enough to question the authorities you don’t agree with, the most dangerous authority is the authority you don’t question. Remember authorities should be authorities because they know what they’re talking about. Questioning someone who knows what they’re talking about should never be a problem (unless they have clearly answered the question several times), they should be able to explain it… if they can’t, then they’re not an authority worth shit. Not only should any trustworthy authority be able to explain their reasoning, they should be able to provide examples and in most cases cite research and/or facts that support their conclusions. I’ve seen too many times where some jackass will say they’ve “done the research” but fail to provide any kind of reasonable source for that “research” and more pathetically: fail to provide the points of data that lead them to that conclusion.
You don’t have to be rude, you don’t have to be nice, you don’t have to be neutral… you just have to be there. Don’t try to fight stupidity with fire, fight it with questions. There isn’t a liar around that can clearly explain their reasoning through many questions and there isn’t a question that an authority shouldn’t be able to clearly explain.
