Check out this bullshit fact-checking news flash:
NO SHIT, motherfuckers?!? You need someone to explain to you about fucking TIDES?!?
Apparently so. Apparently a whole shitload of people are so ignorant and easily-bamboozled, they think some dumb-ass then-and-now comparison photos taken in the same place are proof that climate change isn’t real, the glaciers aren’t melting, etc. NOTHING TO WORRY ABOUT HERE. All that’s just “fake news”, and we have the photos to prove it! Can’t argue with that! Or so they aggressively slobber.
But how willfully ignorant am *I* that any of this still surprises me? That it raises my heart rate in frustration? Everything about the Facebook-meets-Trump era has confirmed that a dangerously large portion of the population is under-educated, media-illiterate and easily-manipulated. Even the smart and literate ones *want* to believe — are bound and DETERMINED to believe or at least fanatically embrace and repeat — whatever serves their lazy-ass or evil-motivated agendas of fear, hate and/or violently self-serving power-and-resource-hoarding consume-for-the-moment and prep-for-JESUS’-second-coming (a deluded fantasy cooked up fairly recently in Christianity’s timeline and popularized for profit and the powerful thrill of twisting weak minds by charlatans in the 1970s). So why do I bother getting mad and bitching about each demonstration of people’s idiocy?
*****
The good news is I paused and stopped before re-tweeting a link to this featured moment:
Let's try to not be so willfully ignorant. There is no excuse for most people to fall for & buy into this level of stupidity, or to be able to manipulate people with such incredible bullshit dumbassness.
THE TIDE. People haven't heard of it? JFC.
The (other) good news is I stopped to think about why I know about tides; I live and grew up in Western Washington where lots of stores of all different types SOLD tide tables on prominent display right by the cash registers, I had the privilege of taking Marine Biology in high school and Oceanography in college, my parents taught us things like which directions the sun rise and set at and took us outside to see meteor showers, and the newspapers had tide tables printed inside them too along with the weather so even if you didn’t experience for yourself what low tide smells like, you knew about this phenomenon of saltwater rising and falling to wildly varying levels and that fishermen and people with boats — of which there are many of both around here — need this information for safe travels and good fishing.
I wasn’t born with any measurable knowledge of tides (beyond the possibility that some of this information is programmed into us as animals living on this blue planet), and neither was anybody else. So even if tides are an observable phenomenon, maybe I’m just lucky to know better than take side-by-side photos of water levels someplace as evidence that sea levels haven’t changed / aren’t changing.
Point is, REACTING and calling people stupid may not be entirely fair and for sure is not the best tactic for getting people to learn.
It’s just so fucking gross though when the same people are shown images of water levels dropped dramatically and dangerously low in reservoirs like Lake Mead (the largest reservoir in the US in terms of water capacity) and they just … ignore it. Don’t bother to see that as evidence that WE ARE FUCKING OURSELVES quickly towards a parched inferno of hellish tortured extinction.
Or not shown. The truth is most people are not shown these images; it is not reported on in the news EVERY FUCKING DAY like the dire warnings this shit should be. It is not sexy, it is grim and people feel very motivated to stay in denial and seize any picture of reassurance some unethical shills will feed them.
No comments:
Post a Comment