Jason Selvig who, along with Davram Stiefler, makes up the comedy duo The Good Liars talks to a woman attending a creepy Trump event and she explains how and why the government is intensifying the strength of hurricanes.
Talked to a woman who believes the US government is controlling hurricanes to hurt Donald Trump’s chances in the 2024 Election. pic.twitter.com/YviQTMtOKr
— The Good Liars (@TheGoodLiars) October 10, 2024
Yeah, the Big Gummint is using Jewish Space Lasers to cause hurricanes that cause Trump to say stupid dishonest shit that hurts his chances of winning. Totally plausible theory they got there, yet another dastardly nefarious insanely clever globalist conspiracy that could only be exposed by some rando at a Trump rally…
That is so sad.
OK, touche.
(Chastened, I am)
I was beginning to doubt her until she revealed she had a reliable source for all this -- Alexa.
Raging Bee@1: Well no, that totally makes sense, doesn’t it? Except for, you know, reality. /s
The stupid; it burns!
I was recently made aware of the statistic that 54% of American adults have a literacy level below 6th grade and although this is an estimate (since there isn’t actually universal testing of adult literacy levels), it’s still thought-provoking that if you meet a random person, it’s entirely possible that they will be unable to read and understand even a basic newspaper article.
I can’t help but correlate that with my experience that many people on the internet simply can’t write. They can’t follow basic grammar, can’t construct even the simplest sentences correctly, and definitely can’t structure their thoughts into a form even half-way coherent. They write the way Trump speaks.
Granted, some of that is laziness and the throw-away nature of internet comments, but some of it is also just people who simply never learned how to communicate in writing. As someone who spent my youth browsing the library aisles, this is just beyond insane to me. No bloody wonder the world looks the way it does if this is what we have to work with.
The problem is less that such morons exist, it’s that out of a misguided sense of fairness we let them vote.
It’s not that this lady is such a whackadoodle. The originator of a nutter idea is a nutter. Not terribly surprising? The crazy part is that this garbled nonsense convinced other adults. It wasn’t their brainchild. Its obvious fallacies weren’t hidden. She didn’t sell it to them. They read it once and were just convinced.
As weird and out of touch as this lady is, she didn’t hide any of that from the people who decided to believe her. And they willingly chose to buy into her message anyway. That seems far worse to me because people have to trust their own minds to some extent but there’s an extra chance to catch nonsense from outside.
Whoops! Actually meant the previous comment for the “real Bourne conspiracy” post. But you know, it mostly fits here as well. The lack of widespread condemnation of either of these bizarre and unhinged stories is why I can’t trust anyone with an R after their name.If you willingly hitch your wagon to this what sorts of other wild nonsense are you willing to get along with?
I see where she went wrong here.
Alexa isn’t a reliable source.
I’ve noticed that my microwave oven and the toaster are far more accurate and informative.
I enjoy watching the expressions on the faces of the people who are walking past the camera and catching snippets of her answers.
Several smirks, several eye aversions and hurrying past the crazy lady, and one man in a blue t- shirt who was completely dumbfounded by her claims and had to tug on his ear to make sure he heard that right.
Some people will believe anything. I think there should be a law that US Congress critters can get slapped with penalties for
using their public office to promote conspiracy theories that cause real harm to the more gullible citizens.
Hmmm.
…
(My suggestion).
EigenSprocketUK, that’s the thing with non-compulsory voting.
Special-interest blocs.
This person will vote because they are motivated.
(Motivating one’s followers to vote by whatever means is what it’s all about, when only around half the eligible electorate votes)
—
Not a thing here in Oz — still lots of probs, but that’s not one of them.
I don’t think Alexa is so unreliable that it would say anything explicit to support ludicrous weather conspiracies.
Over at Daylight Atheism, there’s a quote from a news item about the hurricane conspiracists and Alexa:
Ouch. This is deep confusion in the brains of the people using Alexa.
Looks like it was a perfect storm of Alexa being unreliable because it relied on a website that was technically labelled as being unreliable (Hypothetical Hurricanes Wiki, listing a 2038 Atlantic Hurricane Season):
https://leadstories.com/hoax-alert/2024/10/fact-check-hurricane-control-conspiracy-is-not-proven-by-alexa-predicting-milton-fatality-number-before-landfall.html
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2024/oct/08/instagram-posts/hurricane-milton-article-came-from-fictional-wiki/
Last one:
https://factcheck.afp.com/doc.afp.com.36JQ6QL
@EigensprocketUK, 13:
Everyone gets to vote, it’s a failure of law that people are not legally obliged to. It’s also a failure of biology that not everyone is adequately equipped to understand even if the issues are explained to them in simple terms. Is government noticeably better in places where voting is legally mandated?
You can “help everyone understand” until you’re blue in the face, and it’s an observable fact that it’s pointless. Example: how many people smoke tobacco? Society has been “helping people understand” that that is a bad idea for decades, and while the new fangled fad of vaping and the whole making it illegal to do it in pubs and schools has reduced the numbers doing it out in the open somewhat, there are still smokers. Worse, there are still YOUNG smokers, people who don’t have the excuse that they started in the sixties. How much “helping them to understand” do these people need?
Have you ever had a job where you had to deal with the public? I have, when I was a kid I worked in Dixons selling stereos and TVs and such. At school, I mostly hung around with the other smart kids. I was peripherally aware that there were dumb kids, obviously, but since we were placed into sets based on ability I never had to deal with them during lessons. My impression of the average intelligence of people in general was thus wildly skewed. Then I went into a position where I had to deal with every yahoo that could walk in the door of the shop on a Saturday morning, and I gradually realised just how dumb the average person is. And I worked hard to never, ever have to deal with the public ever again.
If you think these people are reachable by any system that could “help them understand”, you’ve presumably never met any of them or tried to talk to them for any length of time, or, god forbid, tried to sell them a piece of technology.
tldr; explain all you like -- some people are dumb, there are more dumb people than there are smart people, and dumb people breed more.