Every so often I go look at FaceBook to see what my far-flung friends are up to. As I think I mentioned some time ago, not everyone I'm connected to there is a friend in any usual sense, some being more on the "useful" side than the "loved" side of things. Also, some of my old friends and acquaintances have wandered into less than sane waters in the interim, and some people have a maddening combination of really interesting hobbies and mind-bogglingly stupid views of the world. So there is a certain amount of unhinged crazy that batters my brain when I visit the site.
Fortunately, most of the stupid can be tamped down by telling FB not to show me articles from FrothyMouthWeekly or whatever, and that generally takes care of it, stupid mostly being handed around lazily instead of actually getting elucidated by its adherents. Which probably explains its popularity, now that I think about it. However, some of the dumbth is unavoidable, and comes out in self-righteous mini-rants laden with words and phrases that person has never used before, all signalling to anyone outside the echo chamber, "This is what my puppetmaster told me to say!" The merest critical thinking causes it to fall apart, the rhetorical tricks are trite beyond measure, and a mindset of assumed results before considered facts seems to be a requirement. Narrative über alles!
But heaven help you if you try to break down the programming in the least.
It wouldn't bother me so much except that these are for the most part pretty intelligent people. In fact, intellect (or relative lack of same) doesn't much seem to change the resistance to this type of brainwashing. More than a few minutes of observing that fact causes me to despair for mankind. So back I go to selected blogs and even more carefully selected IM correspondents, where I'm kept honest, myself, and I don't have to mutely accept painfully foolish and self-defeating bombast in order to maintain my pragmatic and carefully curated illusions.
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