Warning: I’m about to rant here, big time. I really don’t care if anyone reads this or not, I’m doing this for my own benefit so I can try to move on. Whether you agree or disagree with me is something I have no interest in.
My blog title is a reference to the UK TV series “Nathan Barley”, in which one of the characters (Dan Ashcroft) wrote a magazine article called “Rise of the Idiots”. Every day I’m finding myself thinking about this more and more.
Whatever happened to critical thinking? What happened to healthy skepticism? Why don’t people ever question things and try to learn/grow?
Every day I’m bombarded with ridiculous emails and messages, such as:
“If you don’t forward this email on to 5 people, your Hotmail account will be deleted!”
and it includes “proof”, which is a link to a BBC article from 2004 saying that Hotmail is CONSIDERING adding a paid account option. But nothing about them forcing everyone to pay, and nothing about them deleting accounts. And what kind of company says “We’ll only protect the accounts of the people who forward a chain email”?. They probably make billions from the advertising of the free email accounts anyway, why in the world would they delete a huge revenue stream?
But people don’t question the email, they just panic and forward it on without thinking.
Another one I get:
“Join my Facebook Group to protest the mistreatment of people in Some Country”.
Because joining a Facebook Group will help. The Government of Some Country says “Well we were going to be brutal dictators, but 30,000 people on Facebook were opposed to it so we decided to become a democracy instead”.
Be honest, you’re not joining the group because you really care about the issue, or else you would be out protesting, lobbying politicians, or donating money to charities to try to help.
You’re only doing it because it’s a quick and easy way to say “Hey look everyone! I’m a good person, I joined a Facebook Group!”.
Let’s look at another aspect of society, the news. In America, you have Fox News. In the UK you have those tabloid newspapers. In Australia you have Seven News (the others aren’t perfect, but this bunch of morons really stands out).
They have reporters who turn news reporting into opinion pieces. No serious journalist should ever use the word “Amazing.” as a sentence during his report. Or using the word “disgraceful”. Those are opinion words, you’re being paid to present the facts without bias or opinion. It is up to the public to form their own opinions, the minute you start doing that for them then you’re taking away something important from society. “Seven News said I should be against this, so that’s how I’m going to be”.
So much for journalistic integrity.
Nine News was just as bad the other night, interviewing a woman who had been dead for 45 minutes before being revived. She talked about how she could see and hear everything that was going on, how she floated around the room before re-entering her body. Sounds like a classic Near Death Experience, where a simple hallucination caused by the lack of blood to the brain gets interpreted as a religious experience. It’s the exact same thing that happens when test pilots black out in centrifuges during training, they hallucinate too. But this isn’t the point, this woman is entitled to her opinion (even though 5 minutes of research on the internet would show there was nothing religious about her experience at all). What is the point is how Nine presented the story, at no stage did they present the woman’s opinions as her own personal beliefs. They made it sound like fact. Perhaps the reporter who wrote the story is religious, or they believe in life after death, but this kind of thing should not be presented as fact.
And using the word “miracle” is a total cop-out to the paramedics who revived her. God didn’t save her, the paramedics and science saved her. They’re the ones who studied hard for years to learn how to revive patients, there was science behind everything they did. Science which has been tested over and over in controlled conditions with hard evidence to back it up.
If I saved someone’s life and they thanked God instead, I’d be more than a little irritated.
Of course it’s just as much the fault of the public that the news can get away with this kind of behavior. We don’t have good attention spans anymore, we want emotion rather than the facts, entertainment rather than knowledge. The news are doing whatever gets ratings, if the public wanted truth and facts then that’s exactly what they would be getting.
Don’t get me started on A Current Affair and Today Tonight, it’s depressing that these poor excuses for entertainment are classified as part of the “News Hour”. They’re opinion pieces with the power to destroy criminal cases by biasing the public, getting facts wrong and ruining people’s lives.
If anyone is reading this, please join with me. Be skeptical in a healthy way, don’t accept things as fact without at least making an attempt to check for yourself. If someone forwards you a chain email, just quickly Google it to see if it’s backed up by a news article from a credible source. Don’t do something just because everyone else does it. Don’t be afraid to think outside the square. Don’t be afraid to miss a terrible TV show that everyone else watches just because you’re afraid of being left out of the conversation the next day.
Read books, watch documentaries, expand your mind. Never take news articles and TV stories as the absolute truth. Watch TV shows that point out the errors of the media, such as Media Watch, or Jon Stewart, but have a healthy skepticism of these shows as well as they can also get things wrong sometimes. Make sure you’re getting all the facts and all sides of the story.
Life isn’t meant to be easy, it shouldn’t be. Overcoming challenges is what gave us many of the greatest innovations of the human race. It gave us literature, science, technology, music, and the great works of film.
What has the Human Race accomplished in 2009?
You only have yourselves to blame.
