General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: HILARIOUS! When people mistake "The Onion" for real news [View all]tblue37
(64,982 posts)posters who try to explain to them that The Onion is satirical and fictitious.
The fools respond with "That's your opinion!" or squawk that the MSM never bother to use stories from The Onion, as though their failure to do so is evidence that they are suppressing the "real" news because of a liberal bias.
Even when the joke is explained to them, they have to double down and insist on believing that the bizarre stories are true.
I love the comments from those who accept the story that our heat wave is caused by the presence of a massive star at the center of our solar system.
Of course our sun is precisely that--a star at the center of our solar system that is directly responsible for a lot of our planet's heat. But the posters assume this means that there is actually a second star among the planets that is responsible for how hot it is, and some brag about having captured an image of that extra star!
For some reason, I just flashed back to an essay written for an English 101 class I was teaching back in the mid 1970s. The student wrote, "The English language was invented by the kings and queens of England so that they could communicate with the captains of their ships at sea."
When people think that way, it can be difficult to get past such beliefs.
When I was young and naive, I thought that many people must be sandbagging--i.e., pretending to be less informed and less thoughtful than they really were. I just couldn't believe that such ignorance was as pervasive as it seemed to be. But now, at the age of 63, I have come to accept the wisdom of the old saying that the worst problems are caused not by what people don't know, but by what they think they know that just ain't so.