Scenario:
You’re talking to someone, and you mention the treaty of versailles. They say “the what?” and you say “The treaty of versailles. You know, when Germany lost WWI and had to give up land and other military functions?”
and your friend just stares at you and says “…what?”. So you say “Just google it.”
Well your friend is an idiot. You should have seen that coming from the fact that they don’t know basic history. Be that as it may, you’re trusting your friend to use the most powerful search engine on earth to find things he doesn’t know what he’s looking for. So he searches “Treaty of her thighs”
Which for some reason returns THIS RESULT. No really, I was hoping it would return some porn result, and I could have made fun of that. But no, top result is an Ohio war. Which may be because I’M located in Cleveland, so google is like “You’re searching for dumb shit, here have an Ohio war instead”. But I can work with this to help prove my point.
So you told him to just google treaty of versailles, and he comes back talking about a war between native americans and white people in ohio in the 1790s. You see how wrong that went?
When you tell someone to “just google it”, you’re entrusting that the person you’re talking to isn’t a massive dumbass. That’s a pretty tall stretch these days. I find most people are completely intolerable. We have all these PSA’s that people need to tolerate other people for being different. Which never made sense to me. I don’t give a shit that you’re a different background than I am. I’m judging you for walking into an autozone and throwing bricks because they’re out of blinker fluid.
My grandma taught me growing up “If you need to raise your voice to be heard, then nobody wants to hear what you have to say. If that’s the case, you should reflect on why that is. Is it because you’re wrong about everything you say, and people have figured that out? Maybe try NOT being wrong about everything you say.”
And that’s when I watched the family interactions as a kid a little more closely. My dad would yell over everyone, and growl and piss and moan and do everything he could to be louder than his sisters, while his mom is shaking her head. Meanwhile, if my grandma tapped her glass indicating that she was to speak, EVERYBODY shut the fuck up, and the room quieted to dead silence. She spoke at a normal tone, and everyone listened to every word. My dad, who has no self reflection, no ability to judge people or situations, or reality, just yells until he gets his way…which even after he gets his way, still doesn’t work out in the end because it was the wrong approach to start with.
So to trust someone like my dad to just google things for himself, instead of just googling it for him, and showing him the CORRECT results, is something that would lead to him being 1 bit smarter than otherwise would. Over time, enough of these bits would mean he’s smart enough to start thinking on his own. THEN he can google on his own.
But right now, you’re asking a nation who just elected trump by popular vote to think for themselves. And I’m at a point where I think that’s just a bad idea. I think the collective average of society equates to a man who puts hammers in a box, and puts that box in the garage, high up on a beam, barely supported, directly over the space the car would pull in. Then when you get out of the car, and close the door, the air movement is enough to make the box wobble. The wobble is enough to make it fall. And it falls right on your head. Because you put it there. And you can’t figure out why that happened.
That’s what I think of society. That’s where I think we’re at, mentally. Partially because I’ve seen this exact scenario play out. And partially because I see these people in public, all day, you know the ones. The people who you wonder how they are able to walk properly without their brain short circuiting, and they fall more often. The people who breathe through their mouth. These are the average day to day people who are (somehow) living their life on their own.
And you want them to think for themselves, to make decisions which affect everybody else…god dammit. Why did we give Americans the right to vote??? They shouldn’t even be googling things by themself!
The other half of this conversation is that I can’t explain every detail to every person. Mention it’s an important event, let them know it’s fun to learn new things, then move on and don’t care if they look into itIt’s not my job to educate people.
Just Google it. Or don’t. Be ignorant. I don’t care.
You need to learn how to look things up for yourself. LMGTFY is a website for a reason.
This reeks of young adult in college “I can convince others with facts” energy. Good luck. It gets old. People want to be ignorant. People suck. They don’t care. Why bother.
Been there, done that, didn’t end well. Bumping into delusional people and trying to use facts, gradually made me realize some important things. Took me way too long too, so please take a shortcut in this regard.
You may think it’s a debate, but is it really? Does the other person really play by the same rules? If you’re talking to a delusional conspiracy theorist, you can forget about facts. You’re dealing with an emotional matter, so you can safely skip the facts, and use emotions instead. Besides, they don’t use facts, or appreciate them.
Long ago, I met some people who were using fancy physics terms, but were actually talking about quantum woo. At first, I tried to take them seriously, but eventually realized it’s a waste of time. I realized that these people are far beyond my reach, so I just stayed quiet and moved on.
A few years later, I bumped into someone who claimed that all seedless fruit are GMOs. I tried to explain about selective breeding, and how ancient that technique is. At some point, I told him to check the relevant wikipedia article, to which he replied: “Wikipedia, it’s all lies.” I learned something very important that day. We don’t seem to have much common ground, so where do you even start with a person like that?
Fast forward a few years, it’s COVID time, and the hight of conspiracy season. I started looking into this thing, and read a bunch of studies about conspiratorial thinking and the mostly subclinical mental conditions behind it. I learned, that these people don’t have any use for facts. Those will only make things worse. What they really need is therapy.
Nah. You need to have people fighting that fight, but you also don’t need to spend your whole life in the trenches.
You can address some things and not others, you don’t need devote your whole existence to it.
In addition to all of that, one of the most infuriating things to find when googling something for yourself is finding the schmucks online that say it too. The only response to the question you were asking, that you found by googling is “just Google it.”
I ain’t reading all that
I got to “treaty of her thighs” and thought it was funny, googled it and got ‘Versailles’ back as number one. So it turns out they didnt have to write it after all.
