73% Of All Internet Memes Are Factually Mistaken

I don't care if Lincoln said it, it's nonsense, because the Internet has made it infinitely easier to check the accuracy of quotes.

And that's what makes all these inaccurate memes so infuriating: people could have taken a minute or two to check the meme's accuracy before sharing it in your favorite Facebook group, and they didn't. They found the assertion made by the meme to be convenient to their arguments, or flattering to their subculture, and so they believed it and spread it around: 85% of Japan's population is atheist. Evangelicals have better sex lives. Tom Paine was a vegan. Constantine and the Pope wrote the entire Bible, start to finish, Genesis to Revelations. That photo of Hillary Clinton hugging Osama Bin Ladn was not photoshopped. Taco Bell is going out of business. Samsung devices are spying on us for the Japanese government. Obama gave Al Sharpton millions of dollars' worth of public funds. There are trillions of dollars' worth of gold ingots in the Vatican Bank. Hillary Clinton can't be trusted. Drinking lots of beer actually does make you sexy. Every one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence was an atheist and an Illumitatus. Karl Marx and Otto von Bismarck carried on a secret love affair for 30 years, and Bismarck is the actual author of Kapital.

Has the Internet made people more stupid? Or were they always about this stupid, and the Internet has brought me into contact with more of them? Or is it completely wrong for me to blame the Internet for any of this, because I could just as well have used it to contact brilliant people who are very scrupulous about getting their facts straight before they assert something?

Maybe all that the Internet has done is to demonstrate that I am an idiot, because this is what I have found after 2 decades with this remarkable tool. If I really am surrounded by idiots, does that mean anything at all other than that I have allowed a bunch of idiots to surround me?

One way or another: the search for intelligent life on Earth continues.

"All I know for sure is there's already more'n a few bad ideas runnin' around loose out there."

-- David Lynch, screenplay for Wild at Heart, based on the novel by Barry Gifford. (Sorry, David, Barry, if that quote isn't exactly accurate to the letter. It was the best I could manage.)

An incorrect assumption is not the same as a bad idea, but it can lead to bad ideas, and just watch or read Wild at Heart for a glimpse at all the scary kinds of shit that bad ideas can lead to.

Several people have urged me to write more in my blog about being autistic. In a sense I think that every post on this blog already is about being autistic in the sense that I've written them all, and that I've tried my best, while writing them, to be just exactly who I am.

I correct people a lot. Maybe one manifestation of my autism is that I haven't noticed how annoying this can be, or I haven't understood how to do it tactfully when it's not best just to STFU. One thing that being autistic means for me is that I've been autistic all my life, but I didn't know I was until I was 46, and for 6 years now I've been making certain adjustments in my behavior based on this new information.

Of course, people are all individuals, and, autistic or neurologically-typical, some are much more receptive to being corrected than others. I try to be receptive to it. (How else would I or anyone else ever learn anything?) What concerns me here today are people who hang on with bitter determination to incorrect assumptions in the face of huge amounts of correction -- stupid people, that is. I blog an awful lot about stupid people, don't I? Is this a typically autistic obsession? I don't know.

I also don't know how many people are determined to hang on to the following incorrect assumptions:

Jesus would've been required to be married -- wrong. Constantine changed the Bible -- wrong. Constantine and the Pope changed the Bible together at the Council of Nicea -- wrong, the Pope wasn't even at the Council of Nicea. There once were hundreds of Gospels -- pure speculation, the ones we've found plus the ones we've only heard of by name all together add up to several dozen. Since I'm saying all this I must be a Christian -- wrong, I'm an atheist and I think Christianity is bad for people, I just think Dan Brown is extremely bad for the study of history. Only Catholics dislike Dan Brown -- wrong. Biblical scholars can't be trusted on factual matters of history or textual criticism because of their religious bias -- usually wrong.

The assumption on the part of some stupid atheist or another that I'm a Christian and a Republican because I disagree with him or her about something is particularly galling. Time and again I go back over these exchanges, and the amount of remarks on my part which could be construed to be religious, again and again, is nada, zero, squat, the null set. The stupid atheist assumes I'm a Christian only because I disagree with him or her on something which has no resemblance whatsoever to an article of religious belief, but is only a factual mistake current in a big circle-jerk of an atheist game of Telephone.

I wonder, are there really as many people running around loose whose worldviews are so stupid, simplistic, binary, zero/one, on/off, black/white, atheist/Christian, correct/incorrect, as it sometimes seems to me? Or am I subconsciously drawn into conflicts with such people, which gives me an inflated idea of their numbers? (Am I subconsciously drawn to them because I'm autistic?) I hope it's the latter, both the sake of the world at large and the amount of effort needed to confront mass stupidity, and also for my own sake, because if this group of stupid people is actually statistically insignificant, and it's only an unproductive subconscious drive on my part which brings me into contact with them, I can become more conscious of this tendency, overcome it and thus find much more rewarding uses for my time. (If my impression of the numbers of such people is not exaggerated, then my Stoic tendencies won't let me ignore them. Someone has to deal with them, and, to paraphrase what Perry said to Jack, Elizabeth Warren is busy.)

You got that? If I've incorrectly assumed that there actually is an entire movement of people who make all of those incorrect assumptions and more, I want to know. I'd be overjoyed to be proven wrong.