A Million Stupid Bastards with A Million Guns!

It all starts with information.

Information makes the world move forward. It allows us to grow as human beings. It helps us plan for future events, and understand past ones. Information protects us from poor decisions, or shows us the outcome of these same decisions. Information is the soil from which ideas grow and blossom.

So more information is better, correct?

Of course not! We have more information than ever before, and it's so readily available that with little to no effort or financing on my part, I could download and print the world's news for the past week and distribute it to everyone in my nearby area. And I could post the link to all of it on this here blog, and facebook, and twitter, and all over the damn place. I could attempt to educate the world.

And I would fail miserably, because the world is full of stupids. And these stupids seemingly refuse to be educated.

The easy availability of information does not encourage folks to do research and understand issues that they feel passionate about. They simply have an easier time finding one (usually unreliable) source and bleeding it dry, copying and pasting and reposting the information that pops up first when they type two words into the Google.

I feel that the availability is directly leading to these problems. Before the internet and file sharing and wikipedia and all that jazz, if you wanted to know about something, you had to physically research it. This involved long hours in a library, flipping through books and reference materials and microfiche and cross-referencing and fact-checking and pulling all-nighters and such. And you wanted to cover all of your bases, because one disputed fact that you couldn't account for, and you were in for another night at the library. So you became well-educated in your chosen topic, and you made rational assumptions and reasonable concessions to refuted points.

Now, it takes little to no effort to shout one poorly-articulated point, and then flood your adversary's facebook wall with link after link to supposedly factual websites by people who probably did more work than you did.

I realize this isn't true for everyone, and there are plenty of people out there that do their research and understand something before they start talking about it. And there are people (like me) who may have wrong information, and may mention it to other folks, but we're willing to own up to mistakes and admit that sometimes we just don't have a clue what we're talking about. But these aren't the people I'm talking about. And the people I am talking about have a much bigger army.

There are millions of stupid bastards out there, and they're all armed with unlimited information. And they only need a little bit of it to drive you crazy.