The Marketplace of Bullshit

Once upon a time, in the distant past of the internet, there existed the online skeptic community. And by skeptic I mean skeptic. Not the “I don’t believe things that are mean” kind of skeptic, I mean the “show me the evidence or fuck off” kind of skeptic. Oh happy days. Anyhoo, in those glorious times skeptics believed in a concept called “The Marketplace of Ideas”. Sounds grand doesn’t it? In short in an environment where ideas can be discussed openly good ideas rise to the top and bad ones sink to the bottom. I miss those times. But it wasn’t meant to be as soon the far left loons invaded the skeptic community. The Market Place of Ideas was replaced with Orwellian newspeak, demands for privilege checking, and accusations that people who were questioning the rancid stupidity coming out of the mouths of these dyed haired uber-feminists were engaging in “hyper-skepticism”. 

So why am I mentioning all this? Well while watching the complete cluster-fuck that is the American election I began to notice something. Or rather I began to notice that something was missing. And when the media started their screeching about the social media site Parler I realized what that something was. For the last few years you may have noticed that the media, progressives and a few politicians have been voicing concern about online conspiracy theories and so called “fake news”. The solution to which, as they would have you believe, is censorship. However there is a solution, a solution with a long track record of success I might add, that could be used to combat fake news and conspiracy theories that the media or politicians rarely if ever suggest. That solution is called “critical thinking”. And it’s easier to do than you think. All you have to do when presented with a story is to ask very basic questions such as, “what evidence exists for this claim?”, “why is this person telling me this?”, “does the person telling me this benefit in anyway by making this claim?”, “am I being told the truth or what I want to hear?”. Not very hard at all. So why would the media, progressives and politicians push the censorship option rather than critical thinking? 

 

 

Welcome to The Marketplace of Bullshit. In this marketplace it doesn’t matter if ideas are good or bad. Bad ideas can float to the top and good ideas can get flushed down the shitter. And pretty much no one is a fair seller in this marketplace. You see the reason the media, progressives and politicians don’t suggest critical thinking is because they don’t really care if you believe jet fuel can’t melt steel beams, or they’re putting chemicals in the water that turns the frogs gay, or that the moon landing took place in a film studio. They only care that other peoples bullshit is competing with their bullshit. In other words the demands for censorship isn't about protecting the public from the big mean Neo-nazis, it’s about removing the competition. As for critical thinking? Well if more people engaged brain before they judged what they were being told it would become a hell of a lot harder to sell bullshit. And that’s the last thing those in the media, progressivism and politics want to deal with.