First shot over the bow

I completely lost my patience yesterday.  One of my Facebook friends, who has been showing a disturbing singlemindedness over the Obama Administration, posted two links that claim the newly passed health care reform mandates every single American will be forced to have a microchip implanted 36 months from the signing of the bill.

If you really think you need to read these, here they are:
House and Senate Health Bills Require the Micro Chipping of Americans
Microchipping (Mark of the Beast) to Begin in 36 Months Under ObamaCare - Project Nsearch

If you read the things carefully, and you read the links provided within those pages, you realize something profound.  These people do not understand logic.  Particularly formal logic.  They use a lot of "thus" and "therefore" but they have not a clue how to properly use them, because their syllogisms are broken.  There is nothing in those documents about every American being required to wear these RFID chips.  They just saw the words "registry" and "RFID" and started swinging the baseball bat at their favorite dead horse.

Since the friend was pleasant enough in high school and really is, for the most part, a caring individual as long as he's not spewing hate in Barack's direction and promises of a bloody revolution to the rest of us, I started typing up a comment.  I intended to show him the broken logic, ask him to reread the statements with that in mind and consider taking another, non-hysterical point of view.  About two sentences in, I scrapped it and broke the Facebook connection with the guy. 

Cowardly?  Maybe.  I just realized there was no point.  If he is unable to recognize the obviously broken logic, he likely doesn't have the same tools I have to approach a critical reading of the sites, and so it would be unfair of me to debate him on that level.  It would sound condescending to instruct him on those skills, and I would be willing to bet he'd reject them, or worse, claim he has them already while I obviously don't, because I can't see the obvious truth.  Yes, I've had similar arguments before.

This has been bothering me all day, and I'm one of those people who are really interesting when bothered.  I'll walk around the grocery store, having arguments with myself out loud (okay, muttering to myself, but that is out loud) about why this happened, what I could have done differently and why the hell is milk so expensive these days?  Someday I'm going to be one of those old ladies that talk to the air and find my imaginary conversations more interesting than those with living, breathing humans.  (If I'm not mistaken, someday was about five years ago.)

I blurted something out in my mutterings that I didn't like to hear myself say.  This former friend of mine has a lot in common with my sister, father and mother.  He wasn't a great student--I believe he took the advanced math and physics, but I don't think his GPA was much anywhere else.  My sister was a C and D student before she dropped out.  My mom dropped out of high school two weeks before graduation.  My dad took a year of tech school after college, but didn't finish. 

None of these people have had a liberal arts education, or as far as I can tell, even exposure to a university environment.  They're all intelligent people, but they're intelligent in different ways than I am. I tend to be book smart, but street stupid.  My parents are both very intelligent people.  I don't think they could have produced me if they weren't.  But their intelligence has never been challenged or directed. My sister and my mom are both highly sensitive on the subject of intelligence.  Both will claim they are "not smart like (me)" and start hand waving and walking away if they feel out of their depth, rather than staying, listening and asking questions for clarification. 

I think that the people that gravitate to this sort of information are people who feel inferior intellectually, even though they're not.  What they really are is lazy.  My mom has an obsession with being right, but she never takes the time to research something or think carefully about what is said.  She just goes with a feeling that says, "This is right but that is wrong."  If you ask her why, she starts that handwaving again and says, "I just know.  It's obvious."  Or my favorite, "It's in the Bible!"

There are lots of things in the Bible.  Lots of nice, contradictory things.  Of all the logical fallacies, only false dichotomy angers me more than appeal to (Biblical) authority.

My dad told my son, "If you read Sarah Palin's book, you'd understand why she's going to save this country when she's President."  Had he read the book?  Not exactly.  But Glenn Beck had a very fair and balanced analysis of it on his show.  Yeah. 

Dogma, whether religious or political,  is the last resort of people who want to talk about big things, but don't want to actually think.  They're desperate to be right, so they fall victim to shrill rhetoric and logical fallacy, often quite deliberately used to mislead.  This is true of liberals and conservatives, lest you think I am lumping all conservatives into this category while sanctifying myself.  It's no more useful to let Stephen Colbert think for you than Glenn Beck.

The problem is that, like with my friend, they don't see the problem.  They think I'm trying to trick them, or that the Devil is using me to tempt them off the path, or that--and I love this--their untrained ability to reason is better or more valuable than mine. Until I took my Logic and Critical Thinking class, I was in the same predicament.  Once introduced to formal logic, my brain said, "Thank you!  The world makes so much more sense now." I don't draw diagrams every time I'm presented with an argument, but I do test all the premises and see how syllogism fits together.  If it's broken, I know to mistrust the information.

But that's not necessary to thinking critically.  My mom and sister don't have to take that class.  What they do have to do is stop, listen and ask themselves, "What does this person have to gain by telling me this? What is he citing? Is that a reliable source? What does that source have to gain? Does that source really say what he says it does?"  It's so much easier to just accept what is said and disseminate it untested.

I should have argued with my friend.  I should have asked him every one of those questions.  Instead, I sent the links to Snopes and asked them to do it for me.

Ah, irony.