Facts vs Feelings

[SEE UPDATE at foot]

I recently had a long email exchange (can’t call it a discussion: all the words that made any sense were all sent; none received. *sigh*) with someone who has sold their soul to the idea of feelings trumping facts.

And this person calls themselves a “conservative”. Seriously.

Here’s the rub:

I received–yet again!–a rehashed and reworded email calling forth the thirty-year-old, tired old hoax about “FCC Petition Number 2493” from someone all riled up about First Amendment rights in danger of being lost to this thirty-year-old hoax.

I returned an email letting them know it was a hoax and added a gratuitous, “I might be tempted to sign such a petition if it existed to keep the charlatans you fear might be taken off the air off the air”.

And there went the baby with the bath water. Now, of course, since the sender of the hoax FELT some favorite religious charlatans were threatened, not only by the evil FCC but by me of all people, I was in for a slew of spittle and froth, “signifying nothing” save the writer’s total committment to feeling over fact.

Oh, funny aside: one of the religious charlatans I mentioned himself admitted some of the charges I laid at his door on national television, but that fact made no difference, either (nor did the fact that I sent a link to an article discussing the admissions. Of course.)

More germane: multiple citations of articles clearly and concisely and definitively debunking the Petition 2493 hoax weren’t enough to make an argument to someone completely sold out to arguing according to feelings, not facts:

“I did read it and I know you said it is a HOAX, but I DO NOT BELIEVE IT IS A HOAX.”

People who argue with their eyes closed, their fingers in their ears and their mouth motoring away at “la-la-la-la-la-… ” are impervious to reason and facts.

And these people can vote.

I used to call these people reality-based fantasists and faux liberals, but now, self-styled “conservatives” are as likely to be included in this class of idiots as not.

This is what “democracy” gets us. Weep for the republic that once was.

[Addendum: Out and about this a.m., I met an old guy who runs a junk store who’s a good example of “feelings over facts”. He had on his shelf a bottle of clear amber fluid labeled “Pepper Beer–not for drinking”. Naturally that led this unmoderated tongue to comment, “What a shame. Beer is for drinking” which led to…

“Beer destroyed my family,” and a tale of growing up in a family where his father got drunk on beer and was abusive. No amount of pointing out the fact that the beer didn’t force excessive amounts of itself down his father’s throat making him into an abusive drunk was going to convince him of his father’s responsibility for his own drunkeness. No, it was the beer that did it.

*feh* Such people are idiots. Inanimate objects, chemical substances and the like do not make people harm others. People mmake themselves do harmful things, including making the CHOICE to abuse mind-altering chemical substances of all kinds.

The bushwah about people, including addicts, not being responsible for their actions is the perhaps single most harmful meme in our society today.]

UPDATE: Hilarious stupidity. The person who prompted this post has “retaliated” for my having pointed out that their spread of a hoax–especially now that they have adequate evidence that what they are spreading is a hoax–is “bearing false witness,” which is a strange thing for someone claiming to be a Christian to do, well, this same person has apparently “felt” like CLICKing on a link or attachment in an email without checking it out, and had their email addressbook harvested by some malware. (No, I do not think they are directly spamming me, although I could certainly make some trouble for them with their ISP were I to report the spam apparently coming from their address.)

Of course, I could be giving this “feeling” person more credit than they are due. Fortunately, I’d never have even noticed the spam emails except this is my day of the week to weed through my email spam queue for false positive (there were none, as usual).

Aside: I’ve almost grown to like email spam now that I filter everything through my hosting service’s spam filters. 🙂 I love for unethical people to waste their resources trying to hook me. Were it not for the fact that they are also wasting bandwidth, I’d no longer mind spammers at all.

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