A collection of saves from the past two or three weeks. This first one has been around for a while, and of course speaks to the evidence of psychological studies…
i still think my favourite thing that’s ever happened to me on the internet is the time a guy said “people change their minds when you show them facts” and i said “actually studies show that’s not true” and linked TWO sources and he said “yeah well I still think it works”
In quoting these memes I am retaining original spelling, capitalization, and punctuation.
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Far left: we’re gonna get everyone’s basic needs met.
Far right: we’re gonna exterminate entire social groups because they are impure.
Centrists: I literally cannot tell you apart.
This goes to “both parties are the same” crowd, “both are corrupt, both cheat” etc etc., who are apparently cynical about politics but not paying close enough attention to how it matters.
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my girlfriend regularly tells me “if free public libraries didn’t already exist and someone tried to invent them, they would be condemned as a socialist plot” and I think about that a lot.
Condemned by conservatives, needless to say.
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Via Nigel Sellars, a photo of angry women in 1960s fashion, and below it a young black girl being escorted to school by a white man.
The people who threw rocks at Ruby Bridges for trying to go to school in 1960 now are upset their grandchildren might learn about them throwing rocks at Ruby Bridges for trying to go to school.
Thus the opposition to “critical race theory” by certain populations.
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Via Marty Halpern, photo of white teenagers, mostly men, pouring their drinks over the heads of two black women and one white man sitting at a soda fountain.
Critical Race Theory lesson one:
Your grandparents identify with one of these two groups, and have handed down their values.
Take all the time you need with this.
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Finally, not a meme, but a post by David Brin, who repeats the central messages of his book Polemical Judo (covered here just a couple days ago), with comments to an NPR link about how “a growing number of Americans are questioning the value of going to college.”
Of course they are. The latest surge in culture war is a subsidized campaign of hatred against universities that (since the WWII GI Bill) made modern America. Red state politicians see their states’ university cities as blue infestations, to be gerrymander-robbed of all voting power. The raising up of children of the poor and many races is anathema to confederates. And NIGHTLY on Fox there are railings against every single fact-using profession.
To be clear, there are some anti-fact lefties and those woke-police are accurately satirized by Bill Maher. They supply the Foxites with ammo, every day. But the GOP has become a cult for whom “fact” is a curse.
There is a core reason every fact-using profession is attacked by one side in today’s re-ignited US civil war. Science, teaching, medicine, law, journalism, civil service – and now the US military/intel/FBI officer corps – are denounced almost nightly on Fox & pals, because they dare to say: “Sir that’s factually false.”
The reason is simple. The fact professions are all that stand between hyper rich oligarchy and a return to full, feudal power.