Facts Used to be Facts

Ever since I can remember there have been people who I'll refer to as "roll your eyes" people.

By this I mean people who would express opinions about things that were just so wrong that all you could really do was roll your eyes.

It could be in almost any topic, but the views were so clearly contradicted by reality that it was hard to argue with them.

For example, if someone maintained that aliens were routinely grabbing people and examining them undetected.  You can't actually prove it isn't happening, but there is so much evidence that it isn't happening or couldn't happen undetected that no reasonable person would believe it.

Now, sometimes the person holding these views was otherwise an intelligent person, but for whatever reason he allowed this unreasonable idea to take hold.

It used to be the sort of stuff people would hear on late night talk radio or read in some tabloids and if you ignored all the rest of the world it could almost sound credible.

Over the years as we got an almost unlimited number of cable channels, we have seen these roll your eyes views move into primetime.  In fact we have a whole cable news channel that seems to specialize in this stuff.

It gets ratings and I'm pretty sure most of the people saying these outrageous things actually know better but their audience doesn't.

We have another phenomena that seems sort of new, where people think they can hold any opinion they want despite scientific evidence contradicting them.  I mean people who maintain the earth is flat when there is clear proof it is round.

Its sort of a relativism that I don't remember and maybe it is something with the schools.

There are wrong ideas, at least in the world of empirical science.

The problem is that these views have become more mainstream and now we have a "roll your eyes" administration.  It actually believes some of these outrageous things and doesn't seem to be learning.

All we can do is figure out why we seem to be getting dumber as a nation and see what we can do about it.  Or we can just "roll our eyes".