Raistlin

One thing that really annoys me is when completely oblivious people make adamant, absolute claims that are entirely bogus. Regarding the Supreme Court, this comes often from liberal, very partisan, wannabe commentators who only whine about the conservative corporate shills (because NONE of the Democratic elite does what any large corporation wants).

For instance, today the Supreme Court struck down a California law which prohibited the distribution of violent video games to minors, because the law violated free speech. "Conservative" Justice Scalia wrote a strongly-worded opinion (read: Scalia wrote an opinion). Justice Thomas dissented (along with "liberal" Justice Breyer, but apparently online liberals have chosen to ignore that).

An example of this is here, which also happens to have the best headline on this story. The article itself doesn't say much, but the comments are headdesk worthy. Classic examples:

I can't believe:
- that Scalia actually did the right thing
- that Thomas DARED to offer an opinion that dissented from Roberts and Scalito's

How is this possible?
Thomas voting AGAINST the other 3 Fox News Justices.
Breyer voting AGAINST the other 3 Mainstream Justices.
3 Fox News and 3 Mainstream Justices agreeing on something.
:mind blown:

Every single one of those people is an oblivious, willfully ignorant moron who has never bothered to try to actually learn something about the Supreme Court Justices outside of checking Daily Kos. It is the intellectual equivalent of religious whackjobs deriding evolution solely because that's what their fundie church told them. Anyone, and I mean anyone, who had a basic understanding of, say, Scalia, would have known absolutely that Scalia would strongly support free speech rights in this case. The only one who could reasonably be called a "Fox News" Justice would be Alito, who is more thick-headed than a concrete statue (he makes Breyer look logical in comparison).

I posted in the comments there with two back-to-back comments from an anonymous commenter (the first one being fairly long). Those posts give an overview of why many other comments were blatantly stupid. I just needed to rant about the abject willful ignorance of people. So many people base their opinions on what their knee-jerk reactions says is or should be true, regardless of age or demographic or intelligence. Intelligence is not correlated with rationality, or at least not by much.

Another somewhat recent example of this was Citizens United, where last year, according to some liberals, the Supreme Court decided that "corporations were people." *facepalm* The actual facts of the case were that a corporation had gathered up some private donations and spent the money to fund a movie that was critical of Hillary Clinton. The FEC wanted to prohibit that private criticism of a candidate with regulations that placed limits on so-called "soft money" (which is money not directly donated to a campaign, but used to spread a political message for or against a certain candidate). The Supreme Court held that those regulations violated free speech, and they were absolutely, 100% correct. The case was NOT about whether corporations are people, but whether the federal government can place content-based speech restrictions on private parties unconnected to a campaign. And the answer was, and needed to be, "no."

The dissent and many liberals derided the opinion for giving corporations the same rights as people, which it absolutely did not directly do. It is simply a necessary consequence of allowing people to group together to form organizations or businesses, and to have elected or appointed representatives act in the name of their organization. The ACLU, then, is an entity capable of endorsing a political opinion. So is the New York Times editorial board, the NRA, churches, charities, animal shelters, and any other organization. According to the pseudo-logic of the opposition, what is perfectly acceptable for non-profits centered around a political ideology to do should be prohibited from for-profit organizations (except for the media!) whose members and representatives believe the same thing. And that's even assuming there can even be a meaningful line drawn between media and non-media sources. In the age of TV and internet, anyone trying to disseminate information is part of the press. Otherwise, you'd have to figure out where to draw any sort of rational line between for-profit bloggers, non-profit bloggers, media businesses wholly/largely owned by a private corporation, media business with a large variety of entirely separate corporations with no majority, newsletters published by corporations, non-profit political organizations, non-profit media organizations, etc. etc. etc. about which ones have the right to support a political opinion and those that don't. I argue that it is impossible.

Outside of religion, politics is the biggest source of self-delusion, cognitive dissonance, and blind ignorance. And it is especially obvious online where you can see just how many people wallow in their own unquestioned beliefs.