Quote Originally Posted by Utopian View Post
Just a rant...

I'm disgusted with the Internet today. This morning I allowed myself to participate in "debates" with two people I genuinely like about a topic that genuinely disgusts me. The odd thing is, I was taking what I considered to be a middle of the road stance, given that I simultaneously was engaged with two people on opposite ends of the spectrum of the debate. In both cases, I offered counterarguments to each extreme opinion. Sadly, too much of the bases for our arguments came from the Internet.

On one side, I was told "you cannot argue with a meme." That's true. Wikipedia defines an internet meme as "an activity, concept, catchphrase, or piece of media which spreads, often as mimicry, from person to person via the Internet."

Yup, that's all it is. It does not matter if it is true or not. As long as something is passed on from person to person enough times, which is really easy to accomplish on the Internet, you can create any truth you want. A few years ago a beginner on this forum decided to give himself "decades" of honing experience. He created blogs reviewing his own honing. He created multiple personas praising his own work. Repeating it enough times put a fiction in front of people's faces enough times that some suckers started to believe that he knew how to hone. Joseph Goebbels, propagandist for the Nazis, said "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people eventually come to believe it."

No, I cannot argue with a meme generated to promote a blatant political agenda. It does not matter that it was based on the same article authored by dozens of different people all over the internet. This is a common ploy all over modern media. Some individual or committee decides the message of the day and the minions start spreading it everywhere--all pretending to be the original author. Keep repeating the same thing and somebody will believe it.

In my era, the big transition from high school to college was the revelation that not everything you read in a book is true. The Internet expands that concept to an extreme. Not everyone is an expert, not everything you read is correct, and for Pete's sake, understand that statistics can be, and are, manipulated to forward any desired agenda. Meme's based on articles repeated over and over referencing ridiculously tweaked statistics can be used to manipulate the opinions of the way too many people.

"If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people eventually come to believe it."

The Internet should be a source for information and opinions too. Sadly too much of that information is just propaganda used to manipulate too many sheep who don't know enough to verify what they read. Goebbels' job is a lot easier today.
You most certainly can argue with a Meme. For every argument that can be made with a meme, there is a meme that counters said argument. Sometimes one need only fight fire with fire.

Honestly I'm not sure Goebbel's job would be any easier today. People may have more junk stuffed into their heads now than ever before, but at the end of the day all the education and information in the world can not help those who don't have the ability and/or drive to weed through it all and find an application for it. Hence the reason Goebbel's words are just as applicable now as they were in the 1930s and 40s. The same reason the public at large is falling for the same strategies he and Hitler used:

"His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it."

Look familiar? It should. The US propaganda machine follows this pattern to the letter, and they do it for a reason - this is all it takes to hoodwink the average person of average intelligence. It's easier to latch onto a pseudo fact that matches your perception and world view than it is to challenge them and dig for the truth behind said pseudo fact. Most people will take the path of least resistance rather than dig into a topic and find they may have actually been wrong.