Maybe I should be more patient with stupidity

I am taking a break from Facebook. Someone tried convincing me that Roman Polanski was set up and then talked a lot about unfair courts and the fact that his wife was murdered by Charles Manson's family and then wondered why I was pushing so hard at the fact that he raped a 13-year old girl, because isn't it suspicious that she dropped the charges? Or that her mother was fine with her going along with Roman Polanski to Nicholson's house?

I was rather horrified at the argument and implication. I put up an status update of "Does surviving the Holocaust give you the right to rape 13 year old girls? Or does your wife have to be murdered by Charles Manson too?" And that can go much farther into horrible sarcasm (ok, if you survive the Holocaust but your wife avoids the Manson family altogether, can you still rape women over 18?)

But I am trying to get a handle on my inability to ignore stupidity. Netanyahu using the Holocaust to advance a "Let's nuke Iran before they get us" argument is being touted. There was an old stupid story about The Professor and The Student (in which the professor challenges the student with a lot of "can you really prove God?" and the student turning it around and noting that the professor can't even prove evolution or that he has a brain) but in this version the student was EINSTEIN - like holy shit, Einstein had long tedious debates with crazy professors who stopped their classes in order to have theological debates and he totally pwned the old secular humanist fucks.

Of course, there's the Economics Professor who gave all his students that same (rapidly falling) grade in order to illustrate that SOCIALISM IS BAD!!! because Economics professors are all Ayn Rand cult members who don't know this Keynes guy.

Let's see - cousin Becky tried to defend cousin Brian's nth conspiracy theory by claiming that there is no proof that the airplane ever hit the Pentagon and I should have an open mind. I'm more pissed at Becky since she should know better. Brian is a nice stupid guy who is living at his mother's trailer and these conspiracy theories make him feel important. If they make him happy, who am I to point out that they are fucking stupid?

There have been other incidents. Damn the internet just gets fucking irritating. And I don't mean youtube comments either. If you are looking at youtube comments, you deserve to get pissed off.

But it's worse when people I nominally respect are spouting bullshit and repeating crap and posting these shitty memes.

Then again, sometimes that's my fault for respecting the wrong people. Or giving them the benefit of the doubt. For example, nobutora was a toxic personality from the first moment he joined weirdjews2 but I would defend him because he sparked discussions and he made other Orthodox Jews seem sane for disagreeing with him (after all for some his brand of observance is assumed to be partial to all Jews) but at a certain point I had to admit to myself that he was going to be constantly one note - homophobic, confrontational, hating on America, quick to criticize every instance of lashon hara that wasn't coming directly out of his mouth and without a doubt one of the stupidest most dishonest fools when it came to any scandal in the hareidi community. There's defending a community and then there's pretending that no problems ever exist in that community and that all criticisms are just antisemitism.

I guess it's worse when I try believing in people even when all evidence points to the contrary.

It's like Benjamin Franklin said: "Everyone is a fucking moron these days."

Or was that Einstein?