4 Dangerously Influential Dimwits
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. That's a popular belief that pervades society these days and is born of a curious and unearned entitlement, sort of like the way we all think a bus shouldn't have urine on it, but of course it does. It's also terribly untrue due to its lack of completeness. Everyone can have an opinion, but you have to be ready to accept that it may be wrong and misguided and in need of correction. That's not an opinion. That's a stone cold sexy fact.
Unfortunately, too many people have beliefs that are rigid and not open to change. Like trying to pee with a boner, they are difficult to manage and can be disastrous when forced in another direction. No one likes to hear that the things they strongly believe are wrong, but it's a disservice to all of us if we can't be open to the idea that we are wrong, and open to learning something new. And while it's true that no one is right all the time and no one knows everything, that's natural. What's unnatural are those people who have been elevated to a position of authority, rightly or wrongly, who use their power and influence to spread their wrongheaded beliefs, not just to the benefit of ignorance, but to the dangerous detriment of those who believe them. Basically I mean assholes who spread bullshit. Follow along!
Sylvia Browne
Sylvia Browne, world-renowned fake psychic and perennial runner-up in ogress beauty pageants, has had a long, lurid career of stringent bullshit, foul deception and money-grubbing assholery. Many people have tried to expose her fraudulent ways, but those who want to believe hold fast to their ignorance in a way that is both aggravating and sad. Like a dog that refuses to stop eating poop, they consume what she tosses out like it's delicious, cruddy ambrosia.
While proponents can argue that it does no harm to believe Goblin Browne's ranting if she gives comfort to people who have lost loved ones, you really must question all the times that she's been caught in outright, terrible, despicable and stomach-turning lies.
Sylvia Browne predicted that MS would be cured in 2012. The common cold would be cured in 2010. Obama would not be re-elected. There would be a tsunami in Florida this fall. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie will break up. She has predicted that for four straight years. There are lots of lists of her failed predictions to peruse, but that's harmless, right? She's like your loopy aunt who drinks too much schnapps and tells you what a big boy you've become when her hand is on your inner thigh. It's not right, but it's technically not too bad.
Got $20? I'll show ya how auntie makes a beer bottle disappear.
Here's the part of my research where I Googled Holly Krewson. Opal Jo Jennings. Lynda McClelland. All people who had gone missing. All people whose desperate families had been told by Browne that they were abducted and taken somewhere else. All people who were actually murdered. What a shitty shitbag Sylvia Browne is for giving false hope to families. Imagine losing someone you care for, the pain and anguish of wondering if they are being hurt or if they're dead. Then to be told by someone you trust that they're alive. Then to have that rug pulled out from under you by reality. Fuck. Browne told one of those families that their loved one had been sold into slavery in Japan. In reality, she'd been killed only hours after disappearing.
Sylvia Browne is a soulless toilet bug who just wants your money and charges hundreds and thousands of dollars to tell people shit she's obviously just making up. She'll even diagnose your medical problems on the spot and argue with you when you don't agree with her assessment of your own personal health. The potential repercussions are mind-boggling in their ridiculousness. Because really, taking medical advice from someone who looks like Sylvia Browne is like taking wanking tips from Captain Hook.
Jenny McCarthy
Jenny McCarthy got famous for showing her tits and making farting sounds, which is how I wanted to get famous. But I failed miserably, so maybe this entry is tainted with jealousy. Once that shtick ran its course and she became a parent, McCarthy apparently got into the bottle of pills marked "bwaagah laahagah wha!" and downed every last one with a glass of Scotch to hop on a one-way train to Crazy Town, Vaccination Station.
McCarthy currently champions the anti-vaccine movement. After her son was diagnosed with autism, McCarthy went on a crusade to "educate" others about the link between vaccines and autism. To save you the time of reading into the subject, I will let you know that there is no real link between vaccines and autism. Look at this helpful and hilariously grim website for many, many details on why her beliefs are crazy like a fox hopped up on peyote if you'd like to know more.
While it's awesome if McCarthy wants to ignore science and believe unhelpful things, when she starts going on talk shows and writing books to let other people know why they shouldn't vaccinate their children against lethal diseases, that becomes an issue. The number of parents opting out of vaccines has steadily increased since McCarthy and those like her started making public appeals, while the total lack of any real autism cases linked to vaccines has remained the same.
Like with climate change, there are a handful of "experts" who claim that they know the real truth (which no credible people believe), as though the vast majority of doctors and scientists around the world were conspiring to be evil. Because that's why they all got Ph.D.s in the first place -- just to dupe the common man into believing some bullshit so they could then gather at the Nobel Prize gathering and high-five each other for playing y'all like suckas.
Tom Cruise
My fellow Cracked columnist and the guy who I share a cot with at the Cracked offices, Adam Tod Brown, recently wrote a piece in favor of Tom Cruise and why he gets unfairly shit on. And while I agree with him, as a reader pointed out to him later on Facebook, there is one big issue with Cruise that is not so easily forgiven, and that's his insane devotion to Scientology's hatred of psychiatry.
Psychiatrists are not the devil. I looked into it, and very few are even partially demonic. Scientology believes that psychiatry is a Nazi science and that its history is rife with abuse and fraud. The history of abuse and fraud that Scientology also carries around is therefore ironic and thus hilarious as well.
Cruise has stated publicly that there are no such things as chemical imbalances in the human body and that psychiatry is a pseudoscience. There's such an abundance of evidence that psychiatry and medications like antidepressants do work, however, that it's borderline insane to even start a debate on the subject. Questioning their efficacy is kind of like questioning Lindsay Lohan's acting skills. What do you gain by doing that anymore?
Like, it's like, Romeo, Romeo, where are the for?
Now, the star of Vanilla Sky ranting about stupid shit may not seem like a big deal to you and me, but remember too that Cruise's beliefs are the beliefs of Scientology, and they have actively sought to promote legislation that would criminalize the use of some drugs, especially for kids. So if your child has ADHD and needs medication, Cruise and friends want to see you punished for giving it to him, because in their minds your child just needs to give them a lot of money and get rid of the alien souls that are sucking the life force from their anus, or whatever logical thing it is that Scientology believes.
Scientologists have also managed to weasel into grade schools to deliver anti-drug programs filled with all manner of cockamamie lies and misinformation for kids, like how dependency sets in on your first dose of a drug and how it will be stored in your body fat and come back to haunt you weeks or even years later, like some kind of crazy antidepressant flashback.
Political Policy Makers
Don't get your panties in a twist, Republicans, I'm mainly interested in the policymakers here on both sides of the fence. But to starts with you, the GOP has, in recent years, become the party of saying or doing anything to pander to the most voters it can. It doesn't really have principles anymore, it just wants you to agree with it in a way that is at odds with liberal beliefs. At any cost. And unfortunately, legitimate things like fiscal conservatism have taken a back seat to rampant social conservatism and the touting of hardcore religious beliefs, neither of which should be at the forefront of any political party's platform due to rampant suckitude and shittiness. The result of this is the emergence and spread of things like creationism in schools.
Sit down, kids, you need to hear this -- creationism is not true. And what's more, you can have faith and still understand science. They work together, they really do.
To a certain group of conservatives in the GOP, science and faith are at odds all the time, like Jon Cryer and that Kutcher fellow on Two and a Half Men, I assume, having not watched the show since Episode 2, Season 1. Worse still, some believe that science is liberal and open for debate. It's really not. Science has no politics; it just is. It doesn't want to prove you or me wrong -- it just wants to prove the truth. Science is impartial all the time, even if scientists aren't always. But when people like Donald Trump make climate change a political issue, or others make creationism vs. evolution an issue, it politicizes something that has no business in that realm and, what's more, it makes it seem like it's open for debate. It's not. There is no debate. If you think you can question science, everyone else reserves the right to question what order they get to shtoop your mother.
Get ready for such a shtooping.
Even now, as the Republican Party looks forward to 2016, some of the members that the media is projecting as potential frontrunners to lead the party are being asked questions like how old they feel the Earth is, another question you don't get to have an opinion on, because science already has the answer, and they're either outright refusing to answer or tossing out ridiculous answers like "It's a mystery." You know what's a mystery? What happened to Jennifer Connelly's boobs. The age of the Earth is pretty straightforward.
No one has a choice to believe in evolution any more than they can choose to believe that the sun is hot or that shit stinks. But because some people, either willfully or otherwise, are ignorant of the facts, the GOP has latched onto this and made it a rallying cry. They've turned their policies vs. Democratic policies into God vs. atheist non-believers, or working people against dirty, freeloading hippies. They make it seem like people who want to teach evolution are anti-God and want to rob you of your Christianity, and then it's a slippery slope into gay marriage and welfare checks and heroin overdoses for everyone, isn't it?
But evolution isn't an attack on Christianity. It's science showing you where people who didn't have answers way back in the day got it wrong. It happens. A lot of stuff in the Bible is wrong, and we've come to accept much of that, unless you're holding hard to the law that calls shellfish an abomination or that part in Leviticus that supports slavery. By continuing the faulty debate, on this and any other issues, it sets the country at odds and creates an artificial and ignorant discord solely for the sake of ensuring that people never come together and maybe start to work on bigger problems. It's meant to ensure that you support your party and they support their party and we never find cause to meet in the middle, and it's a dirty-ass trick.
Across the aisle, Dems aren't above selling out to avoid ruffling feathers as witnessed by their hasty inclusion of God and Israel in the party platform. When Republicans saw it was missing, starched and uptight eyebrows were raised. The response was a rushjob to change the language to recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and specify people's potential as "god-given" because you want to make sure the opposition approves of your wording when you're running a political campaign, lest someone think you have different ideas.
The liberal media does a disservice to Conservatives as well by choosing the best and brightest twat waffles from the right to keep on the news at all times. In fact, the conservative media is complicit in this as well, whether knowingly or unknowingly. Could you ever get a liberal to agree with any fiscally conservative platform, even one that was 100% sensible and reasonable, if it was being presented by a troll like Bill O'Reilly? Or Ann Couler? Or Glenn Beck? These people are living, breathing shit puddles who sensationalize everything and make it objectionable. The right will never win over the left with fools like this and the left will never listen to the right because they raise the blowhards up and pretend they represent the party as a whole when really they only represent the small but vocal group of prolapsed anuses that somehow learned to speak.
Of course, nowhere was the Democratic machine more in weak, wussy form than in Obama's first debate in which he let Mitt Romney dance a mudhole in him with a good natured smile on his face. And why? Because the GOP goes for the throat while Democrats are happy to just sit back and hope for the best. The entire debate was a really delightful microcosm of current American politics as a whole. Mitt Romney told lies convincingly, Barack Obama let them slide and tried really hard to explain what he thought was best. One side lies, the other closes its eyes and sings "lalala" really loud and then they wait to see if more than 50% of people are standing behind them when it's done.
Fact is, political discourse is broken right now. Issues are never issues, reactions and scare mongering are what wins elections. A huge number of people are ill informed about what they need, what could help them and how they can attain it. And politicians aren't going to educate uninformed voters, they're going to herd them like cattle by dangling prizes. Are you ignorant and hateful of gay people? We're going to ban gay marriage and maybe send them all to France, where gay comes from. Are you ignorant and in need of health insurance? Vote for me and I'll make sure that herpes gets cleared right up!
The problem with running a country like America is that it is not simple. 300 million people need a lot of shit in order to be happy and productive. It's not easy but the majority of those 300 million want it to be easy. They want easy answers, easy lives and easy decisions. So policy makers cherry pick simple ideas, they manufacture drama that you can understand and point you in the direction they want you to go, and then they do whatever they want afterwards because the election's over and you can't do shit about it for the next 4 years anyway. Enjoy those herpes, yo.
