Shut-up Stupid Sunday: Decade of the Unreal

The decade is drawing to a close and hopefully we have learned some lessons from it.

This last decade was like the Asch Conformity Experiment on a national scale.

In the Asch Conformity Experiment researchers presented a group of subjects with the following picture:

All the subjects but one were told to give the wrong answer and Asch studied how often the people would go along with the group when they were clearly wrong. The answer was about a third of the time.

So in this decade we were told that dismantling Federal Government Services and paying more to private companies to perform the same tasks would strengthen the country, because paying more for less has to be good.

Like the Asch Experiment people heard this over and over again and began to believe in what they thought was the majority view.

We were told that Iraq attacked this country in the Anthrax scare that left 5 people dead, giving America a reason to invade. Then were told that there were no attacks on America since 9/11, including the Anthrax scare, which meant the war on terror was working.

We were told the stock markets rising at a pace that didn’t keep up with inflation was a boom, and that was a reason to continue to shift money into the hands of the top 1% income as the income of the bottom 99% got less.

We were told that artificially inflating the housing market would serve as a substitute for manufacturing to power the economy.

We were told war could pay for itself, even though it never has.

Throughout the last decade the MSM subjected the American people to a mass version of the Asch line experiment and convinced enough people to believe that line C was the same length as the line in exhibit A, Until Reality Struck Back.

Katrina showed that having a working Federal Government would be beneficial.
The Financial Meltdown showed that the economy can’t be separated from reality.
The massive deficits that have been used to pay for the wars showed that wars don’t pay for themselves.
The (Healthcare, Banking, ect) Industry abuses show that businesses can’t regulate themselves.

So to all the people that want to bring back the last decade by repeating over and over again something that is blatantly false, like: Sarah Palin has a brain; That President Obama isn’t an American citizen; That healthcare reform means Death Panels, Larger Deficits and Liberal controlled Time Machines; That ACORN has launched a coup and took over the country; That activist judges can prevent prayer in schools; and whatever other blatantly false stories that can be debunked by opening your eyes, To those people I say “shut-up stupid” and let the coming decade be one where we actually use reality to guide our decisions.