this post was submitted on 28 Nov 2024
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Not strictly: he says only an educated people can be a free one, meaning that all free peoples are educated ones, but the inversion of that is "No uneducated people can be free". By that, I assume he means that uneducated people are far more susceptible to deception and manipulation compared to the educated that will be better able to detect lies, point them out and understand explanations of why that's bullshit.
As an example: If I tell you that the "vaccines cause autism" study was a) just a pilot study, not an actual one at scale, b) heavily fudged to the point that one scientist was kicked off the project for refusing to falsify results, c) only examined a specific vaccine, the MMR combination vaccine usually given to infants and d) led by a guy that had financial stakes in a company trying to sell individual vaccines for measles, mumps and rubella, you can probably smell the bullshit.
If I tried to explain that to someone who's not educated enough, they'll probably stare at me blankly, then shrug and say something to the effect of "Well, you never know what to believe these days" and change absolutely nothing about their stance.
Things get far worse when someone tells their base that some group is capturing and eating their pets and ends up inciting violence by people who take him at face value.
Edit: I don't know why I said "harmless" there. Anti-Vaxxers aren't harmless, even when compared to incitement of hate crimes.
Wow, I never knew I had conservative-related PTSD, but here I am having vivid and terrifying flashbacks to just that scenario.
I could try to come up with some bullshit home remedy solution and insist "That's what my pa alwys did, helps every time!" and when it doesn't work for you, double down angirly "Well it works for my pa, you're just doing it wrong"?
Or I could acknowledge that I'm not actually qualified, and all I can do is say "Sorry to remind you of that"