Story time.

I've been reflecting on how much nonsense we all get caught up in..... and I must mean all the group think and caught up in MEME's and partisanship.... etc... and regardless of if the "nonsense" is correct or not. It just seems to me like it's more a matter of our herd mentality than it is about if the data is correct or not.

When I was younger there was this rumor that developed about people being deported. Some people I knew were being deported. They were friends of mine, and I went to talk to them, A little impromptu goodbye party. I came back to where I lived at the time, and went to bed at like 4am, got up at 11am, and by this point the rumor mill had started. And in less that 12 hours of the initial episode of these 3 people being deported, the rumor mill had it up to 30 and there was this massive Sweep of deportations. And yet all of this was based on 3 people and one event. There were people worked up into hysteria they were ready to Jump ship, effectively. All because People are Crazy, and they just have an impossible time wading through data.

This quote was great from:
George Orwell, "Politics and the English Language," 1946

Now, it is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.