Facts Don't Care...

I'm pretty sure most, or at least some of you have heard this somewhere: "Facts don't care about your feelings". This meme has been popularized by "the cool kid's philosopher", Ben Shapiro. Ben is a very well educated man who regularly "debates" college students who he intends to "destroy" with strong arguments based on facts rather than feelings.

What's funny though, is that almost everything coming out of mr. Shapiro's mouth is factually incorrect. He has his own right wing news and opinion website, The Daily Wire, in conjunction with several podcasts, all sponsored by prominent far right organizations like Turning Point USA and GOP political donors like Charles Koch (formerly of the Koch brothers) and Education Secretary Betsy DeVos and her billionaire family. Shapiro stars in PragerU misinformation videos as well as on his own show, The Ben Shapiro Show, to disseminate far right and conservative propaganda that's based on a most egregious misrepresentation of "facts". Ben is a right wing grifter who doesn't care about facts, only about winning the argument against leftists by any means necessary. He even wrote a book about it: How to Debate Leftists and Destroy Them: 11 Rules for Winning the Argument, now only $1.14 for the Kindle version on Amazon...!

But besides all the stupid lies this man flings into the world, poisoning the innocent minds of impressionable teenagers and helping them along a path that ultimately leads to the dark pit of alt right white nationalism and fascism, the phrase that helped him become so famous in the online world, is itself a load of nonsense. Rational people try to ground their opinions in facts, sure. But the facts wouldn't mean anything if they're not used to form that opinion. In other words: facts wouldn't mean anything to us if they wouldn't make us feel one way or another about a certain political or social topic. Ben wouldn't get so upset about someone (rightly) calling him a racist, based on the fact that he called Arabs degenerates who rather live in the gutter, if he didn't care about that fact. Ben is of the opinion that name-calling Arabs or Palestinians isn't racist at all, but fact remains that he feels something about those facts. This is true for all of us, our emotions are embedded in the oldest parts of our brains; this is just a fact about the evolution of our species. It therefore takes genuine effort to let rationality prevail, and I know of literally no one who's 100% successful with that strategy.

Nonetheless it's a lofty goal to strive for, even knowing that we won't succeed completely in the foreseeable future; 100% democracy is also unattainable at the moment, we'll always be left with some form of representation, but that doesn't discharge us from our collective duty to make our democracies as successful as humanly possible. And I use the word "duty" with the caveat that I presume we all want democracy, and that we all agree that democracy, political as well as economical, is our best chance to maximize freedom, individually as well as the the whole of society, which I know isn't true for all people... See how difficult it is to make factual statements when those facts will be used to subjectively form an individual opinion? Anyhow, if you're at all familiar with Shapiro's work, and if you're able to see through his fast talk and confidently uttered words, you'll know already what a charlatan he really is. Nevertheless, here's a good one about how feelings care about your facts:

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