I recently had an intensely irritating experience on Nextdoor. I'd been on it for a year or so, and found it modestly useful once or twice. Sadly, that streak came to an end.
I posted a comment on a running thread. It swiftly provoked a couple of opposing responses which I can't describe as anything other than lunacy.
None of the irresponsible raving by the offended neighbors changed my mind regarding the thread topic, but they certainly made me change my mind about their intelligence, tolerance and manners. I had no idea of the extent of mental illness in suburban USA.
I got to thinking, "Were those responders genuinely potty or were they mere trolls throwing out stink bombs for entertainment?" I concluded "no, those imbeciles probably really did mean what they wrote. They really are that stupid." Sigh.
Mark Twain observed that the number of fools is a majority in any town. I've agreed with that for decades, but right now I find it particularly depressing, and I'm ready to withdraw. It made me homesick for the far more sensible environs of ER.org.
No doubt, for the average IQ to be 100, there must be a large number of below-average brains meandering through the world to balance out the smarter ones. But I would have expected that holding really, really stupid opinions was self-limiting. Surely, people that idiotic would either be inexorably migrated to less-nice neighborhoods or else removed via spectacular Darwinian elimination. Yet, so far, karma has inexplicably overlooked them.
Anybody else been similarly disillusioned about the sanity of their neighbors?
I posted a comment on a running thread. It swiftly provoked a couple of opposing responses which I can't describe as anything other than lunacy.
None of the irresponsible raving by the offended neighbors changed my mind regarding the thread topic, but they certainly made me change my mind about their intelligence, tolerance and manners. I had no idea of the extent of mental illness in suburban USA.
I got to thinking, "Were those responders genuinely potty or were they mere trolls throwing out stink bombs for entertainment?" I concluded "no, those imbeciles probably really did mean what they wrote. They really are that stupid." Sigh.
Mark Twain observed that the number of fools is a majority in any town. I've agreed with that for decades, but right now I find it particularly depressing, and I'm ready to withdraw. It made me homesick for the far more sensible environs of ER.org.
No doubt, for the average IQ to be 100, there must be a large number of below-average brains meandering through the world to balance out the smarter ones. But I would have expected that holding really, really stupid opinions was self-limiting. Surely, people that idiotic would either be inexorably migrated to less-nice neighborhoods or else removed via spectacular Darwinian elimination. Yet, so far, karma has inexplicably overlooked them.
Anybody else been similarly disillusioned about the sanity of their neighbors?