The Misconception: When your beliefs are challenged with facts, you alter your opinions and incorporate the new information into your thinking.
The Truth: When your deepest convictions are challenged by contradictory evidence, your beliefs get stronger.
Novelty Facebook pages, get-rich-quick websites and millions of emails, texts and instant messages related to the event preceded the official announcement on May 1, 2011. Stories went up, comments poured in, search engines burned white hot. Between 7:30 and 8:30 p.m. on the first day, Google searches for bin Laden saw a 1 million percent increase from the number the day before. Youtube videos of Toby Keith and Lee Greenwood started trending. Unprepared news sites sputtered and strained to deliver up page after page of updates to a ravenous public.
It was a dazzling display of how much the world of information exchange changed in the years since September of 2001 except in one predictable and probably immutable way. Within minutes of learning about Seal Team Six, the headshot tweeted around the world and the swift burial at sea, conspiracy theories began to bounce against the walls of our infinitely voluminous echo chamber. Days later, when the world learned they would be denied photographic proof, the conspiracy theories grew legs, left the ocean and evolved into self-sustaining undebunkable life forms.
Interesting concept, but clumsily delivered. One example - "photographic proof?" Who could consider photography proof of anything after all of the BS that has surrounded, for starters, the Kennedy assasination or the moon landing? "Photographic proof" is an oxymoron. Photos can be faked as easily as any other medium.
I'm not sure this is anything we don't already "know." Everyone knows they can be fooled, and that the fooler in chief is themselves. Is this article just another way to say that? Seems like it.
Nonetheless, the Fooler In Chief benefits from analysis of this topic.
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