IS YOUR OPINION THAT IMPORTANT?

I'm new to Twitter. Even though my account was made in 2015, I have only been using it these last 6 months or so. I am one of the original facebook poster boys. In fact, there's a good chance Zuckerberg had a file on his desk with the name "Grampa Ivy" on it, but that is another story for another day. I don't use facebook much these days aside from keeping in touch with the many friends I've made around the world. During the course of my last active year on facebook, I kept spreading one important message, which I have also mentioned on Twitter: STUPID PEOPLE BELIEVE THEIR OPINIONS ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN FACTS

Elaborating further on this, it is hard for stupid people to share their moronic opinions in public because they look stupid when a knowledgeable person shoots them down, but it is very, very easy for them to do it on social media. They have the anonymity of the screen protecting them. Stupid people just want to be part of the conversation because they're often not in the real world. They want to be heard. The problem is that stupid people don't do their research. Most of the time they are simply sharing the non-researched stupid opinions of other stupid people. Often stupid people adopt opinions simply because they like the sound of them. "Well that sounds right. Good enough for me"

Today I am talking, in particular, about the "It's just a flu" people.

Over the last 2 months I saw this over and over from stupid people. None of them researched CV19 or knew what was happening in China. They knew fuck all about the virus, BUT it was current affairs so they HAD to have an opinion. "It's just a flu"

Of course the internet enables stupidity to go viral, pun intended. If only we could social distance the e-stupid people from each other. This stupidity made it easier for Western conservative governments to avoid lockdown, so as to try and preserve their precious economies. If this stupidity hadn't spread enough to divide public opinion on CV19, the UK, USA and Aust would have succumbed to public pressure, driven by doctors and scientists, and closed earlier.

If you were one of these stupid people sharing stupid opinions that hadn't been researched, opinions that were based on your feelings and not facts, know this...

Tens of thousands of people are going to die because of your need to have an opinion on something you knew nothing about. Unfortunately you're probably too stupid to grasp this, but hopefully the message might sink into one or two of you. The internet is a funny creature. As soon as people come online to share their opinion, they become terrified of being judged by all the other random pixels, so they fear being wrong. Consequently they will insist their opinion is right regardless of any facts presented to them. The scientific world is completely different. A scientist welcomes errors. This might sound strange to some, but if you can put a line through something because it is definitely wrong, you just moved closer to finding the truth. Science doesn't work on opinion. All work is thoroughly peer reviewed because this eliminates personal bias. If only the internet were the same. If only people weren't afraid of being wrong. If only the stupid people listened and learned, and then challenged that which they questioned with facts rather than opinion. If only. So many more people would survive this next month, but their fate was determined weeks ago by one simple opinion... It's just a flu.