Quote:
Originally Posted by heep223
I'm sure 99% of people would agree that being obese is not good for your health.
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A couple of things. First, I think you're probably right in the implication that if you're just on twitter all the time, you're going to get an inflated sense of the prevalence of these sorts of beliefs, because they just get magnified. I saw no fewer than half a dozen high-profile accounts (i.e. people with over 100,000 followers) talking about this, which then filters through those followers to millions of people.
However, notice the reaction here. It's basically evenly split between "this person is a lone kook; nobody really thinks in these terms" and "this person actually has a really good underlying point". Which is it?
There seems to be a tendency by which crazy ideas are actually
protected by their audacity. Seems related to the concept of the "big lie". People hear something completely outrageous and think, "surely no one really thinks this; this isn't worth my time". So no one really says anything, and it metastasizes, and we end up with Donald Trump getting ~40% of the vote of a major political party.
So again, I'll concede that I should probably just turn off twitter for a bit so as not to be so constantly bombarded by this sort of idiocy, but I also think you need to acknowledge that you may be underestimating the rapidly expanding reach of this ideology.