Seriously, I hope I'm not the only one to notice as of late, but everyone and their fucking mother is a goddamn expert on EVERYTHING! People share "news" stories and these unconfirmed and unvetted sources get thrown around like a Frisbee in a college quad. This is good, this is bad, this is new, this is recently discovered... Who is coming up with the bullshit and passing it off as truth? Everything labeled "Documentary" on YouTube (a shoestring budget, no damn research of any real substance, and just a full-motion video version of a power point presentation and viola! you have a "documentary") = 90% horseshit. There are now literally thousands of sites, not one of them sourced to a peer-reviewed study or journal, from authors that have no merit whatsoever... Like who the fuck is this guy? What makes him an expert or even slightly knowledgeable on anything? I witnessed a "documentary" someone posted on FB a few weeks ago how fracking is bad, and solar and wind are good... With mostly rumor, conjecture, and opinion with almost ZERO facts. WTF? Then I have one Army buddy who constantly posts things citing bad behavior by our Law Enforcement around the country and upon reading these stories they're only getting one side of the story and going out of their way to make the cop look bad. Granted, a few instances the cop is doing bad, but I'd like to get both sides of the story before making a judgement. And of course, I can't go one week without someone posting something that is so goddamn biased I can't even get through the first paragraph... The incredulous left-leaning view of the author and the fucking article isn't even about anything closely related to politics. It could be a story about going camping and it will usually state something like "and those damn republicans are screwing up our national forests." In our modern world where everyone is an expert, and every "news" story (from some ambiguous and unheard of site), "documentary" and blog is taken as gospel truth, I fear we're fast approaching idiocracy.
/rant
Whew, now I feel better.