Will It Ever Make You Believe?

I'm convinced the people I work with get all their news from tomorrow. And by news I mean headlines, or whatever the first words trending on Yahoo happen to be.

So there is this guy at work, an attorney astonishingly enough, who was quite simply booming about the Apple v. Samsung decision, and he thought, out loud and loudly, that the appellate court, and I think he made a stab at guessing which one, should obviously take into account the decisions in Europe and South Korea which have been less protective of Apple's patents, or alleged patents if you're team Samsung.

Now of course this was all news on Monday & I listened to all the experts and pundits then and I learned & relearned a few things about patent law, & notwithstanding all of that junk, I thought I could remind this Legalzoom Boombox in the room that neither South Korea nor Europe at large are part of the Ninth Circuit, but if you knew these people, you'd know how pointless that would be. You would know that their knowledge is received, remembered and superior to anything you can point out so I skip it, try to drown them out and center my chi with post-digital ambient music, bad choice I realize unfortunately far too late, and begin to stew with frustration and genuine lamentation for humanity.

The largest problem as I see it is that the people in this office, lawyers all it pains me to say, will uncritically swallow any peace of Internet wisdom they come across. And by wisdom all they really need is a headline. They won't read the article, certainly not the entire article or half of it, or look for more articles and read those, they won't ask questions like who are 'they'? what are 'their' credentials? what are 'they' basing these sweeping and unconvincing conclusions on? No. none of that, just a lot of parroting of wild declarations from their font of knowledge the Internet and a lot of Well I heard that this has transfat, or Eating egg yolks is like smoking?

No shit. These fools caused a shortage of egg whites in the cafeteria over an article, widely discussed on the Internet, published in an online journal (named suspiciously like another legitimate medical journal) which claimed that eating egg whites is as bad for you as smoking.

Yeah. That article.

Most online articles I glanced at, didn't refer to the advertorial journal, the qualifications of the physician, or even the nature of the study, but merely cited the study "published on-line" and echoed the conclusions. OK, some of them did try to tackle a seriously highbrow discussions of cardiovascular disease, but didn't manage to get anything more illuminating out than "It increases the same amount of plaque in your arteries' which is of course the very unsubstantiated conclusion of the specious study to which they should be highly critical of, yet are amazingly not, in the first place. I wasn't actually amazed. That was sarcasm.

After the fools yapped about this study/article/viral headline for a day, each and every one of them licensed to practice law in at least one US jurisdiction I have to remind, which then caused a widespread shortage of egg whites, I then enjoyed reading the article the next day on CBC, authored by an honest to goodness not imaginary doctor, debunking the study itself, and by extension the uncritically accepted conclusions parroted by online publications and uncritical, sub-literate, mouth-breathing, office drones throughout this great land. I'm not vain, I don't think my office is exceptional.

And like I said, I won't mention it, and I will not argue with these people. It would be like discussing continental philosophy with a gibbon. They can go on with their egg white fad. And just off the cuff, and based on the research I conducted over a grueling 15 minute period, the largest manufacturer of prepackaged egg whites, eggbeaters, is ConAgra. An AgraBusiness behemoth which spends hundreds of thousands of dollars keeping our good clerics in congress from forcing companies to label their products that contain GMOs, and is quite possibly the only beneficiary of this mindless spectacle.

Bear in mind, these intellectual elite, as they might style themselves, do not ask where the study came from, they sure as hell will not ask where their egg whites come from, but this is where the critical thinking should start, not end, and you would hope that you would eventually get to the point of asking, who has the ability to disseminate, and who could actually benefit, from such a wildly unsubstantiated claim?

No, I stopped fighting the self-styled temp employee intelligentsia long ago. After all, they paid for an incredibly expensive degree, and feel kicked about and a tad slighted, yet entitled to work in an office where they're allowed to mindlessly spout off whatever received Internet knowledge they happen to have an opinion on at that particular moment. I, on the other hand, prefer to blog in private, or semi-privacy seeing as I've uncloaked the blog from some lurkers and creepers.

And you know who you are, and that's more than cool, but just don't judge. I doubt any of you could write jack, let alone anything uplifting, enlightening or un-"spiteful" first thing in the morning before you even finish your coffee, which is how I generally prefer my rantings. Enjoy!