Some people are very, very stupid: and that’s just not your problem to fix

Don’t drive yourself insane trying to educate idiots

Not for the first time that day, I stared incredulously at my phone. “How do you know,” a random bloke mused at me, “that this graph only shows convicted sex offenders?” I wondered whether to screenshot the massive bit of the graph that said ‘Source: His Majesty’s Prison Service’, or the bold axis saying ‘incarcerated sex offenders’ first. Surely, he couldn’t be that dumb. No one was that stupid. No, I must be missing something. Maybe he was making a deeper point about the nature of conviction, presumed guilt, or the reliability of data. It was my fault for not understanding his question.

“Oh.”

Nope. Dear reader, he just was that stupid.

Sometimes you just want to start screaming and not stop

I confess that it used to make me really angry when I encountered stupid people. I don’t mean developmentally challenged folks, because I’m not an unfeeling monster, I mean people who are just very, very thick.

Not people with a different opinion or politics to me: people who fundamentally struggled with the most basic logic, reasoning, or analytical comprehension. People who couldn’t follow a simple line of argument. People who had no idea what the difference between a fact or an opinion was…