Good point. Some people are not scumbags they are thick.
I agree with that.
Yes of course some people are thick, but even that, I think, is not really the main issue. Lots of highly intelligent people believe all sorts of nonsense. Or, where they have reliable knowledge, willfully fail to make obvious causal connections between facts they know, or invent spurious connections between unrelated facts. The prevalence of logical fallacies in people's thought processes is staggering - think of all those furious mathematics PhDs who wrote in to Marilyn vos Savant, telling her she was wrong about the Monty Hall problem (an elementary probability puzzle which any reasonably intelligent ten-year-old who comes to it without preconceptions should intuitively be able to understand).
This is by no means restricted to conservative-minded people, obviously. So some people are convinced that asylum seekers arriving in this country are automatically given a nice house to live in and lots of money, while other people refuse point blank to acknowledge that there might be a connection between the UK's severe and ever-worsening housing shortage and the more than 600,000 people settling in this country every year, to the point of insisting that anyone who might even consider there to be a connection must be - sigh - "racist" and therefore wrong and a grotesquely ugly freak, END OF.
This links in to the stuff in the other thread (the one about Trump, I think) regarding echo chambers and the tendency of the internet and social media in particular to reinforce people's existing views and prejudices far more than it exposes them to new points of view.
