About this time every year, social media explodes with the same “news” — your canned pumpkin is actually squash! It has no pumpkin in it at all! You’re buying into a lie, then baking it at 375 degrees for an hour and putting it on your Thanksgiving Day table!
The truth is considerably less exciting.
Facts are stubborn things, said John Adams. But being stubborn does not always win you an argument. We have all been in “discussions” in which we were correct and the simpleton on the other side of the table was not. We laid out the facts as plainly as anyone could. And they remained unconvinced.
Maybe they found comfort in character assassination, or muddied the waters with irrelevant information. Maybe they just threw up their hands and left the room. Maybe they even took a swing at you. What they didn’t do, though, is change their mind. Facts had nothing to do with their position, either before or after the discussion.
All hipsters look alike. This was the assertion recently written in one of those magazines that publishes those sort of articles. Hipsters, as it turns out, don’t like to be pigeonholed like that any more than lawyers, ethnic minorities, or SEC football fans. One actually wrote a threatening letter, accusing the magazine of using a photograph of him without his permission and disparaging him personally.
Turns out, it wasn’t him in the picture after all. He just looked like the hipster in question. Ah, irony.
