To think some people are so thick it’s almost beyond parody

I see a lot of this online. I don't know whether it's badly programmed bots or people not really engaging with the details of posts. I shared something e.g. an Easter parade in the town centre starting at 3pm. The comments I got included 'they never do this in [town] only [nearby other town' despite the fact it literally says it's in town. 'They never do anything for Easter only [other religious festival] despite the fact it literally said Easter. And the rude 'Where and when' no please or thank you.

I honestly despair at people's ability to engage with even the simplest of language.

There's an awful lot of bottery (is that a word?) playing on nostalgia for racist ends in my view. History pages posting pictures of say, London in the 60s, and comments always include things like 'it was so wonderful then, you wouldn't recognise it now' (with the inference that there were only white people around then).

Made me laugh the other day when there was a host of similar comments under a post about slums (by a real person, who subsequently pointed out how dreadful it was to live under those conditions).

Interesting link about weaponised nostalgia here: Weaponized Nostalgia: How the Past Became a Political Tool

But very few would say they struggle to read.

And reality TV, I have not watched whole episodes of Love Island but some of the clips I have seen seem to indicate that it is almost a badge of honour to be ignorant. Ironically, we have a world of information at our fingertips but people seem loathe to use it.

I agree, these days it's cool to be thick. Like all the people who proudly say "I can't do Maths, me!" Like some demented badge of honour.

The people on fb who repost competitions that blatantly don’t exist, along with the sob story of why they should win it.

’We deserve this caravan holiday because in 1983 my Uncle’s cousin had his tonsils out, he was never the same, my dog has no legs and is in a wheelchair and I have one leg shorter than the other. So please can we win as we’re all survivors’.

Then someone replies: it’s fake Judith.

Yes, I used to live in a place like that too. But this isn't one of them! 🫣

I see jobs advertised on a FB page which clearly state the job is office-based and people post asking if it’s remote. How can they expect to get a job if they can’t read the advert

But sometimes, that kind of information can't be googled accurately.

In our village, the post office is notoriously unreliable re opening hours. If you look on the website, it shows the "official" opening hours, but we all know that in reality, it depends on the whim of the guy running it. He'll often randomly close at odd times during the day, or sometimes, not open at all. So rather than waste a journey, locals will post on the village facebook page asking if he's open, i.e. asking others who've been in to the PO that morning/afternoon.

Same with buses, no official "apps" around here, so can't track the buses en-route, so it's helpful to ask locals if they're generally running on time "today", especially as the official bus timetables are more of an aspiration of what might happen rather than the reality of what is happening.

The council have just changed waste collection days, etc and managed to send out incorrect leaflets showing collection days three times! FB has been a godsend for locals asking each other what's being collected "today" and reporting sightings of the bin wagon when people haven't had their bins collected by late afternoon and wondering whether the day's wrong, or they've been forgotten, or whether the bin lorries are still around.

Sometimes the "official" information is simply wrong, or outdated, or doesn't give you the information you need, and being able to put a request out is very useful.

It’s always the same people on our local FB who comment on every post and shoehorn their political views into every conversation even when it’s irrelevant or they’ve just made things up. It must be so tiresome to be able to think of nothing else. In the days before Facebook they probably would’ve had to get a hobby to occupy themselves because everyone they know would be telling them to shut up.

Also surprise surprise we also have houses/flats here being built specifically to house Pakistani paedophile rings… according to a random lady on Facebook

Not Newham, by any chance?

🤣🤣🤣

This one isn't actually that daft. The email that turns up makes it look like a specific person is asking the question. I can easily see my 90 year old Grandad who all things considered is quite technologically switched on thinking "Oh, it's a bit rude not to answer this person, but I've not opened it yet." They don't realise that the answers going on the website for all to see.

This. It used to be that people aspired to intelligence. These days, mainly due to the internet giving a voice to the masses, intelligence is now belittled.

There must be an awful lot of brown envelopes everywhere then. We have them too. Every developer building houses is apparently getting them, despite the council being obliged to build a certain number of houses in a specific time frame. It’s tedious reading the same ill informed rubbish.

The comments section of our local newspaper is another indication of general thickness and bigotry. Racism abounds, if there is a report of a court case where the offender is non white there will be masses of comments calling for hanging/deportation but if the mug shot shows a white person there are often no comments at all. Everything the council does or does not do is because they are "woke" and getting brown envelopes. Support for Reform is strong and they truly seem to think that this party will make life wonderful for them. I play "bigots bingo", I read the article and then what the comments will say, I am generally correct.

It's true though - an average doesn't mean that exactly half of people are below and half above. I mean, it might, sometimes, but it doesn't have to.

Half of people are above / below MEDIAN intelligence.

IME most people don't know the difference between mean, median and mode.

I've left most of the heritage groups I was a member of because of this.

Every post, even bomb damage, and the same comments (often started by the poster)... Better when I was a kid...the council...brown envelopes...mosques...Muslims...illegals...woke..

Like clockwork and it just grinds you down.

I remember some outraged letters in the local paper (years back when bots etc weren't yet invented) complaining that the council had granted planning permission to convert an empty city centre building into a hotel. The complaints genuinely seemed to think this meant that the council were bankrolling the whole thing.

I thought how difficult life must be for them if they understood so little.

You've got to love the people who read about a dog that went missing in Milwaukee - originally posted 19 years ago - and they repost it and urge all of their Facebook friends in Chelmsford to look everywhere and do whatever they can to find this poor creature!

I often wonder, when checking my junk mail box, just who responds to all the obvious rubbish and scams. The vast majority of it isn't remotely well crafted to look believable, and it will often be 'from Google' - except Google sadly couldn't secure any kind of connected email domain to reflect the product in question - not even one of their own - and so was forced to use a random string of 36 letters and characters @ some provincial Liberian university for people to contact them on!! However, now I'm starting to have some kind of idea of who does respond and make it all worth their scammy while.

Believe me, there are many stupid people out there. I talk to many each day who do not know how to reset a password . The mind boggles...

It’s definitely not all bots. Some people are genuinely stupid or can’t see past their blinkered views even if they are ‘intelligent’ in other ways.

I think one of the points above about people having a very small world is quite key - if you are surrounded by similar people and the algorithm feeds you more content along the same lines (and you're not great at critical thinking to start with) then I think it is easy for people to become convinced "they" are the problem.

They being the council, the government, foreigners, illegal immigrants, legal immigrants, rich people, poor people... whoever suits the narrative at any one point in time.

I gain great entertainment from reading the debates on NextDoor, it's all flags, Reform, "Liebor" plotting to make them house immigrants. There was one stunning thread about a new housing development where the OP swore that her daughter had been told by one the construction workers that the homes were being specifically built to house asylum seekers. Cue pages of outrage and bile. Even when someone posted genuine links that showed that the homes were all for sale, it was denounced as fake information.

I used to work in a particular London Borough so joined the local FB page as my organisation was quite a prominent one in that area.

According to the numpties on that page, EVERYTHING wrong in the Borough was the fault of either the council or the Muslims, or the Muslims bunging the council brown envelopes. 🙄🙄🙄