Scary

"The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie -- deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Belief in myths allows the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought."


I ran across this quotation from John F. Kennedy and wanted to find out more about the context in which he used it.  (It turns out it is from a commencement address given in May, 1962.)


How ironic that this quotation led to the following:


One of the sites I clicked on turned out to be a screed against Muslims and our president.  Intrigued by what I was reading, thinking, how in the world can anyone believe this stuff, I decided to see what kind of comment response it had received.  Surely there are people who will be saying "what a bunch of garbage this is."


Oh, but no.  One particularly vitriolic commenter, who even trumped the writer in his hate-filled ideas,  had the ID "amanuensis".  Now I've always found that word delightful, especially since Mom said that that was her original profession.  So I was particularly distressed that this person identified his- or herself that way.


So I clicked on the ID link to see what other things this person had commented on.  He or she had made over 2000 comments on that site (I don't know over what time period).  The frightening thing was that this person had made nineteen comments over the previous 24 hours, all extremely hate-filled.  Does this person have a life outside the Internet?  Will this person someday emerge to commit some horrible deed?


Like I said, it's really scary.