Ray Martin Said It So It Must Be True

Or "Pearl has a rant"

I am tired of spending a lifetime around the mis-informed that pick up the mis-information and run with it. I know I have had a similar rant before but it just keeps coming at me.

Why do people limit their information sources? Even if you ignore the internet, there is the choice between commercial and non-commercial radio and television in Australia. Some newspapers are more reputable than others. Heads up - mass circulating emails/tweets/facebook messages and women's magazines are no source of anything credible.

Now the world doesn't have to agree with me on everything - and to a great extent I am not even contesting my "rightness" on most issues, but I am asking folks to educate themselves and not just take the lowest common denominator of information and take it as gospel.

Current affairs example - our illustrious Opposition Leader again crying "just stop the boats". You mean the boats full of people who are claiming refugee status - which is their full legal and human right to do so. You mean those people from Afghanistan (yes that country that we are at war with and is getting the life bombed out of it, with corruption running the few bits still standing), can't understand why they want to leave.

Or to take it back to land rights when I explained to the ignoramous (that I am related to) that it didn't mean our Aboriginal people could only claim land that they had a continuous, unbroken link to ie not or back yards. Says this brainiac - well why didn't they just say that in the papers? Well they did in the media I follow ...

Or to a classic quote one of the donators of my genetic heritage - "the Aboriginals are such a primitive people - they didn't even invent the wheel". Well, you try and live in this hostile, mostly desert country for 70,000+ years without a wheel and then come back and tell me about who is "primitive" mate!

I know some of this is history, and that's okay. I can't publish the latest comments to respect the privacy of identities of those who said them but damn it pisses me off. There is no excuse for ignorance (climate change is a fallacy, the American health-system-for-all is a conspiracy of evil, Muslims are "bad") in this day and age with reputable sources of information available at the click of a button.

... breathing deeply, and stepping off the soapbox (for now) ....

* I acknowledge that mentioning Ray Martin dates this but you could insert John Laws or anyone from Fox News. And I do acknowledge that Ray martin used to be a real journalist but his years on the most commercial of commercial tv news is his lasting legacy as far as I am concerned.