Born Every Minute

Check out my new favorite blog, aptly titled Stupid Beautiful Lies. This freaky Canadian doesn't give a damn that he doesn't have anything to say. He just writes for the hell of it. What's amazing me is that we all keep reading this kind of stuff. I stumbled across his site randomly and was drawn in by its professional looking layout, complete with a Flash animated title-bar and oh so chic pictures. I figured - this has to be good. It wasn't. The first post I read was, The Lost Art of Toilet Worship. Although written well enough to trick me into reading the entire post - it was, as you might expect, complete crap. Literally it was crap written about crap, sarcastically pretending to be deep and meaningful.

Very clever, I thought. I decided to post a comment thanking him for wasting my time. Something short and simple like, "You're full of shit." I was blown away when I clicked the comment bar. There were already plenty of comments there, and many of them were glowing with praise. They were idiotically pathetic attempts to continue the empty philosophical debate about the deep mystical significance of shit. Not only was Stupid Beautiful producing figuratively literal SHIT (strange as that is I think I worded that right), there was an audience that was eating it all up. Think about it.

I didn't bother to comment. There was no point - it was all too silly. SB was just pushing our buttons, seeing how far he could go, how much he could get away with. Apparently pretty far. Apparently a whole lot.

I was entertained enough to scan through a few more of his posts and while they were all pretty much written in the same vein there is one post I absolutely love. Scientist Finds God is possibly the single most brilliant thing I have ever read online. If you do nothing else this summer, read that post. Most especially read the comments it provokes. The rest of this post is about that post, so if you're so inclined, read it before continuing here.

The post itself was fairly entertaining. Well written and funny, it was the kind of thing you'd expect to read in The Onion. But I absolutely could not stop laughing at the comments some people left. Some of them wanted to believe so badly they refused to accept all of the obvious signs it was just a light-hearted tabloid parody. Even when all of their intellect was telling them it was a hoax, even after SB himself commented he was altering the article to cover obvious factual distortions - they still just had to ask: "This is B.S. . . . right?"

This sort of thing almost makes me want to start my own conspiracy theory, secret society, or cult religion. It really is true: the more outrageous the lie, the more likely they are to believe it. I still don't think people are naturally so stupid, but we really do have an absurd ability to hold onto what we want to believe in, regardless - even in spite of - evidence to the contrary. I always knew belief was a powerful thing. I guess I never realized just how ridiculous it could become.

As bizarre as it is that SB can continue to post such complete crapola and keep his audience rushing back for more, the funniest thing is - I know I'll be back too. Maybe not for the same reasons as some fools, but I'll be back.