Dear lord, this thread is depressing. Anyway, I've got a few WTF moments:
I was at a club meeting once and they were passing around an attendance sheet, and I overheard this one girl ask, "What's a 'sign name?'"
One of my brother's friends informed me, matter-of-factly, that Adolf Hitler was a genius. Apparently, he never heard of the Beer-hall Putsch, a.k.a. Operation "Let's all get arrested!" Or how he invaded Russia in the winter, or how he failed the entrance exams to art school. Really, Jackson Pollock went to art school, and Hitler can draw better than that guy.
This one idiot I have the misfortune of knowing thought that "pessimist" meant "neo-nazi." After that I might have sympathized with the Nazis a little bit more, for that child proved an excellent argument for the eugenics movement.
One guy I know was apparently thoroughly brainwashed by his Uber-Christian parents into thinking A) abortions involved cutting the limbs off of babies and letting them bleed to death and B) that the Salem Witch Trials never happened. Absolutly pathetic.
A few weeks ago I noticed my mother had started watching some sort of Christian fundamentalist talk show thing, whereupon I overheard some of the most preposterous lies and propaganda I have ever heard and probably ever will. For example: that by modifying the lyrics of the song "It's the end of the world as we know it" to read "It's the end of your pain as you know it" makes it into a miraculous healing prayer that can pull people back the brink of death, as their two or three instances of anecdotal evidence DEFINITIVELY PROVE beyond a doubt. Another one was how they said that some scientist somewhere (they didn't give a name) had used some apparatus (nameless, again) that measured the vibration of atoms when exposed to sound, and supposedly the atoms (of what substance or how much they did not say) when exposed to someone speaking the Hebrew language vibrated CONSIDERABLY more than people speaking other languages (How much is "considerably?" What other languages did they use?), thus PROVING that Hebrew is the language God spoke to create the world. The creepy part is that this is not a show where you call in to donate money, so I can't tell if they're crazy, stupid, or lying.
My afformentioned mother once told me that she is one of the smartest people I will ever know. I laughed, at the time, but now I wonder if her mind has started to go from all the stress (single parent, shitty job, my drug-addict brother, etc.).
[EDIT] Hold on, I forgot one:
I was watching the news (there's a dumb move for you) and they were doing a segment on how these new eco-friendly lightbulbs have mercury vapor in them, and how people don't seem to know how dangerous it is to break them. To demonstrate the public ignorance (and how!) they did one of those street shout-out things, where they walked up to this one young woman (who may have been pregnant) and asked her if she knew there was mercury in the lightbulbs, and the effects of mercury poisoning. Her response: "Umm...can't it give you Downes' Syndrome?" Yes, lady, mercury has the magical ability to form an extra chromosome in each of your cells.
