Four Ad hominems and Me

I read something the other day that I liked: "Very Serious Narrative (VSN) will be trumped by Easily Checked Facts (ECF) every time." Ideally, that should be true, but I've bumped up against a couple of difficulties while pondering this.
My Dad, as I have mentioned before, has a proclivity toward chain emails. Usually, these emails contain a lot of Culturally Pervasive Misinformation (CPM), and CPM can often be dealt with using ECF. But the question always comes to mind: If the truth is so easily found, why does the false keep popping up in my inbox?
But what caught my attention this morning was that somehow I have been lumped in with four other blogs, the writers of which say things like

"Anyone who has read a newspaper or paid attention to world events–even only occasionally–in the last ten years knows that the Muslim world is a savage place that will never be civilized and whose only version of “democracy” is to elect fellow savages. Anyone who needed the Muslim invasion of the Israeli Embassy in Cairo, last week as a wake up call should go back to sleep. You simply haven’t been paying attention . . . "

and

"These's protests, like the supposed "anti-war" protests, are usually a bunch of children of upper-middle class families who convince those who've never made anything of themselves that capitalism is to blame for their sorry condition. Yeah right! Just another excuse to find drugs and maybe a hook up for tonight. Dumb hippies!"

In these kinds of cases, it's not just a matter of misinformation and lack of fact-checking. These are expressions of deep-seated prejudices which they justify using current events. It would take a book -- or several books, perhaps -- to explain that these current events have long histories going back decades, and even then they would fail to understand the motivations of the people they are judging.

No, people are going to believe what they want, and they will seek out others who will confirm or justify the things they believe regardless of the data, the numbers, the history or the evidence. To do otherwise would take too much effort.