Reply #33: I'm seriously beginning to wonder what

[Igel]

"critical thinking" means to a lot of people. It seems to mean "criticizing people on the other side of the political/ideological/class divide and disbelieving anything they say."

But those are the things that the conscious application critical thinking skills is precisely *less* important for in some ways: One's prone to subject whatever the 'enemy' says to withering criticism and instinctively distrust it--sometimes "criticism" is even wrongly taken to mean "critique", which is also a problem.

But it's the stuff we *want* to believe that needs the conscious application critical thinking skills.

This kid goes and says he helped kill something like 220 civilians; because he says it in order to say bad things about a war and a president we dislike, some think he's some sort of hero, instead of a depraved, weak-willed mass-murderer. Ask if he should be imprisoned, some answer 'no', he was just following orders. Uh-huh. Then when it turns out he's not really a depraved, weak-willed mass-murderer--just a simple snake-oil salesman, or perhaps tetched--people defend him and try to show he's really as evil to the core as he wanted us to believe. Mind boggling.