Lalalalalalala

We need to stop listening to each other.

No, wait! Don’t stop reading! I said listening. Reading is fine.

OK, if you’re still with me, here’s what I mean. Advice we keep getting from well-meaning people and/or college leaders is that we need to respectfully listen to people we disagree with. We shouldn’t interrupt or catcall or throw things. We shouldn’t shout people down or demand that they not be allowed to say anything. Violence is bad. Niceness is good. Now go to class.

But COME ON!!! Have you heard what those people (i.e. whomever we disagree with) are saying?!? How can we not react?

There’s an obvious answer: Don’t listen.

Practice saying this while clasping your ears with your hands: Lalalalalalala.

Have you been astonished that there are large numbers of people in America who haven’t decided for whom to vote? Can they not tell the main candidates are different from each other? Have they not heard that there is an election coming up?

You might attribute this to ignorance or stupidity or busyness, but there’s another better explanation: self-care — peace of mind.

Think about it. Depending on your point of view, do you get a migraine after 30 seconds of exposure to NewsMax or MSNBC? Could that possibly be healthy?

I’m not saying ignorance is bliss. Clearly it isn’t — if you don’t know stoves are hot, you’re getting burned. I am saying you should read stuff, not listen to it. You’ll have time to think, no one who can hear you yelling if you’re at home alone, and you get the last word (in your mind).

This is particularly important on college campuses these days. My alma mater recently sent out an official statement that amounted to “You all have a right to speak but be nice.”

How is that supposed to work?

This is what college administrators should be saying: “There is no right to speak publicly on campus outside of class, but you do have a right to write. Campus visitors may not lecture or answer questions but they can hand out pamphlets quickly and then run. Stern written rebuttals can be emailed to them.”

Another of society’s problems solved here.

You’re welcome.

(NOTE: Yes, this may cause a serious pamphlet/screed littering problem on campus, but I can’t solve every crisis. Peace and freedom come at a cost.)

This isn’t funny. Or is it?

Humor is good. If you don’t understand that, you have no sense of humor and there’s no point in talking to you. Get out of here.

Deception, aka misinformation, is bad. If you don’t understand that, I can probably fool you with something.

I bring this up because the California Legislature recently passed a law against “materially deceptive content” about candidates and elections. A second law requires social media platforms to label deceptive content.

First Amendment lawsuits have ensued — the most recent one last week in federal court in Los Angeles on behalf of a blogging lawyer named Kelly Chang Rickert and The Babylon Bee, LLC. They say they want to be able to publish satire without fear of being sued or having to label the obvious.

The law, the suit said, “forces The Bee and Rickert to include a label on their satire that makes the satire so obvious that it defeats the point of posting it.”

Fair enough, but there is a tad of irony here. Check out the Bee website — it says it’s “fake news you can trust.” It’s already labeling itself.

Anyhow, it’s clearly satire and one of the defenses to this suit is going to be that no one is going to sue them for silliness.

Or are they?

When you get down to page 17 of the lawsuit, maybe arguing against itself, it says this: “Some of The Bee’s satirical articles have been mistaken for real news articles.

“For example, Donald Trump once presumed a satirical article written by The Bee was a real news article and retweeted it.”

Maybe we should have a law against dumb people instead of jokers.

I can’t make this stuff up.

Or can I?