Kool Aid is way too sweet, is loaded with chemicals, and can make your brain turn into mush. It can cause your critical thinking skills to become warped and make you focus only on the weak-sense aspect of the discipline. It can make you look past the obvious to things that are convenient to your preconceived notion of the truth. And it can eliminate your ability to think for yourself.
Weak-sense critical thinking occurs when you start with the conclusion and work backwards to find reasons to support your premise. This form of thought is very common with sports fans, who defend their favorite team no matter what.
It’s the official’s fault that my team lost.
The other team cheated.
We would have won if the weather was better.
The weak-sense sports fan will allows be searching for excuses to defend the team’s losses. And these people band together to amplify the argument. It works like the grapevine; one fan tells another, who tells another, who tells another... Eventually, all of them have the same talking points, and it doesn’t matter whether or not the talking points are true. They have left the "real" world and joined the Kool Aid drinking crowd.
The Boston Red Sox’s Bill Buckner provides the perfect example of sports-related Kool Aid drinking. Red Sox fan groupthink blames the loss of the 1986 World Series on an error made by Buckner in Game 6. Never mind that the game was already tied by the time Buckner infamously let a groundball slip between his legs. Never mind that the Red Sox could have won Game 7. The Kool Aid dictates that the loss was entirely Bill Buckner’s fault. And any role that Buckner played in getting the Red Sox to the World Series or getting them to within one game of the title is forgotten.
And in politics, Kool Aid drinking is even more common. One needs to look no further than Fox News to see clear evidence of the consumption of this dangerous beverage. Whether it is Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, or Brit Hume and their legions of loyal followers, the talking points are always the same:
Brown people are coming to kill us.
To have peace, we must wage war.
Freedom should be sacrificed for security.
Lowering taxes increases revenue.
George W. Bush is a competent leader.
Liberals want to take away your guns and give them to homosexuals.
Etc., etc. etc.
Right-wing Kool Aid is the most popular flavor... the Fruit Punch of political brainwashing. However, a new flavor has entered the marketplace. And this flavor has a blue color to it. Consumers of this blue Kool Aid are easily swayed by catch phrases and media hype. They are quick to throw good people under the bus in support of their opinions. They are developing a groupthink that is dangerous to the progressive cause.
And as the left drifts further away from being the "Reality-Based Community", I drift further from the left.