Thread by @robfordmancs

What a shame H L Mencken didn't live to see Twitter.com - every day this website proves him right in a thousand ways

"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong."

Yup, and now you can see all the clear, simple and wrong answers to every complex problem in real time, in one place!

"On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."

Only once the moron got a twitter account though, Mr Mencken!

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary."

Except now we make and spread our own hobgoblins, cutting out the middleman!

"The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth."

Analysis of twitter data has pretty much scientifically proven this one.

"Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong."

That's you, angry dog avatar people in everyone's timeline, shouting your certainty unbidden.

"The kind of man who wants the government to adopt and enforce his ideas is always the kind of man whose ideas are idiotic."

Political activism on twitter.com!

"The most costly of all follies is to believe passionately in the palpably not true. It is the chief occupation of mankind."

This one could pretty much be the new corporate slogan of Twitter. Or facebook.

"The fact is that the average man's love of liberty is nine-tenths imaginary, exactly like his love of sense, justice and truth."

See any twitter discussion which puts someone's strongly held preferences at odds with any of these things

"Liberty and democracy are eternal enemies, and every one knows it who has ever given any sober reflection to the matter."

Several hefty books debating this notion recently, Mencken was there a hundred years ago.

[Liberals] themselves, as a practical matter, advocate only certain narrow kinds of liberty — liberty, that is, for the persons they happen to favor. The rights of other persons do not seem to interest them."

See liberal debates abt Brexit, Trump, etc on twitter.com

"Democracy is a sort of laughing gas. It will not cure anything, perhaps, but it unquestionably stops the pain."

See the general mood of Leave voters of all kinds since June 2016

"It is common to assume that human progress affects everyone-that even the dullest man, in these bright days, knows more than any man of, say, the Eighteenth Century, and is, far more civilized. This assumption is quite erroneous."

Mr Mencken how you wld have adored twitter...

"No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have researched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby."

"What the world turns to, when it has been cured of one error, is usually simply another error, and maybe one worse than the first one."

"Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt. The more stupid the man, the larger his stock of adamantine assurances, the heavier his load of faith"

"The majority of men prefer delusion to truth. It soothes. It is easy to grasp. Above all, it fits more snugly than the truth into a universe of false appearances—of complex and irrational phenomena, defectively grasped."