Memes

I'll say that I hated the JC version at first.

Then I saw the video and it turned me around on it. Now, it's a decent cover. I'm not so much of a fan of NIN that I can't appreciate a cover of the music by someone else. I don't really know a lot about Cash, but the imagery in the video was just really powerful.

That being said, anyone crediting Cash with the song, apart from the fact that he covered it, is shameful. Yes, he sang those words. He didn't write them; so the meaning behind the lyrics are not his own. He applied his own take on them, sure, but the credit should go to the original author for the context of the song.

The fact that people are so stupid as to think it's Cash's song, is just another nail in the coffin of the intelligence of humanity (or at least my faith in it). Having people say this kind of dumb shit about the song, and implying their attribution of credit for the lyrics to Cash, is just testament to the erosion of wisdom from humanity.

It's so appropriate that we live in an age of unparalleled access to information, nearly the whole of human knowledge at our fingertips nearly all the time, and yet, people are so willfully uneducated, and so defensive about what they know, that even when faced with incontrovertible proof from that pool of human knowledge that they are, in fact, very wrong in their thinking, only to have them argue against such information futility, is the exact problem with humans. We have such an ego about what we know and that we cannot be wrong about something that we will defend something that's clearly wrong to our dying breath with absolute and completely misplaced conviction, for no other reason than to prove to ourselves that we are somehow infallible.

Being wrong is part of the human experience. You will get things wrong more often than you get them right. What defines you as a person, is how you deal with that inevitability. Do you rail against the truth? Do you consider your position and listen to the arguments against? Or do you bury your head in the sand (or up your own ass), so you don't have to listen to the dissenters?

IMO, this is the root reason why religion still exists. If you look at how common that is, with all the people blindly following, and defending it, with every fiber of their being, it's obvious that we are still, a very, very idiotic race; willing to accept anything as truth simply because we were told that it is at a very young age.... Before we were capable of criticising the absurdity of it all. Is there a God? 72% of the earth would say yes. And therein lies the problem. If almost three quarters of people are willing to believe in a sky genie with no proof more reliable than ink on paper and the assurance of others, then what fucking hope do we have of getting anything else right?