I consider myself a huge Raiders fan. Living in Germany, I wake up every Monday morning, during the season, at 0230 in the morning to watch this team play. I have to be in at work at 0600. Good or bad I stick by this team. I love this team more than anything. I probably need counseling, but when the trolls start getting diarrhea mouth without doing any analysis, a white hot rage lies within me. It’s most likely because I would not do that to their teams, so how dare they do that to mine. It is as if the Raiders are the Generals facing the Harlem Globetrotters. Every week the Raiders are the "laughingstock" of the NFL, no matter their record or their stats.

      I understand why this is, it’s because it sells. A team that dominated and struck fear in the hearts of people for so long has been a joke as of late. It’s like when a little kid makes fun of something they are terrified of to make themselves feel better.

      There is a name for all the Raider bashing out there. It is called an "Illusion of Truth". The "Illusion of Truth" effect is when we judge things to be true based on how often we hear them. We like familiarity, and repeating a lie often enough makes it familiar to us, the repetition making it fall right in with all of the things our memory tells us are true about the world. Every advertiser or propagandist knows this. Humans are social animals, and there is a primal part of us that still says, "If other members of the tribe who I feel close to believe this, there must be something to it."

       And no, simply showing us the correct information doesn't fix it. Quite the opposite: research shows that once we've seized on an incorrect piece of information, exposure to the facts either doesn't change what we think, or makes us even more likely to hold onto the false information. You can guess why this is: our self-image triumphs over all. It's more important that we continue to think of ourselves as more infallible than admit we're wrong. This is how people continue to believe admitted hoaxes after they have been proven to be false.

       Most of you will still think of this as something other people do, and that you of course are the unbiased observer who can clearly see their stupidity. There is a reason for this, too. They call it the Bias Blind Spot. The biases in your system cripple even your ability to examine your own biases. So just now, when you thought to yourself, "Ha, I've caught myself doing that! But at least I'm not as nutty as those 'Obama is a Muslim' Nutjobs!", you just saw your own bias at work. You're trying to examine a broken mechanism with a broken mechanism. It's like trying to perform surgery on your own ass, with a scalpel that is itself clenched in your ass.

         Now I know I’m just letting the trolls win with this rant but I know we are right, and we know that our team will succeed. So Fuck Sports Insider, ESPN, Warren Sapp, Chris Carter and every lazy analyst troll out there. The Raiders are coming and there is nothing you can do to stop them, Tom Jackson!

THE TIME IS NOW! OAKLAND RAIDERS DEFENSE (via r8derdan2475)