Joined Oct 2012
3K Posts | 725+
Crab Key
You say 'once'. Have you seen the .... that rebounds around the vacuous echo-chamber of the internet these days? The psychology of this is fascinating. This so called 'truther' movement is more pervasive than you think. It seems that these people deem an afternoon watching 'YouTube' conspiracy videos as 'research' and the likes of Alex Jones, Russ Tanner, Art Bell, Jeff Rense and David Icke as legitimate investigative journalists, activists and sages. Dare to disagree and you are immediately branded a troll, a 'disinformation agent', paid government shill, 'sheople' or accused of being 'asleep'. A cursory glance at one of these foolish moon landing hoax videos and you immediately lift the lid on a pandoras box filled with chemtrails, geoengineering, 'FEMA' camps, false flag theories, Agenda 21, flouride, anti-vaccination, etc etc perpetrated by all manner snake oil salesmen, quacktitioners and pseudoscientists. Easy to dismiss as a rational skeptic, but increasingly people are lacking this critical faculty to do so..and that's a real concern. Thus the easily spooked, the uneducated, the gullible and naive are instantly snared by the domino effect and their impressionable minds topple. But at the same time they appear to derive a sense of empowerment - self efficacy perhaps, that in reproducing this ..... they are 'awake' and privy to some arcane knowledge forgetting that the origin was the comments section of YouTube. Suddenly their dull lives are assigned some significance, and this breeds a dreadful sanctimonious superiority over what they perceive as the 'herd'. Irony is, there is an inverse relationship between their perception of 'truth' and reality. The more 'awakened' these people perceive themselves to be, the more closed minded and irrational the outcome. Science is a lie, it seems that the anecdotal is becoming gospel...and in a nation such as the USA where some 48% would entertain the notion of creationism, or the UK where it is one in six, this is perhaps as literal as it is metaphorical
General idea seems to revolve around a global elite, or illuminati, comprised of a cabal of zionist lucifer worshipping masonic bankers dedicated to global depopulation which they will achieve by a series of dastardly and nefarious schemes such as 'chemtrails' and excessive flouride in your water to 'calcify' the pineal gland. Unsurprisingly, it seems to attract the religious extremists, the gun toting far right smarting from the perceived erosion of their civil liberties, the anti semites and the xenophobes and seems to generally thrive on maintaining ignorance, fear, discrimination and prejudice.
The point being, in entertaining any popular manufactured internet conspiracy theory you're then only a mouse click away from the emergent (or re-emergent) flat earth movement...or is it a hollow earth? They don't seem to be able to make their minds up. Anyway...
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/jan/20/flat-earth-believers-youtube-videos-conspiracy-theorists
lol