i know a large number of normally rational, thinking people who are quite far left libs politically who will argue until they fall down that 9/11 was perpetrated by the bush administration and was rigged to blow so that the wars on iraq and afghanistan could be more easily justified. they think groups like the national society of professional engineers are wrong about the collapse, because they saw some video on youtube which says it was rigged therefore things like physics and structural integrity are immaterial because they KNOW it's all wrong. as i always like to joke "lack of evidence is proof the conspiracy is working".
but it gives me pause to think that people have such a hard time coping with reality that they invent or grab onto the first thing that reinforces their belief system so that they can continue to live their lives being on the "correct" side of how they view history. i shouldn't expect everyone to be a Skeptic, but i think it should not be asking too much for people to have some kind of bias towards objectivity when there is an abundance of evidence to debunk the myth several times over. i agree it would have helped to know educational background on this particular poll, but i also know that i've talked to people who supposedly were able to graduate from a respectable university and i would consider them crackpots when it comes to certain topics.
I always think of the episode with the heroic inanimate carbon rod, turns out it's from Empire of the Ants.
Conspiracy theories are all generic, like ethnic jokes, all you need is a theme, a sinister interpretation, and a willingness to throw Occam's Razor into the garbage. I've often been tempted to try and make one from scratch and see if it got wings, I'm still pretty sure I invented the Dihydrogen Monoxide Poisoning gag, and I know how to load something up with believable technobabble. Maybe something claiming aliens had created the new minor planets in an attempt to control humanity's future by altering astrological principals?
Wait, I've got it... the NWO has infiltrated NASA and suppressed the Discovery of Planet X, in order to throw off astrologers while using their own more accurate predictions to help them rule the world.
I don't think the belief values should be taken to seriously, poll firms use these things for calibration curves on top of keeping their name recognition and revenues up in off years. Subtract out the lowest scores for unsure and do and you probably know the real values of belief versus people being dicks on the phone, getting their answer backwards, or a typo by the recorder... though the results are still pretty sad. Some of those aren't exactly conspiracy believers either, "Do you believe aliens exist?" one is going to nail not just the Roswell anal-probe crew but probably most scientists, geeks, etc. I wish they'd included education background on this one instead of just age, gender, party.
"That's the trouble with political jokes in this country... they get elected!" -- Dave Lippman
You know I only found out recently that predates the Simpsons
- 06/04/2013 06:18:13 PM
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