Over the Continental Divide at Flight Level 350. Indian Peaks Wilderness, Colorado, 2014 (Yep, it’s a chem trail, alright.)
Contrails are really chem trails sprayed down on us by the government for sinister reasons…
The Feds are planning a takeover of Texas and are using Walmarts as secret troop concentration areas…
The Twin Towers were blown up by the CIA…
Osama Bin Laden is still alive…
Lizard people run the governments of the world…
Fluoride in the tap water is an evil government plot, as are vaccination programs…
Barack Obama is the Anti-Christ…
The Apollo moon landings were faked…
The Earth was created 6,000 years ago in six 24-hour days…
And, yes, among other idiot-tudes, I would even include: anthropomorphic global warming is a lie, the JFK assassin was not Lee Harvey Oswald, the Confederate battle flag has nothing to do with white supremacy and racism, and all illegal immigrants are criminals and rapists.
And it goes on and on and on and on, this descent into idiocracy.
There are plenty of topics on which there are legitimate grey areas…plenty of smarter ways in which we all might debate and discuss political issues, natural phenomena, history, etc. Why do some insist on believing things that have been completely debunked?
Apparently what we need to be teaching in schools is how to fact check and how to use basic logic. We should teach and explain things like confirmation bias, the anecdotal fallacy, begging the question, straw man arguments, circular reasoning, the incomplete comparison, the red herring, proof by assertion, the nature of a scientific “theory”, the cumulative effect of peer-reviewed science, helpful and explanatory statistics versus manipulated statistics, etc., etc, etc. (For a more complete list of a potential curriculum, see THIS Wiki entry.)
I’m not sure any of that would do any good, though. It seems that some people just WANT to believe utterly ridiculous things and it is impossible to convince them otherwise.
Oh, well. I guess I’ll just head out to Area 51 and see if I can get myself kidnapped and anal-probed by extraterrestrials.
2 Comments
ooooooohh! anal probing. I specifically asked to skip that one at my last check up. Extraterrestrial proctologists, how novel.
I don’t have too much problem imagining that some atmospheric spraying of potential cloud seeding particles has been going on. Yet I’d say the earth likely took at least 28 hours to create–perhaps 7,000 years ago. My geochron articles must have reflected late night burnout while working in the argon lab some years ago.
Thanks for the comments, Dana! See you around the bubble!