Over the last few weeks I have been responding on facebook (don’t judge!) to an old friend I reconnected with via my brother. Now, my brother has been a conspiracy believer for a long time and knows my position very clearly and with good humour we banter amongst ourselves often.
This old friend is a different matter however and debating with him left me lost for words, something that rarely happens to me. It started with a post he put up about vegan alternatives to bacon. As bacon is the only thing that could ever be accepted as possible proof of a wise and loving creator if there was such a thing, I made a quip about leaving bacon alone. Well I would just like to state to all the bacon lovers out there that we are responsible for death and war and Amazon deforestation, global warming and the eventual death of the planet. I didn’t know that beforehand and, I must admit, I did feel slightly guilty.
Round two was a post he put up a story about a Particular PhD Scientist who challenged GPs to inoculate themselves with the MMR vaccine, the dose adjusted for their body mass. The challenge was apparently rejected thereby proving vaccination was dangerous. Now, the only conspiracy I will not tolerate is the anti-vax movement and I will try to stamp it out wherever possible and with extreme prejudice. So I did a little bit of research on this scientist (I forget her name) and discovered she was a geologist. So my opening punch was to comment that I did not take medical advice from geologists, thank you very much. With the torrent of abuse I received it was obvious I was dealing with a hard core conspiracy believer. The usual came out – mercury, aluminium, general poisons which either lead to an agonising slow death over 70-80 years and sterilisation but then it got personal.
As an engineer and lover of science I was being fooled. The great unknown powers that be have actually manipulated the educational institutions of the world, including my own, to only teach us what they wanted us to know, and that common sense and intuition were a far greater tool for knowing the physical world than the junk science that we were all exposed to.
My response to this was that intuition and common sense don’t go very far when designing an aircraft, or a bridge or a building or any number of structures. Common sense and intuition is what lead early medicinal practitioners to use trepanning, prayer and appeal to god/gods. No, we are all being duped and we are so blind and believe ‘them’ so much that we have no hope of salvation.
Then came the final encounter. New footage of the ‘missile’ that struck the pentagon in the 11th of September attacks. I did maybe 10 minute’s internet research to find this particular video is fake. It’s a doctored video of the pentagon during the 60’s taken from the air. I pointed this out to him and the tirades continued. If it wasn’t a missile then what was it, because it sure as hell wasn’t a plane. He then posted the In Plane Site video, which I debunked, explained where the inconsistencies were and showed where and how the producers manipulated evidence and blatantly lied.
There is an opening in the video where the narrator explains where the US Government had lied and that showed, to paraphrase, dishonesty and even guilt. Naturally the lies discovered were due to their own circular reasoning but we won’t let that get in the way of the truth. I used this to suggest that seeing as the producers had edited certain bits to suit their own ends they were being dishonest and indeed guilty of lying themselves. Why should he trust them?
It went on and on to a point that I had to reveal to him that I was an aviation specialist, had been trained for aircraft accident investigation and had used it during my career on a number of occasions. I then went on to explain that, just from the physical evidence, in my professional opinion an aircraft had flown into the pentagon the damage and the amount of wreckage that was found was consistent with the force of the impact and the structure it struck.
Well then, apparently all that meant was that I was an arrogant SOB who thought I was better than everyone and that I should show some respect.
My final reply was short and I didn’t feel like being passive or polite anymore. I could see that we could never agree, that he was totally inflexible, utterly closed minded and paranoid. And that I shall welcome the New World Order with open arms if only for the fact that it would remove the ‘truthers’ from the gene pool. That didn’t go down well either. So I blocked him.
There is no debate, no arguing and no reasoning with these type of ‘truthers’. They will totally ignore any and all evidence presented. My little ray of light is that, at the very least, I have raised and educated my own children to be critical thinkers and rational skeptics.
It’s a long rant I know, so thanks for the therapy session. Is our hour up already?
