Showing posts with label flat Earth. Show all posts
Showing posts with label flat Earth. Show all posts

Thursday, February 4, 2021

There is a reality crisis…and this is NOT the way to fight it.


So it seems that every moment you turn on the news you run across stories of conspiratorial beliefs and behaviors so shockingly deranged that you might think you ran across a parody of our conspiracy culture rather than an account of an actual event. At first you might get the urge to laugh at it all, but then the laughter feels a bit uncomfortable.

Take for example the case of Steven Brandenburg. He was the pharmacist who destroyed hundreds of vials of the coronavirus vaccine…and now we know why. As detailed by this recent story in the NY Post, Brandenburg is a hard-core conspiracy theorist who believes the Earth is flat and the sky does not exist. What you think is the sky is actually a dome erected by the—wait for it—the government!!! The dome is supposed to shield humanity from the eye of God. But Brandenburg ultimately destroyed those vaccines because, as the article points out, he thought they might be a part of Bill Gates’ microchip plot, they might kill people or either make them infertile or make birth control useless. So apparently Gates’ evil vaccines either cause births…or they don’t. I guess you can take your pick of what you want to believe.


And no, it’s not worth wasting time trying to logically deconstruct Brandeburg’s apparently feverish imaginings. This man clearly appears to be mentally ill.


But then you see the story of last weekend’s incident at Dodgers Stadium in Los Angeles where anti-vaxxer conspiracy theorists attempted to block people from getting their COVID vaccines. Where some 40,000 or so Californians have already died from the virus, behavior like this is absolutely maddening. So, if you want to be irresponsible, self-deluded, and self-destructive, you can go ahead and put your life at risk. Just say no to Bill Gates’ microchips that will turn you into an alien clone. But you don’t have the right the put the lives of others at risk with an outrageous stunt like that protest. Behavior like that, as far as I’m concerned, is tantamount to attempted murder.


But the madness of the current conspiracy culture, unfortunately, begets madness of epic proportions of those who think we can use the power of government to solve any social ill.


In Tuesday’s New York Times, this op-ed attempted to offer a solution to QAnon and its own conspiracy mythology in what appears to be a parody of big-government, liberal overreach. The author, Kevin Roose, is endorsing calls from various academics and law makers for Joe Biden to create a “reality czar” and a “truth commission” where the government will now go into to business of even more electronic surveillance to route out conspiracy theorists who might be potentially violent, like the ones who stormed the Capitol on January 6. Sure, Roose, does allow that reality czars and truth commissions might sound somewhat “dystopian.” Oh, you think? It sounds maybe like “ministry of information” or “ministry of propaganda” in any standard authoritarian regime. Kim Jung Un in North Korea, Manuel Marrero Cruz in Cuba, and Nicolas Maduro in Venezuela all have forms of their propaganda ministries that act as the final arbiter of what is allowed to be the spoken truth in their countries. North Korea, Cuba, and Venezuela are also dictatorial hellholes people risk like and limb to escape every day. 


As Matt Welch in this Reason article points out, not only does the Roose article sound like a parody of the meddling, over-regulating left, but it is bound to have very severe unintended consequences. Do you really want whichever party is in power to have the authority to interfere with online speech in order to define the truth? Would the liberals endorsing this idea, the same liberals who had just spent four years raging against Donald Trump and his hostility to the news media want to keep a “truth commission” if Biden gets replaced by a Republican in four years. I suspect not.

 

Moreover, the foolishness of these endorsements of the government getting into the anti-conspiracy business is the fact that the fearful, unsophisticated, and disenfranchised who get lured into conspiracy world are people who are constantly looking for any miniscule, subtle sign of more government surveillance, more regulation, more clandestine control. Governmental anti-conspiracy commissions and regulations will boost the paranoia, will merely confirm what conspiracists already want to believe. It might be something similar to the FBI’s and the ATF’s reactions to David Koresh’s Branch Davidian cult in 1993. Koresh, a con artist with a messianic streak, was preaching an imminent apocalyptic end-of-the-world scenario to his followers. The sign, he said, would be when the armies of an evil government came and attacked their movement. So the ATF and the FBI saw it wise to surround Koresh’s compound with tanks and helicopters. Quite predictably, death and destruction ensued.


So these Orwellian “reality czars” and “truth commissions” are the worst possible things that could be done to counter the conspiracy movement. The only thing, and the most poten strategy for stopping these movements of epic paranoia is also the most challenging thing. It does not involve deplatforming anyone by social media companies or intrusive government investigation. It involves education. It involves teachers from grade school through high school and college stressing the importance of logic, reason, and critical thinking as the guiding principles of any sane, stable and civilized society.

 

As I outline in this white paper for the graduate program in Communication and Public Relations at Saint Peter’s University, the antidote to dangerous conspiracism is especially media education, media literacy, and the fields of public relations where we teach young people to always be advocates for reason and truth. 

Thursday, December 17, 2020

If they won’t wear a mask, throw the bums out!

Well, okay, maybe don’t call them bums. At first, be nice. 

Several weeks ago, I was interviewed for this Fatherly.com article about how conspiracy beliefs are tearing some families apart. What can you do if one of your relatives keeps insisting that COVID does not exist, the Earth is flat, and Bill Gates is trying to microchip you through vaccinations to imprint the mark of the Beast 666 on your DNA? 

 

Actually, as I discuss in the article, the most useful approach to pulling your wacky uncle back out of the rabbit hole is not to dismiss his claims as absurdity or call him crazy or naïve. Confrontation will only cause the true believer to dig his heels in and cling to his beliefs even more tenaciously. All you will achieve by that tactic is to drive the conspiracists back to Alex Jones or State of the Nation or Before It’s News, or any of their ilk. Your conspiracy-believing relatives will take a deep dive back into their paranoid safe spaces on the Internet, questing ever more tenaciously to hear reaffirmations of their fringe belief systems…or just gather more “facts,” more ammunition to fight back next time when you try and tell them that Lee Harvey Oswald really did shoot JFK alone.

 

The best method to dealing with the conspiracy believer, instead, is to ask them to examine their belief systems. Ask them to take a close, critical look at the other theorists who have convinced them that time-traveling aliens were really behind 9/11 and see what testable, verifiable evidence these theorists can provide. Or is the evidence provided by these purveyors of colorful stories of grand global cabals just a long list of web links to other conspiracy theorists who make more claims with no verifiable evidence. Ask wacky Uncle Bob to think about whether or not it is suspicious that an Alex Jones or a State of the Nation claim that everything you read about in the news is a conspiracy? If a conspiracy blogger were to claim, for example, that maybe just the JFK assassination was a conspiracy or the 9/11 attacks were an inside job, a reasonably patient person could hear them out. But absolutely every single world event is part of a conspiracy? At that point, Uncle Bob should realize that he is being taken for a ride by an unconscionable liar and fraud, a flim-flam artist who is monetizing traffic to his blog by spinning one outlandish, absurd claim after the next.

 

In fact, this sort of examination of conspiracy web pages has been an ongoing part of my Conspiracy Films class throughout this semester. Among all of the conspiracy sites, perhaps none was a better teaching tool than State of the Nation. My students were able to use it as a prime example of how to spot the most audacious examples of disinformation and fake news.


But, ultimately, will this attempt at helping those poor alienated souls who are feel so disconnected from any kind of a consensus reality always work? And what can one do about the loved ones who cling to their theories the most tenaciously? 

 

Well, legally there is nothing one can do. Just because a friend chooses to live in their own, self-constructed reality, there is no way we can force him to accept the fact the Earth is round or that over 300,000 Americans have already died from COVID-19 if they refuse to do so. They can't be forced into the psychiatric care they so desperately need. If these people annoy you enough, you can always just ignore them. Or how about a rule that we don’t talk politics or conspiracy theories around the dining room table this Christmas?

 

But it these people cross the line into dangerous behavior, such as refusing to wear a mask in a crowded place or congregating with the rest of their COVID-denying friends, to only responsible thing to do is to bar them from your life, your home, or from making contact with your family.

Wednesday, January 22, 2020

Like I said, one of the best things on the Internet...

If you’re stressed out and need some pure gut-busting laughter, I can’t recommend the Sci Man Dan flat-earth-fail compilation videos strongly enough. I had written about the Sci Man Dan YouTube channel before, but for very concise distillations of flat Earth lunacy, do check out the channel’s compilation of the stupidest, most inane arguments made by those who believe the Earth is flat. Here is a link to one such compilation video.

In fact, these compilations are giving me ideas for this blog, as well as possible exercises for my future classes on conspiracy theorists. Wouldn’t it be just as funny to start a compilation of the most shockingly stupid anti-vaxxer or 9/11 conspiracy theorists.

Hmm…although I don’t know if funny would be the right word here. Especially when it comes to vaccines. With the flat Earthers you are merely watching the mindless, uniformed ramblings of the hilariously ignorant. They might be stupid, but they hardly cause any damage in the world. 

Anti-vaxxers, on the other hand, get people sick, or worse. 

The flat Earthers are like the performers in old-time freak shows. They are intellectual grotesqueries you can stare at and laugh at and feel superior.

The anti-vaccination activists make you wish that a law could be passed to keep people whose IQ’s are below a certain level from voting. That way we could be sure that no one who actually believes the anti-vaxxer drivel will ever be able to cast a ballot in any election.

Monday, January 13, 2020

No, the Earth is not flat. You're just a moron!

So this appears to be a thing now…every reference to space and the space program gets an automatic reply by the flat Earth believers, as in this article about pictures of the Earth taken from the International Space Station. The piece quickly triggered a set of mental defectives to trot out their conspiracy theories about doctored photos that only create the illusion of a curved Earth.

Now a story like this is probably run in this paper to illicit the incredulous chuckles from readers. It could lead to several head-shakes and jokes about the silliness a of a few people who still believe in nonsense like a flat Earth. As the article details, the Earth was know to be a sphere over 2000 years ago. Simple calculations have been able to prove it.

So I guess I might be in a slightly surly mood right now, but I’m not getting the urge to chuckle at this. Even one flat Earth believer in the world in 2020 is too many. As a growing body of psychological research in conspiracy beliefs is demonstrating, people who believe in idiocy like this are the alienated, the mentally unfit, clinical paranoids, and the sufferers of various mental and personality disorders. They are the antisocial misfits, the inept outsiders who are so alienated from the rest of society that they need to concoct narratives of vast evil cabals that are responsible for all of society’s ills. The creation of these fantasies by these chronic misfits lets them feel like the heroes of their own private universe. It lets them feel like heroic crusaders saving the world from conspiracies no one else is smart enough to see. These conspiracy beliefs are the ultimate ego trip.

Or, in plain English, people who believe in the Earth being flat - or the anti-vaccination agenda, for that matter, or the faking of the Moon landing, or mass shootings being perpetrated by "crisis actors" - are a collection of frigging morons who should be committed to mental asylums against their will. It would certainly be for the betterment of society. 

Sunday, September 8, 2019

One of the best YouTube channels out there!



If you were to subscribe to just one YouTube channel devoted to debunking the depressing glut of conspiracy theories polluting the internet, I would urge you to make the Sci Man Dan channel the one. Check out a sample video right here. Not only does this channel devote almost all of its time to dismantling Flat Earth theories, it does so with a wonderfully droll British wit. Not only do you get to see science at work, but presented in a very funny way.

I had been recommending Sci Man Dan to several students recently and they asked what the point was in putting this much energy into dealing with fringe kooks like the Flat Earth believers. The energy must  be put into dealing with Flat Earth believers, into exposing the absurdity, the sheer ignorance of their claims, because they are out there. People like this exist in the twenty first century and they must not. 

This is exactly the reason I am blogging and teaching about the dangers of conspiracism and the threat posed by the shameless, reprehensible charlatans behind this movement. While we should be living in a time where science, rationality, and reason should be ordering our belief systems, we are instead descending into a new Dark Age of willful, aggressive ignorance. This can not stand. The 9/11 “truthers,” the false-flag crisis actor conspiracy theorists, and the rest of their sleazy ilk exist in our time, and they simply must not.

Tuesday, March 5, 2019

Not sure if I should laugh or cry.


So here's a link to YET ANOTHER major study verifying what the scientific community has known for a long time: there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever to suggest that measles vaccines cause autism. Case closed!

Except given the state our modern world is in - and not just America society, but many other countries in the world where we've been seeing measles outbreaks - will this make much of a difference to an ever-growing segment of the population that likes to make up its own facts and create its own belief systems completely unconnected to any empirical evidence? I fear that the answer to that might be..."not likely."

I'm as pessimistic as I am because I recently watched a fascinating, hilarious, frightening, absurd, disheartening documentary on Netflix called "Behind the Curve." It focuses on that other great modern derangement I've been writing about here, the flat Earth movement. The documentary is quite fair to the flat Earthers, actually, as it lets them tell their story in their own words. We see some of the thought-leaders of the flat Earth movement as they explain their beliefs and why they came to believe what they do.

Now the idea that the Earth is flat I will just leave in the same category as the "Pizzagate" conspiracy and the Qanon conspiracy. It is so staggeringly absurd that it's not worth spending the time addressing all of its claims.

What makes the documentary especially fascinating, though, is when we see how this monumental foolishness serves as a magnet, a community, and a surrogate family for people who are and always have been, for whatever reason, completely alienated from consensus reality and any organization or institution of expertise. We see these people congregate in online communities - when they don't get together at actual conventions - and spin their wild yarns of a massive, world-wide conspiracy to hide the truth about the real shape of the Earth. We also see how the people who make up this zany movement already have a propensity for paranoia and for living in their own self-made fantasy worlds. The stars, if you will, of the flat Earth movement profiled in "Behind the Curve," people like Patricia Steere or Mark Sargent, are also staunch believers in vast collection of other conspiracies, everything from 9/11 trutherism to flase-flag-attack theories and all the way to the vaccine conspiracy theories.

But a really sad part of this documentary is when we see people who take their kids to the flat Earth conventions, who teach them to believe in this archaic, utterly unrealistic load of demented nonsense. In my eyes, the behavior of those parents borders on child abuse. It borders on child abuse as much as the behavior of parents who refuse to give their children vaccines. It makes me want to scream that if children can be removed by authorities from families where they are beaten, starved, and tortured, why shouldn't they be taken away from parents who refuse to vaccinate them? Or who indoctrinate them in idiocy like the flat Earth beliefs. That, of course, will never happen. But sometimes it really makes me wish!

So what about our new study debunking the vaccines/autism link yet again? Is there reason to believe it will change minds?

I hope so.

But, then again, when we still have flat Earthers despite all the evidence...

Monday, March 4, 2019

When my students make me proud!


I was so proud of several of my students who brought a story that I had missed to my attention about flat Earth beliefs and YouTube. This is a link to an article about a new study from Texas Tech University that found that a number of people who believe the Earth is as flat as a pancake seem to have been swayed to this belief through YouTube. Again, I’m kind of embarrassed that I missed this story, but very proud of students who brought it to my attention.

The study adds some interesting points to the conversation about unlimited speech and expression on social media and what to do about the spread of hoaxes, fraud, and fake news on platforms like YouTube, Twitter, and the like. Being a knee-jerk free expression absolutist, I don’t like to limit speech of any kind in any medium. Democracy can only function when we trust the individual and allow each and every person to express themselves without any governmental interference. As I had written here before, even the unadulterated horse manure that comes out of Alex Jones’ mouth should enjoy the same free speech protection as any other American citizen’s opinions and social media platforms like YouTube and Twitter are in the wrong for banning him. I firmly believe in the arguments John Milton laid down in “Areopagitica” for a free marketplace of ideas. To counter ideas one might not believe in, to counter ideas one might even find dangerous, each person has an obligation to speak up, speak out, and criticize. If you don’t like someone else’s speech, you should add more speech to it, not ban that individual from speaking.

And that comes back to the very sensible conclusions of the Texas Teach study. It’s author, Asheley Landrum, does not blame YouTube for flat Earth beliefs. The core of this nonsensical belief system, I am certain, is rooted in much more complex psychological and sociological issues. The flat Earth videos exist because there is a growing number (although I am curious about the exact number of true Flat Earth believers out there) of people who are already given to believe in anything that goes counter to all scientific consensus. And, quite correctly, she argues that the findings of her study should actually be a call for scientists and academics to start adding more of their voices to counter flat Earthers, the conspiracy theorists, the anti-intellectuals on YouTube and other social media. 

So dear academic colleagues, please start producing your YouTube videos right away! 

Wednesday, June 6, 2018

Please let this be a joke! Please let this be a joke!


Hmm...so a friend of mine recently shared this link to a story about the latest in Flat Earth thinking and Flat Earth conspiracy theorizing. Apparently the flat Earth model is not enough to accommodate Australia. The giant pancake flying through space - or whichever model whatever group of Flat Earthers choose to believe in - would not be big enough to hold the Australian land mass. Thus we get this conspiracy theory that Australia is really an invention by the great global - pun intended - conspiracy. So Australia does not exist, so say these yo yos. Got that? Australia has been invented by NASA and all the people who claim to be from there are actors all in league with the conspiracy and just pretending.

Oh, boy! Need we say more? Life in the 21st century.

This is almost as wonderfully deranged as the conspiracy theory about Finland not existing. Yup, I just ran across this the other day. Check out this link to the story. Finland is really a Russian/Japanese hoax concocted after World War II.

"But wait!" you might say. "So what about all the hundreds of years' worth of recorded history referring to Finland? How about all the people who've been to Finland? Or the ones who claim to be from there? Or couldn't you just get on a plane or a ship and just travel to Finland?"

Recorded history? Recorded by whom? "They" can make up the fake books! In the hidden printing plants of the Illuminati and the Bilderbergers.

People from Finland? Actors! Just like the Parkland and Sandy Hook crisis actors.

Flying or sailing to Finland? The airlines and cruise ship companies - all in on the conspiracy - are actually taking you to Sweden where an army of Swedish actors are then pretending to be Fins.

Ah, the great derangement of the 21st century. This makes my job of deprogramming college kids who are open minded to garbage like this even more...well, at least colorful.

Wednesday, March 21, 2018

Mammas Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to be Conspiracy Theorists


I am quoted in this article about a new study into the psychology of conspiracy beliefs. It's fascinating to read that insecurities kindled in people from the time they are infants will shape their predisposition to believe in fantastic, irrational, and unrealistic claims of massive conspiracy theories later in life. These findings are not surprising, though, as a growing body of research has been affirming that people who tend to be the biggest fans of the most outlandish conspiracy theories are also those who feel the most powerless, alienated, and insecure. "Individuals with anxious attachment are preoccupied with their security, tend to hold a negative view of outgroups, are more sensitive to threats, and tend to exaggerate the seriousness of such threats," the study says.

Raising well-adjusted children who are given adequate feelings of security and control in their lives might be a good start to help keep us from raising another generation of kids who will believe that the Earth if flat, that LBJ, J. Edgar Hoover, the Dallas police, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, aliens, oil billionaires, Elvis Presley, Oliver North using a time machine, Frank Sinatra, and John Wayne shooting from the grassy knoll killed JFK.

Moreover, as I argue in the article, the educational system needs to do its part in teaching logic, critical thinking skills, and media literacy skills to help young people deconstruct the messages of paranoia hucksters like Alex Jones and the flat Earthers, to understand all of the underhanded and unethical communication tactics conspiracy theorists use to convince the gullible and unwary of everything from "crisis actor" conspiracy theories to the fantasies of the anti-vaccination crowd.

I incorporate such exercises in the class I teach about conspiracy films and American culture at Saint Peter's University. In their semester projects, students need to manufacture their own conspiracy, creating one using tactics such as the reverse scientific process to cherry-pick facts that support preconceived notions, inaccurately assigning causality between unrelated variables, and launching all manner of character assassinations against one's critics. Once students can see how easy it is to create vast conspiracies where none exist, they should hopefully be able to recognize all the flat Earth theories, Moon landing hoax theories, and 9/11 Truther claims for the simple parlor tricks they are.