Forteana and Critical Thinking
Having a day of posting Fortean material has just reminded me of a piece I read recently about Critical Thinking
My evening with Joe was very illuminative. After the moon hoax came the following, depending on your point of view:Read it all - a very funny debunking of some of the current myths that are flying around in the 21st Century.Alien blobs surrounding the Space Shuttle OR a negative image videotape of a blurry object at the bottom of an aquarium.
UFO squadrons flying in close formation OR distant geese at the limit of a digital zoom slowed to 5 frames per second.
A giant, manned American space station in orbit around Mars OR a still frame from NASA’s 1976 Viking animation.
Otherworldly “rods” darting invisibly through the skies of our planet OR individual frames of a large insect leaving a blurry video trail as it whizzes past the lens.
Every time I would identify one of these great mysteries, Joe had the same response: okay, but what about this! No fight, no defense – nothing. And then we’d be on to some new blur or smudge that proved, incontrovertibly, that this “reality” we live in is a giant lie, and that we are all victims of Dark Forces moving beyond our control or even our awareness… and that while the sleepwalking sheeple go on with their corporate-controlled lives, the mysterious wheels of the Shadow Government turn inexorably onward, crushing those brave few individuals who are on to the whole horrid plot like so many ants.
There is a word for this diseased mental state. It begins with a “P” and if you blurted out “progressive” then shame on you, you horrible bigot. That may be a correlation without causality.
As I was leaving Joe’s, he said something I’m sure he thought was very funny. He said, “Man, I’ll bet a guy like you thinks Lee Harvey Oswald really shot JFK.”
Tags: skepticism, logic, debunking, conspiracy theory