Skeptomania - Paranormal / UFOs, etc.

asmodee

Normally conspiracy theories are either annoying or just plain amusing, but 9/11 conspiracy theories piss me off just like the Red Cross does. There are so many people profiteering or trying to gain recognition for themselves over a national tragedy. I think the families of those that died deserve better than some jackass making up wild conspiracy theories and putting the blame everywhere but where it belongs.

WTB1

I think half of the population of the US are idiots. I read that something like half believe we didn't land on the moon. These same people vote.

TheMadHobbit · Subway Tolkien

Which is why the only conspiracy theory that I personally think has any legs is the one that says that the "powers that be" have a vested interest in continuing to keep our educational systems in disarray.

"Proles and animals are free."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proles

http://www.orwelltoday.com/proles.shtml

http://www.atlanticfreepress.com/content/view/2520/81/

Gren · God Of Oreos

I'd still need evidence of a comprehensive conspiracy like that.

I think it's a combination of increasingly poor public education over the last several decades matched with an incredible accessibility to equally incredible amounts of information, via the internet and cable TV. To the uninitiated, to those who don't know how to make the discerments, all but the craziest of stuff on TV and the internet would seem equally credible. If evidence isn't evaluated and used to make decisions on belief, then emotions and existing beliefs tilt the choice.

WTB1

I don't think the government is smart enough to sinisterly subdue and control "proles".

The older I get the more I see incompetence and stupidity in the government/officials. Not to side-track, but that was always a reason i just couldn't take ufology seriously at all. I could never get past the notion that the government could keep crashed saucers, let alone retrieved alien beings, a secret.

The same government that handled Katrina keep aliens a secret and placate the common man on beer, gambling, sex and football so we are unwittingly subdued into servitude? Doesn't add up.

TheMadHobbit · Subway Tolkien

Not saying I completely believe that it is a conspiracy, but 'sposin' it is, my guess is that it isn't a planned or strategically developed plot.

Rather it is evolving by by 'happy accident'.

If knowledge is power, then the supression of knoweldge is what is required to create an imbalance of power.

I would point to the suppression of literacy of black people in the South during the days of slavery as an example. I would also refer to Mike Judge's film "Idiocracy". Not a great film (no Office Space to be sure) but it does have a ring of truth to it.

I won't go all carol on you. But it seems that critical thinking by the "average" citizen is growing scarcer year after year.

I also seem to recall a recent article about how the uneducated are outbreeding the educated. Additionally, just attend your local PTA meeting to become REALLY afraid of the future! Sure, there are conscientious parents in attendance, but every year the "intelligent" ones more frequently become "too busy" to attend, while the dullards are sure to be there in force. Perhaps as a corellary, the same "intelligent" parents are typically the parents who wind up sending lil Johnny and Suzy to private "academies", leaving the Public schools for the "common folk".

Heck, even TV makes hay out of our ignorance. I refer you to Jay Leno's "Street Quiz" segments.

To be sure - there are many direct, indirect, applied and accidental causes for my so-called "Conspiracy to Dumb Down the Nation" (trademark pending, all rights reserved). Again, I do not think it is a carefully orchestrated X-Files Illuminati style plot, but rather a confluence of factors.

But in my opinion, the end result is still the same - ignorance is growing.

WTB1

Well, then we are in complete agreement.

It's odd that ignorance might be growing even while the information age is in full stride. Maybe it's overload to youngsters - who to believe, who to believe? Which source?

It could be that we're in a stage where less people are, for instance, monitoring a news story in a well....common sense way. If one really wanted to know the facts as best they could at the time, would they REALLY just read it from one source? What if there was a he said she said story? I've witnessed it happen a lot. One person in the room picks their side, the other theirs and argue it robustly. Doesn't common sense dictate that most of the time the truth lies smack dab in the middle?

There's a dearth of bullshit detectors out there I think. Don't get me wrong, I might be one of the sheep on the other hand. Shit, i don't even know what the hell Anon is talking about half the time.

chefkathleen

TheMadHobbit · Subway Tolkien

/agree @ anon!

However, I think that it isn't so much that EVERYONE is going dumb. I think that instead it is manifesting as a gap - similar to the economic gap.

I predict that over the next few decades we will grow closer to another dystopian future scenario - Brave New World. Complete with its Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and Epsilon castes.

Again, not necessarily through deliberate manipulation but rather by consequence.

Yaish · Intel Chief

I think there is a deliberate strategy among the political parties to maintain and grow their support bases. They don't want too much change, change might boot them out of power. They need to their voters dumb and happy, and their contributors happy enough to keep the money flowing in.

chefkathleen

paul68 · Shaved Ape

The problem is in large part due to the fact that our technology is getting smarter faster than we are. People's belief systems, emotional tendencies, and natural human natures, change very slowly. We change little, technology changes very fast. Where once you had to really dig to learn about something, you can sit down and in seconds have 100 different ideas about it at your fingertips.

The information age as it's called, is basically handing children the keys to a candy store. And most of that is just like real candy, and only good for creating rot and decay. We arent any better better at learning. We haven't even accepted that more important than thinking for ourselves as we hear chanted so often, is teaching and learning HOW to think in the first place.

Emotions and bias, credulity and gullibility, are every bit as determining as ever when people make choices. Instead of several choices though, they now have thousands. Although nothing has changed and only a few of these choices will be correct or have merit, the masses will still make decisions the same way they always have.

All thats happend, is we have more people, with a whole lot more opportunities to believe stupid things.

Gren · God Of Oreos

That US public education is getting worse and worse is not in question. We've all sorts of hard data on testing to support that.

I attribute it mostly to the increases in sociological studies and decreases in focus in math and sciences.

I attended K thru 12 from 1960 thru 1973, and I swear to God, we were expected to learn a lot tougher stuff prior to, oh, 1969, 1970 than after. A time of great social upheaval, it wasn't long before the hippie kids in college in the 60s became the teachers of the early 1970s, later moving up to administration. Science and math are 'establishment' topics, while history and social studies are amenable to, ahem, interpretation. In my high school, half the science and math classes available to my sister, who'd passed thru just 4 years earlier, were gone by the time I got there, replaced by Current Events and fluffy social study variation classes, and art class had been expanded to include Art History Western and Art History Classical. Not bad stuff, but a freakin' crime if science and math classes get axed to make room.

Not to mention that in-school discipline went out the window about the same time frame, a part of the new permissiveness.

The decline of science education is the root. Once you have a basic grasp of how to evaluate claims, how to evaluate evidence, and how to recognize logical fallacies, it's pretty hard to get sucked in by claims you'd like to believe were true.

GSpoon

I've met plenty of people that were good in science and math that still could not think for themselves. I used to manage a girl that was an A student taking calculus and yet she could not count change back to a customer. Without a calculator she was lost. I also had an argument over the xmas holiday with my cousins stepdaughter. She is 13 or 14 years old and she insisted that we were all wrong, that Hitler was a jew and that he is the one that killed the Nazis by putting them in camps. Sad thing is she too is a "good student".

I do agree that critical thinking and logic are much needed in schools. Sadly the way that school is taught now is more of a problem than what is taught. It is based on memory. It doesn't matter if the subject is science, math, history, or english, the goal is to cram enough stuff into the kids brain to get them to pass a standardized test. Forget the fact that the test is set up so that you can damn near score a high enough grade to pass just by guessing (as was NC's just a few years ago). We have many (by some estimates as much as half) the people graduating from school that are functionally illiterate.

I have seen people in a biology or chemistry class making a's because they know the steps to teh scientific method, but they don't understand how it works or how to apply it.

Sad thing is I see it all the time with my costudents in college as well