OK, I’ll say it. Calling something out as “tinfoil hattery” without attempting a debunk is nothing but snobbish pseudo-intellectualism of someone imitating the vocabulary of their betters. People do it far too often here and it needs to stop.
I first noticed it on this thread where a couple of people showed up all smug and self-righteous with the “tinfoil hat” dismissal and turned out to be completely and abjectly wrong.
So stop using “tinfoil hattery” dismissal unless you can make a stab at debunking what you’re talking about. This board is about fighting ignorance, not having a nice self-glorifying wank at things that seem ignorant but we can’t really be bothered to think about.
Couldn’t be. Manic Depressives don’t tend to suffer the delusional activity that makes necessary a good, stout foil cap with essental garnish & condiments…
The moon landing joke you linked to would have really sucked if it had been followed by an elaborate debunking. Sometimes it’s OK to indicate to certain beliefs are crazy without backing it up, once it has been well-established elsewhere that said beliefs are in fact batshit-crazy. Not to mention that the alternative is boring as shit.
Funny:
“Did your tinfoil hat fall off?”
Not funny:
“I believe that idea is erroneous for the following well-known and obvious reasons. Anyone holding such a belief in the face of this evidence seems likely to be delusional and paranoid to the point that they would believe other unlikely ideas such as mind-control rays being used on them by the government or perhaps aliens.”
I’ll side with the (thus far) majority. No matter how well one debunks such a belief, the believer won’t care nor change his view. Moon Landing Hoax has been debunked so thoroughly by so many that any idiot who attempts to reopen it doesn’t deserve a new debunking; just verbally smack, in a forum appropriate way, the poster. Even better would be to totally ignore such posters, but that’s asking too much. Too many internet posters cannot ignore trolls, thus giving said trolls the sustenance they need to keep trolling.
So now If I claim the CIA is trying to read my mind Others have to properly refute my claim rather than point me to the proper headgear to protect my noggin from Spook rays and mind control devices?
Besides, smartass answers (combined with board glitches) is how we got the whole “1920s style death rays” bit, complete with the longest thread in GQ history. So to dismiss the use of catchphrases in responding to answers is like the internet without Monty Python quotes.
