I have seen what madness lies ahead, and it is pure, unadulterated stupidity.

The BBQ Pit
1

Today I took an inadvertant excursion to the Twilight Zone, where nothing has to make sense just so long as you’re not the only one that believes it. Case in point:

One of my fellow airmen was showing the infamous Flash movie that “shows” that the Pentagon was not hit by Flight 77 on September 11th. It wasn’t a “Hey, isn’t this neat?” sort of thing. Oh no. He was showing it the earnestness of a true believer, breaking down the impossibility of the whole thing before my very eyes. And the scary part? He was getting other people to believe him.

So, being the reasonable, logical person that I am, ask him quite reasonably what he thought DID hit the Pentagon that day. He said, and I kid you not, a missile. Now, friends, not much can leave me speechless, but that did, and I started to lose patience. So I pointedly asked him what happened to the other aircraft that day, since it can be proven beyond any shadow of a doubt that there were four planes that did not arrive at their destination that day and we have video footage of two of them and wreckage of the third, so if the fourth one didn’t hit the Pentagon where did it go? While he was standing there slack-jawed trying to digest that one I asked him who had a missile large enough to cause that much destruction and had the means to deliver said weapon without being discovered. His reply? You guessed it. The US military. In other words, in the face of all evidence he honestly thought that the military disposed of Flight 77 AND fired a missile at the Pentagon.

So, while my mind was boggling at this I flippantly asked him if he thought that there was a conspiracy in the Kennedy assassination. To my utter astonishment, he said yes! He then proceeded to lay out the whole grassy knoll thing to the letter.

At this point I’m thinking that I’m dealing with a nutter here, so I decide to give him one last chance, and so I asked him if he thought the moon landing was a hoax. By now you should know the answer. :eek:

I have now firmly established that I work with a conspiracy theorist of the highest order, and I have further established that several other people I work with are gullible enough to be taken in by such dreck. What happened to critical thinking? What happened to logic? What happened to simple common sense?

I don’t know about you guys, but tomorrow I’m going to wear a tinfoil hat just in case the stupids are contagious, because apparently I’m working at Lunatic Ground Zero. I come to that conclusion because there’s simply no other explanation for what I saw today. So wish me luck tomorrow, because by tomorrow I may be drooling on myself and blaming Diebold and Big Oil for all the world’s ills, and if that happens you need to ban me and save yourselves. Because if you can’t see the insanity swirling around you when those topics come up it’s already too late.

2

Are you sure he wasn’t yanking your chain? Because if he wasn’t you need to be very afraid. For all of us.

3

Maybe you can come up with a scheme to let him believe that, with such knowledge, he poses a grave danger to The Powers That Be, and he should be very, very careful, for example, traversing an echoing parking garage to his lone car parked at the entirely opposite end. Tell him he should vary his routine; never take the same route to and from work on consecutive days. Feed his paranoia; he’ll be fun to watch while he implodes.

4

What about the duck?

5

There’s no chance of this guy getting stationed in one of those underground silos where he ends up with the keys to launch nukes, is there? Or anywhere else where he has access to such things? Because, you know, for the safety of the entire friggin’ planet (assuming you want us to keep living and all), you’d best report him to your superiors.

Say, wait a minute, doesn’t claiming that the US military deliberately attacked and killed it’s own people violate some kind of military code of conduct rule? If it does, then you really ought to report him. I realize it’ll only feed his paranoia, but if it keeps him from fragging someone…

6

The video may be (is) crap, but it certainly is well made crap. If it weren’t for the little matter of the disappearance of Flight 77, it would certainly give me pause.

And, no, I am not universally credulous like your coworker. (For the record – “maybe” but highly unlikely on the Kennedy conspiracy, and the moon landing was genuine in my book. Although the Pentagon does look a lot like a crop circle or a Nazca line drawing…)

(And, yes, I am kidding about that last part. I doubt that Betty and Barney Hill and a raft of space aliens and abductees crashed into the Pentagon on their way to Area 58.)

7

A must-have fashion accessory for the conspiracy enthusiast.

They even have a testimonial from a squirrel:

8

No way, dude. rjung is not giving you his SDMB password.

::FLEES::

9

OK, so now we know one more thing that the screenings are not designed to catch before they sign you up… oy, Doors, I feel your pain. we gotta count on this to watch our backs?

Nobody ever bothered with that thru their entire upbringing. Heck, logic and critical thinking would be things to avoid developing! They lead you to [right wing: question authority! reject the old values! adopt alien ways!] / [left wing: follow cold science instead of your heart! hold some beliefs to be better or truer than others!].

Also, with a lot of people, there is this phenomenon: at some point in their lives they have the epiphany that first their parents, then the Establishment as a whole, have been feeding them propaganda, advertising, myths and pious lies, in order to elicit some socially desired response (obedience, patriotism, trusting priests and policemen, buying GM cars and Marlboros, going to college, marrying in June). This blows their mind and they conclude that EVERYTHING out there is potentially propaganda, advertising, myth and lies, that one “truth” may be as good as the other, and that since everything “established” was wrong, then the more something radically challenges what the Establishment says, the closer to the truth it MUST be.

10

Wait a minute. This guy thinks that the US Air Force destroyed a US passenger jet and launched a missile at the Pentagon, and he’s a member of the Air Force himself? Why the fuck did he join in the first place? Is he bucking for a slot in Evil Officer Training School?

11

Wait, they have that now? Twenty years ago when I was thinking about enlisting they didn’t have that, so I didn’t join. And now they have it? Why is that all the cool stuff either happens when I’m too young or too old to enjoy it? :mad:

12

…to NOT repeat what he “knows” to be true about the conspiracies. :smiley:

13

I think I’ve got this straight now. A secret cabal of military personnel, working for a Wiccan conspiracy that didn’t know the difference between a Pentagon and a pentagram, was about to blow the whistle on JFK’s assassination, which took place because the president was about to confess that the American space program was a hoax and he actually gave the money to Cuban expatriates to kill Marilyn Monroe because he found out she was left-handed. The Strategic Air Command, hungry for technology spin-offs (which they thought would come after Monroe was dead and the money really started going to NASA) murdered the president using three tiny missiles acquired from the Japanese (26% of whom are left-handed) which were fired from the grassy knoll. This foiled the plans of Lee Harvey Oswald (who was left-handed), who was planning to shoot governor Conolly (who was born left-handed but had been forced to suppress it early in life) on the orders of Fidel Castro (who was left-handed and damned proud of it). So on Sept. 11, the SAC fired a regular-sized missile at the Wiccans who thought the Pentagon was a pentagram to prevent their disclosure of SAC’s complicity in JFK’s assassination and the moon hoax which was actually a slush fund for the murder-for-hire of Marilyn Monroe. This clever plan was endangered by the fortuitous hijacking of flight 77, which took it on a path which would have allowed everyone on board to see the missile’s trajectory, which would have blown the cover story of a launch from a Greenpeace boat harassing clam diggers in Chesapeake Bay. So SAC acted again to eliminate the witnesses, some of whom were probably left-handed.

Did I miss anything?

14

You forgot about the evil reptilian Queen of England. Oh, and the Dillinger quintuplets.

15

Especially since Airman Doors can just go get MsRobyn’s password instead. :wink:

16

The Queen, as anyone who gets their news from pamphlets handed out in airports (coincidence? I think not) knows, supplied the drugs used in disguising Monroe’s murder as a suicide. As for the Dillinger quintuplets (known to the world as the Dionne quintuplets but actually fathered by the bandit while hiding out in Canada in the months prior to his assassination for threatening to spill the connection between Hitler’s becoming chancellor of Germany and the Coney Island hot dog concession), besides being a little too conspicuously right-handed, not to mention Canadian and perhaps among JFK’s many unknown mistresses, they all took dancing lessons in their youth and could have taught our fake “astronauts” how to take those long, bouncing leaps that made it appear they were working under low-gravity conditions – essential to the moon hoax.

Anything else?

17

Perhaps you have Area 51 confused with Hangar 18? :wink:

Serious question though: what did happen to the plane? Does the video ignore a heaping pile of wreckage? :confused:

18

Airman, show them this:

http://www.snopes2.com/rumors/pentagon.htm

19

You played that well, Airman, but stopped a little short. You, being a well-informed Doper, thought that reference to JKF and moon landing conspiracies should have been enough for your colleague to admit that some conspiracies are unjustified.

The next question should have been “Do you think the Holocaust was a hoax”? This would have placed him in a very uncomfortable position. “Do you think the Earth is 6000 years old?” would likely also have had him squirming.

(“Do you believe that David Icke is correct when he says that world leaders are all reptilian aliens in disguise?” would be the last straw on the back of my personal ignorance-fighting camel - a ‘yes’ to that would really preclude any further dialogue IMO).

I’d suggest asking him these questions and then talking him through the snopes page Lib suggested. Other Quackbusters are:

JFK: http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/home.htm
Young Earth Creationism: http://www.talkorigins.org/
Holocaust denial: http://www.nizkor.org/
Moon landing: http://www.clavius.org/
David Icke: http://www.yousurelydon’tneeda&citation&todebunk&thisknobend.org/

20

Yes, actually.

Where do the Rand Corporation and the reverse vampires fit into this?