The other day I noticed a Facebook friend ‘liked’ a 9/11 Truther site. I’ve known this guy all my life. He’s a Birther, a Teabagger, thinks Obama is Muslim Socialist Commie etc. Now I see he’s a 9/11 Truther. Aiyiyiyiyi…
Another old acquaintance is a FB friend. She’s a nice lady. But she’s always posting about conspiracies. A few recent ones are UFOs (space aliens) in the Middle East (pics of missile contrails), 9/11 truthism, and ‘chemtrails’. (I’m really tempted to get a pic of an old aircraft venturi and claim it’s a ‘chemtrail nozzle’. <EG>)
I remember when the only CT people talked about was the Kennedy assassination. Now there are so many CTs I have to think to come up with a list.
Kennedy assassination
Moon hoax
9/11 was an inside job
Chemtrails
Illuminati, Bilderbergers, Freemasons, et al.
Space aliens/UFOs
Water fluoridation pops up from time to time.
A variation of this is that polio vaccine is a conspiracy to poison/sterilize fnord [insert ethnic group here]. Don’t ask how they — whoever “they” are — managed to target a specific ethnic group: that just identifies you as part of the conspiracy.
The idea that “much of modern medical knowledge” comes directly from Nazi pseudo-science experimentation on live human subjects “because that’s the only time it could be done.”
That crazy particularly hurts, because it’s so damn stupid. Sterilization is a very popular form of birth control all around the world. In a lot of the world, the surgery that is required is risky. Even in developed countries, sterilization requires surgery, and, like all surgeries, it’s not risk-free. If there were an effective way to sterilize people permanently just by giving them a shot, and if it were cheap enough to use in a plan to get rid of some ethnic group, that’s the method that would be used instead of vasectomies or tubal ligations for people who want sterilization. Insurance companies in the US would be all over that like white on rice. It wouldn’t be something that could be kept secret, at least not for long.
I know a pediatrician who seems to believe this. She is so full of woo, I wouldn’t believe it was possible if I didn’t know her. At least she is not an anti-vaxxer. And incredibly suspicious of “industrial food” which includes pretty much all the major cereal crops, which she claims are all franken-foods, so modified from their “natural state” that they are full of unspecified dangers.
Of course she is the same person who went to the open house at the Catholic school and got really upset when they told her that Grade 1 catechism would include test where they would need to give answers that matched the teachings of the church, not the new age synth-pop religion she was teaching her daughter at home.
The water flouridation one is the one that pisses me off quite a bit. My parents grew up in a poor country with very little dental hygiene to start with, and of course no flouride in the water. My mother and my aunt both lost their teeth at a fairly young age (i.e, before 50).
I have extremely healthy teeth and I’m sure this is at least partially because of the flouride in the water. It is SUCH an easy fix, yet people somehow think it’s evil.
Well when they start losing their teeth…but that means everyone else in the community suffers, too!
Check this out: a new sterilization technique developed in India involves only a minor incision and then a shot to the vas deferens. Also, it’s 100% reversible. Science is awesome.
Oh yeh, cancer had been cured, but Big Pharma is suppressing it because the treatment costs is big money. As if cancer was just one thing, and the cure itself wouldn’t bring enormous profits.
ETA: My eyes appear to be blinded to the word Illuminati, as in the OP. I blame the Illuminati and Jim Henson.