Ever talk to someone and they will say something just so out there you request clarification, only to realize they are 100% sincere! Hell it has happened to me with my own parents. From there on out you sometimes just avoid anything to do with the issue because there is little point turning every discussion into a debate.
And just to head off the obvious can we leave mainstream religion out? If your neighbor believes her fridge is a reincarnation of the prophet well that would go.
Just world fallacy- Wow just I am floored by how common this is, sometimes clothed in karma talk. Like someone saying I wonder what he did to deserve that to someone in a wheelchair, they actually think everything happens based on how deserving someone is. Bad people get diseases and killed, good people get rich and lucky.
For some reason, an old Dilbert cartoon popped into my mind in response to reading this posting.
It was Catbert (Evil HR Director) conducting a diversity sensitivity training program. He was pointing to a poster saying that people fall into one of the four categories shown in the four squares on that poster-
Conspiracy theorists. I used to have a neighbor who believed in chemtrails. He would corner me ever so often and ask me If I had seen the chemtrails the previous night while swearing that they were as clear as day. He was so earnest about it, I never had the heart to tell him, “What?! Of course not, ya lunatic!” and would instead say something noncomittal like “hmm, I guess I missed them again”
Oh og, chemtrails. My new coworker is a pea-brain who believes that. I’ve only heard about it second hand so far, but it’s only a matter of time before he tries to talk to me about it, and I will not be able to hide my disdain.
A guy I once worked with was convinced it would never be possible to build any kind of working humanoid robot. I showed him videos of Honda’s ASIMO - he insisted it was just a person in a suit - I paused the video at places where you could see right through the robot’s hip joints - he said it was camera trickery.
Same thing with any other robot footage I showed him - even for machines too small to contain a human. He had a particular knack for happening to glance away from the screen at critical moments (to light a cigarette or check his watch, etc), then he would claim that the thing I just pointed out in the video wasn’t actually there. I think this was a pathological avoidance of being wrong, rather than trolling or something.
I had an otherwise perfectly wonderful co-worker who believed that anything in the night sky that sparkled or remained in a stationary position was an alien ship watching us.
A coworker once said, when surrounded by half a dozen people with technical or scientific backgrounds, “did you know the moon landings might be faked?”
The chorus of “that’s a movie!” didn’t quite rattle the windows.
I have a cousin who is an engineer and he believes it was faked, he says that they didn’t have the engineering capability to land on the moon back then.
Personally I think he’s full of it and have told him so, but just to show that someone with a technical background can still be taken in by these things.
Mangetout, why would you even bother arguing with someone like that?!?
It’s interesting you should say that because there was something else about the chemtrail guy - he really, really, knew meteorology. He wasn’t trained in it, but but he was so well self taught that he could identify all sorts of clouds, tell you how they formed, and it was all science based. I suspect his desire to learn all that was based in his desire to identify chemtrails, but he really did know far more than the average bear.
I’ve thought of something else regarding hard to fathom world views. I’m an RN, and I have come across several people in the medical field that think “the drug companies” (it’s never specific as to which companies) are suppressing a cure for cancer because “they make too much money on the treatment”. I have tried to argue that that’s just stupid, but I have never got any traction in doing that. Even pointing out that a cancer cure would make billions of dollars doesn’t put a dent in that.
He was my boss, and kept bringing the topic up (he had worked on automated and robotic stock picking machines in the 70s/80s, and considered that the state of the art)
I recently had an experience with someone who was, very briefly, a coworker. He was absolutely convinced that all women wanted babies and no woman could possibly be happy unless she gave birth to babies. Upon finding out I didn’t have kids he immediately started in with “it’s not too late” and all the different medical things that could be done for infertility and simply could not accept that I was OK with no having kids. I must be in some terrible denial, you know? It got to the point where it was interfering with getting work done. It was inconceivable to him that a woman could have any other goals or desires than motherhood.
I wasn’t at all unhappy when he got himself fired for stealing a couple days later.
Sometimes I swear they are just jerking around. I once knew a man who insisted that 5-6 pm was the hottest time of the day, not 1-3 pm, no matter what, and people who drove with two hands on the wheel were much worse drivers than one-handed drivers, cuz they were nervous Nellies. And those were just some of his stories.
Creationism. Actually, I don’t really get strong religious belief of any sort, even as common as it is. It just seems to me like believing in unicorns or fairies. And I say this knowing and loving plenty of decent and intelligent people with strong religious belief.
Yes I have an “Apollo Hoax” friend… he is such a good (but naive) guy. It is at the point where I cannot talk to him about it without wanting to punch him. :mad:
He thinks “the rest” of us are mindless sheep who are blinded, while he and his CT friends truth seekers… :rolleyes:
No matter what facts I present, his favorite line is:
“It is (enter current year) and humans STILL do not have the technology to place a spacecraft - let alone a human - on the moon and then return it to Earth… why would you think we could do it in 1969!?”
OK, I have a friend who is a physicist, studies climate change patterns as a hobby, and worked for Homeland Security. He dismisses a lot of chemtrail stuff but not all of it. If I understand correctly, he thinks substances may be sprayed into the air to counteract the buildup of greenhouse gasses, so it’s a benevolent program, not a conspiracy.
If your neighbor believes her fridge is a reincarnation of the prophet well that would go.