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CONSPIRACY THEORIES have been popular down
the ages and creating one is generally quite easy. All you need
is a major event to occur (generally involving the government)
and then you say that it was a set-up, or didn't happen really,
thus annoying the government and discrediting it.
One of the earliest occurred when, in the
year 64 AD, the city of Rome (Roman Empire) caught fire. Two
thirds of the city was destroyed. Popular opinion began to spread
that Nero, Roman Emperor of the time, had started the fire. "Proof"
was offered by the fact that Nero promptly started building himself
a lovely new extra-large palace in the city centre. Nero promptly
came up with a counter conspiracy - it was the fault of the Christians.
So the Romans duly punished the Christians for it and one of
the first conspiracy theories began.
Creating a conspiracy theory is quite easy.
Wait until something happens which the authorities are going
to benefit from (like putting someone on the moon and bringing
them back). Preferably this thing should be vaguely unlikely
- technology seems to have advanced too quickly, or this particular
thing should be impossible. Then start a rumour that "they
didn't have to do it at all" and "it was done in a
spray painted desert/ on a Hollywood sound stage" with a
quick dash of "you can tell, the backdrops are the same
for some of the shots" and maybe "Would you jump around
like that astronaut is jumping around if you were on an alien
world?" which cannot go without the side comment of "They
filmed them getting onto the moon - where did the camera come
from?"
We are focusing on the conspiracy theory (not
why some boring old prawn says said theory is wrong) so we won't
explain how all these things are refuted scientifically with
proper figures and statistics, which leads us nicely onto:
"There are three types of lies: lies,
damn lies, and statistics" (Benjamin Disraeli, former
UK Prime Minister)
Which means that a government can prove that
something has happened with films and statistics, and you can
murmur about "computer imagery" and "statistics
can prove anything" before going on to quote your own statistics
about why such an event was impossible and the government is
lying. Governments are notorious for lying, so when they do tell
the truth nobody believes them anyway.
Statisitics can be used on both sides of a
conspiracy theory. You can use them to prove a conspiracy theory,
or the other side can use them to disprove things. The average
length of the arm of a 6 ft high man can be very useful, but
there are three ways of working it out, and all three of them
(also known as the mean, the median and the mode) can produce
perfectly valid results which can be used in statistics. The
fairest thing to do then is to get an average of the three results
which you get that way, but... err... that will give you at least
two and possibly three more results, depending on whether two
of the results are sufficiently similar for them to be called
the "mode" or not. And those results will be just as
fair, clear, concise and appropriate as the previous three, thus
allowing for six different arguments using the same set of figures,
which were probably inaccurate anyway.
Conspiracy theories sometimes claim to uncover
the truth, though it is rare that they are taken seriously (there
are a lot of conspiracy theories, none of them are proven, and
most are clearly false with some even being dropped). This means
that the conspiracy theorists have probably managed to seriously
damage the argument that people could never have landed on the
moon, although the rage that they work pro-moon landing people
up into by mentioning the idea that the Moon remains untouched
(best situation for it really) could be said to prove that they
have something to hide with no better argument than shouting
and screaming - although the fact that the conspiracy theorists
have never really suggested this idea casts doubt on their
argument because they're obviously idiots, thereby proving...
err... something. |
