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Post by PhantomWolf on Sept 7, 2010 20:48:25 GMT -4
Most people welcome information they didn't already know. That's how you learn. That's how science progresses. But HBs, for some reason, find new information upsetting and threatening, so they look for ways to blunt or counteract it. Not all new information though, only new information that threatens to force them to re-evaluate their belief in how the world works. They have a rigid mindset that says that the Governments of the world, and especially that of the US are up to nefarious things and so any information that agrees with that they will absorb and use without even considering it, whereas anything that would cause them to have to consider that perhaps Governments aren't quite the kin of Satan they want them to be, they refuse to accept.
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Post by ka9q on Sept 8, 2010 11:00:15 GMT -4
You have a point. This might be oversimplifying things a bit, but I think their worldview can be simply stated thus: "the US government is unmitigated pure evil. It is simply not capable of any positive achievements regardless of motive or intention".
Apollo would be an example of such a positive accomplishment, albeit for the "wrong" reasons (showing up the Russians as opposed to advancing scientific knowledge and technological know-how). Ergo it was impossible for the US government to have accomplished it. And as Sherlock Holmes famously said, once the impossible is eliminated, the improbable, no matter how unlikely, must be the truth. I.e., no matter how convincing the evidence may appear to be, Apollo had to have been faked because it was impossible for the US government to have done it for real.
Have I gotten it right?
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Post by gillianren on Sept 8, 2010 14:54:16 GMT -4
For a certain subset of HB, yes. Though I do maintain we shouldn't lump them all into one thought process.
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Post by ka9q on Sept 9, 2010 7:51:18 GMT -4
For a certain subset of HB, yes. Though I do maintain we shouldn't lump them all into one thought process. Agreed, though my take does seem to apply to a very large fraction of them. Certainly the ones that keep going off on rants about the general evilness and incompetence of the US government. Said incompetence never seems to extend to the faking of a moon landing. That's done with extreme competence, though not so well that it fools our HB friends...
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Post by gillianren on Sept 9, 2010 14:26:22 GMT -4
They're much harder to fool than people who actually know what they're talking about, too.
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