Deception is vile and I needed to test how it works
Dear Steemiacs,
this post was a social experiment (or less euphemistic: a prank) to test how far I can stretch your tolerance for ill-founded and arbitrarily made logical connections.
I genuinely apologize to those who I managed to deceive and will give all those who upvoted that post (minus the bots and myself) two upvotes on their posts or comments. I hope you take it as a wink to be even more critical towards the content you consume, than you already are. If you upvoted because you caught the exaggerated tongue-in-cheek tone and found it amusing, kudos to you!
The rewards of the previous post I will save as part of the giveaway in a future steemit contest!
Needless to say, I am not seriously believing in the holistic conspiracy theory that I have laid out there. The post was rather inspired by all the conspiracy content that I have found on the Steemit platform. Never have I encountered so many vaccination-opponents, believers in a flat earth, or the belief that someone on this planet has the knowledge and tools to seed a devastating hurricane or to deliberately set off an earthquake with a Richter scale of 8.2.
I was surprised at how easy it was to find sources for assertions that I wished to be true for my theory to make sense. I googled for “Antarctica satan” and, bam, there was someone contemplating about members of an alien race being trapped in Antarctica that were referred to as “fallen angels” in the book of Enoch. It is equally easy to reference a source, but deflect the original intent or even distort the content towards an interpretation that is favorable for your own debate.
There are issues that do bother me, such as the aggressive behavior that Monsanto is displaying when it comes to environment, monopoly in agriculture and autonomy of farmers. However, mixing up “real” issues together with “imaginary” ones puts the truly existing problems into a shady light. I am also concerned with how slow the progress in some areas of medicine has been. But I do not believe that the pharma industry is deliberately withholding a cure for cancer. I am regularly reading academic publications on cancer therapy and there is no reason to believe that the pharma companies have any superior knowledge than what universities and other academic institutions, whose work is (more or less) publically communicated, have attained.
To wrap up this addendum, my knowledge and insights into how this world works are extremely limited. However, I always go by the estimate of how probable any theory is compared to what is conceivable and possible according to common sense and basic knowledge about physics, biology and human behavior. Of course, I can never rule out that there is a secret society (Illuminati, Freemasons, you name it) who rules and plans everything in a way that somehow always ends up to follow their desired path of events with the aim to bring humanity to its final demise. But to me this sounds highly unlikely since given their projected power, they could have already done the job with much less effort 200 years ago.
I rolled my eyes back a few times at that article and laughed at some arguments, but it's damn well written.
You could bullshit the bullshiters at their own game if you'd want that :D
Haha, yes, that's what I wanted to try if I could succeed at it! Thanks for reading.
Interesting post and view point. I guess your pointing out it can been see both ways, one of those you can find anything you search for on the internet scenarios.
This in essence is the brainwashing effect an the conditioning we all receive throughout our lives, only as humanity beings to awake do this realisation begin to dawn on the masses. In my opinion a lot of these theory are red herrings, to the the main objective is to wake up the human massesto the fact we are free !
It is laudable that people can freely speak their opinions nowadays, at least in some countries. And they should by all means have the right to do so, no matter how bonkers their ideas are. It gets problematic, however, when the uttered points of view contain unequivocally erroneous statements, misleading assertions and by doing so pose a threat to the health and wealth of those who wish to follow these particular points of view.
Once a brainwashed generation gets to brainwash another generation without suspecting any brainwashing itself, the way back is really hard... To realize that one has been brainwashed takes a lot of questioning, profound knowledge and courage.
That's a great achievement of the internet: to be able to consider many different opinions and identify potential brainwashed spots of our minds.
Indeed the Internet is the greatest an the worst invention. To me the most important this is for Humanity to wake up and realise how to live sustainably, then we can look at the ideas. Some I think are true other not so but the important thing is we eliminate the factors that are destroying our freedoms before we even look at these. As long as people are not free then this problems will always exist.