PS = Post Scriptum ;)

http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postscriptum

Wat een dijenkletser Olga. Ik vroeg me gewoon af waarom iemand op zijn verjaardag anderen zou waarschuwen dat hij misschien wel stinkt.

Ik ben nog niet helemaal wakker zie ik nu :D

I've got a collegue who is totally into conspiracy theories. The works. He believes it all, doesn't matter if the conspiracies are mutually exclusive. We never went to the moon, The Americans/Israelies/NWO/the Catholic Church did 9/11, Chemtrails ofcourse and more.
One of the more strange things he believes is that we are being ruled by a kind of lizards in disguise who in reality live in the inside of the earth. Earth is hollow, you know, with another sun inside of it! Hitler was apparantly such a lizard.

All in good fun to listen to, but I shut him out hard a while ago when he tried to prove to me that the Holocaust never happened. I'm not really tolerant to such thoughts, with a grandfather who spent some time in a concentration workcamp.

I wonder what drives people to believe everything they read like that... Where is this person's ability to form critical thoughts? To think for a moment about the implications?

I really have no idea. It actually is a very interesting study of the human Psyche (or at least of some of them).

You can't reason with these people about these thoughts. They say something and if you react with something like "alright. If it is as you say, why do we see that, or what does this mean?" (meaning some inherent contradiction or ignored proof). Invariably the reaction is something like "I don't know, but I still think there is something wrong here".

Like my collegue said "I don't believe an aircraft crashed in the Pentagon (9/11)". On showing a few photographs of aircraft pieces on the Pentagon lawn the reaction was "I'm not seeing anything, I still believe that no aircraft crashed there".

As they say. "You can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into."

But it is fun to follow.
Go to http://www.davidicke.com/forum/ for some laughs and wondering. :-)

OMG the things people will believe...

Chilling isn't it? They vote.

I used to think it wasn't real. It being internet and such, but then I met this collegue of mine.
There are really people who believe all these things.

Very difficult people to reason with, these... Every counterargument you can come up with, is even more proof for their theory; documents are forged, photos are 'doctored'. But when you suggest that it could be possible, then, that their ufo-photograph might be 'doctored' as well, they say no - because it is on the internetz. And that's all true. Because so many people belive, they can't all be wrong, can they?

True.

"Follow the money" they tell you. He who benefits from (name your conspiracy) is the perpetrator (or somebody behind them).
The problem is, that this works with ordinary crimes (up to a point), but not with conspiracies on the scale the conspiracy theorists envision them. There are allways people who benefit from random things. Even if they do't have anything to do with it. Opportunists and such.

But what else to expect from people who think the Matrix is a documentary?

No please... No one is that stupid... I refuse to believe it! It's a conspiracy to make us all believe that there are really ignorant people in this world!

http://www.davidicke.com/forum/showthread.php?t=116315

http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread531509/pg1

Read and weep.
And I do know about Poe's law.

hmmm the second link seems to say the movie is a metafor for the system we created ourselves. I can follow that, actually. Economy is a system like that, banking another.. they only function because we believe in them. Making money by Terry Pratchett has a similar theme.

The first link though... and the whole forum there. Those people cannot be for real, can they? that is beyond stupidity and out the other side...

Actually, I read an article about that recently... but I can't find it.

Basically when people don't understand something and that something seems to have some measure of power over them, they begin to suspect it. Almost all conspiracy theories start at a lack of knowledge about something that affects people's lives.

An obvious example of this is the whole anti-vaccination movement: people seem to not understand how vaccines work, and believe they cause illnesses and the doctors are lying (doctors are the authorities that must be mistrusted), etc.

And people do seem to seriously lack an ability to form critical thoughts - or rather, they think they're been critical by believing the conspiracy theories and all of their 'real proof'....

In the end it's human nature to distrust what they cannot understand and what they have no control over. It's kind of... caveman-like thinking, really.

erwinl just wrote something interesting about it on his LJ, it sounds similar to what you describe.

*reads* Yup, pretty much. People's suspicion and tendency to believe in conspiracy theories is fueled by their own feeling of lack of control, and an attempt to get that control back by blaming something/someone - preferably a superior authority that they can't control, so they don't have to take personal responsibility.

Again I'm going to mention the anti-vaccination movement because I think it's currently one of the most damaging conspiracy theories ever. Babies are actually dying of the whooping cough because other parents aren't vaccinating their kids anymore.

These parents are afraid that their children will get autism - a neurological disorder that they cannot understand, accept or deal with - and instead of grasping the neurological causes of autism, they blame vaccines instead. (They also seek ways to 'cure' autism with *other* nonsense) But vaccines are incredibly important. They're one of the greatest medical inventions ever. If people don't get vaccinated, lethal diseases like the whooping cough, polio, tetanus and diphtheria are going to come back and actually kill people. But hey! At least your kid is not an autist!

... Yeah, I really can't stand the anti-vaccination movement. People can believe in conspiracy theories all they want, but to an extent where they are actually causing epidemics of diseases that we were previously totally protected from? What the f***.

The whole autism thing, I can understand. Autism is hereditary. They'd rather blame someone else than face the fact that it's in their own genes.

Plus, being autistic is not all that bad, it's not something that needs to be cured.

You know what I don't get? The pet food conspiracy thing. That is weird.

Plus, being autistic is not all that bad, it's not something that needs to be cured.

Oh how I wish everyone would think that...

Pet food conspiracy? Haven't heard of it. :o

Autism is reversible? Yeah just like Homosexuality can be cured, I'm sure.

Pet food is made of meat-byproducts, the stuff that the slaughterhouse is not legally allowed to call real meat. Frikandellen are also made of this stuff. And there's a conspiracy theory going around that anything that comes off the slaughtered animals that isn't meat, automatically becomes meat-byproduct, like the organs, whether healthy or disease-infected, foetuses, roadkill and all kinds of other stuff. Of course the laws about meat and meat-byproducts are hideously complicated, so that's probably where that story comes from.

First, hate the anti vaccination movement, they are putting MY children at risk.

Second, worked at a pet food producer, saw what goes into dog and catfood, and even had some. Tastes horrible, but isn't in any way dangerous or anything. Cats are really picky about what they eat, and cat food ingredients reflect that. The only thing in there that I wouldn't normally eat is whole dried eggs..

We had a talk about conspiracy theories at work yesterday too! It must be the season.
I read in Metro a lovely example: Someone said that the Dutch state didn't save the DSB bank because ING and ABN needed the new customers. I'd like to have a follow-up on that man, after the publishing of the report from Commission Scheltema (which basically said the chairman of DSB should never have been allowed to get a banker's license).

which basically said the chairman of DSB should never have been allowed to get a banker's license

Will you believe me that my dad, who knew Dirk Scheringa a bit, has been saying that for the past twenty years?

I would, because your dad is probably just as smart as you (only maybe in different fields?).

Schaap & Roepert Accountants just knew most of the small entrepreneurs of "het Gooij" rather well, is all. Both my dad and me are too modest to let you call us anything like "very smart". :P

Having birthdays in your office means that you have first dibs on the cake! And I am always hesitant to kiss colleagues (when congratulating them on their birthday), because not all of them appreciate it. (And this has nothing to do with my wife being present, either!)

True. I don't mind having the birthdays here, and the cake. I just would like them to communicate with me about using my office sometimes.

Kissing colleagues is always a hard decision. Office etiquette is not my forte and it always involves greeting people I don't really know...

Ooh ooh! I've got a quirky detail. Recently I did something which - to my surprise - resulted in me receiving an official invitation today from the French ambassador to come celebrate the 14 july French national holiday at the French Embassy in The Hague. Weird, eh?

I wonder what that celebration entails... In the little town where my parents lived, it was a byo-buffet and fireworks.

Now I'm wondering what a byo-buffet at the French embassy would look like, and what the ambassador would think of the things the dutchies bring with them. :)

lol, I'm guessing a buffet at an embassy is not byo, but the thought is funny.

The village was divided about my father's sateh (which they called la sauce aux cacahuètes), some really liked it in all its foreign exoticity, some refused to try it.

...because what wine goes with that!? :)

According to my dad, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C3%B4tes_du_Rh%C3%B4ne_AOC

Oh gods, chemtrails... I can't take people who believe that seriously. Ever. It's all about weather conditions, wind, airplane flight routes, and just because you're not a meteorologist doesn't mean the government is spraying biological weapons across the sky.

Well, I found the box of a chainsaw in our office's copier room yesterday. Just the box, mind you.