alt med and the conspiracy theory mindset
When tackling Mike Adams’ inane temper tantrum blasting those who don’t take his woefully uninformed and dangerous notions of medicine as gospel, it seems I made an error. Our snake oil salesman did manage to include a link to one of his “sources for the views of the skeptics” he so loathes, a 9/11 conspiracy video that attempts to prove that it was impossible for the World Trade Center to collapse after a direct hit by two aircraft and that only strategically placed explosives could’ve possibly done the job. Really, it seems that pretty much anything that goes against any mainstream consensus is more than enough to get Mike to believe it. As long as it’s different, it must be hidden knowledge that separates him from the blind sheeple, right? I wonder what he thinks of the Moon landings and at this point, I wouldn’t be surprised to find that he’s a Moon Hoaxer too…
For someone who chides his critics on believing everything they hear without question, Mike manages to pull a notable feat of hypocrisy by channeling 9/11 Truthers without asking some elementary questions about the basic premise he’s advocating. How would the thousands of people who work at the building every day ignore mysterious workers drilling into support columns and packing hundreds of pounds of odd bags around them? How would you keep those demolition crews silent? What about the planes and their passengers? Why did a number of intelligence agencies around the world send warnings about the potential a major terrorist attack to the CIA and FBI which were ignored if 9/11 was an inside job? And how would a government that can’t keep a simple office affair quiet for more than a year sit quietly on something like this, especially in an age when any random White House aide who was within a hundred feet of President Bush is getting six figure book deals by revealing every single detail of Bush’s glibness and arrogance?
The reason why people don’t believe that the U.S. government killed its own people isn’t because they’re just gullible meat with eyes who trust anything and everything politicians say. It’s because they know such a plot is ridiculously hard to pull off, impossible to keep secret, and runs contrary to a whole lot of evidence pointing to decades of broiling conflict between American politics in the Middle East and Central Asia, and radical Muslim groups coming to a head. But as far as Mike is concerned, evidence is just one of those things skeptics would use to cloud the truth that only he and a select few are wise enough to see. And that’s really what his tantrums about those who criticize him and the follow up in which he engages in vigorous back-patting are all about. In their own minds, he and his followers are enlightened and due to all cranks’ inability to take criticism, any doubt in their platitudes is seen as an enemy attack that must be repelled at all costs. How dare the skeptics miss how enlightened and ahead of the mainstream they are? Why they must be silenced! Oh wait, you can’t just make them all pipe down? Ok, then we need to tar them!
Just like those who believe that humans were created by alien experiments, or that the world is being ruled by alien lizards, or that swine flu was a biological weapons test by the New World Order, or even that we’re secretly on the verge of a war with aliens living on the dark side of the Moon, the most hardcore disciples of alt med woo are looking for some sort of secret, hidden knowledge they believe will give them an advantage, or make them seem like an enlightened elite. The wholehearted embrace of conspiracy theories as a shot at skeptics seems to be another glaring piece of evidence for that hypothesis. Like religious adherents who had a revelation, Mike Adams, his fellow snake oil salespeople and their fervent followers are defending what they believe makes them special and dare I say, superior to those of us who are just mindless sheeple with wool pulled over our eyes by the government, Big Pharma or Big Science. And all things considered, they pity us for our “close-minded ways” until we get under their skin and they decide to throw a fit in reply…
Great post, Greg.
I had a weird moment of disorientation where I thought I was reading the Bad Astronomer blog. I guess it was the picture and the subject of the post. But speaking of conspiracies, it is true that I have never seen you both together in the same room. Hmmm.
I’m not a 9/11 truther, but there is some historical precedence for false flag operations of this magnitude being successfully hidden from the public for some amount of time. The Gulf of Tonkin and the burning of the Reichstag come to mind. It’s not entirely unthinkable that the government could manage to hide something like this.
However, with 9/11 (or any event), we obviously have to look at the physical evidence, which, while there are some major inconsistencies, doesn’t really seem to definitively point to false flag actions.
A mindset that not all the time can be aligned with our own, doesn’t mean that it is erratic all the time.
Politics and media are very powerful, can control, show and hide anything that they think required. Think about this like an electronic brainwasher machine.
Like seen the word ‘TERROR’ 24 hrs/7 days a week, what will you be felling after that? Obviously TERROR…
And who can save you then…? Make your own conclusions.
Nobody likes evidence against their savior.
This is why, counter to virtually everyone I know, I think Oswald acted alone. You can’t hide a conspiracy forever. Lincoln was killed by a conspiracy, and that was very quickly apparent. Russian ballistics studies showed that the lone assault was plausible. There was no ‘magic’ or ‘pristine’ bullet. There were carcass studies that showed a relativly undeformed bullet could have done what it did. Plus, months earlier, Oswald tried to kill General Walker with the same rifle. When the ‘little people’ knock down the mighty, it’s natural, at least for us, to think it impossible, must be a conspiracy.