Poisoning the well, illustrated
Source.
Flat Earth can be disproved by hand, and is contradictory with Hollow Earth. Faking the moon landing is contradictory to having a mars colony, and neither plays well with Moon Nazis.
(Please refrain from suggesting a unified theory of all five in the replies. Public masturbation is so undignified.)
But the celebs moisturizing with children’s foreskins? Mildly exaggerated at worst.
I Got a $650 ‘Penis Facial,’ and My Skin Has Never Looked Better
The Hollywood EGF facial actually utilizes one of Georgia Louise’s signature serums, which contains EGF, or Epidermal Growth Factor. EGF is derived from the progenitor cells of fibroblast (i.e., the cells that produce collagen and elastin) that are taken from newborn baby foreskin.
Now, before you clutch your pearls, thinking that I had baby foreskin rubbed into my face, rest easy. The foreskin is collected during circumcision, at which point the stem cells are extracted through a centrifuge.
Deep state? Affirmed in the NYT.
President Trump is right: The deep state is alive and well. But it is not the sinister, antidemocratic cabal of his fever dreams. It is, rather, a collection of patriotic public servants — career diplomats, scientists, intelligence officers and others — who, from within the bowels of this corrupt and corrupting administration, have somehow remembered that their duty is to protect the interests, not of a particular leader, but of the American people.
And what does it even mean to put “George Soros” in the same category as “Reptilian Overlords”? George Soros is undeniably real. Real, and running the Open Society Foundations. I’ll paste the Wikipedia infobox here:
A paragovernmental organization with an eleven-digit endowment belongs firmly in the “We have questions” tier or lower. (For some readers, it may help sharpen your skepticism of the OSF if you say “Megacorporation”, because that’s what it is.)
I could go on, but I think these examples are enough to demonstrate that several of the items are in the wrong tier, and the chart is grossly unreliable as it’s not even consistently wrong - you can’t use it as a reverse-oracle. High marks for graphic design, no points for informational content. Like Abbie Richards said, “Disinformation is everywhere.” Including in the chart.
I can’t speak to the degree of deliberate intent by Abbie Richards specifically, but I strongly suspect that somewhere along the way, someone friendly to George Soros made a deliberate effort to stigmatize criticism of Soros by poisoning the well and calling such criticism ‘antisemitic conspiracy theories’. Similarly for a bunch of the other items.
A theory may be described as a conspiracy theory because it is obviously untrue, or because people who stand to lose if that theory is proven true have spread a false rumor that it is in the category of obviously untrue theories.
Why is JFK in the lower tiers?
Come to think of it, why is there no Gladio in the lower tiers? At least there’s the Tuskegee experiment.
Anyway, I encountered an egregious example of this from a prominent member of the “skeptic community“ who claimed that people who talk about Monsanto are really just GMO deniers, and all mentions of Bayer/Monsanto’s “allegedly shady business practices” are really just misdirection from people who don’t understand that DNA is harmless and edible.
Forced monoculture, patenting plant genes found in the wild, and preventing farmers from saving seeds are all things Monsanto are responsible for, and that’s bad enough, but some people act like Monsanto is a shield for GMO fear mongering, and some people think GMO fear mongering is a shield for Monsanto.
Denver Airport shouldn’t be in the “questions“ section either. Part of it was built too big and over budget, but there are no open questions. There’s a small kernel of truth, and a large conspiracy theory.
Area 51 is where the American Air Force tests experimental planes. Some of them might have looked like flying saucers. Some of them might have been Russian “UFOs” in the cold war. No big mystery.
While we’re at it with UFOs: Alien abductions. There’s often a real trauma that people who report alien abductions have experiences, but it’s not a conspiracy and the explanation is not Aliens. The real phenomena explained as “alien abductions” range from sleep disorders to being drugged and raped by relatives. It’s not so funny any more if you think that a guy who talks about being anally probed by aliens was probably raped by ordinary humans.
A large part of the satanic cult panic is false memories, or people who sell outrageous sob stories to the media (like nightly news magazines and daytime talk shows). Another part is people who were molested by relatives and try to find an explanation why their uncle would to that and nobody intervened.
Obviously there were loads of Elvis sightings because “Elvis impersonators” are a thing, although I saw the last one in 2008.
If you dismiss something as a “conspiracy theory“, you often dismiss the kernel of truth together with the outrageous inventions and bullshit.
This chart is the same tier or lower as high speed rail in CA/US.
