Tuesday, April 9, 2024

When Silly Science And Anti Science Collide

 



Time to boost this recurring theme.  A little bit of eclipse, a little bit of gematria, and a little bit of anti vaccination propaganda rolled up into one disinformation image package.

Flat Earth, Moon landing hoax, UFOs and strange sky phenomena.  They aren’t as innocent as they seem.  There’s a history of decently intelligent people that don’t understand and fall for the outrage porn engagement bait.  Fighting back at the scientifically incorrect misinformation or disinformation.  Never realizing that the oxygen they add to the fire is not the greatest idea at times.  Spreading the message even further instead of squashing it.

I’m going to have to pull a number out of thin air here, but I do have years of experience and a far better than average grasp of the psychology behind what’s going on here.  My time on this topic shows that far more than 50% of the activity is not generated by people that don’t actually believe the nonsense they are spouting.  Grifters and agenda pushers don’t care about being right, they just want access to your time to continue the spread and this eventually your wallet.

There are psychological associations that are a “given”with conspiracy topics.  An eclipse is an astronomical event.  Astrology and spirituality gets conflated with astronomy.  The same with flat earth as a great deal of the topic centers on the mistaken religious and spiritual associations about the science behind the age and shape of the Earth.  And then for example, moon landing hoax and 9/11 denialists use bad science to keep anti government and anti science sentiment along.  Even though they might post scientific info, it’s been already debunked but still appeals to anyone that mistrusts science.  Even though the readers viewpoints are being divided with mutually exclusive sources of the cause of the conspiracy they simply do not care to invest in understanding or researching the correct information.  And gematria can have an appeal to both spiritual and science issues making it a nice little bridge between the worlds.

I suppose that technically the claim isn’t wrong about that being the midway point.  Although when you break it down to exactly half a day I’m pretty sure it’s impossible to prove that the vaccine rollout was timed out down to any time unit shorter than a day.  Again, like we said about Naismith yesterday - if this was so damned important and we’ve known the eclipse dates for so long, why are we hearing about this today instead of years ago?  Date spans aren’t really gematria, but when you look at the comments on these wannabe viral posts you can tell the gematria clowns are into it.  It comes off as an afterthought.  Like they waited until the news stories for the day were locked in since something bigger to whine about might present itself.

This image has been Community Noted on Twixter, correctly pointing out that we know exactly when eclipses will occur for a long time to come.  And we know where in the world it will happen.  And we know that there are a lot of them.  And here we are the day after another eclipse and the world hasn’t ended yet.  Vaccines still work.  And grifters gonna keep grifting.

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