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Saturday, January 19, 2013

Stop Faking Sense... About the Moon Landing



The reason the compelling proof provided in this video will not put an end to the conspiracists who say we faked the moon landing is because the conspiracists who say we faked the moon landing are faking being the sorts of people who find proof like this compelling.

Apart from finding this effort rather quixotic, though, I also have to say I don't agree that the word "conspiracy" is a good one to describe the incumbent corporate-military interests that lead to the unnecessary and immoral Iraq War and occupation, the war crimes of torture and indefinite detention perpetuated in our names, or the bailout rather than prosecution of a minority of financial fraudsters at the expense of the still suffering majority they defrauded, and so I don't really agree with the larger lesson of the video either, namely, that the necessity of criticizing and organizing to resist such evils really stands to benefit from directing conspiracists away from moon-landing hoaxes to these targets instead. I say this having noticed that conspiracists who do focus on these targets tend to say things about them that are equally nonsensical as saying we faked the moon landing, things about controlled demolition, reptile aliens, the Bilderberg Group, chemtrails, and the gold standard.

Now, I'm a sucker for deadpan narration over NASA archival footage, and so I might have enjoyed this video even though it cannot actually succeed in doing what it appears on the surface to be doing, that is to say convincing moon-landing hoax conspiracists who are contemptuous of proof that they are wrong with proof, and even though I question its deeper premise that one best transforms the useless paranoid mindset of conspiracism into the indispensable mindset of critical citizenship by going down the conpiracist's rabbit hole and debating their pseudo-technical fixations of the moment on the actual merits -- but then on top of everything else the narrator made a completely gratuitous anti-gay joke in that same deadpan tone at the end that made me feel like a real sucker for having liked the guy and for thinking his heart was more or less in the right place right up to that point.

Was he was faking that all along? Kinda like I'm faking being homo sapiens even though I'm a homo, I guess.

4 comments:

Dale Carrico said...

Maybe he meant to deny hoaxsters the "wisdom" the Latin sapiens translates to -- and which few humans live up to even when they are straight -- but I want to hear him say it himself before giving him the benefit of the doubt that this wasn't some vestigial no homo crapola long after hip hop outgrew that nonsense. Maybe he could have joked that Moon Landing conspiracists were going all homo habilis on us. Now, THAT would have been choice, amiright?

Black guy from the future past said...

Oh Dale you are being a bit over sensitive here (a good thing to be by the way). Homo MAY have been a consciously planned gay dig. I mean he obviously knows the word has connotations outside of "Homo" meaning "man", but I am sure he meant to both evoke the gay sentiment of the word, while also evoking how being "Homo" without the "Sapiens" part (wisdom and knowledge) makes you a pretty dumb human. He knows that most people don't like to be called homos yet he also calls them stupid at the same time. Crass, but brilliant insult.

He also has another video that is a common topic of interest on this blog, the validity of nations. Maybe you might be interested in picking apart and analyzing his arguments?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ty--HHErH4Q

jollyspaniard said...

He seems to imply that it's young people who are into the moon landing conspiracy but in my experience over here in the UK it's the older folks. They're conspiracy mad in general and they don't care about the War on Terror or climate change they're reactionaries who want to believe that they're the rebellious underdogs who know the score and you're one of the sheep.

I liked this video, not because it will change these people's minds because it certainly won't but it was amusing and poked fun at these people. These people and this way of thinking should be made the butt of jokes. When they launch into one of their tirades at parties they should be made to feel sheepish and embarassed for brining the subject up.

Dale Carrico said...

I liked this video, not because it will change these people's minds because it certainly won't but it was amusing and poked fun at these people. These people and this way of thinking should be made the butt of jokes.

A fair point.