32 minutes ago, richard_smith237 said:

We already have a real-world example that puts this idea to the test, and it doesn’t support the conclusion you’re drawing. The Iraq WMD claims were among the most heavily promoted, expert-endorsed, and media-saturated narratives of the modern era - and they turned out to be false.

That was eventually acknowledged. Investigations took place, reports were published, and the original justification collapsed in full public view.

And yet… nothing like a “Great Awakening” followed. There was no mass collapse of trust, no widespread rejection of authority, no permanent shift into some enlightened state. Trust took a hit, cynicism increased, and scepticism grew in certain areas, but institutions carried on, governments stayed in power, media outlets kept operating, and most people simply moved on. That’s how real systems behave.

People didn’t suddenly reject medicine, abandon science, or walk away from political structures altogether. What emerged was selective distrust, not total disbelief. History shows that even when a major lie is exposed, authority isn’t dismantled - it’s absorbed, reframed, and compartmentalised.

That’s the core flaw in the “Great Awakening” narrative. It treats trust as if it’s all-or-nothing, as though pulling out one issue brings the whole structure down. In reality, trust is uneven, situational, and resilient. The Overton window shifts slowly and unevenly, not through some unstoppable surge of collective enlightenment. People don’t “wake up” once and stay awake forever - they adjust, recalibrate, and carry on in the same world, perhaps with just with a bit more scepticism than before.

If there was no irreversible awakening after the Iraq WMD debacle, there’s no reason to believe one would suddenly occur over Apollo. Which is why the argument that it’s now “too late” or “too dangerous” to admit the Moon landings were faked - and that the lie must therefore be maintained indefinitely - doesn’t hold up.

History shows that even significant deceptions, once exposed, don’t trigger societal collapse. They get absorbed, rationalised, and eventually normalised. The idea that Apollo has to be protected at all costs to prevent chaos simply doesn’t match how trust, power, or institutions actually function.

+1

4 hours ago, rattlesnake said:

It is one of the foundational myths of the modern era. If it is exposed and understood as fake by the majority of the public, everything else, including the restrictive supranational 'health' and 'climate' policies, will collapse instantly as belief and compliance are essential to their viability.

This is an outstanding example of what a self-inflated gas bag sounds like. Best stay away from the Needle of Truth.

1 hour ago, richard_smith237 said:

The idea that exposing the Moon landings as fake would cause everything else to collapse is a classic conspiracy cascade - the belief that one hidden truth, once revealed, brings the whole system down overnight.

It seems to me a major motivation driving the conspiracy goofballs is to bring some notoriety/infamy/excitement into their otherwise empty, nondescript lives. A very bizarre affliction, indeed.

5 minutes ago, richard_smith237 said:

Do you not think this has far more to do with the rise of social media - effectively giving everyone a megaphone, collapsing traditional gatekeeping, and rewarding outrage, certainty, and simplicity over nuance?

While conspiracists like to frame themselves as having “opened their eyes” in contrast to the supposedly blind sheeple, the trusting masses, the reality is rather less flattering. Much of society is either too busy to engage with every speculative claim, or sufficiently informed to recognise how conspiracy narratives cherry-pick facts, quote-mine sources, and strip context to manufacture doubt.

When facts are examined in full - uncherry-picked, un-memed, and subjected to proper investigation rather than Facebook or TikTok-driven pattern hunting - falsehoods tend to collapse, as they did with WMD. At that point, reality has a chance to reassert itself.

The UK, imperfect as it is, was at least able to reach that reckoning without completely bending to partisan tribalism in unearthing the WMD falsehoods.

Well, there are dumb people in every group and the 'conspiracy theorists' are no exception. But when I refer to the Overton window shifting, I am taking a high-level view and looking at society as a whole. These past four years, I have seen an increasing number of 'non-conspiracy theorists' (i.e. ordinary people from all walks of life) say things which were unthinkable ten years ago about the WEF, for example, or even vaccines. Last Summer, in France, I recall one day when I (tactfully) expressed my vaccine-sceptic views within a very 'normal' circle of people and they were not badly received, I even got a few nods and interested follow-ups.

This is what I mean when I say the needle is shifting and people are 'waking up', I am not basing this assessment on people like myself who are aggressively pushing the boundaries, but on the ordinary folk who, as you say, don't have the time or inclination to engage in these matters and simply tend to go where the general wind and sentiment are going. The 2025 zeitgeist is very different from the 2015 one.

3 minutes ago, gamb00ler said:

This is an outstanding example of what a self-inflated gas bag sounds like. Best stay away from the Needle of Truth.

It seems to me a major motivation driving the conspiracy goofballs is to bring some notoriety/infamy/excitement into their otherwise empty, nondescript lives. A very bizarre affliction, indeed.

Crisp, punchy, almost witty… A decent effort, keep it up.

4 minutes ago, rattlesnake said:

Crisp, punchy, almost witty… A decent effort, keep it up.

Your opinion of me, like all your opinions, is based on willful ignorance and is accorded value as warranted.

1 hour ago, scottiejohn said:

Agreed.

And most ex leaders of that time now agree and make excuses for "their mistake(s)".

A lot of people died because of those "mistakes."

1 hour ago, scottiejohn said:

Read the recently published;

My Life, Our Times; Gordon Brown's Memoirs where he claims that "even" he was misled and believed the WMD claims!!

Doesn't say much for MI6 then, does it, unless, off course, the UK government was actually complicit.

1 hour ago, scottiejohn said:

54 minutes ago, KhunHeineken said:

That's some great photoshop work. 😂

As usual you cannot accept the truth!

PS; No matter the topic/subject!

That was essentially my point earlier. No matter what proof is presented, it will simply be rejected by those already predisposed to distrust it. When conclusions are driven by emotion rather than evidence, and by a default scepticism of anything official, no amount of verification is ever going to be sufficient.

At that stage, it’s not about the strength of the evidence anymore - it’s about a mindset that has already decided the outcome in advance.

2 hours ago, richard_smith237 said:

That said, I think Moon-landing deniers are looking for something far more explicit - something absolutely perfect and beyond dispute. And even then, there’s a strong likelihood they would simply claim the images are fabricated anyway.

39 minutes ago, richard_smith237 said:

Do you not think this has far more to do with the rise of social media - effectively giving everyone a megaphone, collapsing traditional gatekeeping, and rewarding outrage, certainty, and simplicity over nuance?

What is your opinion on Wikileaks then? Not social media, but a platform for whistleblowers.

It's interesting how an issue is labelled a conspiracy theory, until a whistleblower uploads transcripts, or video footage, or photos etc.

9/11 gave the American government the power of mass surveillance. Conspiracy theorists commented on how the government is tracking, tracing and listening into everyone. Those people were ridiculed.

Then along came this guy, Edward Snowden.

It's a short video. Is he lying? Is he crazy? Is he telling the truth?

Whistleblowers often prove conspiracy theorists correct.

2 hours ago, KhunHeineken said:

So, governments all around the world, including mine, lied to their citizens.

No possibility it's happened on other occasions????

I remember Bonking Billy stating, "I did not have sexual relations with that women." 😂

What about the JFK assassination? A bullet that can turn corners, really? 😂

What about the Vietnam War? "The Domino Effect." Communism was going to sweep across the world if not stopped in Vietnam. 😂

The list goes on and on.

So, at the height of The Cold War, and the space race is on, no possibility the moon landing was BS?

I keep an open mind because I know government lie to their people and to the world.

No one is arguing that governments never lie. Of course they do - Iraq’s WMDs, Vietnam’s domino theory, Clinton’s denial, all fair examples. But this is where the reasoning jumps the rails:

“Governments have lied before” does not logically become “therefore this specific event must also be a lie.”

That’s not keeping an open mind - that’s treating suspicion itself as evidence.

Every example you’ve listed has two things in common: they were political decisions, made by relatively small groups, and they eventually unravelled precisely because lies of that scale are hard to maintain.

The Moon landings are the opposite kind of claim. They weren’t a single statement or justification; they involved hundreds of thousands of people, rival nations, independent tracking, physical hardware, ongoing experiments, and decades of verification by groups with no incentive to protect an American Cold War narrative.

The Cold War actually undermines the hoax idea. The Soviet Union had every reason, every capability, and every incentive to expose a fake Moon landing in real time. They didn’t. Not then, not later.

Scepticism is healthy. But open-mindedness cuts both ways. If “governments have lied before” is enough to dismiss Apollo, then it should also be enough to dismiss every complex system that depends on physics, engineering, and international verification - satellites, GPS, orbital mechanics, even modern communications.

Most people don’t take it that far, because at some point probability, scale, and evidence matter.

Questioning authority is sensible. Assuming that a lie is more likely than a globally consistent body of evidence is not. That’s not an open mind - it’s a conclusion reached first, with the justification filled in afterwards.

3 minutes ago, KhunHeineken said:

What is your opinion on Wikileaks then? Not social media, but a platform for whistleblowers.

It's interesting how an issue is labelled a conspiracy theory, until a whistleblower uploads transcripts, or video footage, or photos etc.

9/11 gave the American government the power of mass surveillance. Conspiracy theorists commented on how the government is tracking, tracing and listening into everyone. Those people were ridiculed.

Then along came this guy, Edward Snowden.

It's a short video. Is he lying? Is he crazy? Is he telling the truth?

Whistleblowers often prove conspiracy theorists correct.

I agree with most of that, and I’ll add an important distinction: I’m not anti-whistleblower at all.

In fact, whistleblowers are often how real wrongdoing comes to light. But the key word there is verifiable. Credible whistleblowers bring documents, corroboration, timelines, and evidence that can be independently checked. They don’t just make claims in isolation and ask to be believed on distrust alone.

Look at the examples where lies actually unravelled - WMDs, Vietnam, Watergate. They didn’t collapse because people “kept an open mind” - they collapsed because insiders came forward with evidence, and that evidence could be cross-checked. That’s what separates a whistleblower from a crank. A claim without corroboration isn’t bravery - it’s just noise.

That’s where the Apollo hoax argument falls apart. A programme of that scale would have produced real whistleblowers decades ago: engineers, flight controllers, contractors, tracking station staff, rival intelligence agencies. Not vague anecdotes, not second-hand stories, but hard evidence. And yet after more than half a century, there’s nothing of that quality - only recycled claims, misinterpreted footage, and people who conveniently can’t be verified.

So yes, governments lie. That’s not controversial. But scepticism isn’t a free pass to ignore probability, scale, and evidence.

An open mind doesn’t mean believing every alternative narrative equally - it means being willing to follow the evidence wherever it leads, including when it leads away from the conspiracy rather than towards it.

29 minutes ago, KhunHeineken said:

A lot of people died because of those "mistakes."

That response leans far more on emotion than on facts. The reality around Iraq was always more complex than the simplified “they lied, therefore everything collapsed” narrative.

Arguably, the decision to remove Saddam Hussein did not hinge solely on WMD claims. Saddam was a documented mass murderer who had used chemical weapons against his own population, invaded neighbouring countries, defied multiple UN resolutions for over a decade, and posed a persistent destabilising threat to the region.

Those facts existed independently of the WMD intelligence failures.

The WMD claims were largely used as a public-facing justification because they were easy to communicate and politically effective, not because they were the sole or even primary strategic reason for the war.

The intervention was almost certainly going to happen regardless; WMDs were the simplified narrative used to sell it.

People didn’t die because intelligence assessments turned out to be wrong. They died because a brutal regime was removed through military force, for reasons rooted in long-standing geopolitical, regional, and humanitarian considerations.

Conflating those realities into “one lie caused everything” is an oversimplification that doesn’t hold up under scrutiny.

29 minutes ago, KhunHeineken said:

Doesn't say much for MI6 then, does it, unless, off course, the UK government was actually complicit.

Not really. Intelligence failures don’t automatically imply incompetence or complicity, and history is full of examples where intelligence agencies got things wrong without being part of some coordinated deception. Intelligence work is probabilistic, fragmentary, and often based on incomplete or deliberately manipulated information - especially when dealing with closed regimes.

In the case of Iraq, MI6 wasn’t operating in isolation. Intelligence assessments were broadly aligned across multiple countries, drawing on shared sources, defectors, intercepted communications, and Saddam’s own long record of deception.

That doesn’t mean the conclusions were correct, but it does mean the failure was systemic, not uniquely British and not evidence of deliberate collusion.

The leap from “intelligence was wrong” to “the government must have been complicit” is the same logical error seen elsewhere in these debates. It assumes that bad outcomes require bad faith. In reality, intelligence agencies can be mistaken, pressured, or overly confident without there being some grand, coordinated lie behind it. Mistake, bias, and political pressure are far more common - and far more plausible - explanations than secret omniscient coordination.

Pointing to intelligence failures doesn’t strengthen conspiracy arguments; it actually underlines how messy, imperfect, and non-omniscient these systems really are.

And this is exactly the problem when responding to oversimplified comments like yours. Presenting misinformation and accusations takes very little effort because it carries no burden of proof and relies largely on emotion. Correcting it, on the other hand, requires time, context, and a more nuanced explanation. The imbalance is obvious - it’s easy to make the claim, much harder to responsibly dismantle it.

1 hour ago, Red Phoenix said:

I am not an American, let alone a 'typical MAGA voter'.

You got your noodles mixed up...

You’re just a conspiracy, a red herring.

1 hour ago, richard_smith237 said:

That was essentially my point earlier. No matter what proof is presented, it will simply be rejected by those already predisposed to distrust it. When conclusions are driven by emotion rather than evidence, and by a default scepticism of anything official, no amount of verification is ever going to be sufficient.

At that stage, it’s not about the strength of the evidence anymore - it’s about a mindset that has already decided the outcome in advance.

+1

45 minutes ago, richard_smith237 said:

The intervention was almost certainly going to happen regardless; WMDs were the simplified narrative used to sell it.

+1

3 hours ago, KhunHeineken said:

A lot of people died because of those "mistakes."

Doesn't say much for MI6 then, does it, unless, off course, the UK government was actually complicit.

The UK government was neck-deep involved in the programmed destruction of Iraq and anyone genuinely believing those were "mistakes" is an ignoramus.

This was the last time France did the right thing, when Minister of Foreign Affairs Dominique de Villepin told them all to p*ss off at the UN. He and Jacques Chirac still had sovereign principles, a remnant of the De Gaulle years.

Tony Blair is a criminal and nothing else.

3 hours ago, HighPriority said:

You’re just a conspiracy, a red herring.

Thankfully, you're here to raise the semantic and conceptual bar.

3 hours ago, richard_smith237 said:

That response leans far more on emotion than on facts. The reality around Iraq was always more complex than the simplified “they lied, therefore everything collapsed” narrative.

Arguably, the decision to remove Saddam Hussein did not hinge solely on WMD claims. Saddam was a documented mass murderer who had used chemical weapons against his own population, invaded neighbouring countries, defied multiple UN resolutions for over a decade, and posed a persistent destabilising threat to the region.

Those facts existed independently of the WMD intelligence failures.

The WMD claims were largely used as a public-facing justification because they were easy to communicate and politically effective, not because they were the sole or even primary strategic reason for the war.

The intervention was almost certainly going to happen regardless; WMDs were the simplified narrative used to sell it.

People didn’t die because intelligence assessments turned out to be wrong. They died because a brutal regime was removed through military force, for reasons rooted in long-standing geopolitical, regional, and humanitarian considerations.

Conflating those realities into “one lie caused everything” is an oversimplification that doesn’t hold up under scrutiny.

Not really. Intelligence failures don’t automatically imply incompetence or complicity, and history is full of examples where intelligence agencies got things wrong without being part of some coordinated deception. Intelligence work is probabilistic, fragmentary, and often based on incomplete or deliberately manipulated information - especially when dealing with closed regimes.

In the case of Iraq, MI6 wasn’t operating in isolation. Intelligence assessments were broadly aligned across multiple countries, drawing on shared sources, defectors, intercepted communications, and Saddam’s own long record of deception.

That doesn’t mean the conclusions were correct, but it does mean the failure was systemic, not uniquely British and not evidence of deliberate collusion.

The leap from “intelligence was wrong” to “the government must have been complicit” is the same logical error seen elsewhere in these debates. It assumes that bad outcomes require bad faith. In reality, intelligence agencies can be mistaken, pressured, or overly confident without there being some grand, coordinated lie behind it. Mistake, bias, and political pressure are far more common - and far more plausible - explanations than secret omniscient coordination.

Pointing to intelligence failures doesn’t strengthen conspiracy arguments; it actually underlines how messy, imperfect, and non-omniscient these systems really are.

And this is exactly the problem when responding to oversimplified comments like yours. Presenting misinformation and accusations takes very little effort because it carries no burden of proof and relies largely on emotion. Correcting it, on the other hand, requires time, context, and a more nuanced explanation. The imbalance is obvious - it’s easy to make the claim, much harder to responsibly dismantle it.

It was a complete fabrication, as Colin Powell admitted afterwards.

Why was naughty Saddam executed and his country plundered by 'the good guys'? Always for the same reason. He was going to implement a gold-backed currency and pull out of the dollar/central banking fiat system. Same as naughty Gaddafi.

26 minutes ago, rattlesnake said:

It was a complete fabrication, as Colin Powell admitted afterwards.

Why was naughty Saddam executed and his country plundered by 'the good guys'? Always for the same reason. He was going to implement a gold-backed currency and pull out of the dollar/central banking fiat system. Same as naughty Gaddafi.

I see – so Colin Powell supposedly stated that the reasons for entering Gulf War 2 was fabricated?

He didn’t. His later remarks referred specifically to the 2003 Iraq invasion, where he acknowledged that the intelligence used in his UN presentation was wrong, badly sourced, and politically mishandled, calling it a blot on his record – not a knowing fabrication, and not something that applied to the 1991 Gulf War at all - was that about gold too ?

What you’re doing instead is relying on incomplete, cherry-picked claims that dumb down and oversimplify an incredibly complex geopolitical issue – which, frankly, has become typical of your recent posting history, Rattle. It’s a desperate tactic and an exhausting one to counter. I don’t want to write another 1,000-word essay just to address yet another stripped-down, misleading comment; whether intentional or not, this pattern of exhausting discussion through flawed claims and misinformation isn’t debate - and it would take pages to accurately and informatively break down the reasons - allowing for the nuance of localised and International geopolitics and pressures at the, both internal and external levels.

Wrong intelligence is not the same thing as fabrication, and collapsing that distinction is misleading. There is also no credible evidence that Saddam was removed because he planned a gold-backed currency or posed any threat to the dollar. Iraq never introduced such a system, had no capacity to do so under sanctions, and its brief move to price oil in euros was symbolic, UN-approved, and economically irrelevant.

The same claim doesn’t hold up for Libya either. Gaddafi talked about a pan-African gold dinar, but it never progressed beyond rhetoric and was not treated by Western governments as a serious monetary threat. Libya in 2011 was driven by the Arab Spring, internal revolt, and a UN-mandated intervention that later drifted into regime change.

It’s also lazy to lump Saddam and Gaddafi together as equivalent figures: Saddam ran a genuinely totalitarian state that sought to control politics, society, expression, and even loyalty itself, while Gaddafi ruled through personalist authoritarianism – repression, patronage, and unpredictability rather than uniform surveillance.

Reducing all of this to a neat “bankers vs gold” story isn’t insight – it’s oversimplification, and at this point it’s barely better than posting a meme and calling it analysis.

30 minutes ago, richard_smith237 said:

I see – so Colin Powell supposedly stated that the reasons for entering Gulf War 2 was fabricated?

He didn’t. His later remarks referred specifically to the 2003 Iraq invasion, where he acknowledged that the intelligence used in his UN presentation was wrong, badly sourced, and politically mishandled, calling it a blot on his record – not a knowing fabrication, and not something that applied to the 1991 Gulf War at all - was that about gold too ?

What you’re doing instead is relying on incomplete, cherry-picked claims that dumb down and oversimplify an incredibly complex geopolitical issue – which, frankly, has become typical of your recent posting history, Rattle. It’s a desperate tactic and an exhausting one to counter. I don’t want to write another 1,000-word essay just to address yet another stripped-down, misleading comment; whether intentional or not, this pattern of exhausting discussion through flawed claims and misinformation isn’t debate - and it would take pages to accurately and informatively break down the reasons - allowing for the nuance of localised and International geopolitics and pressures at the, both internal and external levels.

Wrong intelligence is not the same thing as fabrication, and collapsing that distinction is misleading. There is also no credible evidence that Saddam was removed because he planned a gold-backed currency or posed any threat to the dollar. Iraq never introduced such a system, had no capacity to do so under sanctions, and its brief move to price oil in euros was symbolic, UN-approved, and economically irrelevant.

The same claim doesn’t hold up for Libya either. Gaddafi talked about a pan-African gold dinar, but it never progressed beyond rhetoric and was not treated by Western governments as a serious monetary threat. Libya in 2011 was driven by the Arab Spring, internal revolt, and a UN-mandated intervention that later drifted into regime change.

It’s also lazy to lump Saddam and Gaddafi together as equivalent figures: Saddam ran a genuinely totalitarian state that sought to control politics, society, expression, and even loyalty itself, while Gaddafi ruled through personalist authoritarianism – repression, patronage, and unpredictability rather than uniform surveillance.

Reducing all of this to a neat “bankers vs gold” story isn’t insight – it’s oversimplification, and at this point it’s barely better than posting a meme and calling it analysis.

I'm not the lazy one in this exchange, I never use AI. It so happens that Middle-Eastern geopolitics is one of the topics I have studied the most over the years (namely by reading books, not social media, though the latter is great - especially X - for forum use).

You know by now that I don't seek to 'win' debates and merely provide information for those who might be interested in it.

Powell knowingly lied that day and to think US intelligence would be dumb enough to actually believe that vial he was holding contained anthrax is beyond naive. I encourage you to forget you are talking to Rattles and simply look at this at face value.

I won't derail Red's thread again, but a couple of things:

1. Regarding mainstream media and the way many forum members treat them as authoritative sources of truth:

   The Washington Post, Feb 2003:
   Irrefutable
   AFTER SECRETARY OF STATE Colin L. Powell's presentation to the United Nations Security Council yesterday, it is hard to imagine how anyone could doubt that Iraq possesses weapons of mass destruction.

   

   https://archive.ph/Lcrs2#selection-2027.0-2085.199
   
   

2. Billions were confiscated by the US from Hussein and Gaddafi. Both were in the process of freeing their respective countries from the hegemony of the dollar (Hussein through the creation of a eurodollar, Gaddafi through the gold dinar). To think that this was not a central element in the decision to 'regime change' them would be, again, very naive.

Here is a great book to understand what central banking is exactly, and how the interests of one specific oligarchy are 'safeguarded' domestically and abroad:

The Secrets of the Federal Reserve

Uncover the hidden history and true mechanics of the U.S. financial system in Secrets of the Federal Reserve by Eustace Mullins. This groundbreaking, yet highly controversial, work pulls back the curtain on the Federal Reserve, challenging everything you thought you knew about how money and power operate in America.

Mullins meticulously details the shadowy origins of the Fed, tracing its creation to the infamous Jekyll Island meetings. Discover how this privately controlled entity allegedly serves the interests of powerful banking elites, manipulating everything from inflation and the national debt to core economic policy.

Essential reading for anyone questioning economic inequality and the concentration of financial power, this book is guaranteed to spark debate and redefine how you view the forces shaping your wealth and your nation's future.

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-secrets-of-the-federal-reserve-eustace-mullins/1017687047

On 1/18/2026 at 6:40 PM, richard_smith237 said:

Anti-vaxxers... Covid conspiracists... Moon-landing deniers... Flat-earthers.... Chemtrails...

Different costumes, same troupe.

They present themselves as brave iconoclasts, lone wolves howling truth into the void. In reality, they are astonishingly predictable. If a view is held by scientists, doctors, engineers, historians, or anyone who has spent more than five minutes studying the subject, they reflexively reject it. Not because they have counter-evidence - but because it is official.

The defining feature is not scepticism. It is contrarianism. Not independent thought, but oppositional identity.

If vaccines are recommended by every serious medical body on the planet, then vaccines must be poison.
If Covid killed millions, then it must have been “just the flu” - or a hoax - or a rehearsal for global mind control.
If the Moon landing is documented by telemetry, physics, photographs, mirrors still used for laser ranging, and the testimony of thousands of engineers… then obviously it was filmed in a shed by Stanley Kubrick.
If the Earth is demonstrably round, measurable, navigable, and observable from multiple independent systems, then clearly it is flat - because NASA exists and therefore lies about everything.

The pattern is painfully consistent.

Mainstream media says A - therefore A is false. Experts agree on B - therefore B is propaganda.

Consensus emerges after decades of evidence - therefore it’s a psy-op.

Notice what never happens: they never produce a better explanatory model. They do not replace germ theory with something more predictive. They do not replace orbital mechanics with equations that work. They do not improve epidemiology, astronomy, or physics. They simply sneer at them from the sidelines and declare victory.

This isn’t free thinking. Free thinking requires work. Reading. Maths. Method. The ability to say “I might be wrong”.... What we are seeing instead in threads such as this is epistemic vandalism - the tearing down of knowledge without the capacity or intention to build anything in its place.

Even better, these movements feed on each other. Fall for one, and the rest come bundled free. Anti-vaxxers drift effortlessly into Covid conspiracies, then into 5G paranoia, then into global cabals, then into “nothing is real unless I discovered it on a Telegram channel with a wolf avatar”. The worldview must remain internally hostile to authority at all costs, otherwise the entire self-image collapses.

And that’s the crux of it.

This is not about truth. It is about identity. Being “awake”. Being special. Being one of the few clever enough to see through the grand illusion that somehow fooled every airline pilot, civil engineer, virologist, and satellite system on Earth - but not Dave on YouTube.

What masquerades as radical scepticism is far closer to a psychological tic: an automatic rejection reflex. A kind of intellectual Tourette’s, where “they’re lying” bursts out regardless of context, evidence, or coherence.

At some point, this stops being an alternative viewpoint and starts looking like a shared cognitive pathology. Not dissent, but dysfunction. Not courage, but confusion. Not free thought, but a fear of reality so profound that fantasy feels safer.

In short: if everything official is fake, nothing true is knowable - and that isn’t enlightenment. It’s stupidity.

And then you put him in charge of health...

On 1/18/2026 at 8:13 PM, CallumWK said:

Mods, have you considered renaming this forum to "the flat earthers" forum?

I believe that they considered it, but it was so large that it would have spilt over the edge!

11 hours ago, rattlesnake said:

I'm not the lazy one in this exchange, I never use AI. It so happens that Middle-Eastern geopolitics is one of the topics I have studied the most over the years (namely by reading books, not social media, though the latter is great - especially X - for forum use).

Try 'being' there... you'll learn more...

On 1/21/2026 at 11:24 AM, BritManToo said:

I never really understood why anyone would care if the moon landings where real of not.

It certainly doesn't make any difference to our lives.

Unlike COVID or climate change which governments use to destroy our lives, health, incomes and freedom to travel.

Leaving science deniers unchallenged is a big mistake.

On 1/19/2026 at 5:30 PM, richard_smith237 said:

Steve Fossett completed a solo, non-stop circumnavigation in 2005 that crossed the equator, the North Pole and the South Pole before returning to his starting longitude.

Should he not have returned to his starting LATITUDE.

On 1/21/2026 at 3:11 PM, rattlesnake said:

It is one of the foundational myths of the modern era. If it is exposed and understood as fake by the majority of the public, everything else, including the restrictive supranational 'health' and 'climate' policies, will collapse instantly as belief and compliance are essential to their viability.

Really don't mind if you sit this one out.
My words but a whisper your deafness a SHOUT.
I may make you feel but I can't make you think.
Your sperm's in the gutter your love's in the sink.
So you ride yourselves over the fields and
You make all your animal deals and
Your wise men don't know how it feels
To be thick as a brick.

I did have the pleasure of hearing it live.

55 minutes ago, wil iam not said:

On 1/19/2026 at 1:30 PM, richard_smith237 said:

Steve Fossett completed a solo, non-stop circumnavigation in 2005 that crossed the equator, the North Pole and the South Pole before returning to his starting longitude.

Should he not have returned to his starting LATITUDE.

I misread two separate google pages and overlapped the information - there were two separate flights.

- Steve Fosset completed an circumnavigation of the globe in Virgin Atlantic GlobalFlyer - across the equator.

- The Rockwell Polar Flight flew a polar navigation taking off from the continental US, flew over the North Pole, continued south, flew over the South Pole, and returned to the same location.

On 1/18/2026 at 8:11 AM, save the frogs said:

This is classic.

Gets in Buzz Aldrin's face and gets punched.

Anyone who refers to Buzz Aldrin as a coward deserves to be punched in the face.

9 minutes ago, Effective altruism said:

Anyone who refers to Buzz Aldrin as a coward deserves to be punched in the face.

Indeed, the quote-mining on this point is particularly weak. Yet for some reason, an out-of-context fragment from a Buzz Aldrin interview continues to be recycled by Moon-landing deniers as though it carries weight. It’s less a matter of evidence and more a failure to grasp basic language, context, and nuance - an attempt to score points by misunderstanding what was actually said rather than engaging with it honestly.

Aldrin was explaining why we haven’t been back to the Moon since Apollo - the “we didn’t go there” quote is simply a sentence fragment stripped of its context.

About why they didn't go back to the moon... “That's not an eight-year-old's question. That's my question. I want to know. But I think I know. Because we didn't go there. And that's the way it happened"...

... “And if it didn't happen it's nice to know why it didn't happen so in the future, if we want to keep doing something, we need to know why something stopped in the past if we want to keep it going”...

He was rambling some what - but its quite clear he was talking about why humans never went back to the Moon.... Moon-landing-deniers have commonly taken this quote out of context and attempted to present it as evidence.

3 hours ago, richard_smith237 said:

Indeed, the quote-mining on this point is particularly weak. Yet for some reason, an out-of-context fragment from a Buzz Aldrin interview continues to be recycled by Moon-landing deniers as though it carries weight. It’s less a matter of evidence and more a failure to grasp basic language, context, and nuance - an attempt to score points by misunderstanding what was actually said rather than engaging with it honestly.

Aldrin was explaining why we haven’t been back to the Moon since Apollo - the “we didn’t go there” quote is simply a sentence fragment stripped of its context.

About why they didn't go back to the moon... “That's not an eight-year-old's question. That's my question. I want to know. But I think I know. Because we didn't go there. And that's the way it happened"...

... “And if it didn't happen it's nice to know why it didn't happen so in the future, if we want to keep doing something, we need to know why something stopped in the past if we want to keep it going”...

He was rambling some what - but its quite clear he was talking about why humans never went back to the Moon.... Moon-landing-deniers have commonly taken this quote out of context and attempted to present it as evidence.

Of course it is irrelevant to quote these statements as proof the Moon landings didn't happen… but they can validly be added to a series of unusual and/or troubling elements.

Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins all retired from NASA shortly after the Apollo 11 mission, living away from the limelight. Aldrin struggled with depression and alcoholism his entire life.

It is also notable that they were unusually and uncharastically somber in their post-mission press conference. What was wrong with them? They had just accomplished the greatest feat of mankind's history, hadn't they? Why the unease?

Again, this doesn't prove anything, but it is not the aftermath one would expect, and it certainly doesn't do anything to change the minds of those who are already sceptical of Apollo's authenticity.

Just watch some NASA debunking videos. Laughable with photoshopping, CGI and bad actornauts.

The India 'moon landing' was a joke. Atari graphics.

Much of 'space' footage is filmed in underwater pools and then green screened.

Space has always been a hoax.

Without it you won't believe in falling rocks, dinosaurs and the incoming alien invasion (...soon...)

The cognitive dissonance is too much for most.