Friday 17 October 2014

Conspiracy Theories

Many people love a conspiracy.  Perhaps it's the challenge of unraveling it that piques their interest, or they want to be entertained by reading about the various theories that surround it.  The stranger the theory is, the more likely it is to be true, right?  Also if there is more than one source to a story, it appears credible.

The Ebola crisis is spreading and as usual the conspiracy theorists are out in force.

"Ebola is a bio-terror project that got out of control.  The U.S. has sent troops to Sierra Leone to shut down a bio-weapons lab rumoured to be the source."

"Islamic State fighters deliberately infected themselves in order to transmit it to the West."

"Ebola is a hoax that's being used to cover up secret human testing of vaccines and chemicals."

And so on.

There are those who have said that governments will naturally discredit these theories through mainstream media.  A conspiracy theorist is just another term for a critical thinker who actually asks why, like a "real" reporter should do instead of accepting the status quo they are told to report for everyone to accept.

That thing about a bio-weapons lab in Sierra Leone being the source?  The first documented case in this Ebola outbreak was a family in Guinea who had eaten meat from an infected animal - over 100 miles away.

Troops being sent over?  The United States will send military reservists like the National Guard to West Africa to help launch a major health care training and hygiene program.  They have all been trained in preventing infection although only a very few will be expected to come into contact with infectious people or objects.

As for the other aforementioned theories: totally false.

I'm just waiting for someone to say that the whole thing has been exploited by the Illuminati in order to gain control of the government.

2 comments:

  1. Admittedly, the whole Ebola thing is making me nervous, but I'm not buying any conspiracy theories - unusual for me, since I'm quite the conspiracy theorist normally!

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  2. All this mental clutter makes me not want to hear anything about it. I have to force myself to try to find the truth - because I don't want to do something stupid that I would avoid if I knew better. That's actually a political strategy - put out so much stuff that people get confused or sick of it and don't vote at all. Sad huh?

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