Malevolent Lies

I keep reading small articles here and there about someone in a public sort of job who displays a degree of misinformation that amazes me.

Now thinking that the earth is flat when many people have circled it or that dinosaurs aren't real don't seem to have much impact on one's day to day life except it is simply so clearly wrong that I can't understand how an adult person could still believe these things.

I'm not talking about mentally incompetent people, as far as I know, just average intelligence people who believe things that are obviously wrong.

In some cases it has to do with misguided religious teaching where the bible is interpreted to say the world is only so many thousand years old.

These things are so easily disproved, which underscores the real problem.

People believe there is some giant conspiracy that is trying to control them.

Some might call this God, but ignoring that, it is scary that people have so lost confidence in the press, the Government, the teachers and anyone who is reasonably educated that they believe truly absurd things.

Now these get reported because they are on the extreme edge of this trend.

The vast majority of people understand the world is round and that dinosaurs and fossils are real.

But this mistrust leads to other problems and is fed by shouts of fake news or conspiracy.

Take the moon landing or the Kennedy assassination.  There have been and still are people who believe that the official accounts of this are faked.  They seem to believe this because it would be possible to fake them and you can't prove a negative.

This last one is probably the one that causes the most problem, where someone says prove it didn't happen!

Well the burden of proof, and I mead real proof should be on the person making a claim.

Now sometimes there are a few tidbits of odd information that can be spun into a web of lies, but it doesn't constitute proof.

To believe that there is a group that is so powerful and so malevolent that they twist history and science for some unknown purpose is a claim that too many believe.

Its more than sad, its scary.