“GMOs are not good for you” (how absurd!)… [sarcasm intended]

“there was more to 9/11 than those hijackers” (thousands of idiot scientists and engineers, all wearing tin-foil hats, making up nonsense)….

“The Deep State… ( OMG, not that story about wiping out 7 regimes in 5 years again!)….

“anti-vaccine propaganda”… (oh, no…not that claim about autism again… or the millions of sterilized women and crippled children in Africa again)

This leaves no doubt, if there were any, that you are the #1 conspiracy theorist on mf.

 I largely agree with pj. The vast majority of his posts recently have been supporting conspiracy theories and pseudoscience. My recollection is that he used to be a much better poster. Now just about everything he has been posting is going against the mainstream with sources having little factual credibility and which have almost all been right winged biased. These kinds of things foster further divisiveness as well as confusion during a time when unity in the US is severely lacking,

 But to be fair, he's not the only one who has posted this kind of stuff.

Here's the thing with blatantly biased sources. They come up with many whacko theories and the vast majority of time, they are wrong. 

Because of this horrible track record, they get written off as nothing but sources of conspiracy theories. 

Personally, I can bust them most of the time because its a piece of cake to do the fact checking each time yourself vs relying on an almighty fact checker to do that.

However, fact checkers do a wonderful job of doing all the fact checking work for you........most of the time, so you can save yourself alot of trouble/work by just reading their stuff

The fact checkers represent mainstream views and they are real people, that think inside the box  with cognitive bias that keeps their thoughts from veering way outside mainstream views because the far right and far left have such a horrible record when it comes to presenting crazy things, that more often than not, don't seem to make sense.

However, we can all agree(I would think) that every once in a while they come across crazy things that don't make sense and those crazy things are immediately written off because "it's them again".

When Gunter brought up the fact that respirator's were killing people, I told him here that it didn't make sense. Turns out, his source was correct and I had to apologize to Gunter for not taking him seriously. Gunter was also the first person here to bring up the crisis at the southern border when everybody else said Trump was making it up........including me.

 ventilators are hurting people, not Corona            

                            9 responses |             

                Started by GunterK - April 5, 2020, 6:32 p.m.            

 https://www.marketforum.com/forum/topic/50047/

Gunter does buy into tons of conspiracy theories and if you are fair about me, you will note that I call him out every time(including the 2 times above when I was wrong).

I am willing to TRY to take each case by itself and try to evaluate it based on the credentials and objective facts. When Gunter has a conspiracy theory that lacks supporting facts...........let him have it(like I have done). 

When the facts are NOT on his side, it's pretty easy to provide the authentic facts to prove that he or others are wrong.

The facts are the facts. Instead of getting frustrated, use it as an opportunity. It only makes you look good. I don't see Gunter attacking anybody personally here with his views. He actually seems like a pretty nice guy that respects others. I would hope that because he has a different political view, it's not causing others to be less tolerant of him or to discrimate. 

At MarketForum, we should respect everybody's sincere opinion and respect that person, ESPECIALLY if it disagrees with ours. 

Why people believe in conspiracy theories – and how to change their minds       

  https://theconversation.com/why-people-believe-in-conspiracy-theories-and-how-to-change-their-minds-82514

With regards to me, I learned my lesson in disregarding what I thought were whacko theories from him several times and was wrong and will try to investigate it objectively(if possible) but when it sounds crazy, I admit bias kicks in immediately.

 Gunter does sound like he may be a classy guy (I haven't met him though) and quite possibly is just trying to be helpful. But folks like him promoting the conspiracy viewpoints of these sources only adds to divisiveness and confusion, which is not a nice thing. Also, some of these sources' aims are to downplay the danger of this virus. There's way too much fake news on the internet.

 Back in February, I never would have imagined that COVID-19 was going to result in its own major divide in the US. We're at war with an invisible enemy as Trump said. In the past, wars brought the country together. Not this time. I blame a lot of that on Trump, who is constantly pitting folks against other folks. He's not the least bit Presidential. He sucks to high heaven in that respect and is, therefore, a terrible leader of the US. I've never seen anyone like him and I thought Obama was bad. Well, Trump is making Obama seem like a great POTUS in comparison! Trump is so bad that I could almost see myself voting for a socialist like Sanders just to get him out. And I'm the furthest thing from a socialist. Trump isn't just a meanie jerk. He's a narcissist who is destroying our country and doesn't give a sh*t. He needs to go!

 I fear for where the US is headed as it is two distinct nations with one country. A badly divided country is a weakened country. This is no longer the country I have fond memories of. 

 “Gunter….[snip]…quite possibly is just trying to be helpful. But folks like him promoting the conspiracy viewpoints of these sources only adds to divisiveness and confusion, which is not a nice thing. Also, some of these sources' aims are to downplay the danger of this virus. “

Since this paragraph is referencing me, please allow me to respond.

First, I would like to say that I respect your opinion… after all, free speech is of high importance in the USA (or, at least, was important)

Today, we often hear the term “MSM”. When you think about it, there shouldn’t be any MSM, there should only be the “media”…unbiased, reporting the news.

Nevertheless, it is almost unavoidable that some media eventually would lean to the left, and others to the right. However, today the vast majority of our popular news media is leaning in the same direction…. therefore the term “MSM”

This means, the public is exposed to a one-sided view of reality. The MSM distorts the news, they redact the news, they ignore important events they don’t want you to hear, and sometimes they just lie. They tell their audience who to like and who to hate.

Where does a person go, when his curiosity wants to explore ideas other than the ones coming from the mouth of our MSM?

The internet !!!! What a great place for a curious mind to explore the world!

While searching for ideas differing from the propaganda of the MSM or the ‘establishment’, we may wind up on a site that is labelled as a “ conspiracy theories” site.There you may indeed find some “crazy” theories of behind-the-scenes bad people doing bad things to us.

On the other hand, you may also find real information, information the MSM does not want you to hear.

Being conditioned by the MSM, you may not want to believe what they tell you (hey, it’s “conspiracy theory”), but then, when you see actual video clips that prove their point, you will realize that these sites are being painted as places to avoid, only because the MSM tells you to do so.

I was called the forum’s #1 conspiracy theorist in this thread.

This surprised me. I have never considered myself to be a conspiracy theorist. I just don’t always believe the government story, especially when it doesn’t make sense. I try to analyze things myself.

For example, when somebody tells me members of the Royal Family of England are hybrid-reptilians….yeap, “conspiracy theory”

On the other hand….

Some kind of vehicle crashed near Roswell, NM, and created a trench on impact, and residents find all kinds of metallic debris, big and small. Then a convoy of Army truck arrives and whisks everything away. If the military had told us that one of their top-secret experimental aircraft had crashed, that would have made sense. But they told us, it was a weather balloon!!! You have to be kidding!

Or….

The government tells us, L H Oswald killed JFK. Wait a minute… I saw that video. I don’t believe it.

Or…

I watched 9/11 on TV, as it unfolded (I knew some of the people working on the top floor of WTC1). Long before all kinds of theories started floating around, I noticed things that defied physics. Then I heard testimony from first-responders. There is an overwhelming amount of evidence suggesting that the official description of 9/11 is wrong. I don’t believe the official report. 

Does this make me a conspiracy theorist?

Coming back to our life in the Covid19 world…..as you said, many people are confused, hearing opposing opinions.... and for many, that’s not good.

Please let me address current events, regarding the Covid19 crisis, and what troubles me.

No doubt, this virus is more dangerous than most people anticipated a few weeks ago… at least, that’s what we were told. (today, the CDC sings another tune)

However, we survived SARS, we survived MERS, we survived the bad flu of 2018 (which killed 60k), and then there were the biggies… the Asian Flu of 1958 (which, in terms of population size, was much more lethal than Covid19), and the Spanish Flu of 100 years ago.

In all these previous cases, the country’s economy never took a big hit. However, this time, extreme measures were taken…. forced business closures, forced house-arrest, forced mask wearing, etc.

So, now we have millions out of work, businesses shutting down forever, and many people too scared to leave their homes.

Some people say,it’s the lockdowns that stopped the pandemic from being worse (sounds logical to me!) but they can’t prove it. Many other doctors say, it would have been better not to have lockdowns… and they can’t prove it either.

Many experts also predict that the death rate caused by lockdowns (due to delayed medical treatments for cancer or TB patients, for example) will exceed the Covid19 death rate…that’s a prediction, not a fact.

However, it is a fact, not a conspiracy theory, that one hospital in California now already reports more deaths from suicides than from Covid19. During the last 4 weeks they took in more suicide patients than all of last year.

And it is a fact, not a conspiracy theory, that doctors in hospitals across the country are encouraged to call unrelated deaths “Covid19 deaths” (that’s fraudulent data manipulation). Just read this weekend that in one hospital a gun-shot death was reported as a Covid19 death. (that’s manipulation of data…. fraud!)

Many experts now claim that the focus should have been on retirement homes (where most of the fatalities took place), and regular folks and all businesses should have been left to live as usual.

As you said, hearing these different opinions and facts confuses people.

But, I ask myself, why did the whole world rush to implement such draconian measures? This was not done during the other epidemics. I have no answer for this. Maybe, everybody copied China's response.