Re: Amazing...
"Being different" doesn't mean you're right. It's a common misconception, borne of the belief that all those people who were "different" and "successful" means that the two are somehow related. Correlation rather than causation, and all that.
Unfortunately, more often than not, it means you're wrong and/or just don't understand enough to discuss it on any sensible level.
Every single moon-landing conspiracy nut I've ever spoken to (and there are a few of you, I'm afraid) has a poor grasp of physics, a terrible reliance on "implying things from video footage", and a sheer lack of understanding that they could be wrong too... the usual problem is that I get halfway through explaining why one thing they believe is utter horsecrud, only to be presented with a "Aha! BUT..." mid-sentence about something completely else.
It takes a million times more effort to debunk a nonsense theory than it does to make one up. I hereby claim that gravity is a new magnetism that applies to all objects including light, not curvature in space-time. Prove me wrong. It took Einstein most of his life to do so, and if *you* can't, then I'm assuming I must be right all along, because you're obviously not smart enough to debunk it, right?
And... though I know it's just going to end in Aha! BUT!....
The "moon rock" isn't, wasn't, never was, it didn't come from the moon, the one that *did* couldn't have weighed as much as that (they brought back 1oz samples, that was 3oz). The stuff is literally explained on the Wikipedia page, with citations: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netherlands_lunar_sample_displays
Some guy who has nothing to do with the Apollo program gave them a thing, told them it was Moon rock, they "phoned NASA" years ago who said it was "possible" but have never examined it, they thought that was good enough and put it on display. Human error/fraud, nothing to do with NASA/Apollo/Buzz/Neil whatsoever, at all, in any way, shape or form. It doesn't prove that "there is no such thing as Moon rock on Earth because we've never been to the Moon", it only hints - at best - that museum curators are idiots, or that sometimes people nick stuff that's valuable and replace it with junk because nobody ever bothers to check, or that old people get confused. It's also a tiny *speck* of rock, but well done for blowing it out of all proportion.
Anything about flags moving is just so Meh by now, surely. The easiest debunk for those (which again takes a million times more effort than to keep making up nonsense), is that it's actually quite hard to make movement in even an atmosphere that will move a flag from that distance just by walking/jumping past it.
As a lot of debunking of this stuff shows; Try it. Put a flag out in a sealed room on a still day. Measure a whole raft of lines on the floor. Jump past it like the astronaut does. See how close you have to be to make it move. You can literally debunk 95% of all the conspiracy nonsense by just trying it yourself... all the sun-angle bull, flags moving, taking photos, etc. etc.
And, let me tell you, if you throw a thousand theories and *ONE* is plausible, your reputation is destroyed so badly already that nobody will listen. If you posit one theory, take it to its conclusion, test, prove, debunk yourself, recreate independently, etc. then people will beat a path to your door. Bandwagon-jumping on things that are obvious nonsense without even the simple precept of "just try it yourself" just makes you look a fool. Tell me... which way does water drain down a plughole? All the nonsense in the world is solved in ten seconds by *trying* it, using the simple equipment of your daily ablutions and some *basic* science (i.e. hypothesise beforehand, set up, experiment, test, repeat, confirm, determine contributory factors, repeat, test, isolate, confirm, publish).
The problem, of course, is that estimating *any* distance from a single, flat 2D video is almost impossible. It's the "UFO sighting" problem all over again. Don't even get me started on the number of people not using original footage, inferring detail from JPEG/MPEG artifacts, measuring distances by counting pixels and then jumping to conclusions, etc. It's the "sun angle is all wrong" nonsense all over again.
No. No no no. You're wrong. Copying in more people who agree with you doesn't make you right. Even a Dr agreeing with you doesn't make you right (they're usually Dr in very dubious fields and of dubious professional reputation like the ECat guys). You have an answer for everything that just doesn't add up.
If it wouldn't add up in a court of law, you're honestly just wasting your life away looking for things that aren't there. You can find *all* kinds of things that aren't there if you look hard enough and long enough and are convinced enough.
What you can't do is, in any way, prove that the Moon landings are fake or didn't happen.
Think of it like this:
- You score minus one point for every nonsense theory you've ever backed that turns out to be nonsense. Every minor incident like this.
- You score zero points for any theory that's unproven or subjective.
- You score one point for every one that remains is confirmed true by reliable sources (note: YouTube, Wikipedia etc. are *not* reliable sources, though they might be convenient for troll-bashing).
If your lifetime score is zero or negative, you're not someone to listen to.
If your lifetime score is positive, then maybe you can be listened to.
In my experience, the reason every conspiracy theorist has *so many* theories is not that they are reinforcing their case in one area, but because when "okay, maybe I was wrong but... " happens, then they are shielded by a thousand others that "may be right". It's the shotgun method.
That's not how reputation works.
Reputation works because, for countless scientists over decades, their work has proven to be true even when it looked like nonsense and was incredibly difficult to understand and predicted radical flaws in the entirety of science that prompted revelations, testing, and investigation and were found to be true. Every nonsense that they got categorically wrong, they lose reputation for. Those people in negative reputation are not famous, not listened to, and continue to spout nonsense (David Icke, the ECat people, etc.) no matter what their qualification. Those people who get even into positive scores are heeded and respected. It's an extremely hard thing to do, to provide something new that nobody has ever seen before and which is proven correct... that's why PhD's take so long and are so hard to earn, and can be revoked in a trice.
I also know someone with multiple PhDs and several degrees who believes some absolute nonsense. He might know what he's doing in certain areas, but in all others he would be laughed at for asserting an incorrect notion.
Guess what? NASA is, was, and still will be full of PhDs. What you have is not "conspiracy theory"-itis. It's "anti-meritocracy". You want to be better than a room-ful of PhDs because you've probably not got one (nor do I, by the way, I've just worked among those people long enough to know that I can't grasp the kinds of things they learn for enjoyment as a side-track to their actual main work).
Unfortunately, your reputation, being associated with the nonsense you present, is already in the negative. It's just that bad. To realise how bad it is, you have to have some sense of these things. It's hard to know you're being stupid if you are starting from the base of "I'm stupid".
People like you will always exist. But at no point is anyone ever going to go "Oh, look, the Moon landings WERE fake..." and get that as an accepted theory. It just isn't going to happen. The weight of evidence is *so* far the other way that you can't even understand how much nonsense it would be to claim otherwise.
If you want to be taken seriously, work on making the score positive. Not parroting bad and debunked arguments about blurry photos, tiny scraps of unoriginal footage, and completely poor understanding of simple physics.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
