What do CTs remind you of?

[Pebble]

The problem with that is that people can always find reasoning for things, regardless of how bizarre or equally sublime it may be. You have to consider what the reasons are before considereing if they are relevant, otherwise you'll always be thinking inside a very small box.

Not sure I follow this line of reasoning. During a three year period the birthrate in Stockholm correlated with the number of storks nesting nearby. No such correlation is found elswhere in the world, no such correlation was found in Stockholm before or since. The reason for the observed correlation was chance.


Given the infinite number of possible associations to examine such random associations are inevitable. Further indirect links between correlated events are common. Sunlight exposure is linked to skin cancer, sunlight exposure is linked to vitamin D levels, so reduced fracture rate is linked to skin cancer.

The first question must surely be - is the apparent relationship real, and the second question must be are there confounding factors that explain the association. Then one moves on to what is the reason for the association.

[Spring Heeled Jack]

To belatedly return to the title of this thread, CTs ultimately remind me of the phrase: "A big boy did it and ran away." Surely this must have been the very first CT? Two hairy old Neanderthals called Drodbar and Gorbly probably came up with it during an argument over who shat the bed.

Another thing CTs remind me of is fairly tales. There's the same kind of magical thinking involved. Why does Rapunzel have impossibly long hair? Why is the wolf incapable of just pouncing on Little Red Riding Hood while she's walking through the forest, as opposed to all that pretending-to-be-grandma kerfuffle? Why would the Wicked Witch of the West (or Mel Gibson's space aliens) just happen to be violently allergic to water? Who cares!! If these things were not so, the story wouldn't work.

And that's why Harry Potter always has exactly the right gadget he needs to defeat Lord Mouldyfart, which just happens to have been given to him for some utterly trivial reason, and Superman is constantly bombarded with hundreds of tons of a mineral that ought to be rarer than wise remarks from George W. Bush, otherwise the comic would consist entirely of Lex Luthor being spanked. Which might appeal to a certain audience, now I think about it.

Anyway, CTs are exactly the same. You choose your highly improbable conclusion - NASA didn't send anybody to the Moon, the Holocaust didn't happen, the Queen is a cannibal space lizard - and then rewrite absolutely everything that disagrees with your inarguable fact. This is yer classic circular reasoning.

I think it was John Keel who pointed out that in order to disbelieve the Holocaust, you have to assume the existence of a conspiracy capable of manipulating the media so completely that it's a wild leap of faith to accept that World War 2 happened at all. Likewise, if the USA never went to the Moon, the USSR could have won a massive propaganda victory simply by discovering this fact. But for some reason they never did, even though it's plainly apparent to thousands of ranting nutters in tinfoil beanies. The only rational explanation is that of course the Russians knew, but they were in on it too because... And before you know it, the entire Cold War is just make-believe for some incredibly convoluted reason involving aliens.

I would like to ask the CT believers, and especially the Moon Hoax ranters, the following question. I freely admit that it is the case that some of the official NASA publicity photos of astronauts on the Moon appear to have been retouched. Now, if you look closely at a large number of wedding photos taken by professional photographers, you will discover a surprising amount of blatant retouching. Does this prove that weddings don't really happen and everybody else in the world is gay but for some reason, doubtless involving aliens, they haven't told me?

And by the way, could this explain why aliens are so keen on sticking big things up peoples' bottoms?