38
votes
Apollo moon landing conspiracy theories were early hints of the dangerous anti-vax, antiscience beliefs backed by politicians today
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Title
- Moon Landing Denial Fired an Early Antiscience Conspiracy Theory Shot
- Authors
- Phil Plait
- Word count
- 1224 words
archive link
Moon landing? Why not various, mostly anti-Semitic, Nazi conspiracy theories, or AIDS epidemic conspiracy theories, or Kansas flu 1918 conspiracy theories? Strange choice.
this is one of the more frustrating and pointless flavors of Tildes comments
article: A is an example of B
comments: what about C, D, E, and F? those are examples of B too. why didn't the author write about them?
the article is not claiming "here's an exhaustive list of all the examples of B in the world". it's not claiming "A is the definitive example of B, it puts all the other examples of the phenomenon to shame". articles don't need to encompass the entire universe of the subject they're discussing.
these flourished prior to WW2, but after the Holocaust, discussing anti-semitic conspiracy theories would typically get you viewed as a neo-Nazi. they were (correctly) seen as very harmful ideas to spread, which limited their spread among "polite society".
these came about after the moon landing conspiracy theories. I think you could make an argument that they're part of the general trend that the author is describing.
the article you linked gives examples of rumors and conspiracy theories that were present at the time, but I don't get the impression that they took on a life of their own and persisted over the decades the way moon landing theories have.
as the author says:
the "harmless fun" aspect of moon landing conspiracies is I think a crucial part of what he's talking about, which isn't the case with any of the other examples you list. moon landing conspiracies can act as a sort of "gateway drug" to the broader world of "if they're lying about that, what else are they lying about?" conspiratorial thinking.
I’m guessing it’s because the author’s area of expertise is space.
Phil Plait’s online persona is “The Bad Astronomer”.
I definitely see why he would refer to something from his own experience for a comparison in the text, but it makes the headline sound bizarre to me. There were so many "warning signs" because this phenomenon is ageless, and this particular conspo isn't particularly related.
In general I'm not comfortable with stating an instance of something was a warning sign of another instance of the same thing. But maybe I'm being pedantic.
I don't think the author was saying that all conspiracy theories originated from the Apollo hoax conspiracy, was he? Apollo is just particularly visible, and better illustrates his point that accepting seemingly harmless nonsense can lead to acceptance of very clearly harmful nonsense.
Or the fears of "yellow peril" prominent in the US in the late 19th and early 20th century. Or eugenics, which was very popular in the UK (where it originated with Galton, Pearson, etc.) and elsewhere (where it spread).