The Sceptic’s Guide To Spotting Bullshit

The internet is packed with bullshit.

There’s a whole range of nonsense to be found, thousands of sites devoted to woo, and entire corners of the web devoted to crack-pottery. In lieu of a more thought-out, extensive post I thought I’d throw together a list of a couple things that can very often be indicators to the fact that the website you’ve stumbled upon is spouting bullshit.

Enjoy.

1. The writer seems to have a serious fetish for the word ‘truth’ and will use it in everything from the title to each and every post.
2. The words ‘New World Order’, ‘Illuminati’ and/or ‘Jews’ are used in the same sentence.
3. Info Wars is linked without any trace of sarcasm.
4. The reader is frequently exonerated to “wake up”, or posts are ended with a call for America/the world to “open their eyes”.
5. ‘False Flag Operations’ are mentioned and discussed with reckless abandon.
6. Crude and blurry images with red lines added in MS Paint make up the bulk of the images posted.
7. Monsanto is viewed as something akin to the Antichrist.
8. The phrase “wake up sheeple” is used without irony.
9. Ghandi’s “first they ignore you…” quote is referenced frequently.
10. Any Youtube videos linked will always have their titles in all-caps. Because nothing says credible like all-caps.
11. Any text used in an image must be bright red. Because red is a colour that works on anything.
12. Alex Jones is cited as an expert.

If you guys have any further points you’d like to add to the list, feel free to mention them in the comments.

Sorry, Conspiracy Theorists, The Moon Landings Were Legit

Question: did we really put men on the moon? Answer: Yes, yes we did.

Ever since we first put a man on the moon, some people have spent a lot of time trying to claim that we didn’t.

Likely first initiated by Bill Kaysing, a NASA librarian who wrote the book ‘We Never Went to the Moon’, the moon landing hoax movement is still prevalent to this day;[1] as late as 2001 Fox TV (a wonderful, reliable and totally unbiased source of news, information and opinion) was broadcasting documentaries entitled Conspiracy Theory: Did We Really Land on the Moon?[2]

Verification of these landings that are conclusive enough to satisfy most people has been notoriously difficult; in 2009 there was “tantalizing evidence the flags from Apollo 17 was still standing, but the images were just barely too fuzzy to know for sure”.[3] A frustrating experience for everyone involved but fear not, because just three years later we might finally have some verification.

Just a few days ago the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Camera captured the pictures shown below:

Turns out the landing site of Apollo 16 is still very much still there; even the footprints and the flag.

Some pretty impressive stuff, all in all, and some very solid evidence to show that we did indeed make it to the moon.

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[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Kaysing

[2] http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2001/ast23feb_2/

[3] blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2012/07/31/and-the-flags-are-still-there/