‘The lunacy is getting more intense’: how Birds Aren’t Real took on the conspiracy theorists
On a march, Peter McIndoe held up a sign and talked about how the ‘deep state’ had replaced all birds with drones. It was meant as a small act of satire but has become a mass movement. (The Guardian)
So I read this headline, feeling all kinds of “PISSED OFF-NESS”, not intending to read the article itself, because I thought YUP, in the ERA of Trump and POST Trump, falling fast to the lowest common denominator is what way too many Americans have decided to do! But I decided that maybe there was more to the eye than a simple SCREAMING HEADLINE…so I indeed read the entire article to find that the original intent of one man to claim BIRDS AREN’T REAL was to poke fun at the sheer nonsense of WAY TOO MANY PEOPLE, to just REMAIN DUMB AS SHIT!
AND IT WORKED…It’s a vivid dramatisation of how divisive conspiracy theories are; people who believe them live in another world, where any wild theory flies and even the most fleeting attempt to fact check it or test it against logic (if birds have been destroyed, who’s eating all the worms?) marks you out as a brainwashed liberal. People who don’t believe them cannot think themselves into the headspace of those who do. Then along comes a guy with a sign, and maybe he’s not bridging this implacable divide, but he’s certainly disrupting it. (The Guardian) …What an awful world in which we live, when so many prefer to NOT THINK about truth or facts or reason, BUT DECIDE that the DUMBER one can become makes for a BETTER kind of person!
