Flat like a pizza

There's a saying in Senegal: "There are thirty different kinds of lunacy, but only one kind of common sense."  I found an especially good example of that yesterday over at Inverse, where I found out that there is a feud brewing between the Pizzagate conspiracy theorists and the Flat Earthers.

If you're not familiar with "Pizzagate," it's the idea that Hillary Clinton, George Soros, et al. have been using pizza restaurants as fronts for a nationwide child trafficking operation, and also that you can turn anything, however ridiculous, into a scandal if you simply add the suffix "-gate.".  The whole thing got started with some (allegedly) coded emails between Clinton and staffers over getting pizza for lunch, and blew up from there.  It's resulted in harassment and death threats for the owners of the pizza restaurants involved, and has refused to go away despite repeated thorough debunkings.

Well, there's nothing like believing in one ridiculous idea to make you think that everyone else's ridiculous ideas are completely laughable.  David Seaman, who is a prominent Pizzagate "truther" (as of the writing of this post, his latest tweet says, "Friends: if something happens to me, I want big fucking protests in front of COMET PIZZA in DC every day.  Sickos"), made the tactical error of calling out the Flat Earthers, via yet another tweet, this one saying, "I have it, on authority, Flat Earth is PAID DISINFORMATION to distract from Pizzagate & other Wikileaks reveals to come."

Here's a direct quote from an informational video Seaman made about the topic:

So Flat Earth theory is some kind of weird disinformation campaign, some sort of psyop to make people not believe. The fact that it shows up so closely whenever Pedodate and Pizzagate are mentioned, the fact that that’s when it pops up, I think it’s designed to muddy the waters … whoever’s pushing it continually, it does appear to be a disinformation campaign.

So basically, people are getting checks (from Soros himself, presumably, since he's someone who would have the necessary discretionary income) to convince everyone that the Earth isn't an oblate spheroid, because that would cause us all to be in such disarray that we'd ignore the idea that Hillary Clinton is running a pedophilia ring in the back of a dozen or so pizza restaurants.

Sure.  Makes total sense to me.

Well, far be it from the Flat Earthers to take that lying down.  One of them, Maggie Sargent, took to Twitter in high dudgeon a couple of days ago, and had hot words for Seaman:

All the Flat Earth people are saying is to question everything we have been told.  NASA is run by the federal government and if the federal government can traffic children and cover it up perhaps they made up the entire idea that the earth is round and it's all supposed to take us away from God.  I don't know what to believe either way but you shouldn't be rude to the flat-earth people.  There is a perfectly logical thought process between pizzagate and Flat Earth.  Not everybody thinks like you do.  We're all just trying to figure it out here so you should always be gracious to everyone who questions the government.

Yes!  Right!  What?

Of course, we probably shouldn't expect too much of Sargent, because one of her recent tweets was:

What if the Earth is a dimension?  Not flat, not round.  But like a video game.  This stuff is coming into my Consciousness for some reason.

What the hell does that even mean?  "The Earth is a dimension?"  Like, for example, width?

So the feud continues, with each side arguing that their lunacy is the right lunacy, and everyone else's is actual lunacy.  And the rest of us are just sitting here like this:

So that's our dip in the deep end of the pool for today.  Me, I'm just waiting for the crystal energies, HAARP, and Illuminati people to get involved, and it'll be all-out war, until finally they just self-annihilate in a massive explosion of daftness.  I've already got my popcorn popped.

Deflating "Pizzagate"

A question I get asked a lot is why, here in Skeptophilia, I take time away from serious matters to look at the lunatic fringe, as I did yesterday with my piece on the reappearance of Mothman.  Let the weirdos be weird, seems to be the gist.  You're not going to convince them, you're not going to expunge all weirdos from the world, so it really is kind of pointless.  One friend said it was a little like masturbation; it makes you feel good for a little while, but in the end it doesn't really accomplish anything.

Well, I obviously disagree, because I keep at it on a daily basis.  (Writing Skeptophilia, I mean, not masturbating.)  And I do think there's a point to highlighting the activities of the loonies -- two, in fact.  First, there is the unfortunate tendency that once you've accepted one crazy idea, you're more likely to fall for others, because you've abandoned evidence and logic as the sine qua non of understanding.  Second, there's the even more unfortunate tendency that given enough encouragement, the wingnuts sometimes act on their beliefs.

This all comes up because of a Skeptophilia frequent flier, namely Alex Jones, who in the last few weeks has been ranting about something called "Pizzagate."  Which brings something else up, namely the fact that the media's tendency to turn anything into a scandal by adding "-gate" to the end of it really grinds my gears.  This annoys me almost as much as Alex Jones does himself, which is saying something, because if I had to choose between a root canal and listening to an entire episode of InfoWars, I'd choose the root canal because at least then I'd get some good drugs to help me through the experience.

But I digress.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Anyhow, "Pizzagate" is the insane idea that Hillary and Bill Clinton and various other influential people in the Democratic Party are using the Washington D. C. pizza joint "Comet Ping Pong" as a front for pedophilia and satanic rituals.  At first, the owner of Comet Ping Pong, James Alefantis, tried to go online and defend himself from the allegations, but I'm sure you can predict how successful that was.  The message "Don't let up.  #PIZZAGATE Everywhere!" was posted on Twitter and got thousands of likes and reposts.  "It was like trying to shoot a swarm of bees with a gun," said Bryce Reh, Comet's general manager, who was nearly pushed into quitting his job because of harassment and death threats.

Then Alex Jones got involved.  He posted a "special message" on his website about how serious Pizzagate was, and the horrible the things they were covering up.  "InfoWars and the Pizzagate investigators are just trying to uncover the truth," he said.

Jones, of course, gets not thousands but millions of views, so suddenly the whole thing exploded.  And a couple of days ago, a guy showed up at Comet Ping Pong with an assault rifle, saying he was there to "do some investigating of Pizzagate" for himself.  He fired off at least one, possibly more, shots, but thankfully no one was injured.

The attacker, Edgar Maddison Welch, said that he heard about the pedophilia ring from Alex Jones and decided he needed to do something about it.

Poor James Alefantis, of course, is just trying to keep a business he's sunk ten years of his life into building from tanking.  "I really hope that all of these people fanning the flames of this conspiracy would take a moment to contemplate what has gone on here today and maybe to stop," he said.  I hope so too, but from experience, I can tell you that once conspiracy theorists latch on to an idea, they never give up.

So a lot of wacky beliefs are harmless, but they establish a pattern.  You stop asking questions, you start trusting purveyors of bullshit like Alex Jones, and all of a sudden you move from "odd but not a problem" to "possible incitement to do some serious damage."  And that's why I spend so much time railing against the woo-woos -- even those who, on the surface, seem pretty innocuous.

I'll keep after the big stuff, too.  As you know if you have read this blog for any length of time, I'm not one to suffer in silence.  But the small stuff and the low-hanging fruit deserves some attention too, from time to time.  As the adage goes, "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."  And that applies whether you're headed to someplace nice, or CloudCuckooLand.