Thursday, April 30, 2009

Power of Suggestion and "Science"

´WIP

I plan to review this video here in detail:



It's a hidden camera prank from an old comedy show in Turkey. So its in Turkish but it's content is remarkable, so I'll go with it. It's related to "Swine Flu", "AIDS" etc... All the highly "praised" diseases. And it's the best example I know of. Actually it's also related to things like Global Warming.

To sum it up for now: While the victim is eating at the restaurant, suddenly an ambulance arrives and they try to take him to the hospital, as if there's a medical emergency. At first, not knowing what is going on, he resists and tries to push them away. But when his friend too suggests that he should get on the wheeled bed, he stops resisting. He asks if he looks pale or something, and his friend confirms. From that moment on he's convinced that there really is a medical emergency that he wasn't aware of for some reason. He suspects that there was something wrong with the food. At one stage, the victim even scorns the comedian in disguise when he asks irrelevant questions while our victim is "heading towards death" in his own words. After a while they tell him that he actually looks ok and then it is "revealed" that they got the wrong guy at the wrong restaurant. But interestingly even after that revelation our victim is still angry and says somewhat irrational things like "What if I really died!?". Then it goes on for a while but that part is not relevant to the power of suggestions.

How all that is related to "scientific" propaganda, I leave it to you for now. I'll just say that back then, when I was still a believer in the "global warming", I really was convinced that the temperatures were significantly and dangerously rising. It was easy to see the evidence for it. But immediately after I became skeptical it all began to seem pretty normal again. Similar with AIDS, flu etc. Think confirmation bias.

What's also funny is that I would preach my parents about the terrible global warming which is going to destroy my future and all that. My father would say to me that there have always been some doomsday scenarios like global warming in the past, and he was fairly skeptical. But of course the evidence was so obvious and all the glorious "scientists" were insisting that it was true. So my father's skepticism would appear very silly to me. Now I know better. But I really was a hardcore global warming zealot once. I can write a little more about that later I guess...
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