I know the US isn’t perfect, and certainly the government HAS lied to us before. The Gulf of Tonkin incident and stunts like Watergate come to mind.
But what is it about people who are willing to believe ANY conspiracy story no matter how ridiculous, especially if it makes the US look bad. People who actually believe the moon landing was faked, that we destroyed the WTC and that the US controls weather globally with HAARP.
Now I can understand why some people believe certain silly things that have exciting implications, such as alien bodies and spaceships at Area 51, the Bermuda Triangle mysteries, certain theories about the pyramids and of course the astounding predictions of Nostradamus. If any of the above were true, it would mean there is much, much more to the purpose and meaning of our lives than we currently know. I don’t even want to get into religions, especially some of the more exciting ones.
But I’m talking about people who believe things simply because it makes America “bad.” And they are even willing to accept extremely questionable sources for this information like the Soviet Union during the Cold War and Al Jazzera recently.
I can remember in the mid 1980s when this was simply accepted as FACT by many Americans, that AIDS was a US bio weapon experiment that went wrong, or in most instances one that got away from it’s intended target. I actually remember people saying we deserved US deaths from AIDS because we intentionally infected the African population hoping to eliminate them completely either for land or resources.
Even after it was exposed, there are still people who continue to believe it to this day. I never cease to be amazed at what many people will believe without even questioning any of it. Unless it comes from the US government, then of course it is all lies, conspiracies and cover ups.
I think the answer to many of your questions is the actual truth is so murky as to be almost unknowable. We only “Know” what the government and media chooses to tell us.
I believe that if the government wanted to fake things like landing men on the moon it is entirely possible for them to do so. Governments have performed similar act of disinformation in the past.
Are you sure these people hate their country? Maybe they just have a severe distrust for those in power, not saying it is justified. However what you are describing sounds more like someone who doesn’t like the government, not necessarily the country.
A country and it’s government are not one and the same.
I don’t want to sidetrack this discussion but there is actual physical evidence on the moon of us having been there. That evidence is veiwable from the earth with the proper equipment.
And that is why I referenced Gulf of Tonkin and similar incidents. However regarding the moon landing, WTC conspiracy and things like that…NO government has ever faked something on that scale. You don’t have to simply accept the “US version” for validity, the fact that the Soviet Union ceased trying to get a man on the moon and other outside variables which conclusively demonstrate the truth are all over the place and require a determined effort to ignore.
Well they hate the government enough to undermine and harm the country. I guess that is hating the country by proxy. If you are willing to accept organized propaganda efforts from Hanoi, the USSR, Nazi Germany or Al Jazzera in preference to the truth because they fit a general anti US sentiment that one supports I think that probably qualifies. It is quite a distinction from simply not accepting everything you are told by the US government.
I wonder how many of these people have ever been outside of the US? A tour in the ROK in the early 1970’s sure helped to change my perspective on life.
Most of the time people like this lack the proper perspective.
I recently spoke to someone who was whining about how he saw a Bill Maher factoid that the top 400 wealthiest Americans had more money than the bottom 100 million. I’m not sure of the exact numbers, but you get my point.
I then replied, if you think that’s bad, try checking out how the wealthiest 400 in China, Russia, Mexico, any African country, you name it, compare to their poor. We have some of the most well-off poor people in this country.
He gave this some thought and agreed that it was all about the relative perspective that people have on a topic.
It also strikes me as curious how the same folks that routinely deride the government as the exemplar of bureaucratic incompetence and institutionalized ignorance can, with nary a pause to catch their breath, accuse the same government of conspiratorial misconduct of unimaginable complexity.
That kind of thinking requires some genuine pretzel logic.
Operation Fortitude http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Fortitude was an disinformation program of immense proportions. The size of this program was certainly on par with the Apollo program.
Playing the devil’s advocate, you are assuming the Soviets abandoned efforts to put a man on the moon because we allegedly got there first. Perhaps they stopped because they determined it was not possible due to the high radiation levels encountered in the Van Allen belt.
If you discount the Apollo missions humans have never put an astronaut beyond low earth orbit in the 60+ years of space flight. Why is that?
Well there are some very low quality grainy images of what may be a lunar lander taken from a moon orbiting satellite.
Such an image provides evidence that we put equipment on the moon as did the Soviets. What it doesn’t prove is that humans actually were on that equipment at least any more than putting a 57 Chevy at the bottom of the Marianas trench would prove that a person drove it there.
I love this country. Thats why I hate the elitist bankers/corporations that run this country from behind the scenes.
I hate how they are destroying what so many people fought and gave their lives to build. I hate how they want to treat us like cattle, take away our rights and liberties just because they want absolute control.
Why have the Soviets not proven that we did not go to the moon? If these extremely high levels of radiation would 100% for sure prevent the US from reaching the moon, and the Soviets knew that, don’t you think they would have said something?
Could you imagine if in 1976 the Soviet Union published absolute data showing the moon landing was a hoax? We would probably be communist right now.
I love the original Idea that was America (as expressed by many of our founding fathers and documents), and I love the many Americans who still believe in honor, courage, faith, family, integrity, hard work, justice, and the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Anybody who’s basically on board with that, regardless of their religious beliefs is in my book a true American, someone who embraces what the founders wanted us to become.
However, I do hate 3 specific aspects of our modern landscape that are becoming impossible to avoid:
The increasingly intrusive government. Basically, Big Brother is a reality and rapidly expanding control over our lives.
The sheeple who passively sit by, who believe what the mass media and the institutions of higher propaganda tell them, and they stupidly enable the intrusive government. These Americans (the “fat, dumb, and happy” kind who voted blindly for BHO and other destructive politicians), are killing us. These are the folks that Alexis De Toqueville wrote about in the 19th century, when he predicted our democracy would be history once the “herd” figured out they could vote themselves benefits from the public treasury.
The hostile socialist/progressive types who are working actively to undermine the original Idea of America. They want to “fundamentally change America” into something other than what it was founded on. This includes folks ranging from George Soros and the President, all the way down to the “Occupy” crowd and the socialists who want to force us to accept their radical social agenda and support it with our tax dollars. These folks have no problem using government to restrict the freedoms of others when it fits their agenda, as with BHO forcing the Catholics to provide abortions and contraception against their own beliefs.
That is the one I love most, that George Bush Jr. who is generally regarded as a D student pulled off the most complex and elaborate subterfuge in the history of humanity and despite the overwhelming evidence of a conspiracy all over the internet, he remains so powerful that no national media will even begin to challenge him and the entire Congress is also involved.
Fortitude was impressive, but hardly in the same class as faking a moon landing.
I think the Russians were astute enough to recognize that if the radiation belts didn’t cause a problem with Yuri Gagarin in Earth orbit (where they actually exist) they would pose no problem on the moon (where they don’t exist.).
Because we did it several times, it was hugely expensive and we couldn’t continue to justify the cost just to have astronauts play golf and ride dune buggies on the moon. Now if we found moon gold, secret pockets of atmosphere or really sexy cat women we’d probably have kept going.
That and we mostly shifted our efforts to Mars and other planets and gaining useful data from them.
Hating your country and questioning your government’s motivations, intentions and what’s going on behind the scenes are two totally different things. Our country and it’s government have been involved in some seriously shady shit through out the past couple hundred years. I’m off to spend time with the family but will be happy to post more examples tomorrow, here’s a quick example.
Tuskegee syphilis experiment. Here’s an excerpt from good ol’ Wiki and if you don’t like it you can Google for a bunch more evidence.
The Tuskegee syphilis experiment[1] (also known as the Tuskegee syphilis study or Public Health Service syphilis study) was an infamous clinical study conducted between 1932 and 1972 in Tuskegee, Alabama by the U.S. Public Health Service to study the natural progression of untreated syphilis in poor, rural black men who thought they were receiving free health care from the U.S. government.
The Public Health Service, working with the Tuskegee Institute, began the study in 1932. Investigators enrolled in the study a total of 600 impoverished, African-American sharecroppers from Macon County, Alabama; 399 who had previously contracted syphilis before the study began, and 201 without the disease. For participating in the study, the men were given free medical care, meals, and free burial insurance. They were never told they had syphilis, nor were they ever treated for it. According to the Centers for Disease Control, the men were told they were being treated for “bad blood,” a local term used to describe several illnesses, including syphilis, anemia and fatigue.