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 |    Not for the faint of art. |
| “If they can put a man on the moon, why can’t they put all of them there?” PROMPT July 20th In 1969, Neil Armstrong first set foot on the moon. Afterward, people commonly complained, “If they can put a man on the moon, why can’t they ______.” How would you finish that statement today? make moon landing hoax conspiracy "theories" go away. Seriously, this is the stupidest damn thing since flat-earth bullshit. This nonsense pisses me off more than other nonsense, though. And I'll try to put the reason why into words, but I'm not sure I'll be successful. There has always been an undercurrent of willful ignorance in humanity in general and the US in particular. I think people want absolutes, but there's no such thing, so there's backlash. "What do we really know, anyway? How dare we try to find the answers when we're merely human?" That sort of epistemological bullshit. The Apollo program, political though it was, and born out of the worst case of national dick-measuring to ever consume two countries, was one of the greatest achievements of humankind. Taking a cue from the concentrated effort we made in World War II to construct nuclear weapons, we used the same sort of scientific/technological think-tank approach, not for the purpose of blowing people up (though that was always a hazard with the kind of propellants they used), but for a peaceful project. And there's no doubt that it happened. I mean, we can be as certain about it as we can be about anything. Hell, faking it in 1969 would have cost even more money than the actual moon landing did, and you'd have to somehow convince thousands of people to keep the cover-up a secret. People who worked on the project. People who covered it for the news. People who watched the launches. The astronauts themselves. And yet... I suppose some of these know-nothings just can't wrap their heads around the idea that humankind can actually achieve anything. I really can't think of much else that would motivate the deniers, apart from an abiding contempt for themselves and their fellow humans. It's the same sort of mindset that makes them believe that we couldn't possibly have built the pyramids or Stonehenge or whatever, so it must have been aliens. "I'm stupid and I couldn't have done it; therefore, no one else could have either." I guess. I don't know. To deny the achievement of landing dudes on the moon is to deny the fundamental potential of humanity itself. So really, very little pisses me off more than this sort of thing. I'm not advocating suppression of freedom of speech, but such bullshit has to be met with reality, facts, and, yes, utter scorn. I'm also not advocating punching the idiots who spout that crap. But I don't blame Buzz Aldrin one bit for doing so. |
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