has hit a bit of a nerve in myself. As you may know, there has been recent catastrophic flooding in Nepal. The Prime Minister has asked for more action on climate change, as the flooding was attributed to a melting glacier. Eric Moutsos starts his argument with several inflammatory statements on climate change. He mocks requests to cut back on emissions on a personal level, saying (sarcastically) how he “felt bad” about using oil to power his AC or to eat beef later that night because “the cow farted 20,000 times in its lifetime.” After this, he claims that the news agencies are “all pushing climate change at the same time” as evidence to say that a conspiracy is occurring. The major point in his argument is that the different news outlets reported a 33 missing person statistic in different ways (such as saying that 33 British folks were missing, or 33 missing Americans, or missing people from 33 countries), which he says is obvious proof that climate change is a scam and that forced climate lockdowns are coming. He seems to have a lot of unstated assumptions involved, as he mentions a “predator Satanic master class that controls almost everything and wants 95% of the population dead” casually and with no evidence and/or explanation as to what he meant.
I try to be a good friend and will occasionally view what my friend sends me, but this one particular guy always strikes a nerve in me. He seems to expect that his audience already has a great deal of the background context arguments in mind when watching his videos (in one video he shows clips on the flooding in Idaho with the caption “There’s no weather warfare in little old Idaho!” and essentially says nothing but stare at the camera as he just shows people’s reporting of the weather).
I guess my question is, how does the 33 value prove anything? Does anyone have any more context on these arguments than I do?
Sounds you are fed serious conspiracy stuff. I would let this kind of claims be without investing time to correcting false claims because such conspiracy people seldom listen to sound facts.
It is of course worse if the person is a friend that you want to keep as a friend. Trying to correct false claims may lead to loosing the friendship. If that is the consequence, you might ask the question if the friendship was ever true friendship.
Well, I say “friend” but they are actually a relative of mine. I didn’t want to reveal too much of their information but generally we get along very well except on grounds of conspiracy stuff (which I try to avoid to the best of my abilities).
It doesn’t, because not only have a lot of numbers have been given for different things (people missing from different countries), but those numbers have been changing daily as more information accrues and more people are reported missing. Finding half-a-dozen instances of the same number means nothing.
How likely is it that one of the numbers of missing Brits reported is is the same as one of the number of missing Americans (at a different time) and one of the number of countries involved (at yet another different time)? This is no more evidence of a conspiracy than is finding two people at a party have the same birthday.
Even if those numbers were fake, it wouldn’t mean anything about climate change, only about journalistic accuracy, fact-checking or integrity. Since when would three reporters reporting the same number of UK casualties and US casualties and countries involved mean there is a global conspiracy? It could simply be a couple of mistakes. He’s a loon who’s preying on the gullibility of his supporters.
Did you notice that one of his references to ‘33’ was some-one’s age?
I think so. I guess what he is trying to claim is that since no one can agree on what the number is meant to be, the number is fake, and therefore so is the floods or something. Now that I think about it more, it is very ridiculous to try and claim that the death count number of a very obviously catastrophic flood proves that something about it was fake. What, are they going to have to fudge the numbers that have leveled entire cities? It is very unfortunate that he even goes to this extent with his claims.
I actually did some research (as one of his commenters suggested “Ever notice that it’s always 33?”) on the number 33 and I guess it has to do something with the Freemasons and a little bit with old Christian thought (the same way that since people thought that Judas was the 13th to sit down at the Last Supper, the number 13 is cursed and therefore whenever it is used, it means something demonic).
It always gets me when people will try to discredit climate arguments, not by arguing the science but by trying to discredit the people saying the stuff (and not even the scientists; the politicians, which is such an unfair thing to do because they are already incredible as is!).
One person in our congregation bought a used car with 666 on the license plate. She is a conservative believer with an evangelist mindset and thought that the plate would be suitable for such a person as she is. If someone comments about the plate, it is a good starting point to discussions about God and what Jesus did.
We can have a negative attitude towards ‘wrong’ numbers or we can see them from the positive viewpoint that God is the Creator and Ruler above anything else and if we are His children, we do not have to fear anything.
Nowadays, the real ‘666 people’ tend to avoid the 666 signs. They prefer ‘999’, ‘FFF’ or comparable signs that give the same message but do not provoke overreactions in the persons who are sensitive to 666.
The word for your friend’s interest, I’ll call it, is apophenia, the human tendency to perceive meaningful patterns, connections, or relationships in random or unrelated data, events, or objects.
Wikipedia makes the history of the word really exciting, I think, by telling us that the word comes to us, thanks to German psychiatrist Klaus Conrad, who in his 1958 publication on the beginning stages of schizophrenia, defined it as “unmotivated seeing of connections [accompanied by] a specific feeling of abnormal meaningfulness”.
Eric Moutos is a “rabbit hole” in and of himself: a Salt Lake City policeman who resigned his job, rather than do what he was instructed to do.
I’m open to correction on this: not particularly religious before, he seems to have become a more committed Mormon since his decision.
By the way, speaking from experience, unemployment has a remarkable effect on one’s ability to sort the wheat from the chaff in every day life. The “33” stuff is chaff.
Something more revealing than merely a bad climate argument: Moutsos isn’t offering an alternative explanation of the Nepal disaster. He’s teaching his audience to interpret coincidences as evidence of an already-assumed hidden agency. Once you accept the prior premise that a Satanic elite controls governments, scientists and media and wants to kill 95% of humanity, ordinary coincidences cease to be coincidences: every repeated 33 becomes another “clue.”
“Moutsos often seems not to explain his arguments.” He doesn’t need to for the intended audience. The unstated conspiracy theory is doing most of the argumentative work.
“B.F. Skinner is a psychologist best known for the Skinner Box, a kind of sensory-deprivation device which limits the creature inside it to only one form of stimulus at a time. Using one such box, he discovered ‘superstition’ in pigeons.”
“… pigeons have a compulsion to search for pattern in events around them, the same way we do.”
I would agree that you cannot directly tie one event to climate change, as flash floods and broken ice dams and landslides have been going on since forever, but it is also incorrect to think that it had no part, as retreating glaciers, heavier than usual monsoon rains and waterlogged soft mountainsides all are true, true, and related if on a test.
That is one long sentence. The initial event was a landslide. The question of what triggered that landslide is still open to debate and won’t be settled until investigators can reach the area, but landslides are not unusual. In this case it was more the size of the landslide.
Melt and glacier instability due to softening and lubrication go hand in hand. Climbers up Everest cross the lower ice field prior to dawn to mitigate the risk of movement with warmer temperatures.
I can relate. I was talking to someone the other day who asked me who I thought was the “worst Christian” which is a weird question to ask. He proceeded to claim that the worst Christian was Francis Collins (due to conspiracy theories surrounding the COVID-19 vaccine). I think there are some people who just live in alternate realities and you might just need to avoid that topic to maintain a relationship with them.
I unfortunately have to agree with you. Too many people look at life with a political lens first and everything else second. As someone who previously lived in that mentality, it is scary to look back and think that you lived life always assuming you were doing the best Christian thing when, in reality, your actions were best serving a political party, not Jesus or God.