WOK reason and conspiracy theories

[Lee Brentnell]

From the conspiracies below choose 2 to "debunk". In your debunking you must identify the fallacy/fallacies involved. Make each response a separate post.

1) In the play Macbeth, lady Macbeth couldn't kill the king because he looked like her father. She couldn't do it because it WAS her father. As all good fathers would, He tried to set his daughter on the throne, because he wanted the best for his daughter. He killed the king for her, heard someone coming, stashed the body and jumped into the bed to cover his tracks. When she left he put the body back on the bed and left, and got the throne for his daughter. 

2) The past 8 Late Stops have occurred in block 3, so John was positive that the next one would not be in block 3. He decided to go out for lunch with his friends and walked into class 30 minutes late. Unfortunately for john, it was yet another late stop in block 3.  

3) Tom Riddle is a wizard. Half-blood, but a wizard none the less. When his muggle friends ask him to show him a magic trick, his wand snapped in half before he was able to cast a spell to prove that he is indeed a wizard. I guess Tom's muggle friends will just have to take his word on it then. 

4) "Ben made a Tumblr post about ""First World Problems"" that he tragically faces on a daily basis such as his phone battery being at 9%, but his charger is in another room, and not being able to hear the TV when eating crunchy snacks. But after seeing this, a Tumblr user sent him an anonymous message that reads: "Be thankful for the things you have because there are people who aren't half as fortunate as you are. They don't have ""first world problems"", but they have even worse problems--no clean water, little to no food, and poor work conditions in minimum wage jobs."

6)"Human rights organizations believe that all politicians are corrupt. This is how we know that all politicians are corrupting the world."

7) "For homework, a student was asked to measure how long it takes for him to fall asleep on the following Saturday night. So in order to record how long he slept, the student took a ruler to bed with him before he went to sleep on the following Saturday night."

8) "Bob believes that there is no point studying Shakespeare’s writing because Shakespeare’s writing is full of nonsense. Bob tells his friends that the modern scholars who are still arguing over the meaning behind many of Shakespeare’s work are wasting their time because there is no meaning behind the senseless words."

9) If you're reading this after 12/21/12, the world has ended after all. While the end of the Mayan calendar is meant the end of life. We have all died and this is our afterlife. 

The Aids virus was created in a laboratory - Based on the theories of Dr. William Campbell Douglass, many believe that that HIV was genetically engineered in 1974 by the World Health Organization. Cancer was made to be a million dollar idea but WHO did not give out the cure to make money of the governments.

10) In the last century, numerous ships, small boats and aircrafts have purportedly vanished within the infamous Bermuda Triangle, or as some call it "The Devil's Triangle". Albert Einstein postulated that a curvature of space would cause even light to bend through it. Some theorists believe that "Time'", as a force of nature, can also get warped based on your location. The Bermuda Triangle is thus one location on earth where the fabric of time is so thin that travelers can slip through it and emerge on the other side of a completely different time. The Bermuda Triangle is time travel machine!!

11) "More homosexual men are watching basketball because a basketball idol has revealed himself as part of the gay community. Presumably the idol was paid off to “opening up” in order to generate more income into the sports world by getting more participants from the gay community."

12) "The Chinese using their one child per family policy in hopes of reducing their population base was ineffective, resulting in them using a modified flu virus. They are covering it up by putting the blames on birds, calling it the bird flu virus."

13) "The US city of Boston attack was organized and carried out by Russian sleeper cell agents from the cold war. The attack was not a demonstration of strength but rather one to simply convey a message to the people or the government."

14) The UN is secretly the puppet master behind the worlds governments, and eventually they will take over the world. They've already started with Africa...

15) Clothing companies design socks to unravel whilst in the dryer, one in each pair, so that consumers are forced to buy more. Everyone has had at least one sock disappear in the dryer before, myself included. I had to buy a new pair yesterday.

16) across arrow plane still functioning since in the picture they took of the runway with all the planes getting destroyed one is missing from the original numbers.

17) The government of Canada was actually the first to launch something into space, but they couldn't get their shuttle to orbit the earth, and rather, it is orbiting the sun. Canada never told anyone because it believed in letting everyone have a turn at space.

18)  Aliens Run Grande Prairie...

• Already within Grande Prairie there is an upwards of 3’000 aliens! And close to 200 of them don’t even speak English! Yet, we have integrated them into society without noticing. You could be sitting next to an alien right now and not even know it. The citizens of Grande Prairie are so use to aliens that we do not even recognize them anymore - they are simply another part of the day. Therefore, everyone in Grande Prairie at one point or another has conversed with an alien. We have listened and had our views altered by them, all without knowing it. Slowly the ways of Grande Prairie will become distorted with outlandish rituals from these aliens.

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mu7mB4i24Fs&feature=youtu.be

  
  

  19) The American Government Shows Historical Events Through Things They Control.

  • The American Governments uses everything they make to secretly show events of American history. For Example the majority of American bills show the 9/11 attacks

  • Firstly the five dollar bill shows the Twin Towers before the attack

  • The 10 dollar bill shows immediately after the planes both hit

  • The 50 dollar bill show the towers falling

  • And finally the 100 dollar bill shows the last smoke cloud

    

    

  20)  Google Translator Is All Knowing

  • Google Translator is all knowing. It can answer questions that people bring forward to it by translating phrases into another language - commonly Vietnamese - and then translating it back for the response.

  • For example if we type in “Will 2pac ever die?” translate from english to vietnamese then back again we get the answer of “2pac will never die”

    

    • The same thing happens when we type in “will Justin Bieber ever hit puberty”

      

      21) 

      • If so many books about the end of the world are being published, as wells as "prophecies" than it must be going to happen and these people are obviously experts and I should follow them.

      
      

    
    

[Imogen]

Number 2. "The past 8 Late Stops have occurred in block 3, so John was positive that the next one would not be in block 3. He decided to go out for lunch with his friends and walked into class 30 minutes late. Unfortunately for john, it was yet another late stop in block 3"
     Is the gambler's fallacy. John fools himself into thinking that the next block 3 will not be a late stop, citing the amount of recent of late stops. However, there is the same amount of chance as any other day for there to be a late stop.

Number 7. "For homework, a student was asked to measure how long it takes for him to fall asleep on the following Saturday night. So in order to record how long he slept, the student took a ruler to bed with him before he went to sleep on the following Saturday night."

         Ambiguity. The person took the word "measure" not as in "record the length of time" as intended in the statement, but rather they took the word "measure" as in "record the length of an object".

       

[ms.blackrobin]

3) Tom Riddle is a wizard. Half-blood, but a wizard none the less. When his muggle friends ask him to show him a magic trick, his wand snapped in half before he was able to cast a spell to prove that he is indeed a wizard. I guess Tom's muggle friends will just have to take his word on it then.

This is a fallacy fallacy, and is incorrect because through societies general disdain of imaginary "magic" and the head wizards ministers preventing muggles from remembering such things from occurring and since they say no actual reason against or for it.

[Sarah]

6)"Human rights organizations believe that all politicians are corrupt. This is how we know that all politicians are corrupting the world."

The fallacy used is appeal to authority. Human rights organizations use their authority to present false information in place of an actual argument to state that politicians are corrupting the world.

[Nelumi Mendis]

14) The UN is secretly the puppet master behind the worlds governments, and eventually they will take over the world. They've already started with Africa...

Response: Governments make decisions independent of the UN. Fallacy: Appeal to Authority.

[Nelumi Mendis]

10) In the last century, numerous ships, small boats and aircrafts have purportedly vanished within the infamous Bermuda Triangle, or as some call it "The Devil's Triangle". Albert Einstein postulated that a curvature of space would cause even light to bend through it. Some theorists believe that "Time'", as a force of nature, can also get warped based on your location. The Bermuda Triangle is thus one location on earth where the fabric of time is so thin that travelers can slip through it and emerge on the other side of a completely different time. The Bermuda Triangle is time travel machine!!

Fallacy: False Cause. Time Traveling is impossible because we would need to travel faster than the speed of light.

[ms.blackrobin]

20) Google translate is all knowing
This is an anecdote since they are using an isolated incident that has no proof that such a things will actually become true. Also, if it was all knowing and completed it's job correctly, this wouldn't happen
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LMkJuDVJdTw

[Brendon N]

8. Personal incredulity. Bob finds it hard to understand Shakespeare and therefore is a waste of time and no one else should attend it.

[Sarah]

13) "The US city of Boston attack was organized and carried out by Russian sleeper cell agents from the cold war. The attack was not a demonstration of strength but rather one to simply convey a message to the people or the government."

Middle ground because they use the idea that it is a message to the people/government rather than the extreme of a demonstration of of strength.

[Rishabh Choudhary]

15) Clothing companies design socks to unravel whilst in the dryer, one in each pair, so that consumers are forced to buy more. Everyone has had at least one sock disappear in the dryer before, myself included. I had to buy a new pair yesterday.

The fallacy used in this one is composition/division because it is only true about one therefore it does not mean it is true for all. So if one person has lost a sock it does not apply to all. There place inside the dryer for a sock to disappear.

[Brendon N]

16. Incoherent statement. I don't even know.

[shawnsuik]

Number 4 has another fallacy within it - tu quoque - because the second individual returns to argument to the original person

[shawnsuik]

Number 18 has two fallacies - slippery slope and ambiguity

[Brendon N]

12. False cause and begging the question. The one child policy is not related to the bird flu virus, which can't be explained by saying the government started it.

[shawnsuik]

Number 4 also has the fallacy of - appeal to emotion