I would love (and I know it will never happen) for just one conspiracy theorist somewhere in the world to prove just one, or even half of one of their claims. My local Professor Conspiracy dropped in for a coffee and has some new theories she is convinced of.
1. The internet is just out there in the sky and is free. We should not be paying for it. Yes, Sir Tim Berners-Lee indeed wanted it to be free, which depending on what you use it for (ie avoiding data hoovers), it can be sort of free. However, I cannot get Professor Conspiracy to understand that the "free" internet cannot be brought into your house without charge for the infrastructure and technology that enables it via the providers. I asked her why then does she not drop her internet provider and just go get it for free herself. Her reply. "But you need to pay someone to bring it into your house. All the wiring and that."
In effect, she is arguing with herself.
2. Amazon was never started by Jeff Bezos. It was started by a conglomerate of supermarkets including Tesco and Sainsbury to rig prices and they put Jeff Bezos in as a token chief executive to make it look like it was started by an individual. It is an offshoot of eBay to force out private sellers. She says that the $150billion USD Jeff Bezos is worth is just a lie and a cover-up.
3. She wants to home-school her grandchildren because what the teachers are teaching them is all lies.
Even the most creative of teachers would be very hard-pressed to lie about the content of the recommended curriculum. Shakespeare was a woman? The capital of Belgium is Toytown? Disneyland is a real country? The Beatles never existed? David Attenborough invented dinosaurs to discourage time travel? Cats have their own internet and it's full of pictures of us?
Meanwhile, I'm still waiting for a Facebook acquaintance (who incessantly says she is a moralist, philosopher and former law student - she loves David Irving claiming he is entitled to his "opinion", so that says it all really!) to prove her claim that the Guardian won't interview her because it and the world's media are all owned by the CIA. Not for the actual reason that her ideas are totally disingenuous, dangerous, contradictory and generally off-the-scale barn pot.
Sadly the thin line between conspiracy theories and the world some folk inhabit has now disappeared.
I pity poor ChatGPT, Writing io, Wordtune and all the other AI bandwagoning clones as they assimilate information. They don't stand a chance!
One of those three-panel "Win a Million" scratchcards fell out of my newspaper this morning. Not a major or in anyway newsworthy event in itself, but I must admit my surprise. I didn't think anyone bothered with them anymore, or, to be a little more technical, I didn't think anyone was taken in by them anymore. Firstly, it actually is printed on the bottom of each panel that "Every card has a set of 3 matching symbols, 2 matching symbols and no matching symbols". Right, so you are going to 'win', half-win and not win respectively. Then, while the prize list is somewhat impressive with 1x£1m, 1x£100k, 2x£20k, 3x£10k and other things like holidays, tablet PC's city breaks all the way down to 1000 "faux" fashion watches, 1000 salon makeovers and 1000xVIP Thames cruises. Now should I be stupid enough to spend the £1.53 a minute for the 6 minute phone call to claim my prize (that's almost a tenner, for those of you without cal...
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