Gee, Ya Think?

[theweaselking]

Paper #1: NASA faked the moon landing–Therefore (Climate) Science is a Hoax: An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science (pdf), a detailed study showing that kookery is cross-contaminatory: denial of global warming correlates strongly with antivaxxery, moon landing denial, racism, belief in reptoids, 9/11 twooferism, libertarianism, Birferism, Randroid free-market quackery, Niven-fandom, AIDS-denial, FOX News viewership, goldbuggery, etc.

This produced a predictable reaction: millions of words from idiots online, screaming that this was a giant false-flag operation by Big Climate and that it was all a huge conspiracy organised by the secret Jewish Communist Reptoids On The Moon cabal.

That predictable reaction was carefully measured, producing:
Paper #2: Recursive Fury: Conspiracist Ideation in the Blogosphere in Response to Research on Conspiracist Ideation (pdf), a study comparing their predicted reactions from wingnuts to the actual reactions of wingnuts.

University of Western Australia: mining bad thinking for comedy gold.

Comments

[marlowe1.livejournal.com]

I know a guy who implicitly believes that GMOs are evil, but thinks that global warming was made up.

[lafinjack.livejournal.com]

[aeduna.livejournal.com]

Niven fandom?

[ariaflame.livejournal.com]

And apparently they've made enough noise to have the journal remove the second one but far too late.

[dionysus1999.livejournal.com]

You missed Bieberism. The world will fall before the amassed greatness that is Bieber.