RE: Can we stop rewarding people for half truths and whole lies?
I see no leap in logic; you flat-out denied the existence of any chemtrails:
Chemtrails don't exist. They're widely debunked.
@apocaloptimisto and @transcendfinance showed that chemtrails, or, to be more accurate, "geoengineering" is totally a thing. This does not prove the particular "conspiracy theory" about mind andor population control. It doesn't prove that every contrail is an illuminati plot. But it does disprove your claims that chemtrails don't exist, and that these theories are "debunked". The opposite is true. The dispersal of chemical agents into the atmosphere is common practice for various applications and widely known.
Are we gonna be that internet place where we give people hundreds of dollars for saying that 9/11 was a government plot or that Vaccines are causing autism?
I sincerely hope that Steemit will be the internet place where truth can be spoken to power; where honest, rational and intelligent debate and cold, hard facts are given greater value than the opinion of a thousand authorities.
The Steem whitepaper clearly says:
Steem is committed to enabling free speech and building a free society.
That explicitly includes facts we would prefer not to be true and opinions we disagree with, and I, for my part, welcome that :)
I denied the existence of chemtrails in terms of the common parlance of what chemtrails mean. I didn't say geoengineering. When I say chemtrails I mean the idea that the government is dumping hazardous chemicals on the populace to poison them, not that they're seeding clouds. Chemtrails as they are often defined by conspiracy theorists go far beyond the idea of planes releasing chemicals. Its the idea of this cospiracy to dump mind controlling or otherwise hazardous chemicals on the populace that has been refuted. Though I will also point out that the fact that geoengineering exists does not in any way prove that the government is using it for evil purposes, as people also like to claim.
"I sincerely hope that Steemit will be the internet place where truth can be spoken to power"
Ok. But neither of those are truth and that's the problem.
"cold, hard facts are given greater value than the opinion of a thousand authorities."
Do you hear yourself? We should ignore the literal facts that are attested to by thousands of well trained and knowledgeable experts on a subject and instead indulge in fringe thinking because some guy's blog has a story about how he met someone that said something one time?
Literally nothing these guys have said has given any proof to any of the wild claims they like to make.
"That explicitly includes facts we would prefer not to be true and opinions we disagree with, and I, for my part, welcome that :)"
Allow me to give you a counter point. You are a pedophile. You molest children. No, I do not have any proof of this beyond anecdotal evidence. Yes, this claim is potentially damaging to you. But its just one of those facts we'd prefer not to be true. And I'm sure its an opinion you'd disagree with. In fact, the authorities might say there's no evidence for it either. BUT if I can get enough people to believe it by aggressively spreading the idea, clearly that group belief is just as good as the word of the authorities right? It's all free speech right? Please, smile and welcome the angry mob.
This is the problem. There are children literally dying because their parents believed some stupid celebrity over doctors. Steve Jobs died of easily treatable cancer because he believed that eating a better diet would cure him rather than getting actual medical attention. These blatant falsehoods perpetuated by highly opinionated people with no real knowledge of the subject have consequences. Sometimes fatal ones. And I don't want steemit to become a den of such things.
Because once you start getting into that "everything the government says is a lie" mindset, it spirals. How long until our first 5k holocaust denial post?