Arguments to Use During Christmas Dinner

Most everyone has a woo-loving, conspiracy-obsessed or anti-science family member. And we all know a Christmas dinner with a few glasses of wine and some long-simmering resentment is the perfect opportunity for them to give their skeptical relation (and everyone else) a totally unwanted lecture about how THEY are enslaving us all or how vaccines are poisonous or how some terrorist attack was just a government false flag.

Arguments like that can ruin perfectly nice celebration. They make everyone else uncomfortable as all get out, and put you in a position where you’re either going along with crazy or picking a fight with family. But if you have your facts together, you can push back, disseminating knowledge and defusing the situation with facts. Theoretically, you can reach a point where you agree to disagree and everyone can go back to talking about the weather and sports.

So here are some blog posts related to conspiracies, pseudoscience or general nonsense that might come up during your family togetherness time. Feel free to reference them during an argument, read them out loud, or simply amuse yourself while Uncle Looney is rambling on about chemtrails and eugenics:

The knockout game is not real, but simply a new version of an old (and incredibly racist) moral panic.

The Fukushima nuclear disaster has not irradiated all fish in the Pacific Ocean.

Nor is the West Coast being “fried” by radiation from Japan.

Nor has Fukushima “broken the ocean.” Almost none of what’s being passed around social media about Fukushima is true or presented in the proper context.

Agenda 21 is not a nefarious UN plot to depopulate the planet through sustainability.

Journalist Michael Hastings was not murdered in a one car accident.

TWA Flight 800 wasn’t shot down by a missile in 1996. Or any other time.

Neither the Aurora theater shooting, the Boston Marathon bombing nor the Sandy Hook school shooting were false flags perpetrated by the government and populated by crisis actors. While both are real concepts, neither are used in the way many conspiracy theorists believe they are.

Pope Francis was never foretold by St. Malachy to be the harbinger of the apocalypse.

George Soros does not own Snopes, nor has Snopes been “debunked.”

Have a happy holiday, and may all your Christmas arguments be defeated with logic and testable claims.