Birthers


Birthers are fascinating, and I find them doubly so because they may give us some insight into the way many of us think.

So, was/is Obama constitutionally qualified to be President of the United States by virtue of being a "natural born citizen?" There is something fascinating about this question, because it leads to the question of what people believe and why they believe it. How much evidence do you need to believe a premise. The problem with this sort of issue though is that "proof" can only be presented in the form of eyewitness accounts, and documentation. It's not like you can run any experiments to show this. You can't take some sort of tissue sample and extrapolate from it the likely LOCATION of birth.

But eyewitnesses can lie, and documentation can be forged. But it's even worse than that. You see, records from that period can also be pretty shoddy. I have heard that people want a copy of the original "long form" birth certificate provided as evidence. There are some claims that the long form has been destroyed (a tricky claim at best, since if it is found now, it is even more likely to be declared a forgery).

Conspiracy theories are interesting in how they can come up with a counter to what most consider as evidence. What I don't understand is how conspiracy theorists mind's work. Clearly there is some need to make an attempt to rationalize their belief in order to try and convince others of their theory. And if this is the way some segment of the voting population thinks, is it possible that we all have that sort of logic circuit in our brains without realizing it? These sorts of thought processes seem to occur for all sorts of reasons. Birthers, creationists, flat earthers, the list goes on. Most religions seem to often tread on this sort of thinking behavior, and many downright require it.

I have to say, I try to avoid this sort of thinking. What I find most weird is that people that do think this way are generally very sure about their premise (for Birthers it is the belief that Obama is ineligible to be President of the United States). As for myself, I'm generally unsure about a lot of things, and try to cite my sources when I can (of course I can always make stuff up, build a website for my verification purposes, and then point to that. One of the miracles of modern technology).

What I really wonder though is whether people may be generally hard wired to have this way of thinking.