Forget the birthers: Here come the DNAers

[Sasaki Kojiro]

I should add, it's not clear what drives the poll results. I think my suggestions above were lacking though. Best I can guess, people read something that they want to believe, and then go on with their lives and never check it because they only check things that they don't want to believe. I wonder if they've done a poll that assesses belief and whether people have looked up the evidence against. At least that's how I remember the innumerable bush-iq hoaxes that were thrown around playing out. A simple google debunked them, but they are made so that people who want to believe get just enough that they don't bother googling. But I don't think it's clear how many people are "true" believers.

This still leaves us with the depressing conclusion that people are lazy and don't care about the truth.

Still I don't think any orgahs believe this stuff, and thus the only effect is to play on our guilt by association bias "the other party believes this stupid stuff, therefore...".

edit:

And, wow, to complete the digression, something caught my eye as I was googling conspiracy theory psychology, it was about how movie plots lend support for that kind of thinking. I'm wondering how much I create minor-conspiracy like explanations. I was reading an article by an anti-pharmaceutical company guy and his arguments turned out to be conspiracy theory stuff but it was fairly convincing as I read it (the counter point was excellent however, and a little critical thinking was revealing). I think it's a very hard impulse to quash (the need to have an explanation that covers everything neatly).