Vaccines, microchips and market laws. Who chooses good or bad conspiracy theories?

The crucifixion of Paolo Bernini perpetrated by Pierluigi Battista has been perceived as a club hit on taboo topics. In his extensive list from the pages of Corriere della Sera what should be discussed and what shouldn’t has been decided. It was also mentioned what should be confined to the realms of science fiction and imaginary conspiracy theories, perhaps with an excess of superficiality. However, as it often happens when someone mingles with a field outside their area of expertise, Battista has been proved wrong by his own newspaper and from actual data.
This is probably related to the fact that Italian journalism is more based on the journalist’s reputation rather than on the content he writes. In order to meet the favor of his audience, a writer usually prefers expressing original opinions or giving voice to the common people thoughts rather than report actual facts or data.

Here you find a list of topics that a great journalist such as Battista could not possibly check through, maybe with premeditated malice. First of all, the origins of the HIV virus, whose natural origins are still being debated, whether it first developed in the gay ambient or has been discovered and then spread by a USA laboratory in Africa. Is it possible to give a precise answer to that? Of course a famous writer has more pressing questions to answer.

Another example of Battista’s inaccurateness, not used to commenting economy, is here shown:

One of the more important theorists of Grillo’s movement, Serge Latouche, champion of the ‘objection de croissance’, a very popular topic on Movimento 5 Stelle’s most visited websites, has expressed the principles of the ‘planned obsoleteness’, the obscure and devilish industrial strategy aiming to create easily deteriorating products to induce buying new merchandise, progressively more and more evanescent.

Whoever has a basic understanding of social studies or mass production surely knows that if merchandise were not to waste away or become outdated, capitalism would not even exist.

The extent of his error is not limited to that. A lot of hi-tech objects which are now part of our life actually do not have much practical use; amongst these, tablets are a notable example. In fact, tablets still do not offer performances on par to desktop or laptop computers, but has become one of the “must-have” of this generation.

Serge Latouche may or may not meet the public opinion, but ignoring the mechanism behind contemporary economics is as foolish as believing in Santa Claus or that the current crisis is only a psychological condition.

Here are three last conspiracy theories. When virus AH1N1 spread and Italian government bought millions of vaccines against swine “flu”, conspirationists thought they had proof that the whole operation was planned beforehand by the pharmaceutical industry, and that the same vaccines were harmful. Our vaccines were then gifted to African countries without second thoughts, although online solid proof of the ruse were easily to find.

If you had money invested in stocks in 2008, from conspiracy theorists you would have known in advance of the subprime loans crisis, a news that Nouriel Roubini broke out later.
Last but not least, a note on the RFID subcutaneous microchips, that are still at an experimentation phase of development in the US. Here is one the the societies involved in the project, with an analysis of their usefulness dating 2002 (eleven years ago), written by Paolo Magrassi.