Tried arguing with my uncle about the moon landing using YouTube clips vs. actual NASA docs

So my uncle is deep into the 'moon landing was fake' stuff and we got into it at a family thing. I used to just show him those debunking videos, but last month I printed out like 50 pages of the Apollo 11 mission transcript from the NASA site. We sat down and went through the whole communication log, line by line. He got real quiet when we hit the part about the lunar module's engine bell temperature. Has anyone else found that just giving people the primary source stuff works way better than any video?

3 comments

3 Comments

barnes.mary1mo agoTop Commenter

Primary sources shut down the nonsense fast.

morganm691mo agoMost Upvoted

Yeah, "shut down the nonsense" works if everyone agrees on what a primary source even is. In my experience, people just call whatever supports their view a primary source and ignore the rest. So the fight just moves one step back.

casey8431mo ago

Read a piece a while back about how people treat primary sources like a club to win an argument, not a tool to find the truth. They'll dig up one old letter that seems to back their side, but ignore the ten others from the same person that show a more complete picture. It just becomes another layer of cherry-picking. So yeah, the fight absolutely moves back, because now you're just arguing over which primary source counts.