It doesn’t take long using social media to find some pretty spurious takes on recent news. This includes some conspiracy theories, which are pretty much intellectual junk food. As vexing as it may be, some conspiracy theories can really take off.

There’s a new one that’s going around, and if you’ve read the title of this entry, your palm might already be on your face. There are conspiracy theorists going around on social media saying that the recently deceased president of Nintendo has been offed by Freemasons.

Aside from being laughable, this conspiracy theory is also disgusting. The guy has only been dead for a few days, and a bunch of people with a tenuous grip on reality are attempting to use the tragedy to bring attention to themselves.

The position of the conspiracy theorists is that Satoru Iwata, during his presidency of Nintendo, enacted several contradictory policy changes that weren’t in line with the agenda of the Freemasons, who supposedly are exerting their influence on the video game industry. That sigh of disgust probably came from you.

There are several points that these conspiracy theorists bring up that they actually think support their position, and here is one example:

• The Japanese name of Atari, founded by Freemasons, means “to hit the target”, indicating their goal of wanting to control the Japanese game industry.

One thing that can be learned about Freemasons from Google searches and poking around on “truth seeker” Geocities pages is that they like hiding their agenda in plain sight, typically by using symbology that’s been highly-publicized in films and books. If they’re that confident that their plans will succeed, then why has Atari, their supposed key player in the game industry, had so many commercial failures since the video game crash of the ’80s? Are we to really accept that a company that’s so sophisticated that it can carry out a hit on the president of a multi-national tech company (which happens to be an industry leader) is simultaneously so inept that it cannot produce a commercial success of it’s own?

These guys are already off to a pretty bad start, but there’s more:

• Atari’s goal was to keep the Japanese people lazy and stupid, and Satoru Iwata resisted this.

Then they failed. Japan is easily one of the most industrious nations in the world today, with an economy second in strength only to the United States. Anyone who thinks that the typical Japanese man only sits around playing video games and reading manga are in for a surprise when they visit a place like Saitama for the first time. And again, are we really supposed to accept that Atari can carry out a hit on one of the most influential men in the tech industry, when it would be far more conductive to their supposed mission to address and overcome their commercial failures? One would think that if a company’s mission is to keep people addicted to video games, they’d be less about trying to bring attention to themselves by assassinating people known all over the world and more about knowing how to make a decent video game. Because at this rate, it would be far too easy for some overweight Loose Change enthusiast living thousands of miles away to expose their entire operation by using their Twitter account.

Another one:

• Nintendo initially refused to reduce the price of the Nintendo 3DS, but then cut the price by 40% about 6 months after it’s release.

Satoru Iwata then cut his own executive pay in an effort to maintain Nintendo’s stock value, and the 3DS would go on to become one of Nintendo’s fastest-selling and successful gaming systems. Do I even have to explain why the position of conspiracy theorists on this matter are logically inconsistent? If you want a video game company to be highly successful, why would you have a problem with someone who makes moves that are highly beneficial to that company? Iwata was president of Nintendo when the Wii and Nintendo DS hit the market, and those were among the best selling game consoles ever. They each sold over a hundred million units. Iwata obviously wan’t attempting to sabotage the game industry.

• Nintendo stated that their software production outside of Japan went up, when it has actually been going down.

And apparently being wrong about something justifies calling for a hit on a company president.

There’s more, but I think I made my point. Conspiracy theorists are ridiculous, and so is the idea that Nintendo’s president was killed by Freemasons working for Atari. As opposed to cancer, which we still don’t have a cure for (though they probably have quite a few conspiracy theories about that).

Conspiracy theories don’t take a lot of mental energy. It typically involves a person spending hours reading other people’s ideas, then thinking themselves enlightened and having figured things out for themselves. To demonstrate how easy it is to imagine up a new conspiracy theory, here’s a new one: The government and the Illuminati have been propagating conspiracy theories for decades to occupy people of substandard intelligence. How’s that for a paradox conspiracy theory?

If more people would have instead expended into medical science the kind of energy that they’re putting into circulating stupid conspiracy theories, we might have actually developed a cure for cancer by now.