It’s a curious thing. I’m not dismissing any of their claims, but I find it a bit interesting that they can so easily uncover everything that the government doesn’t want you to know when it’s hidden for a reason.
They don’t
I’m not dismissing any of their claims,
Why not? You should.
He’s indicating he’s not looking to get in on any particular topic, not stating support or disagreement with anything
Conspiracy theories can be revealed to be true. They’re not all bullshit.
In the 90s I was in the rabbit hole about Echelon and had a healthy paranoia about my privacy.
So when Snowden dropped the leaks about mass government surveillance I wasn’t surprised at all. I assumed everyone knew. But nope - apparently Echelon was a “conspiracy theory” and so was all the Snowden stuff until - it wasn’t.
That’s my personal experience but there’s others like MKUltra.
Echelon was not so much a conspiracy theory as a sad game of telephone where increasingly disturbed people projected their increasingly distorted paranoias onto an actual thing.
Same with HAARP. Yes, it as exists. No, It does not do that. Or that. Or even that.
But it did give us a damn fine concert movie from Muse, and that’s indisputable.
I was in a rxxit thread with some wahoo who INSISTED that ALL global warming was caused by HAARP deliberately to somehow benefit the U.S.
I linked a wolfram alpha calc about how much energy it would take to raise the entire atmosphere 1.2 degrees.
It was equivalent to several billion Tsar Bombs.
Posted the evidence, stated that 'HAARP physically couldn’t push that amount of energy into the atmosphere even if it was pumping out the physical max EM that the array could handle, every day, since the day it was first brought online. It wouldn’t even be 1/2,000,000th of a tsar bomb total.
Their response “Well, that’s your opinion.”
And then 2 months later rxxit banned me for saying ‘punching nazis is a moral good’ and now the thread is lost forever.
The power comes from the sun. HAARP modulates the magnetic flux from the sun like the base of a giant transistor.
At least that’s what my local conspiracy theorist told me when I raised the same point. It’s complete bunk of course, but it sounds plausible enough for anyone who is not an atmospheric scientist. Not any less plausible to the average wing nut than the whole story about carbon dioxide emission spectra in the infrared and global warming anyway. There is science words in there.
One of the important aspects that I haven’t seen mentioned yet is a sense of community. I’m currently in a online censorship country so can’t link it, but the ABC in Australia had a good podcast around QAnon.
Effectively there’s people who feel a lack of community/companionship locally and seek this out online.All human thoughts are collected into a sorta zeitgeist that we all unknowingly tap into. Take for example- when you have a truely original idea, that is then uploaded to the collective human zeitgeist, which thus allows other humans to be able to tap into and have the exact same idea. Some people know how to dive deep and collect this information, and spread it out into the public sphere of knowledge.
/s
Like you said, it’s a theory you can look at available data and draw conclusions. The term “conspiracy theory” is used to make anybody they want look less credible.
We know that the government was aware of something that was going to happen in 9/11 but they say they didn’t have enough information. We also know that the government allowed perl harbor to happen so they could have an excuse to join the war. Did the government know what was going to happen on 9/11 and intentionally allowed it to happen? I’m sure I found dig up compelling information. We already know what happened in response to 9/11.
the government would never hand it over
The gov’t is many people, not just one, and they have all kinds of funny humans there :)
There’s good money in “based on a true story”. Conspiracy theories sell books, get eyeballs on web ads, make fame, and boost political campaigns. When a person is rewarded for turning their speculations or outright lies into “nonfiction” form, they’re likely to persist in doing it.
Occam’s razor answer: They’re crackpots with crackpot friends. One crackpot makes the stuff up, the others eat it up.
Did I mention they’re crackpots? Because they’re crackpots.
MK Ultra
This is the important difference between conspiracies and conspiracy theories. Once there’s actual evidence, it’s no longer a conspiracy theory.
For example, the fact MK Ultra was real does not prove the fact we are ruled by lizards.
Evidence existing is a very low bar, It’s when it’s proved beyond reasonable doubt that it stops being a theory.
“I prefer to think of it as more of a conspiracy hypothesis, really”
For every real one that is eventually discovered, there’s 10,000 flying around in real time that are total bunk.
Whether the 10,000 bunk ones are deliberately put out as decoys to hide the 1 real one, I will leave that up to the reader.
All I’m saying is the first attempt on MLK’s life came from a schizophrenic black woman during the height of MKUltra’s operations while she babbled about things the CIA hates and their favorite test subjects were disenfranchised schizophrenics.
Lazerpig called it a Woozle Hunt, after the Winnie the Pooh story. Pooh and Piglet think they’re hunting a woozle, but in reality they’re just following their own tracks around and around.
I’ll have to remember that. It’s much more well put than how I described it.
It can be worse than that sometimes. The crackpots see some nuggets of truth, and for whatever reason, they make some leap in interpreting them that leads them to nonsense. They keep finding things that are either true, and add them to their worldview, or made by people who took compatible leaps of logic away from reality. They propagate it to others.
Taking Kennedy’s assassination as a classic example: it’s true that a lot of people wanted him dead, some benefited from his death, the CIA has a history of assassinations, and Lee Harvey Oswald was a communist who had once lived in Minsk. I can see why someone with just enough information to feel confident can arrive at a belief that the CIA or USSR killed Kennedy, while missing critical information to realize there’s no reason to believe either is true.
There’s an episode of Voyager where Seven of Nine goes down conspiracy rabbit holes that’s a lot like that.
Basically, the first one turns out to be correct (although very minor), but it fuels more and more absurd theories. Essentially she goes into a feedback loop, over- and mis-analyzing everything until she’s convinced that every encounter she’s had with anyone has been part of a conspiracy against her.
So maybe “crackpot” was a bit harsh, at least in some cases.
Yeah that sounds like a realistic, if a bit hyperbolic, portrayal of at least some people’s experiences.
I haven’t personally been in any conspiracy theory rabbit holes, but I’ve seen a few people slide into them. There are some people who are so far out there they generate much of the nonsense, but I think there are a lot more victims than crackpots. And I think most of them have a nugget of truth or legitimate grievance in there somewhere.
“I know a guy who knows a guy.”
I do know a lot of guys who knows guys.
Most of them are useless though. (especially the Feebs.)
In Qanons case, Q gave them the info and was leaking it.
Allegedly anyway. It’s not very hard to say you have an inside man.
Started on 4chan iirc
“Q” hands it over to them in form of riddles.
It’s just…there…on the internet…because the most powerful people in the world are bumbling fools with no sense of security.
because the most powerful people in the world are bumbling fools with no sense of security.
Seems pretty accurate actually.
Ahh, the OceanGate incident. Good times (except for that poor son).
Leaks?
Or NSA beaming info into your brain as you are a subject of a top secret test and can now directly commune with aliens
turns out all those 5G vaccine chips were good for something after all.
thanks bill gates!
Bill Gates chips? Bad.
Elon Musk chips? Good!
Take that, liberals!
depends on the conspiracy theory.
real conspiracies; like MK-Ultra, we find out through leaks, declassification and similar sources.
The loony-bin conspiracy theories like “moon landing hoax” (any one with a ham radio could track the apollo CSM as it went to the moon, there’s no way to hide such a trip. there’s really no way to fake those signals.) are mostly sourced from bullshit.
another great example of this is the Birds Aren’t Real conspiracy. Which… uh… started as satire. there’s plenty of ways they get started, but they all boil down to bullshit.
Hold up. Birds Aren’t Real has true believers now?
the people they were making fun of… demonstrated Poe’s Law.
in any case… I give you this…
it’s a drone used for wildlife conservation so as to not spook whatever they’re trying to track; too much.That doesn’t seem like a conspiracy. That looks like a potential legitimate bit of tech and for that purpose. Have anything a little more convincing?
in full disclosure… I’m not one of those…
I mean I build R/C aircraft all the time. one of my favorites is an 8" scale version of the 1950’s Day the Earth Stood Still flying saucer for refrence
More than once, I’ve flown that in a park only for some MAGA-idiot to go fetch a shotgun and shoot at it. these people are not exactly stable.
The link is broken for me.
Let’s try that
That sounds fun as hell
Declassified documents and vetted leaks/ information like the Panama papers. You can also track the stock lawmakers are trading.
Heavy misinterpretation of publicly available information is one.
Another reason is more social. I find a lot of these people want to feel important or smart by “knowing” something that others don’t.
A lot of these people will jump on the bandwagon of whatever is said by fellow conspricists they’re watching on YouTube.
They also learn the “gotcha” questions which allow them to fall into the rabbit hole in the first place.
Yes, Kent Hovind, a dog will only produce another dog, but that doesn’t disprove evolution!
No, Eric Dubay, I can’t see the curvature of the Earth from an aeroplane, but that doesn’t mean the Earth is a fucking pancake!
Another curious thing is how a disproportionate number of conspricists are religious. I can’t speak for other religions, but so many Christians will invoke the Bible into their arguments.
Maybe it’s partly a sunk cost fallacy on their part. Spending so much of their youth believing complete fiction that it’s easier to deny reality than accept their Bible isn’t an accurate depiction of historical events.
Believing in conspiracy and religion requires superstitious thinking instead of thinking scientifically and skeptically.
We’ve all seen popular entertainment.where the protagonist connects seemingly unrelated clues to uncover the conspiracy (of course they’re always proven to be right by the end of the show 🙄)
These unrelated clues could potentially be explained by a wild conspiracy. But they can always be explained in a hundred other, simpler, more plausible ways.
Superstitious thinking aims to seek out any data to prove a theory… while throws away any data that doesn’t.
Scientific thinking looks for the best theory to explain all the data and throws away those that don’t fit well.
