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Author Topic: Conspiracy theories and the failure of reason  (Read 12739 times)

SirQuiamus

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Re: Conspiracy theories and the failure of reason
« Reply #90 on: November 02, 2015, 08:35:43 pm »

The Twist: Obama is secretly white – Apocalypse postponed, again.
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Telgin

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Re: Conspiracy theories and the failure of reason
« Reply #91 on: November 02, 2015, 08:41:05 pm »

Those links are all very fascinating.  I suspect now that this guy must spend significant periods of time on that website and many like it.

Oh well, guess I'll get ready for the fake alien invasion then.
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Bohandas

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Re: Conspiracy theories and the failure of reason
« Reply #92 on: November 02, 2015, 08:57:59 pm »

When was that conspiracy theory from? I just realized that the fake alien invasion as an excuse to institute a dystopian new world order thing is basically the original ending of (the graphic novel version of) Watchmen
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mainiac

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Re: Conspiracy theories and the failure of reason
« Reply #93 on: November 02, 2015, 09:05:23 pm »

The Twist: Obama is secretly white – Apocalypse postponed, again.

Well he is not so secretly half white.
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LordBucket

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Re: Conspiracy theories and the failure of reason
« Reply #94 on: November 03, 2015, 05:11:28 am »

When was that conspiracy theory from?I just realized that the fake alien invasion as an excuse to institute a dystopian
new world order thing is basically the original ending of (the graphic novel version of) Watchmen

I first started reading about this stuff back in the dialup era, so at least early/middle 90s? Quick google search...here we go: Serge Monast. Here's a transcript of a 1994 presentation about Project Blue Beam which was allegedly a program originally intended for deployment in 1983. Whereas Watchmen was 86/87.

Sometimes it's difficult to determine proper sequence for these things to figure out who got what from whom. For example, when Lilith Fair happened in the late 90s, at the time, Lilith was most well known as a night demon responsible for raping men in their sleep and murdering children. It was a name you might list right alongside Beelzabub, Baal, Astaroth, etc. So for  awhile it was incredibly weird watching these women going around, trying to get young girls to "celebrate Lilith." As in like...imagine a group going to public schools and receiving official endorsement to encourage high school girls to worship Lucifer. That's pretty much what it seemed like at the time.

But their claim was that Lilith was the first woman, created before Eve. A version of the story that does not appear in the Bible. Whereas Lillth as Adam's first wife does appear in a certain fictional novel you might have heard of by the name The Lion, the Witch and the Wardobe by C.S. Lewis.

So for a while it seemed to me that somebody was either actively trying to encourage demon worship based on a lie and doing a very good job of it, or simply comically bad at fact checking,

But now, of course, the "Lilith as Adam's first wife" version of the story is common knowledge, and if I check wikipedia, sure enough, fourth paragraph down she's attributed as the first wife of Adam, based on some obscure piece of 13th century Jewish satire.

So who got what from whom, and when? Was Sarah McLachlin a fan of 13th century Jewish satire about demons, or did she read the Chronicles of Narnia, went with it and got lucky?

Was Project Bluebeam a real or fake military program that was known in the 80s to conspiracy theorist circles from which Alan Moore took the premise and used it for Watchmen and Serge Monast didn't get around to giving that presentation until 7 years later? Or did Alan Moore come up with the idea and Serge Monast stole it and turned it into a conspiracy theory hoping nobody would notice? Or had Serge been telling people about Blue Beam for a decade, and the 1994 presentation is simply the one that survived to the internet age?

Hard to say.



Anyway, since we're discussing specific theories, if you want a really fun one...if I can find it...yes: Project Superman. That's one of my favorites. Probably a couple hours worth of reading, but totally worth it if you're into that kind of thing.

Reelya

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Re: Conspiracy theories and the failure of reason
« Reply #95 on: November 03, 2015, 10:22:20 am »

snip

But that's the thing, I've always known of lilith as the fabled first wife of Adam, and not any of that other stuff. When I was a kid we had books on mythology and stuff, and all of them mentioned Lilith specifically with a Adam connection. And it was not "satire":
http://judaism.about.com/od/jewishculture/a/Where-Does-The-Legend-Of-Lilith-Come-From.htm
Basically, the ancient Rabbis noted that there were two contradictory accounts of Adam's wife, so they hypothesized that there was a "first eve" who displeased Adam and was replaced. That's typical of the sort of mental contortions fundamentalists get themselves into when confronted with contradictory passages in their "every literal word is true" holy book. It took until the medieval period that she got a name: Lilith. It's only the name that got attached to her from the medieval period. Jewish religious scholars believed in her existence since ancient times.

In fact, the meta-story of Lilith is a very good fit for a feminist narrative. It's basically about a woman who was erased from history because she didn't conform to what a man wanted.
« Last Edit: November 03, 2015, 10:36:20 am by Reelya »
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GoblinCookie

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Re: Conspiracy theories and the failure of reason
« Reply #96 on: November 03, 2015, 11:37:12 am »

snip

But that's the thing, I've always known of lilith as the fabled first wife of Adam, and not any of that other stuff. When I was a kid we had books on mythology and stuff, and all of them mentioned Lilith specifically with a Adam connection. And it was not "satire":
http://judaism.about.com/od/jewishculture/a/Where-Does-The-Legend-Of-Lilith-Come-From.htm
Basically, the ancient Rabbis noted that there were two contradictory accounts of Adam's wife, so they hypothesized that there was a "first eve" who displeased Adam and was replaced. That's typical of the sort of mental contortions fundamentalists get themselves into when confronted with contradictory passages in their "every literal word is true" holy book. It took until the medieval period that she got a name: Lilith. It's only the name that got attached to her from the medieval period. Jewish religious scholars believed in her existence since ancient times.

In fact, the meta-story of Lilith is a very good fit for a feminist narrative. It's basically about a woman who was erased from history because she didn't conform to what a man wanted.

Actually the whole thing is a merger of sorts.  Lilith or Lilim is a quite independant demon that was believed in by middle eastern cultures, basically she caused miscarraiges and stillbirths.  Somebody for some reason decided to merge the theoretical first woman that you are talking about with the demon Lilith that was already believed in.  This presumably 'works' because Lilith did not go through the fall of man and hence retained the immortality that Adam+Eve originally had along with the powers.
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Bohandas

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LordBucket

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Re: Conspiracy theories and the failure of reason
« Reply #98 on: November 04, 2015, 09:28:43 pm »

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,1420072,00.asp

The growing plague of unblockable javascript popup ads begins to weary me.



As for the content, it strikes me as poor thinking to believe that people are wrong because they don't believe what other people believe. The consensus is not always correct. If you believe that X is silly because you've examined the evidence and concluded that it's unlikely, ok. But if you believe that X is silly simply because it's not what you were taught...that's not a good way of deciding things.

Even if people's conclusions about any given conspiracy theory is correct, the process that most people use to come to their conclusions is terrible.

Bohandas

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Re: Conspiracy theories and the failure of reason
« Reply #99 on: November 04, 2015, 09:58:23 pm »

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,1420072,00.asp

The growing plague of unblockable javascript popup ads begins to weary me.

Go into about:config and set javascript.enabled to false

EDIT:
Also might be useful to bookmark about:config while you're at it
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LordBucket

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Re: Conspiracy theories and the failure of reason
« Reply #100 on: November 04, 2015, 11:26:51 pm »

set javascript.enabled to false

Disabling javascript renders a lot of sites non-functional or partially functional. Yes, you can play with exceptions but even the sites you probably don't want javascript popups on probably do have other javascript features you do want. For example, the previously mentioned pcmag.com link uses javascript for their comments section. There are chrome extensions that claim to do it selectively, but I've yet to find one that works acceptably.

Bohandas

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Re: Conspiracy theories and the failure of reason
« Reply #101 on: November 05, 2015, 12:34:18 am »

Yes, like the stupid spoiler tags on this forum. It makes it a pain when I'm on my phone to juggle browsing elsewhere with having a conversation here because the mobile version of Firefox/Pale Moon won't support the easy JS toggle button I downloaded for my desktop browser. I keep a tab of about:config open at all times though, so it's not too much of a pain, except when it forgets my search parameters and I have to bring up the relevant setting back up.
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exdeath

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Re: Conspiracy theories and the failure of reason
« Reply #102 on: November 05, 2015, 07:28:02 am »

To those saying conspiracy theories are failure of reason, lets see if you pass some test:

THE TEST:
READ ALL THOSE 3 LINKS ENTIRELY, IN ORDER WHILE THINKING ABOUT WHAT HAPPENED AND WHAT IS HAPPENING ON THE WORLD.

PS: DONT JUST READ THE TEXT TITLE AND LEAVE OR THE FIRST PARTS OF THE TEXT AND LEAVE THE LINK

PS2:ACCORDING TO MICROSOFT WORD THIS TEXT HAS 27682 WORDS, IF THIS IS TOO LONG TO YOU AND YOU WILL NOT READ IT ENTIRELY, SKIP THIS TEXT, LINKS AND POST, EVERY POST HERE RELATED TO THIS SPECIFIC POST. JUST FOLLOW YOUR OWN LIFE LIKE YOU USED TO BEFORE THIS POST EXISTED.

http://www.sweetliberty.org/nobarbarians1.htm
http://www.sweetliberty.org/nobarbarians2.htm
http://www.sweetliberty.org/nobarbarians3.htm

PS:No need to read other parts of website, I am not claiming other parts of the website arent stupid of whateaver, this specific site was selected only because it had the full text (some sites lacks part 3 [the third link]).
PS: My belief on the core idea the text tell its truth/exist came after I started to read the text, so you will be on the same situation as i was.
« Last Edit: November 05, 2015, 07:37:00 am by exdeath »
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Bohandas

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Re: Conspiracy theories and the failure of reason
« Reply #103 on: November 05, 2015, 10:02:21 am »

Well, he brings up the idea hat AIDS was created in a lab, and the Russians have openly admitted that that idea was something they made up during the Cold War to smear the American scientific community

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_INFEKTION#Aftermath

EDIT:
Additionally he also seems to believe the superstition that AIDS somehow preferentially infects gays
« Last Edit: November 05, 2015, 10:06:43 am by Bohandas »
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exdeath

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Re: Conspiracy theories and the failure of reason
« Reply #104 on: November 05, 2015, 11:37:53 am »

Well, he brings up the idea hat AIDS was created in a lab, and the Russians have openly admitted that that idea was something they made up during the Cold War to smear the American scientific community

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_INFEKTION#Aftermath

EDIT:
Additionally he also seems to believe the superstition that AIDS somehow preferentially infects gays
Who you are replying to?
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