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[milo christiansen]

This thread needs some XKCD.

[redwallzyl]

I would just like to point out how totally ridiculous all the ancient aliens stuff is. We like to call it Rorschach archeology because its just a bunch of clueless people saying what they think stuff looks like. Not to mention that like half of it is basically just racism. The history channel use to be good before the dark times. Now its just crazy and stupid get together to make lots of money.

[Kagus]

Y'know, back when the 2016 elections were winding up, I really wanted to make up a birther movement around Trump.

Basic gist being: He's actually from a predominantly Islamic (African? Might be a bit too on the nose vis-a-vis Obama) country, and is himself a Muslim. Exiled from his home country for reasons (probably), he saw opportunity in America and started to set his grand plan in motion.

The idea here being that he wanted to establish his own caliphate, and thus declare his former detractors as blasphemers. But first he needed to get rid of any competition, hence the rabble-rousing for pushing all the other Muslims out of the country, and preventing any more from getting in.

He also concealed his origins by severely bleaching his hair and undergoing skin pigmentation alterations, resulting in the... Somewhat uncommon coloration he possesses, and lends to his vehement denial that any of it is anything less than natural and healthy (also his obsession with the size of his hands, as it's well-known that people of Arabic descent tend to have large hands. No conspiracy theory is complete without referencing well-known facts that don't exist). English isn't his native language, so the relatively limited vocabulary and occasional misunderstandings are to be expected... Honestly, he's doing very well, all things considered!

This would also explain the at times inappropriate interactions with his daughter. Namely, she isn't his daughter; she's his second wife. The "daughter" angle was invented due to the States' stance on polygamy. Since she's the newer, younger wife, she's also the current favorite, which is why he seems to be a lot more touchy-feely with her than with wife number 1.

Of course he'd be ferocious in going after IS, they're direct competition to his plans. There can only be one caliphate, and neglecting the one presented by IS would harm his credibility when he moves into later stages of the plan and starts trying to gather adherents.

Misogyny? Women are seductresses capable of damaging society if left to their own sexualities and identities. They are to be possessions, tamed and controlled by men of the true faith. Just grab 'em by the pussy, show them who's boss.

China? China hates Muslims, so the Muslims hate China right back.

Mexicans? ...okay, I don't have a good answer for this. Maybe a threat, due to Mexico being a predominantly (and oftentimes strongly) Catholic nation? I'unno.



I was never really satisfied with it as a whole, but I liked the concept of trying to turn around the birther argument with something even more ridiculous.

[Hanslanda]

I mean. If we're talking conspiracies, lets at least have a baseline sanity check for parties involved.

A capital idea. We might begin by excluding people so entrenched in their beliefs that they attempt to unilaterally synonymize their particular worldview with sanity as a way of peremptorily dismissing competing viewpoints.

Alternatively we might dispense with such a litmus test altogether by way of acknowledging that two people can look at the same evidence and arrive at different conclusions without either being crazy.

Which would you prefer?

The one that doesn't include 9/11 conspiracy theorists.

Then you're in the wrong neighborhood mate. The point of discussion is to gain insight into how and why people think, believe, and act as they do. This means you might have to *gasp* actually have a reasonable discussion with a person who believes 9/11 was an inside job or that reptilian shapeshifters rule the world.

That said, participation is optional. If you don't want to hear crazy, again, wrong place. As a side note, I believe in about 0 CTs. I kinda think alien abductions are odd. As John Mack said, "The people involved aren't delusional and they genuinely believe something happened. Something strange is going on but I can't say anything for sure beyond that."

[wierd]

With alien abduction at least, there is a plausible biological explanation.

Some of the deep cranial and direct magnetic induction stimulation experiments on humans have succeeded in inducing nearly all of the reported imagery and sensations of both "Near death" (Bright light in dark tunnel, et al), and "Alien abduction" phenomena.

(Sadly, finding "VALID" links for that claim is proving difficult. Saucer morons coopt everything related to aliens.)

[Hanslanda]

I could also understand cancer cures being suppressed because people gotta die of something. That said, it would take a tremendous and implausible amount of people cooperating to do so, in secret. And secrets don't last long when 10+ people know them, much less a world spanning conspiracy at all levels of society.

[wierd]

You dont need secrets for a conspiracy.
Compartmentalized knowledge domains are more than adequate.  See also "Open secret".

Take for instance, "Is curing patients a sustainable business model?"
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/11/goldman-asks-is-curing-patients-a-sustainable-business-model.html

You just need the people in charge of producing the majority of medical care products to decide that a policy will be enforced, for purely monetary reasons. It does not require a secret cabaal of evil people.  People interested in "Fiduciary responsibility" are sufficient.

[Kagus]

Hoo boy, just remembered a friend of mine who is legitimately considering that the British royal family are actually reptilians in human masks and that there's probably an egg nest somewhere in the palace.

He also shared an informational video on how the long-known cure for cancer was being suppressed by the government, and showed the sources you could get this healthy, natural, completely effective curative compound.

It's "Vitamin B17"... Amygdalin. It's fucking cyanide, you numpty. But, hey, you certainly won't die of cancer! (Pretty sure he took the link down when I told him about this slight hitch)

I think he still has his job at the psychic hotline. No, he legitimately thinks he can contact the dead, he's not trying to scam anyone. The guy isn't malicious in the slightest, he really is just trying to help.

Oh yeah, crystals too. Cured his depression, wants me to give the kyanite a go as well. I don't know if it'd work quite as well on me, to be frank.


More interesting, though, is his pal and the stuff he's read about pyramids... I knew I was in for a good time when the preamble was "so, as we know, there are pyramids in nearly every part of the world".

The gist here is that there's a mathematical formula derived from measuring the geometrical shapes and sizes of the pyramid, then calculating them together in order to get a longitudinal, latitudinal, and altitudinal set of coordinates that would lead you to the precise location of another pyramid, somewhere in the world.

I'll be honest, I was a bit dumbstruck by this revelation. For several reasons.


They're all really nice people, and certainly not lacking in intelligence. Just... a little misinformed.

[dragdeler]

-snip-

[Il Palazzo]

This for example: yes there are a ton of stupid discussions. I don't know how hot things can be or need to get and I doubt that anybody discussing this does... But the fact that all three building crumbled at the speed of free fall seems like too big of a coincidence for me.

Right. That's the perception of intellectual superiority coupled with distrust of authority (here meaning experts, not governments) I was talking about earlier.
You know you have no expertise in how structures collapse, but you're sufficiently certain that your personal insight carries enough value to give credence to the existence of a vast conspiracy.

[Kagus]

Well, I mean, one thing is the massive heat energy expelled by combusting jet fuel, that's all well and fine...

But can jet fuel itself melt steel beams? I highly doubt it.
At least outside of Goonstation, because their chem system is fucking bizarre.

[Telgin]

I don't have a lot to add to this topic, but I will at least mention a particularly colorful conspiracy theory that I heard in person a while back.

Apparently, Obama is a secret Muslim (this isn't so unusual, as far as the theories go), and is in league with the Pope (who is also secretly Muslim, which is new to me), planning to take over the world and install himself as emperor of the world.  He is going to accomplish this with the secret Muslim armies he's raising in New Zealand, coupled with the secret UN armies that are positioned around the United States in disguised concentration camps.  He's even spoken to military people at the local air force base who confirm it all.

All of this was stated with great conviction and no trace of sarcasm or insincerity.

There are elements of familiarity to other conspiracy theories there, like Muslim Obama and secret UN concentration camps, but I've never seen them stitched together in such a fashion.  Admittedly, I've never actually listened to Alex Jones, but it kind of sounds like what would happen if you were halfway asleep while listening to him and everything got jumbled in your head.

Sadly for this fellow, Obama's plans seem to have never come to fruition, since it was all going to be a ploy to make sure the last US elections were never held and that he'd be able to hold power forever.

[Trekkin]

This for example: yes there are a ton of stupid discussions. I don't know how hot things can be or need to get and I doubt that anybody discussing this does... But the fact that all three building crumbled at the speed of free fall seems like too big of a coincidence for me.

Right. That's the perception of intellectual superiority coupled with distrust of authority (here meaning experts, not governments) I was talking about earlier.
You know you have no expertise in how structures collapse, but you're sufficiently certain that your personal insight carries enough value to give credence to the existence of a vast conspiracy.

This gives me an idea: what if belief in CTs is a two-step process, divided by an intermediate state in which all doubts are considered equivalent? That could account for cognitive bias driving people out of that state and into full-on CT belief, while perceived intellectual superiority would be one path into it. We tend to think of critical thinking in purely negative terms, "considering the source" and "looking for bias" as a way to disbelieve something without any sense of the point at which an assertion becomes credible; it is plausible that one might go from that to a belief that belief in anything is evidence of insufficient intellectual rigor, particularly when that's what most armchair intellectuals want to find (in others) anyway. Skepticism is hard. Bikeshedding by saying "I question these data" and "I want to see more independent verification" is easy and sounds similar. That said, a sort of doubt-based expressive responding would get people to much the same place; just as we need not understand someone's position to question their credibility, we need not grasp what our opponents are saying to express our distrust of them.

And, once someone as decided that the error bars on estimates of the temperature of burning jet fuel are just as worthy a reason to disbelieve the official story as the gaping holes in the conspiracy theory are to doubt the conspiracy, it is a simple matter for cognitive bias to drive them out of that equilibrium.

[Hanslanda]

There's a full range of conspiracy theories and if the point is only to dismiss them all on a psychological level, I'm a quite dissappointed. Here's some example topics ranging from least to most crazy:

-Israeli nuclear program
-Gladio and other european militias
-WTC7
-Doping combustion motors with ionised water steam
-All that Nicolas Tesla stuff
-Chemtrails
-Lemuria and Atlantis
-The nephilim
-Flat earth
-Lizard people
-There are no trees on flat earth (this one's quite funny)

(...)

Are we really going to put all those in the same bag?

Can we all agree jet fuel along with various plastics and wood easily produces sufficient heat to cause sufficient heating of steel beams that their plasticity increases, deformation and expansion occurs, structural linkages fail and skyscrapers already pushing the limits of material engineering subsequently suffer a catastrophic, runaway support failure?

I mean. If we're talking conspiracies, lets at least have a baseline sanity check for parties involved.

This for example: yes there are a ton of stupid discussions. I don't know how hot things can be or need to get and I doubt that anybody discussing this does... But the fact that all three building crumbled at the speed of free fall seems like too big of a coincidence for me.

We're not or should not be simply dismissing them on a psychological basis. Dismissing them via physics knowledge and applied critical thinking is fine, if the math adds up. WTC7 is a bit odd IIRC. It was never struck by the planes. So that is suspicious.

Also I lied. I feel near certain that Israel possesses nuclear weapons. No reason why. I just do.

[dragdeler]

-snip-