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Author Topic: Conspiracy Theories: The Reread The Civility Clause Thread  (Read 47779 times)

dragdeler

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Re: Conspiracy Theories:The One-ended Stick Thread
« Reply #255 on: June 03, 2018, 02:35:53 pm »

-snip-
« Last Edit: January 18, 2019, 01:38:16 pm by dragdeler »
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Trekkin

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Re: Conspiracy Theories:The One-ended Stick Thread
« Reply #256 on: June 03, 2018, 03:34:34 pm »

What makes a ball not a stick?

The tireless efforts of reptilian topologists. Earth would be a stick if not for our lizard overlords.

EDIT: Aliens built the seven bridges of Königsberg.
« Last Edit: June 03, 2018, 03:37:39 pm by Trekkin »
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MrRoboto75

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Re: Conspiracy Theories:The One-ended Stick Thread
« Reply #257 on: June 03, 2018, 03:57:43 pm »

What makes a ball not a stick?

Am I a stick?
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Trekkin

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Re: Conspiracy Theories:The One-ended Stick Thread
« Reply #258 on: June 04, 2018, 01:02:46 am »

Conspiracy theories are produced and disseminated to teach people to be dismissive about all such ideas

You know, that might not be too far from the truth; I suspect our archetypal "isolated intellectual" is initially attracted to CTs explicitly in order to dismiss them in order to create opportunities to demonstrate their knowledge. Consider how much the standard Internet expert enjoys "proving" (read: loudly calling) other people wrong in order to feel as much smarter than the general public as they do the people they interact with locally (and whose utter intellectual inferiority has long been a settled matter in their minds) in light of how rarely easy opportunities to employ surface-level knowledge of scattered esoterica to indulge their crippling inferiority complex come up in normal conversation. Popular conspiracy theories, in contrast to actual historical or scientific uncertainty and consequent disagreement, are easily proven not only wrong but laughably wrong without needing to do any real work -- and what is more, they evolve in the telling to be more popular and interesting and worth talking about. They are, in short, a steady source of apparent idiots ripe for correction, and so they attract people who are all convinced they are uniquely right/smart en masse. The hops from "person X's refutation of theory Y contains errors" to "theory Y has never been successfully refuted" to "everyone but me is either fooled by theory Y or wrong to think it's wrong" are not large.

EDIT: And, of course, once they believe one, they're already in close contact with many others, so the crank magnetism begins.
« Last Edit: June 04, 2018, 01:05:54 am by Trekkin »
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Reelya

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Re: Conspiracy Theories:The One-ended Stick Thread
« Reply #259 on: June 04, 2018, 09:07:44 am »

I just came across a new one to me

https://www.vice.com/en_au/article/mvx7v8/the-berensteain-bears-conspiracy-theory-that-has-convinced-the-internet-there-are-parallel-universes

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The Berenst(E)ain Bears Conspiracy Theory That Has Convinced the Internet There Are Parallel Universes

You remember the Berenstein Bears, right? Now, what if we told you they never existed?

Yeah, because it was spelt Berenstain, which is a less familiar spelling, so lots of people confuse the spelling. I thought it was Berenstein, and we had one of the books as a kid, though it wasn't a big part of my childhood. The explanation of why this is so common is most probably because of a combination of the repetition of the e's in the name, coupled with the limited reading comprehension of children who were exposed to the books (it's a long name for a small child), along with the common "stein" ending for names. It's not helped, because apparently the name itself is misspelled on some of the old VHS tape labels - one example has "b-stain" on the front and "b-stein" on the top, which shows a common cultural confusion over the spelling.

However, rather than contemplate the theory that their memory is a tiny bit off, or they just never paid that much attention in the first place, people have posited that they've actually been teleported into an alternate dimension in which the only change is the spelling of a 1960s children's book franchise.

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Although the words were written in jest, the writer—the false prophet—blows the whole Berenstain Bears theory open and relates it to the Butterfly Effect.

"At some point between the years 1986 and 2011, someone traveled back in time and inadvertently altered the timeline of human history so that the Berenstein Bears somehow became the Berenstain Bears," he wrote. "This is why everyone remembers the name incorrectly; it was Berenstein when we were kids, but at some point when we weren't paying attention, someone went back in time and rippled our life experience ever so slightly."

Little did he know how important that notion would come to be in the movement.

The next appearance of the theory came in the form of a 2012 post on the blog The Wood Between Worlds by a user named Reese, called "The Berenstain Bears: We Are Living in Our Own Parallel Universe." These 1,600 words would prove to be the main literature of this modern movement. It is simply the Berensteinites' New Testament, their Vedas.

In it, the blog's author makes a "modest proposal," one that implies that all of us are "living in our own parallel universe." He propagates that there are at least two universes; the "stEien" universe and the "stAin" universe. The author attempts to prove the theory as true, and breaks down into mathematical and scientific terms.

The broader theory comes under the general heading "The Mandela Effect" which is a real psychological effect (a thing that many people misremember in the same way), but the conspiracy theory is that this represents slippage between parallel dimensions, or memories leaking between dimensions, or something more sinister such as a cabal of time-travellers going back in time to manipulate history, and leaving clues behind like changing quotes in popular movies.
« Last Edit: June 04, 2018, 09:46:01 am by Reelya »
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Il Palazzo

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Re: Conspiracy Theories:The One-ended Stick Thread
« Reply #260 on: June 04, 2018, 09:36:03 am »

For a while there I had the 'Mandela effect' confused with 'Mpemba effect', and couldn't quite get what does freezing water have to do with parallel universes.

If I'm getting this right, if many more people started misremembering the name like I did, it would be a case of the Mandela effect? And if they couldn't find any 'Mandela effect' relating to the speed of water freezing, some of them would attribute it to the Berenste/ain bears effect?

Mandelaception.
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ChairmanPoo

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Re: Conspiracy Theories:The One-ended Stick Thread
« Reply #261 on: June 04, 2018, 09:55:12 am »

Lets say that indeed, Mandela died in prison but afterwards Yuri Gagarin (whose death, as everybody knows, was obviously a fake news coverup to conceal the Soviet Union's time travel program) changed history so that he lives ..

How the fuck would you remember? What makes you special?
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Reelya

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Re: Conspiracy Theories:The One-ended Stick Thread
« Reply #262 on: June 04, 2018, 10:18:49 am »

Yeah, and you'd think that it would run deeper than that. e.g. people misremember the TV coverage of Mandela's release as being his funeral, so someone must have manipulated time so that he was released instead of died. However, what are the odds that there would be similar TV coverage of what would in fact have been very different events?

Or with the Stein/Stainverse difference, why not a universe where the books were merely never published, instead of some universe where people went back and changed the writer's name's spelling without changing anything else about their life? Sure, if everyone swears they remember Berenstein Bears existing then you google it and get "people think this existed, but it never did and you can't even get the books for that reason" then you'd have grounds for the time-manipulation belief.

TamerVirus

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Re: Conspiracy Theories:The One-ended Stick Thread
« Reply #263 on: June 04, 2018, 10:29:11 am »

In a similar note, a bunch of people were convinced that there was a 90s movie about a genie that starred the comedian Sinbad called "Shazaam"

No such movie exists.
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Reelya

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Re: Conspiracy Theories:The One-ended Stick Thread
« Reply #264 on: June 04, 2018, 10:34:25 am »

The time-traveling lizard illuminati went back in time and reshot the movie as "Kazaam" starring someone else, the sneaky devils.

I'm a little disappointed here that there's an explanation for those Shazaam memories. We're still looking for the smoking gun of something that couldn't have existed, in at least a fuzzily-remembered form.
« Last Edit: June 04, 2018, 10:36:09 am by Reelya »
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MrRoboto75

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Re: Conspiracy Theories:The One-ended Stick Thread
« Reply #265 on: June 04, 2018, 10:44:07 am »

What makes a ball not a stick?

Am I a stick?

No.

You're an orientable manifold, but not a normally classified one.
Are you calling me fat?
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Kagus

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Re: Conspiracy Theories:The One-ended Stick Thread
« Reply #266 on: June 04, 2018, 10:50:08 am »

Gyrobifastigium. That's all I have to say on the matter.

The time-traveling lizard illuminati went back in time and reshot the movie as "Kazaam" starring someone else, the sneaky devils.

I'm a little disappointed here that there's an explanation for those Shazaam memories. We're still looking for the smoking gun of something that couldn't have existed, in at least a fuzzily-remembered form.

You mean like Candle Cove?

Reelya

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Re: Conspiracy Theories:The One-ended Stick Thread
« Reply #267 on: June 04, 2018, 10:57:50 am »

Maybe. I'm still not fully convinced that HR Pufnstuf actually exists. I never saw it, and it just seems unlikely. People are clearly misremembering 1970s McDonalds adverts as a show.

TamerVirus

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Re: Conspiracy Theories:The One-ended Stick Thread
« Reply #268 on: June 04, 2018, 11:07:40 am »

reshot the movie as "Kazaam" starring someone else, the sneaky devils.

That someone else is Shaq, and he was a rapping genie that came out of a boombox
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Reelya

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Re: Conspiracy Theories:The One-ended Stick Thread
« Reply #269 on: June 04, 2018, 11:11:26 am »

That's the thing. Misremembering it as a comedian called Sinbad who played a genie is more sensible than to remember that a basketball-player was a rapping genie that came out of a boombox. There are some things your brain is just hard-wired to erase. These people's brains obviously blocked out the incomprehensible thing and filled the space with something more normal-sounding.

It's actually very similar to what happens to characters in HP Lovecraft stories and Call of Chthulu.
« Last Edit: June 04, 2018, 11:14:35 am by Reelya »
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