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4w ago

Conspiracies

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☆ Yσɠƚԋσʂ ☆ @lemmy.ml

4w ago

Conspiracies

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It's never that I think they aren't evil enough, I just don't trust conspiracies that require too much competency. I think most of them are too dumb and uncoordinated to pull off most of the conspiracies I hear about.
- If you’ve ever tried to coordinate more than 50 people to do a thing, you quickly realize why people refer to management and leadership jobs as “herding cats.”
  If someone gave me the option of faking the moon landing or going to the moon, I’d gladly strap a submarine to a missile.
  It be fucking impossible to coordinate hundreds of people on the world’s biggest secret, then make them and their families abide by media training for half a century.
  
  Unless you're working on something incredibly important, and you can threaten people with jail time if you tell anyone. The US government kept the SR-71 blackbird secret for about a decade, for example.
  
  I think there’s a danger in underestimating a government’s ability to keep a secret especially when they have the power to kill you and your family if you break it. While we shouldn’t overestimate the conspiracies they conduct (i.e. the world isn’t flat, we did land on the moon, vaccines don’t cause autism). I think it’s reasonable to suspect that your government is keeping some important information out of the public eye. Oft for the reason of “national security” aka, it would be embarrassing to us if this leaked.
  
  You ever heard of a little trillion dollar operation known as the NSA?
  
  It be fucking impossible to coordinate hundreds of people on the world’s biggest secret, then make them and their families abide by media training for half a century.
  Yes you can. The Manhattan Project was the blueprint for this.
- Yeah, especially the COVID conspiracies are mostly brain dead stuff
  The whole world pretty much stopped, which helps absolutely no one, but somehow those guys think, that a dark force is trying to kill the economy for...profit?
  Also all the scientists and doctors are together in bed and just want people to stay indoors, because... I have absolutely no clue
  It just didn't make sense from the start.
  Although I do get scepticism against new vaccine methods, but when someone tries to "explain" to me, that mRNA somehow overwrites my DNA and I should drink bleach instead...I usually don't even know where to start to correct them
  
  I agree but a lot of mom and pop shops shut down and of course walmart and all the big names were still operating the whole time. At least here in Canada
  
  I mean, if the dark forces were billionaires and you look at their wealth growth explosion since the pandemic....someone could be forgiven for thinking there was a conspiracy there. Means and motive, alongside a sociopathic disregard for the common person..
  You should advise them to drink bleach and prove its efficacy. For science.
  
  especially the COVID conspiracies
  Lab leak initially labelled as a conspiracy theory.
  Darpa proposal to perform GoF research on coronaviruses.
  Airborne transmission actually true.
  Vaccine doesn't stop transmission
  Natural Immunity providing superior protection (no science supporting vaccine mandates for recovered patients).
  Event 201 plan followed to the letter.
  Government sponsored censoring of social media
  Vaccine nanoparticles
- Yeah. Conspiracies feed a need to believe that there's some easy reason why things are fucked. In reality... things are fucked for a great many reasons, and 'evil people in power' is middle of the pack, at best.
- The most believable conspiracies are the ones where it's full of incompetence. Like ZunZuneo
- Especially the ones where you would need the complicity and cooperation of thousands of people to pull it off.

They would kill you and everything you love if it meant they’d get more money. Never forget that.
- Corporations would happily use slave labor if that was legal.
  Source: The United States prior to 1865
  
  We still use slave labor, California just voted against abolishing it.
  
  Source: Prison labor.
  
  Yeah. Pretty much anywhere slavery is legal will use slaves. Our system rewards people for destroying society.
- Who is "they"?
  
  Oligarchs.

It's never a question of how evil they're capable of being, but how competent.
Plenty of conspiracy theories don't work because they'd require hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of people to completely shut up.
- Yeah. MK Ultra tracked, faking the moon landing didn't.

Conspiracies and conspiracy theories are two very different things. The reason people scoff at conspiracy theories is because they are often times wrong and/or vague. How many *verified conspiracies actually started as a 'conspiracy theory'.
Edit: * added for clarification
- before snowden is was a conspiracy theory that the government is always listening to you
  
  well there's a reason for that -- feeling like someone is reading your thoughts or that your will is controlled by someone else and so on are common presentations of schizophreniform disorders. they just made it fucking true!
- How many verified conspiracies actually started as a 'conspiracy theory'.
  All of them? If you're questioning the official narrative you're "just a conspiracy theorist" until proven right
  
  Actually 🤓 they rather start as undiscovered conspiracies until they leak enough to make people suspicious and form a theory
  
  No. It's not a REAL conspiracy until the 4th Estate says so! They are the ones we should trust without question! They have NEVER proven themselves to be just another part of the control system!!
- Let's be fair, if I told you that a UFO cult led by a sci-fi writer performed a massive infiltration of the US government (the largest ever detected) in order to whitewash itself in official records you'd have thought I was wacko before Operation: Snow White came to light. The same UFO cult also had a number of their agents insert themselves into the life of a journalist who had written negative things about them in an attempt to get her to either off herself or be institutionalized, dubbed Operation: Freakout which was only uncovered in the aftermath of the discovery of Operation: Snow White.
  The UFO cult in question is Scientology.

Lol the cooperations
- Down with Co-ops?
- Flashmobs?

I feel like Conspiracy theories are at least partially the result of a lack of regulation and oversight for governing bodies and corporate entities.
For example... the atomic energy commission approved experimenting on disabled children by feeding radioactive oats to them.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/spoonful-sugar-helps-radioactive-oatmeal-go-down-180962424/
It's one of the reasons we have laws like informed consent now.
Everytime we run into something new, like radiation, some company or government branch does some seriously unethical shit with it and new laws and regulations are written.
So it's like we're all just waiting to find out what new fucked up thing has happened, and how many corporations are gonna fight any proposed regulations regarding it.
- And that's why i say that US law is one of the most reactive.
- It's why we should regulate them into the ground, and give them 0 trust. Get rid of lobbying, screw profit, the economic damage from all the scams, suffering, and death in the long-term is more than enough to make any gain in profit meaningless.
- how else are we supposed to get data on how radiation effects children? Fukushima? Hiroshima? No, neither of those was controlled and both of thosehad goals like "reducing exposure" and "saving lives" by the local government.

is there a convinient list somewhere of all the times this has happened?
- https://old.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/wiki/lopc/
- Wikipedia CIA

People still don't believe their tax dollars are being spent to hurt them after being shown these documents.

Proverbs for Paranoids
You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures.
The innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportion to the immorality of the Master.
If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers.
You hide, they seek.
Paranoids are not paranoid because they're paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.
—Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

Issue being, a large number of conspiracy theories are just utter bonkers (moon nazis theory, etc.), would be really ineffective in practice (chemtrails, etc.), or tries to blame capitalism's problem on a small number of people within the system (International Jewry, etc.). In fact I kind of have a theory that the more "skizo" stuff was put out to make the real stuff look impallatable for people believing the institutions are serving them.
I know at least some opportunistic far-right people that use conspiracy theories to make their ideology look better, met at least one Holocaust denier that just wanted to whitewash the third reich for newbies until they prove they're ready for the truth through proof of loyalty, and one denies the CIA's involvement in toppling the Salvador Allende governance to make Pinochet look even more badass.
- Alex Jones amd David Icke are CIA
  
  If they didn't exist. The CIA would create one. They need lunatics like that to leak documents to if they want the information within to be discreditted.

I get why memes like this are popular—they’re funny and make you think. But honestly, I think they can be a bit dangerous too. Sure, some conspiracy theories have turned out to be true, but way more often than not, they’re just nonsense.
The problem with stuff like this is that it makes it seem like most conspiracy theories are worth taking seriously, which can lead to some real issues. People start distrusting everything—governments, science, journalists—even when there’s no good reason to. It can also give way too much credibility to wild ideas that just aren’t backed up by facts.
Healthy skepticism is important, but it needs to come with critical thinking. Just saying, "What if it's true?" doesn’t really help—it just feeds into the chaos. I feel like we need more “let’s look at the evidence” and less “trust no one.”
- But "look at the evidence" IS "trust noone". Neither science nor journalism has been built on "trust me bro", religion and politics was.
  The line of thinking you're promoting is how dedicated political party fans behave, they distrust anyone who says the party has done something wrong. That's also the exact mechanism of how child rapes have been and are happening in the catholic church. The good priest may have told little Pete to suck him off, but he's an authority and why should we trust a kid over him.
  
  I hear where you’re coming from, and I agree that “trust no one” has its place when it comes to questioning authority, especially in systems that have historically abused power, like politics or religion. But I think there's an important distinction between blind trust and informed trust.
  When I say “look at the evidence,” I mean fostering a mindset where we evaluate claims critically, whether they come from an authority figure, a journalist, or a random Redditor. It’s not about blindly trusting anyone—it’s about examining the quality of their evidence and reasoning. Science and journalism, at their best, aren’t about “trust me, bro”; they’re about transparency, peer review, and reproducibility.
  I get why you’d connect my point to political party loyalty or abuse cover-ups, but I think that actually supports what I’m saying. Those cases happen when people don’t question authority or demand evidence. Blind loyalty, whether to a priest, a politician, or even a favorite conspiracy theory, is the problem. Critical thinking is what prevents us from falling into that trap.
  It’s not “trust no one” in the absolute sense—it’s more like “trust, but verify.” If the evidence holds up, great. If not, we should keep asking questions.

Every fucking time.
It's easy to recognise some super convenient propaganda, or follow the money, but sometimes it's not that simple.

MK Ultra moment

Theres enough conspiracies that 1 in a million have to be true.
Don't use the one as evidence of the million.
- The McDonald's ice cream machine conspiracies do truly confirm 9/11 being an inside job.
  
  Okay but there actually was a huge McDonald's Ice Cream Machine conspiracy that turned out to be true. McDonalds sells the machines made by Taylor Company to the Franchise Owners, then mandates that only Taylor can fix the machines which are needlessly complicated to clean and maintain, and the machines being unreliable was a design flaw known internally the entire time. When a company named Kytch created tools to make fixing them fast and easy: Taylor sued. Then Taylor made their own tool by reverse engineering Kytch's tool, so Kytch sued Taylor back for $900M USD.

I read a mainstream biography about Aristotle Onassis recently - something that was on the NY Times bestseller list back when it was published in 2004 - and near the beginning it casually comes up that the Secretary of State or head of the CIA (they were brothers at the time) was having an affair with the Queen of Greece. It wasn't even the point of the chapter. Instead, it was just a element in the US governments behind the scene manipulations as they used private intelligence firms to sink a deal between Onassis and the Saudis to fund their own shipping fleet.

The bottom fox should look the same as the top fox. After they've believed it for decades, their ego is on the line. They will argue that the evidence is bad, or it was always obvious, or that it's overblown.
- bottom fox
  Poor choice of words.
  
  Phrasing, Lana!

And you're a fool if you think they ever stopped.

The government wouldn't do that!
Oh yes they would
- this is unrelated, but do any Lemmy clients have a tool or option to show what a hyperlink is linking too? just had an unexpected YouTube video blast full volume and feeling very foolish rn
  
  I personally use Voyager, it shows all embedded links individually
  
  Sync shows contents of links(can see the youtube video above) and will give you a warning if it links to rickroll
  
  On Jerboa, you can long press the hypertext and it'll show you the link

The reason why reality and what people believe about reality diverge so heavily is because reality is based on mathematics while people's belief about reality is based on their experiences of the past. And past experiences fail to predict things like exponential growth or new theories or developments in technology.

If 1 in 20 conspiracy theories are correct then you'll be 95% correct if you disbelieve all of them.
If you pick one to believe in you'll be about 90% correct on average.
If you pick 10 you'll be about 50% correct.
- I don't get the middle statement. If you pick just one, the chance is 5%
  
  Looks like Big Math got to you
  
  If you pick one you're 5% likely to pick the right one and be 100% correct.
  You're 95% likely to pick the wrong one. Then you miss the conspiracy that is true and you believe in one that is not true so 18/20 = 90% correct.
  Average out the probabilities and it should turn out to be something like 90.5%.
  Edit:I may be off on the maths now that I think about it.

90 comments