"and did you see the lizards clear?"

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i met a man last night who really genuinely passionately (tho also very civilly) believes in a classic World Govt Elite Conspiracy Theory (freemasons not saurian) — viz the Second World War was a put-up job,m which took 20 years to plan and prepare etc. He is a self-taught, widely read, intelligent, Dublin-born working man (high-end electrical engineer in his mid-50s). Very charming, a good person (also the favourite uncle of one of my oldest friends, so I am inclined to be forgiving, I suppose).

― mark s, Thursday, 20 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

i only succumbed to ilx-style terror-posting once during the conversation (I said that if the freemasons had so much experience organising such vast projects, we shd just let them get on with it, as we were clearly inferior beasts with no such competence). This phased him not at all — he basically agreed! — but it made my old friend's sister's hair stand on end!! (I had to whsiper that i was trolling, a bit later)

― mark s, Thursday, 20 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

Hahaha "Who makes Steve Guttenberg A STAR?"

― Alex in SF, Thursday, 20 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

fazed! (sorry)

― toby, Thursday, 20 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

i guess the question part of the thread is: what are the wonkier Explanations of the World you have encountered being defended by a non-mentalist (in person NOT ON THE NET obv).

― mark s, Thursday, 20 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

but toby i meant that i failed to displace his soul vibration enough to cause him to burst into flame (cf the vibrations-out-of-phase explanation of spontaneous human combustion)

― mark s, Thursday, 20 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

Did we ever establish whether mark s is a lizard and if so from which race

― N., Thursday, 20 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

a. yes b. it wd mean nothing to you (phylum patterns are tattooed on our inner nictating eyelid but you have all — all the humans on ilx — been engineered not even to see our crests and talons, so meh... )

― mark s, Thursday, 20 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

Blimey! where do you get to meet such, er...'interesting' ppl mark s?

― Julio Desouza, Thursday, 20 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

every day. i feel like that every time i talk to conservatives.

― Dave M., Thursday, 20 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

"favourite uncle of one of my oldest friends" = useful info here julio

― mark s, Thursday, 20 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

Oh, OK mark, I should read more instead of rushing and pushing the submit button.

― Julio Desouza, Thursday, 20 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

My roommate, despite reading the Times every day and generally having a better handle on the news cycle than I do, constantly defends bizarre propositions, including the increasingly- irritating "Bush planned the WTC demolition" chestnut. (To his credit, he only hints at that one in a "makes you think" kind of way: and yes, it "makes me think" he's being an idiot.)

Other of his theories seem like legitimate news analysis gone completely awry, like his contention that the stock market is outright "rigged" by a smug Ivy-League elite happily defrauding the common investor. Is this just a slightly-overblown complaint about the often-manipulative practices of analysts and Wall Street insiders? No, it's not: he seems to imagine "them" sitting around in buttoned-leather armchairs drinking brandy and actually physically rigging the market.

Also in a conversation about child-abusing priests I said something about their screwed-up religious sexualization coming through in cases where there's a religious component to the abuse (one made kids hold a crucifix and masturbate, another made them confess to him post- abuse, another had kids eat communion wafers with err something extra on top) and he stubbornly argued for the rest of the evening that this had nothing to do with sexual psychology but that they were just flat-out sadists who sat around concocting these bizarre acts for the sole purpose of maximizing the children's torment.

Granted, none of these are incredibly bizarre (the last is sort of a matter of interpretation), but constant exposure makes up for it. (And why would you read the newspaper if you believed, as he must to defend certain positions, that the newspaper was either lying to you or was completely in the dark about the actual workings of the world?)

― nabisc%%, Thursday, 20 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

(oddly enough i think maybe reading mainstream papers a lot makes it EASIER to fall into this kind of basically well-armoured self-protective thinking)

― mark s, Thursday, 20 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

(And why would you read the newspaper if you believed, as he must to defend certain positions, that the newspaper was either lying to you or was completely in the dark about the actual workings of the world?)

I read the times just to pass the time and to laugh at the positions that they have on certain issues. That's all.

Anyway, didn't you know that the sport news section is the only news actually worth reading!

― Julio Desouza, Thursday, 20 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

Right, right: no one wants to admit that he actually trembles before the paper and can't truly know anything about what's happening apart from what that paper passes along -- thus he must pretend that the paper is only raw information behind which only he can divine the hidden truth using his all-powerful Conspiracy Filter. (And this really does seem to be the way roommate reads the paper: in this weird adversarial way where he wants to scoff at it and say "well obviously the actual truth is...") (Really, though, why won't anyone ever just take a paper at face value?)

― nabisco%%, Thursday, 20 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

("Face-value" in this instance meaning yes there are decisions made about what leads and what gets stuffed and whether X piece of information goes inside at paragraph 30 or runs in the reefer and what stories run period, yes, obviously, but it's not as if any actual effort is being made to lie to or misinform you: everyone involved, from the paper itself to the government officials and spokesmen and lawyers and everyone else quoted within, is doing a simple workaday job.)

― nabisco%%, Thursday, 20 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

conspiracy theories etc give a lot of comfort to some people, making think 'yes, there is order out there, things do make some sort of sense'. if the need for 'truth' cannot be sated, the need for there to be a truth stands in, the fact that this 'truth' is 'hidden' is actually better, because you can make it up...

in conversation with a conspiracy theorist once, i nearly said "of course, the goverment encourages conspiracy theories to deflect attention from its amateruism and general incompetence, it needs people to believe them to maintain the myth of control", but i was not in the mood for verbal trolling

― gareth, Thursday, 20 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

i guess the question part of the thread is: what are the wonkier Explanations of the World you have encountered being defended by a non-mentalist

Calvinism.

― DeRayMi, Thursday, 20 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

Is Calvinism really any more wonky then any other Christian denomination (or any other religion for that matter)?

― RickyT, Thursday, 20 June 2002 00:00 (twenty-two years ago) link

fifteen years pass...

there is a HUGE number of these kinds of vids on YT now :/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qz10cJGVunM

― illegal economic migration (Tracer Hand), Monday, 26 June 2017 08:24 (seven years ago) link

the people who make these vids and snicker up their sleeves about how clever they are to fool the rubes ought to be beaten mercilessly with a stout stick

― A is for (Aimless), Tuesday, 27 June 2017 04:10 (seven years ago) link

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