List conspiracy theories here.

I'm sure they'll get right on it

maybe i'm misunderstanding you but i thought the business plot was a real thing? even if it never got past the talking stage.

― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.)

my reading of the results of the congressional investigation was "no way in fucking hell were these guys ever going to actually overthrow the government". even if they hadn't picked as a figurehead smedley butler, who immediately made a big stink about it to the press, eventually they would've talked to somebody who would have pointed out to them what a dumbshit idea their "conspiracy" was.

government based on fabricated conspiracies isn't exactly a new thing. this goes at least as far back as that time cicero (as far as anybody can tell) totally made up a conspiracy about catiline because he was worried that catiline's policies were too friendly towards the poor.

I think the whole spectrum from center to left has really failed to appreciate what is going on with pizzagate, qanon, Alex Jones, etc. This is not mere "tinfoil hat" stuff, this is the deliberate weaponization of conspiracy theory against political opponents.

deliberate and coordinated, so there's my conspiracy theory I guess

Traditionally shadowy science group The Jasons get chased out of the Pentagon
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/04/storied-jason-science-advisory-group-loses-contract-pentagon

The Georgia Guidestones... wt actual f?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgia_Guidestones

I'd never heard of this until yesterday when I was talking with a friend about how she'd gone for a coffee with an old friend of hers and how the conversation had turned somewhat weird. Now, she's known this friend for years but they only catch up with one another every now and again, this friend has always been religious but is now super religious. So, they were talking about Brexit (of course) when the friend said Brexit was just a smokescreen for what is really going on in the world - the smokescreen being a product of an elite of the Vatican(?!), global bankers (naturally) and, er, some other people she couldn't remember, the clue to all of this being the Georgia Guidestones. I think my friend sort of nodded along politely but I think when she was told the 2004 tsunami was manmade because some scientist in the early 20th century had shown you could manufacture tsunamis by drilling into the earth and dropping some sort of device into the earth's crust and the whole thrust of the Georgia Guidestones and the elites behind it is to drastically reduce the world's population, she demurred. Apparently her friend invited me and her to visit at her house out in Sussex, I said if you think I'm spending a weekend with an insane person you can forget it.

yeah this is real tho, wake up sheeple

also very real:

https://preview.redd.it/ps04q9titmp31.jpg?width=547&auto=webp&s=cab61e040019c4b0d39ab1b603aa7b4cf9941e98

but what if i want to interfere necessarily!

damn i always suspected u were a freemason troll

the sky is fake

Justin Trudeau is the son of Fidel Castro.

obv

or Mick Jagger IIRC

IDK if this exactly goes here, but is there some kind of right wing crank thing about "Delphi Method" or "Delphi Technique" as a means of false consensus building? I ask because there's a certain political process going on in my area that I don't want to get into and that someone I know described as using "Delphi Technique" to build a fake consensus. When I read descriptions of this, it sounded exactly like what is going on with this political process, but every single site/video/article I can find about it seems to be some kind of right wing crank site.

Never heard of it! Why is the consensus it builds false?

the Wayfair one might just be the dumbest of all time.

One of the allegedly trafficked people took to FB to say she was never missing and how stupid they are for believing this crap and the viewers were all berating her telling her she was still missing or she was on a fake "set" recording it

There's no arguing with people who insist that their brains remain broken.

It's the same names, though! The same names!!!

*googles*
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*regrets*

Yeah, I made the mistake of googling that one myself over the weekend. We are a dumb, dumb country.

I couldn't contain my laughter at everybody arguing with the "missing" girl as to whether she was really missing.

Esp since the ONLY report of her missing on the entire internet is this fake-looking website titled "Newsbreak" and the other 99% = Wayfair articles

I just genuinely don't know what the root cause of this strain of brain rot might be, where someone just flat out refuses to accept or even interact with any logical evidence that refutes these dumb theories.

It never ceases to amaze me that people can operate at such a diminished capacity and yet continue to do the things necessary for continued survival. Like you'd think they'd eventually walk into traffic because CARS ARE JUST PROPAGANDA AND DON'T ACTUALLY EXIST AND ALSO THIS FISTFUL OF BROKEN GLASS LOOKS LIKE DELICIOUS SUGARY CANDY YUM YUM

More like what they want you to think is 'logical evidence', sheeple.

xp

But I mean even that dude that stormed into the pizza place armed said the right things about being "wrong" after his arrest (presumably as advised by his counsel), but still doubled down on the overall theory just being more well hidden than they thought.

THIS FISTFUL OF BROKEN GLASS LOOKS LIKE DELICIOUS SUGARY CANDY YUM YUM

Relevant:

Cake: The Movie pic.twitter.com/GjoVeXm3FP

— Daniel 'danbanbam' Spencer (@danbanbam) July 13, 2020

The thing that really upsets me isn't that there is a conspiracy that Wayfair is a front for child trafficking, it's that mainstream news publications are running headlines like "Fact check: No evidence linking Wayfair to human trafficking operation"

Yeah just legitimizes it in the eyes of the theorists

*googles*
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.
.
*regrets*

yeah this

How widespread is 'Tom Hanks has been executed at some point in the past and the person you see today is his brother / someone pretending to be him" in, I guess, Qanon world and around?

Sometimes you see these things crop up but not sure if this is the work of an individual crank or a more common motif

Hanks is the Paul McCartney of today.

That Tom Hanks thing sounds like something cooked up by high school kids for a goof.

Goofy was the dingo that ate the baby

i just thought of a good one that i just learned about recently:

so glenn miller, the big band leader, who disappeared in an airplane en route to france over the english channel ? yeah, that never happened. it turns out that glenn miller was a big womanizer; his plane actually made it to france but upon arriving he got all fucked up and rowdy and ended up dying in a brothel mid-coitus. out of respect for his widow, and because he was a respectable household name — a war hero in a way, he was on his way to play music for our boys fighting the nazis ! — and because it was the '40s and people just didn't talk about that, they pretended he was a passenger on a flight that really DID go down. and so his body was "never found."

crazy huh ?

my preferred Tom Hanks theory is that he works directly with intelligence services to produce unobtrusively pro-American movies

One thing I can't understand about the QAnon people (the two I know/am related to are very religious - a Catholic & a Baptist) is that the Catholic Church has been involved in the sexual abuse of countless children (documented for at least 1,000 years on record), yet QAnon prefers the more obscure target of nonexistent pizza parlor basements and other Soros/Globalist/Gates-driven leftfield-theories.

The catholic church sex abuse scandal isnt a conspiracy theory though. It's a conspiracy that has been pretty thoroughly exposed over the last 25 years. Hard to go anywhere with that

Plus you can blame it on internal conspiracies - the Church is good but those people inside of it are responsible for the sexual abuse.

Yeah, it seems that for QAnon people it has to be something thats internal to that world and not supported by outsiders to really count?

It also seems distinct to regular covid/icke/gates/vaccines stuff, and Soros stuff, but I'm not sure on that - in content it just seems like a more finely honed version of that, but in terms of adherents it seems more distinct. The mainstream covid/gates/soros stuff has a lot of followers (i guess so does Qanon but still fewer than mainstream covidery?). Maybe the difference is that mainstream covid/gates/soros has a large number of dilettantes and casual believers, but for QAnon you really have to be fully signed up

the difference between a warped version of reality and something where that link is actually broken?

A lot of this is just about being part of a special club, seeing through something that others don't (despite this one weird trick clue only they are smart enough to have spotted) - whether it's flat Earth or dead Hanks. The already out there scandals don't appeal for that reason.

The Q stuff is different to that tho I guess. The usual stuff about 'actually the government is far far more competent than we could ever know' (actually as a way of controlling their anxiety about the state of things) but ramped up to try and contend more with the unpredictability and surrealism of the Trump era. As satire has struggled to keep up with reality so has the conspiracy theory and the ante must be upped. Maybe also the institutionalised abuse scandals of recent years have had a deeper effect when it comes to what draws people into the game.

Trying to control and uncontrollable world. That's why you have to carry three guns with you at all times.

Plus you can blame it on internal conspiracies - the Church is good but those people inside of it are responsible for the sexual abuse.

Ah but the Catholic Church hasn't been the Catholic Church since the Second Vatican Council. Keep up there.

Actually there's a split between conspiracy theories, those which are backwards-looking / present-describing and are alternative explanations for reality (moon, JFK, 9/11, iraq), and where ones that are true (or truer) are going to be

and ones which are forward-looking - not explaining today but explaining tomorrow. I'm not sure the traditional explanation of people wanting the messyness of reality to be structured in some way actually works for these or not. These are explanations for things that haven't happened yet

"I'm special because I was here for the end times" is how a lot of that rolls imo

I just genuinely don't know what the root cause of this strain of brain rot might be, where someone just flat out refuses to accept or even interact with any logical evidence that refutes these dumb theories.

― soaring skrrrtpeggios (jon /via/ chi 2.0), Tuesday, 14 July 2020 15:45 (two days ago) bookmarkflaglink

Speaking from a sample of one (my son's flatmate), it's too many shit podcasts and too much weed.