List conspiracy theories here.

What’s hilarious/horrifying is that the conspiracy theorists are probably starting to see RFK Jr. as vindication of their bizarre JFK Jr.-as-conservative-savior theory. Like, “oh we read the tea-leaves wrong, it was the OTHER Kennedy scion we were waiting for!”

xp this level-headedness is uncalled for in the conspiracy theory thread!

some fun fanfic was posted the other day on reddit, from a supposed molecular biologist who has worked on alien genomes. like the autopsy but for the 21st century. an entertaining read.
https://www.reddit.com/r/aliens/comments/14rp7w9/from_the_late_2000s_to_the_mid2010s_i_worked_as_a/

MTV VJ Kennedy could probably get to 20% in some polls 18 months out purely on name recognition.

that reddit thread is wild.. people are really buying into his shit

I have a compilation of men's postwar magazines (Argosy, Saga, etc.) and the editors said that would completely fabricate important WWII battles.. but readers would only call them out on minor technicalities, i.e. "There's no way the Germans had the R-63 Wildcat in 1942, it was even completed until early 1944!" etc., without noting that the battle itself was totally fictional

I get the same drift from this reddit thread, like "what about gut bacteria?" Jeez louise you suckers

This American Life on Art Bell:

Someone sent Art this tape, which was supposedly recorded by scientists who were mining in Siberia. They drilled down nine miles until they smashed through into earth's hollow core. They measured the temperature at 2,000 degrees. And then they dropped down a super-sensitive microphone to listen to the tectonic movements. But they accidentally recorded the moanings of souls in hell.

So Art plays this tape on the air, and people call in to discuss the breakthrough because there are questions of methodology to be discussed. They're not saying, well, maybe hell doesn't exist, or even if hell exists, it's probably not in the center of the earth, or it would be easy for anyone to fake this. They're discussing the logistics of drilling a nine-mile hole and then dangling a microphone into it.

Oh, by the way, there’s Qanon movie in the top ten right now

https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/2023/07/07/sound-of-freedom-qanon-theories-jim-caviezel/

Fuck that movie and everyone who paid to see it

Posted about it in a diff thread

Is Art Bell still on the air? Or did he eventually get trapped in another dimension or something? I used to love listening to him whenever I happened to be out driving late at night. I remember one time someone had brought him a time machine, and he spent the whole part of the show that I heard going back and forth about whether he should try it. I never heard what happened.

Oh I see he died a few years ago. Or DID he.

He died in 2018. I remember he disappeared from the air and said his son had been kidnapped and infected with AIDS. I thought it was a weird stunt but it turned out to be true.

Someone sent Art this tape, which was supposedly recorded by scientists who were mining in Siberia. They drilled down nine miles until they smashed through into earth's hollow core. They measured the temperature at 2,000 degrees. And then they dropped down a super-sensitive microphone to listen to the tectonic movements. But they accidentally recorded the moanings of souls in hell.
So Art plays this tape on the air, and people call in to discuss the breakthrough because there are questions of methodology to be discussed. They're not saying, well, maybe hell doesn't exist, or even if hell exists, it's probably not in the center of the earth, or it would be easy for anyone to fake this. They're discussing the logistics of drilling a nine-mile hole and then dangling a microphone into it.

the tape of the souls in Hell circulated among credulous evangelicals for a while. The recording of the souls screaming in torment turned out to be pitch-shifted from the 1972 Mario Bava film Baron Blood

The Cydonia Face on Mars is another Art Bell classic.

Do super sensitive microphones like high temperatures? Record without distortion at them and remain intact etc

&isn't the earth hollow anyway? I mean otherwise how would the Nazis live down there? I saw a documentary on SyFy

All about the mic placement, I’m sure Steve Albini would know.

If I was to record the moanings of souls in hell I'd use a Behringer mic.

use a disposable mic cos the souls in torment aren't exactly trustworthy innit?

Thanks to a trove of old ’90s Art Bell episodes on Archive.org, I listened to a bunch of them while rewatching The X-Files last year. It was fun but tainted by the suspicion that if I googled a lot of these folks, they are probably now right-wing cranks. I mean, they were cranks back then, but the show/topics often had an apolitical air that made even government conspiracies a bit more fantastical in the vein of "Bigfoot is real" rather than "Dems are secretly sex trafficking children”. Fantasy, really.

Ditto The X-Files, too. The show didn’t have right-wing intent—all that post-Watergate paranoia leaned left, if anything, especially when it tied stuff like Operation Paperclip into its mythology—but it was hard for the modern political environment not to shade my viewing. I mean, the big baddie of the show is basically the deep state, and there’s whole plot about a vaccine that is a cover for collecting DNA from abductees.

That’s basically Glenn Greenwald’s whole schtick—Mulder used to seem like an anti-establishment leftie, now he’d be read as a right winger.

I'm not usually a fan of disinformation pranks but I'll make an exception here

I work at AMC and just got fired for refusing to add this liquid to a customer’s soda. We were instructed specifically to serve this to Sound of Freedom audiences. I am a microbiology student and took it to the lab to examine and found what looks like nanobots inside. pic.twitter.com/UHpULlfof2

— andrew (@mrnastynodrama) July 12, 2023

I'm not usually a fan of disinformation pranks but I'll make an exception here

I work at AMC and just got fired for refusing to add this liquid to a customer’s soda. We were instructed specifically to serve this to Sound of Freedom audiences. I am a microbiology student and took it to the lab to examine and found what looks like nanobots inside. pic.twitter.com/UHpULlfof2

— andrew (@mrnastynodrama) July 12, 2023

Ditto The X-Files, too. The show didn’t have right-wing intent—all that post-Watergate paranoia leaned left,

I was thinking about this recently and I wonder if the main difference is scale. The deep state conspiracy was small in number and hidden, whereas now the conservative conspiratorialism is massive and all-encompassing, everyone is in on it. In some ways conspiratorialism on the right isn't really even conspiratorialism, its things out in the open, democracy, bureacracy, regulations, laws, administration. Groups of people having a meeting is inherently suspect, it should be one guy telling the others what to do

That x-files type conspiracy stuff seems the anomaly though, not what we see today

all digital media is turning teal

Mr Beast is the antichrist.

Antichrist has fewer subscribers

i'm spreading my own conspiracy theory. it goes like this. joe biden had hunter arrested - instead of the phony plea deal that was just a red herring or a macguffin or something - and he will have him convicted and then anyone who has ever done drugs will not be able to buy a gun in the future. it will be called: The Hunter Law.

i'm still working on some of the details...

the fact that a (sinister but unpspecified) "THEY" can "CONTROL THE WEATHER" goes back at least to kurt vonnegut's brother bernard discovering silver iodide is effective in cloud-seeding -- plus there's a famous funny-cringey passage in trotsky's LITERATURE AND REVOLUTION where he declares that mankind will one day (after the revolution, via machines) ) master all of nature including the waves and the clouds ect ect

anyway there was a little old lady -- querulous yet also vociferous -- explaining loudly to the whole tolerant post office, as plymouth prepares for STORM AGNES to make landing, that the russians can stop and start tempests at will, which is why the tanks and rockets in the mayday parade are never seen to get wet

Newsweek agrees with her! Except, in 2017, it didn't work (and good luck with Ms Agnes Storm, iodide or otherwise)...

https://www.newsweek.com/clear-sky-bad-weather-ends-moscow-air-show-605889

Aye, right enough, ye meet some right zoomers when ye're waitin' tae cash yer giro.

I'm just going to assume the study leading to the current headline "Sitting all day increases dementia risk — even if you exercise" is total bullshit being propagated for the benefit of ... shoemakers?

ALL DOCTORS AGREE: STOP EATING THIS VEGETABLE IMMEDIATELY

I haven't thought of Above Top Secret in years, but I heard that the site just collapsed - everyone locked out of their accounts, the owners have ghosted, threads falling apart from spam attacks, one or two volunteers haphazardly trying to keep it all together. Fascinating to see any 20+ year community immediately pivot to cannibalism once the mods disappear.

This is an admittedly minor conspiracy, but I'm pretty sure that the nation's convenience store workers have agreed to stock all the sodas facing backward so you can't easily tell what they are.

Inconvenience stores

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory

who are all of you?

This seems inevitable, only a couple of years living internet left I think

The problem I see with Dead Internet Theory is that the internet isn't self-sustaining. Humans work to tend and pay for it in return for a perceived benefit. As the percentage of fully-automated interaction rises there will be a point of diminishing returns to the real humans who pay for its continuation.

Either an equilibrium will be achieved or the internet will swiftly die. A similar mechanism is present in biology, where parasites that kill their hosts before they can find new ones will quickly perish as a species. A Dead Internet would look like an empty abandoned mall, instead of a mall full of zombie shoppers looking for living brains that never arrive.

I mean a dead internet will still be useful for shopping/banking/streaming, it will just not be useful for social interactions or searching for information

always amazed at how much more difficult it is to search for things anymore

my main task on the two hiking websites I help moderate is killing seo spam.

speaking of conspiracies...I was reminded by my brother that I was the victim of one in 5th grade. I was accused of being part of a conspiracy to cheat in the elementary school spelling bee.

Never mind the fact that I got 32/35 right on the qualifying test to get into the final round. My mother was in the audience and everybody insisted she was mouthing the letters of every word to me. Maybe she was, idk. But I wasn't looking at her. Nor could I read lips (I still am not great at it). and also, the words weren't very hard. even by elementary school standards.

but like everybody kept coming up to me for 3 months saying EVERYONE KNOWS YOU CHEATED any time they saw me or the bee came up, and saying my mom fed me the answers, and that we had pre-planned this system of cheating. eventually I told someone "well I'm sorry these words are hard to YOU, but I actually know things" and subsequently got punched in the stomach.

Woah, that’s fucked up

That's like Quiz Show Part II

always amazed at how much more difficult it is to search for things anymore

― CEO Greedwagon (Neanderthal), Monday, April 1, 2024 2:48 PM (six hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

yeah it's wild I noticed last month that the top result for a lot of the stuff I was searching for was AI generated and now I've noticed it's the top 3

yeah it fucking sucks now!
i may ask well just yell out to my mum from the other room & get as many wrong sound-alike answers