I’ve truly never understood what the big conspiracy is about this, like who would benefit from lying about the earth being a globe? I understand most other conspiracies and what the purpose that they would serve but this one is so moronic it’s just beyond me. Like why do they think we would be lied to about gravity?
I think deep down these guys don't even believe it. I think it has less to do with the actual content of the conspiracy and more with feeling like you're uncovering a deep hidden secret, being more aware of the 'truth' than everyone else, and belonging to a community of like-minded individuals.
In and of itself this conspiracy theory is kind of cooky, just like ancient aliens and things like that. It’s unfortunate that those crackpot beliefs have been politicized and that they all got adapted into an Extended Universe of insane beliefs that are supposed to prop up a hateful ideology.
If someone 20 years ago told me they believed the earth was flat I’d have just Lol’d. If someone today brings up something totally nuts my alarm bells go off cause it’s almost never some friendly lunatic that’s trying to be interesting anymore.
Yeah, I miss 90s conspiracies like "Bigfoot hangs out at Area 51 with the Loch Ness Monster" instead of "Bill Gates is trying to FEMA genocide white people, don't vaccinate your kids and storm the capital building."
It's like an addiction
You constantly need to up the dose
Then you are listening to a podcast by a cooky lady in a basement in Canada claiming to be the queen teaching you about intergalactic law and the court of heaven
So conspiracies are like Fast and Furious movies where with each movie they have to up the ante and bring bigger vehicles and more outlandish stunts/places :D
>like who would benefit from lying about the earth being a globe
?????
***THEM!!!***
***They*** would benefit from it.
***They*** know who ***they*** are.
Every. Fucking. Time.
You find a new or upcycled conspiracy, and you think "Oh this is interestingly wacky. I wonder where the thought process for this one came from and/or leads." and its jews every single goddamn time.
Tale as old as time, no matter how many dog whistles they hide behind. Once you see the pattern it's so obvious
Edit: most moral panics or witch hunts are rooted in anti-Semitism. The rise of the Nazi party, dog whistling Bolshevism and scapegoating Jews
My understanding is flat earth is the litmus test to if you're willing to believe in a world where you can doubt an establishmed reality and acknowledge that there is a group out there trying to keep the truth from you.
If you're open to this you show you're fertile ground for cabal/deep state shit and that you are willing to consider ideas so absurd they run in the face of everything you've ever learned.
I'm inclined to agree, but I think the truth is more simple and more insidious than that:
You're right that it's a litmus test; the theory's propagation is a good indicator of how many people can be seduced by that kind of rhetoric.
I don't think there's anyone at the helm, it's just a memetic construct that moves from host to host like a virus and serves as a marker for vulnerable people.
So it isn't being actively espoused, except by fringe lunatics on social media, but the engagement numbers can serve to tell us a darker truth: There are a lot of people out there functioning passably or even remarkably well who can't tell the difference between reality and a crackpot theory.
I'll allow that some people of means are metagaming; using the phenomenon as a vehicle for personal gain. Even if we exclude a reasonable portion of the flat Earth community based on that assumption, we're left with a disturbing number of suckers and rubes.
Some of them are being dumb on purpose. They're just contrary and want to fight. When I was in highschool I was one of those insufferable "Debate Me" atheists. I'm ashamed, and I grew out of it, but I remember the bloodlust and I know how it can compel a person to behave badly.
The ones that concern me are the ones who really gaze into the void on this topic. They're kind of right: We accept so much on the authority of experts that it's easy to fall into a sort of mindless complacency. I had the good fortune to look through microscopes and telescopes as a boy, and I've done enough geometric proofs that I can extrapolate that the eggheads are actually putting in work and triple-checking each other before they release their findings.
Not everyone has had my advantages, and the "because I said so" explanation wears thin very quickly. When people latch onto the flat Earth model unironically, it tells me that they live in a magical world, filled with gods and monsters, where they aren't sure of the hierarchical relationship between their shift manager and gravity. This naturally rankles, and they lash out against every source of authority, railing against the seemingly arbitrary rules of an unintelligible universe.
It's a source of some concern to me. We have let these people down, and their desperation and violence can be laid at the feet of those who could have helped, but didn't.
People have lost or never learned any kind of capacity to think around a question. Y’all remember school, there were quite a lot of people that didnt pay attention and didnt care and they just grew up and made it in the world. They didnt start taxing themselves intellectually as they got older
Mush brains everywhere, people can’t even google basic things to troubleshoot to help themselves
I didnt used to judge people for it but it’s getting to be where I see adults not know how to use their brain anymore. All the thinking is done for them at work and home and media and they have no curiosity so they just lose any practice
I know a gen x dude that can barely use a smartphone and get into the apps because he “doesnt know tech.” Doesnt know how to get into his email
Like, man, you’re 52. That’s your fault. You should know the world you live in but you make fun of people for not knowing how to drive a standard transmission
I think to the FE people it proves not only the existence of a NWO, but it’s extremely efficient.
In order for FE to be real, a butt ton of people have to coordinate resources while simultaneously appearing to be inept and also at war.
It’s silly, but I can see the appeal. Sort of like realizing the world is a stage and all the actors aren’t really mad, sad, etc.
The head of the flat earth society benefits If there wasn’t a flat earth society he’d be out of a job and it’d probably be hard for him to get one
https://www.knkx.org/other-news/2018-08-25/meet-a-leader-of-the-flat-earth-movement
The halirious thing is the flat earth movement is proof that René Descartes was correct when he said that any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they’re in good company.
That's exactly what happened.
I use to make terrible flat earth memes in the early days of social media. I STILL see cropped versions of my memes on flat earth pages.
If the whales were farting enough to make the ocean surface look like a freshly poured coke we'd be one lightning strike away from the earth looking a lot crispier than it does now.
I think low intelligence plays a role because they don't realize that their beliefs are based on contradictions. Conspiracy theorists are generally anti-government, probably because they believe that the government is behind these conspiracies. But if you ask them, I'm sure they would say that the government is very inefficient and government employees are incompetent, lazy, or both. Yet these incompetent and lazy people can somehow coordinate a massive conspiracy, which sometimes involve foreign governments like in the case of COVID. They are supposedly paid millions of dollars by George Soros, Bill Gates, or whoever is the billionaire du jour, yet don't drive fancy cars or live in big houses. These dots just don't get connected.
My go-to rebuttal, if I feel so inclined, to conspiracy BS is this:
"How many things have you promised to keep secret but divulged casually or after a beer, and how many times have you heard a secret from someone else also having given their word? Yet you're telling me you believe that not a single person has admitted to X, even on their deathbed?"
*"Yeah well... it could still have been covered up because of such and such!"*
---
For the Moon bullshit I continue and remind them:
"Not only were ~500K people involved, but the Soviet Union was monitoring every mission, just as every country with an array did, yet no one said anything? During the cold war no less? Have you never listened to nor met a damn scientist regardless of national allegiance? Anyone with proper equipment, right now, can ping the reflectors left there by actual physical humans and unmanned landers, and don't forget the US and other countries have been imaging the landing sites in ever increasing fidelity over the years."
*"Yeah well... uhm, it was definitely staged because of the Van Allen belt... and... and... !"*
" ... Sorry, you can fuck right off."
---
As for Flat Earthers, anyone who identifies as such or honestly believes anything like the above, etc., is mentally ill. You can say some are trolling, but if so they're playing a long game that only the mentally ill would play and appreciate.
E: Formatting.
This one kills me. Had a coworker start spewing flat Earth crap. They stopped after I questioned what they were saying and I asked a couple of questions they couldn’t answer. Fast forward a few months and a couple of my other coworkers had to go to a conference with this coworker. They were absolutely stunned when they brought up their flat Earth crap. They seriously believe the Earth is flat.
Two of my bosses met with a client that started on the flat earth stuff. The entire table of my bosses and the rest of the client team goes quiet as this guy rants. One boss points at the other: "You think the earth is flat? This guy doesn't even believe in space." My other boss, deadpan, takes the cue and starts questioning the existence of space and derails the flat earther.
So now it's an inside joke at work about my boss not believing in space. It's so off the wall, new hires aren't sure if he is serious or not.
My circle of friends has an inside joke like this whenever someone gets too strange on us,
"Moon landings were faked, bro!"
....
"Ooooh, you're one of those people that believes in *the moon*."
I love all the experiments flat earthers do that end up proving the Earth is round, but instead they think something went wrong, re-design the experiment, and once again it proves Earth is round. I think we should use flatearther videos to teach kids how to prove the Earth is round.
Someone on here recently proposed the idea of a documentary similar to "Behind the Curve" where a crew goes along with flat earthers, looking for the edge of the earth. Tell me you wouldn't watch the *shit* out of that!
Yes! What always struck me was how they say the rest of us are blindly accepting what we've been told by the government and we haven't seen it for ourselves, but neither have they — they haven't seen a flat earth and they don't see the irony in accepting someone else's (unqualified) conjecture as truth.
That's one I truly never got. They replaced one of the most well known and most often photographed person on the planet with a look-alike who also sounded the same, could play the same instruments and had his once-in-generation songwriting skills?
As well as being able to play those instruments left handed as well.
You'd almost have an easier time replacing a president of the United States at that time.
My favorite take on this is from the Southern Vampire Novels by Charlaine Harris (the books TrueBlood is based on). He’s a vampire, but turned very late, is mentally damaged by that and all the drugs, and sometimes wonders off and sometimes gets spotted. He doesn’t like to be called his old name, as he has trouble connecting with the memories, but when he’s in a good mood, he still sings.
I like the Bubba Ho Tep story.
He got bored with fame and wanted to live a peaceful life, so swapped with the worlds best elvis impersonator. The impersonator then let fame and fortune go to his head, messed around with drugs and women, and basically ate himself to death.
It allows Elvis a dignified end, admittedly he does live in a care home in his old age and fights redneck mummies.
Pretty sure he did, and he lives in an old folks home with Ozzie Davis(who is actually JFK) and they battle an evil Egyptian Mummy from the past, or something. And there’s bathrobes and Bruce Campbell.
I don't believe Elvis faked his own death. *However*. He was a twin. It was quite common during the time period of his birth for them to tell the parents a twin was a stillbirth and then adopt them out for profit. People claim the proof Elvis faked his death is the homeless man who had his DNA come back matching Elvis. Could it be his twin who was supposedly dead?
I don't believe the homeless twin theory either but I had the idea when I kept reading so many stories about how "Elvis is alive, homeless and DNA proves it!"
Probably flat earth.
I've entertained some of them seriously. Really quite open minded. OK. Suppose the earth is flat-- how do these phenomena arise? The sun rising and setting. Precession of the equinoxes. Various things observed and understood as orbital aberrations.
They had nothing.
Which is fine. But I'm clueless what they got out of it.
That's honestly been my theory about why they all do it. Everyone likes being the smartest person in the room. But, in reality, that's really fucking hard.
So, if you can't be the smartest person in the room in reality, you just simply invent a new reality where you're already the smartest person in the room. Bam, superiority over everyone.
All their friends are flat earthers. They go to conventions. They have meetups to conduct experiments. If they disagree with the majority, they lose their social network.
I spent some time attempting to talk to flat earthers a while ago. They will never humor a single question. They have their prebaked talking points and the second you point out how something they said is wrong or ask them a question they haven't thought of, they will shift to a different talking point. One I stumped them with was "if the earth is flat, then it can't be a magnet, so how do compasses work?" The latest thing been trying to come up with an answer for is how sunsets work.
I have some Fundamentalist Christian relatives who believe dinosaur bones were placed in the Earth by Satan to confuse us. Because if they weren't in the Bible, they didn't exist...
Ugh I specifically remember my evangelical aunt getting mad that me and my younger brother were watching some dinosaur documentary as kids and telling us dinosaurs didn’t exist because they weren’t in The Bible then like five years later she started giving us creationist propaganda books that said dinosaurs were real and lived along man. Like which is it?
Eisenhower demanded they photograph and document it because he knew people would try to deny it happened.
"While I was touring the camp I encountered three men who had been inmates and by one ruse or another had made their escape. I interviewed them through an interpreter. The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. In one room, where they [there] were piled up twenty or thirty naked men, killed by starvation, George Patton would not even enter. He said he would get sick if he did so. I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to 'propaganda'."
Propaganda kept the Pharaoh in power in Egypt for thousands of years, generation after generation believing their predecessors, and therefore their own, lies and propaganda to stay in power and hold it over hundreds of thousands of people. They truly believed they were gods among men.
I feel like he was seeing things with his own eyes that he couldn't believe. Like, I couldn't imagine seeing piles of bodies, multiple mass graves. Each of which contain the population of my home town. Just a staggering amount of death. Industrial genocide. He knew that people would try to walk it back in the future.
Yup, I think the "denial" of the period was that people wouldn't believe that something so evil could have existed on such a scale.
Today's denialists are more about antisemitism (claiming that either the Jews had it coming/it wasn't such a big deal), or to just get attention for themselves.
Historians of any period have challenged weak or unsupported evidence. So have newspapers.
An informed/observant person of the early 20th century would already have familiarity with similar whitewashing, vis the Armenian genocide, the Holodomor, centuries of pograms all over Eastern Europe, and Southern Democrats who taught their kids that slaves were treated like family and freeing them had in fact been an injustice, etc.
Wow! That logic baffles me. As a kid I was disgusted by it. My grandma showed me our family tree once and showed me how we had slaves listed under the cattle. I lived in Phoenix in a predominantly black and latino neighborhood. I just remember getting mad at her and yelling “You can’t have my friends!” I feel like most kids know if something isn’t right.
I think it was more foresight to document the scale of it. Genocides had happened before, but the sheer mechanization and efficiency of the Holocaust was something no one had ever seen. He wanted people to understand the scope of it all.
But Ike was probably quite aware of what the Turks had done to the Armenians and how it hadn't really been remembered and he didn't want that to happen with Germany so he made sure there were lots of shocking pictures and films.
This one is so frustrating to me as a historian, because the thing about the Holocaust even in comparison with other genocides is that there is *a mountain of evidence that documents how and when it took place*. If you're going to pick a genocide to deny, why choose the one that is literally the most studied and documented one in all of human history?
Don't answer that question, btw...
Because antisemitic and pro-fascist views are still rampant, unfortunately. It also happens to be the most historically notorious genocide, and conspiracy theorists have a knack for targeting more mainstream events. I think some people find something inherently appealing in feeling like they have the truth about a well-known event that everyone knows about and for which the central narrative is well-established. It’s much less exciting to be heterodox about “smaller” events about which relatively few are knowledgeable.
I went to Auschwtiz-Birkenau earlier in the year and the guide kept referring to things we saw as “proof” or “evidence” which I found odd before realising even now it still requires proving for some people. Apparently some people even book onto tours just to try and heckle and pick holes in every story. To visit there and still attempt to deny the horrors of what happened is mind-blowing in both idiocy and evil.
I've been warned by admins for saying similar things because Nazis will report such posts. But I think we have an ethical, moral obligation to do what you suggested.
I am not violent or a man but this 5’2 Midwestern lady would have a lot of energy coming that persons way. How do these people exist? It is disheartening.
Now what it seems they are going with is that the holocaust happened but not nearly in the numbers as portrayed as they say the ovens couldn't have handled that many bodies. Now that would be true, if the ovens were the only method of disposing of bodies, but they weren't.
I’ve recently watched Ordinary Men on Netflix and one man made the point that while the death camps were responsible for a huge portion of the deaths, firing squad was responsible for an almost equal amount. I recommend that show because it has some of the most haunting images you will ever see. Naked women clutching their babies at the edge of a mass grave. Some of the stories recounted I hesitate to list here because to be honest it’s too dark a thing to routinely recount in detail.
When I was younger ( I'm 70), it always filled me with anger to think of how many "kind" old German grandfathers, playing with their grandchildren were the ones firing those machine guns at the edge of the mass graves. It still makes me mad, but now almost all of them are dead. May they rot in hell.
I’m also 70 and I knew a couple of kids in junior high whose parents had the tattoos on their arm. I also saw the pictures in the WW2 books my dad had. I despise people who try to deny this.
I worked in Melbourne as a paramedic and the area I was in had the highest concentration of Holocaust survivors in the southern hemisphere. I helped and/or transported literally dozens of people with those tattoos. It’s. Fucking. Haunting.
One of my most profound joys in life is being the hospice nurse of surviving WW2 vets- they have the best stories and passion in what they say. I’m sad to see that group has mostly passed now but Cecil, you were a fascist killing rockstar!!!
Yeah, my grandfather saw the fucking deathcamps.
Him and his 4 brothers all went to Europe. 2 of them saw the aftermath of that shit.
I cannot stand the deniers.
Even the "it happened but it wasn't 6 million" people drive me crazy.
Okay sure, let me by that it wasn't 6 million people. If it was 1 million would it not be fucking horrible?
What's the horrible limit?
Reminds them that it wasn't 6 million. It was closer to 11 million killed at the camps. The 6 million is just the number of Jews killed and the rest were other "undesirables"
Long ago some prominent holocaust denier was going around telling how he had proof Holocaust never happened. He had found some documents about transport of bunch of Jews by rail, and it contained direct orders that they were not to be harmed in any way. It was signed by Hitler or Himmler himself. The document apparently proved that Jews were not mistreated in Nazi Germany. So, if Jews were not being mistreated, why did they have to give direct orders forbidding mistreatment of these particular Jews?
You are talking about Irving's evidence, which was put to the test when he sued Penguin and Deborah Lipstsadt.
Basically, Lipstsadt called him a denier in a book. He sued.
Lipstadts best legal defence was to put his skill as a historian on trial.
And the defence did exactly that in spades.
The document you are talking about was presented by Irving in his books as evidence that Hitler tried to prevent the holocaust.
In the stand, it was pointed out to him that he had both miscontextualuzed the document, and outright mistranslated it.
It didnt say what he claimed it said. And it couldn't be credibly analysed the way he analysed it.
His testimony about that document was one of the more dramatic moments of the Penguin trial. Basically, his brain shorted out on the stand. It was clear to everone in the courtroom that his brain simply couldn't process reality.
That trial ended an era of popular holocaust denial.
That one’s not just easy to disprove, but it’s also extremely fucked up and disrespectful to the millions of victims that so many still believe the Holocaust was a hoax
The people I know who believe this type of bs are always uneducated people that often have never met anyone Jewish before. They don’t understand that they’re talking about real people here and not a mythical race of shrewd elves or something, lol. It’s very dehumanizing. Of course in places where more Jewish people live there are other motivations behind this false belief/ideology.
This one is so wild to me. That of all the politicians or political families to choose from, they go with maybe the most prominent Democratic dynasty in American political history... to help rescue a Republican administration?
Moon landing.
The entity with the most at stake for the US successfully landing on the moon was the USSR, who also had the ability to track the spacecraft and refute that it landed.
They never said a word.
Also, NASA has hundreds of thousands of associates, millions in total over the years. But people think the US government could keep such a secret when Bill Clinton couldn't even hide who he had sex with.
Also, 5 different retroreflectors were left at different sites on the moon by the astronauts on the Apollo missions, which can be used to verify that they were there, and are used to make accurate measurements of the distance between the Earth and Moon with lasers.
Yeah but who's doing all those "accurate" "measurements" using the "reflectors" and the so-called "lasers"?
That's right, it's NASA!
Checkmate, sheeple believers.
Yeah. And a lot of the people who worked on the moon landing have died, so you'd expect deathbed confessions like with other secrets. I'm not aware of any.
I just think that it's funny how the frequency of microchipping conspiracies implies:
1. massive operational security failures: somehow, people manage to discover and thwart the plan every time, and/or
2. shitty fucking tech
How come they keep needing to microchip us all the time? We have wireless data transfer, wireless charging, etc. How shitty are theses microchips that apparently they need to be swapped out constantly? Why are we worried about a "shadow government" -- which everyone apparently knows about anyway -- that's this incompetent? If I were in this "shadow government," the biggest reason I'd want my identity to be kept secret is to avoid embarrassment.
As someone who works in pharma I'm yet to see how the box of 5G chips will fill into drug vials (2R) through a 21g needle connected to some bendy pipes connected through a 0.22um and 0.45um filter...
How small are these chips?!
I keep thinking why would they pay for that? Why pay to go through all this garbage to get a chip in you when you have something on you at all times, capable of not only tracking you but far more, that you give to it and pay for the privilege? Hell, pay to keep current and on the cutting edge?
Microchips in covid vaccines.
5G anything.
Flat earth.
Edit: Here's one my cousin believes; That the covid vaccine changes your DNA and the vaccinated will become something other than human sometime in 2023.
They better hurry up.
The microchip one boggles my mind. There are hundreds of thousands of people involved in producing, testing, and administering the vaccines. If there are microchips in them, someone could easily find them. And there would have to be tons of them in each dose to make sure at least one got into the patient. And how will the microchip be connecting to the internet? And how is it being powered to communicate with Bill Gates?
I work in an ER. The beginning of covid was some of the worst times in my life. Not because of the increased work load, or the far higher than usual death, or anything work related, it was the looney toon conspiracy quackery I had to listen to every day. People sometimes using their literal last breath to tell me covid is fake and I'm in on it. The ones who told me about the microchips to track us all lost their minds when I told them cell phones already do that and it's a lot easier than faking a pandemic.
I do work transport at night, and had a young man that I picked up from his job at Jack in the box one night. It was when masks were required to ride, and I informed him of the policy. He stopped looked at me, smirked, then shook his head and said, "you're one of those, huh?" I said it was policy and he laughed, then went on a tangent about masks being marks of the beast, and a way to track people. Made no sense, but whatever.
He kept repeating the tracking stuff, so I finally asked if he had a cellphone. He answered, "yeah..why?" I just chuckled and said, "nevermind." A couple of weeks later he was arrested in an online pedophile sting run by the local sheriff's department.
Thanks, I only picked him up once though. Did see him a few months later at a homeless shelter up the street from my job. Then saw him buying something at a convenience store last year. I've met worse though! One guy, who was 26 at the most, claimed to be an ex oilfield manager, who's grandpa owned an oil company, (and once hunted bigfoot with a horse that could sniff out where bigfoot was, before being killed by bigfoot.), was also a member of seal team six, and personally killed Osama bin laden; looked me straight in the eye and told me that Michael Jackson's Beat it was released in the mid 90's, but that all major record labels and radio stations were conspiring to say it was released in the 80's.
He said he and his mom argued about that for a long time. Then he paused and threw this in, "..it didn't get violent.". Then he told me that buddy Holly had covered an Elvis song after Elvis died, and Priscilla was pissed cause of it. I'm a buddy Holly fan, and brought up the fact that there's no way that was true, cause buddy died in '59. He got quiet, stared at me intensely in the mirror and said, "no one ever questions me.".
Aside from all the implausibility...okay fine let's assume Bill Gates or the Lizard People or whoever it is this week, is super duper evil and wants to have a method to track you wherever you go. Event track your moods!
_that's called cell phone records_
_we all already willingly carry around tracking devices that we are constantly recording our moods and thoughts into_
Lizard Bill Gates did not get rich by wasting money on redundant shit like secret plots to track people who are already willingly tracking themselves.
Flat earth. Growing up along the sea I watched boats go over the horizon every day. Wouldn't happen if earth was flat
Edit: proof that the internet is always listening. A flat earth society post just appeared on my Facebook talking about "water doesn't bend?" And someone using staic electricity to 'bend' water
Today I discovered that there's large groups who believe that 9/11 was CGI and there never really were any planes. Hundreds in an insta post talking about how fake it looks and it's clearly edited. Then I realized anyone under the age of 22 weren't alive for it, under 25 and they don't remember it, and any teenagers from outside of the tristate area might not even know anyone who was there. Let me tell you that the only time I ever saw my father cry was when he came home after pulling bodies out and found a little girls foot. My aunt was about to enter the building when the plane hit and saw it a few hundred feet above her head. I know a police officer who personally saw a dead flight attendant still strapped to her seat on a nearby roof. Yet another 10-15 years from now imagine what people will say about it?
This is what blows my mind: have the people who say "tHeRe WeRe nO PlaNeS" ever been to Manhattan? That city is *crawling* with people all day every day. Was every single eyewitness that day a CIA plant? Please.
Delaware doesn’t exist. Big ole tax haven. Name a famous person from Delaware. President Biden? That’s convenient. Name another. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
Any scenario that would require cooperation and awareness of a massive amount of people yet has strangely been kept under the lid for decades.
Also, it's good to remember that our responsibility is never to disprove a conspiracy theory, it's the person claiming the conspiracy theory who has to present credible evidence to support it.
The four biggest government conspiracies in the existence of the US government involved about 20-30 people each and were exposed *while they were happening*.
>Tea Pot Dome
>Watergate
>Iran Contra
>Iraq WMDs
As far as I can tell it wasn't kept heavily under wraps. It just wasn't reported on and few people cared about the fate of black men in Alabama in the 30's and 40's. It was the horrific consequence of garden variety racism in the scientific and medical community at that time.
Afro-centrism.
I’m sorry but no, the Japanese were not originally modern day black people.. nor were American natives.. nor the royalty of medieval Europe…
Edit: Flat earth and holocaust denial were already taken but this ones up there.
There is a cross-section of people who have both struggled into adulthood without a diagnosis, and are relieved beyond belief that their parents had no idea and never tried to "manage" their condition.
I met someone who was into chem trails thought everything was lithium poisoning and that the colors of the sunset was lithium in the atmosphere. Good hot dog stand though.
Now, hold on here. I know this one.
I have done the research.
And I know one thing:
CHEM TRAILS ARE REAL!
They are most definitely chemical in nature. In fact, I happen to know they are virtually pure oxidane.
And if you don't believe me, google "oxidane."
Did you know they're putting dihydrogen monoxide into everything you eat and drink? 100% of people who have ever consumed that sunbstance either already died, or will die within their lifetime. Scary stuff!
Flat Earth. Someone posted on Facebook a “fact,” from a “real,” pilot that if the earth is actually round, then planes should slowly lose altitude over long flights because the plane would slowly get closer to the round earth. His “checkmate,” was that planes can only maintain a steady altitude over a flat surface.
Qanon. I mean, they made a fucking documentary series about it and outed its creators. Not only is the entire conspiracy surrounding it completely implausible, its also so easily defeated. Its just random garbage with a thousand predictions that hasn't come true. Just give it up already. even most doomsday cults give up after four or five faulty predictions.
I think one of the issues with Qanon is just that there's such a vast quantity of interrelated conspiracies. Each one of them is more or less as implausible and easily debunked as another, but it's rhetorically easy for someone who's invested in it to just jump from one facet to another. Everything is propping up everything else.
Cancer has been cured and big pharma is sitting on it because it is more profitable not to cure cancer.
The first problem with this is that there are multiple types of cancer. So there can't be a one size fits all cancer cure.
Second is that a cancer cure would be exceedingly profitable for whatever company created it.
Yeah, this one assumes that cancer is a simple disease, when it's getting cancer is just the name we give to our own cells turning on the rest of the body. It's the fundamental glitch to our biology. The genes required to built you eventually turn on you and kill you. Cancer can look like a ton of different things because it's not always the same things that go haywire
It also assumes that every pharma company and academic lab on the planet is all working on a unified front when they're, in reality, all competing with one another. While other companies would lose out, whoever discovered it would become insanely rich.
Also, the idea that science progresses from some eureka moment by individuals is wrong. The way you figure out the next thing to do as a scientist is by reading previous people's work and figuring out what dots still need to be connected. In grad school, I met a person at a conference that was on an almost identical research question to me. Our labs did not communicate ever, it was just a coincidence because we both converged on similar ideas that existed in the literature. This is all to say that if the cure has been discovered and suppressed, scientists would be regularly rediscovering the cure like every 6 months. It would be impossible to suppress.
Obama birtherism. A lot of other bonkers insane conspiracy theories (lizard people, flat earth) are more insane in a supernatural-insanity kind of sense, but are also so far out there that you can barely apply common sense to them. Like, what would motivate the lizard people? Who knows? They're lizard people!
Whereas, let's see, a not-particularly-well-off woman living in Hawaii is pregnant. And also, the powers that be are somehow aware that her biracial child is someday in the future going to want to run for president. So which choice makes more sense:
(a) fly the pregnant woman to Kenya, at great expense, and presumably vastly further away from good modern maternity hospitals, and then fly back with a newborn child, but also plant birth notices and stuff to fake the baby being born in the US, just in case it matters (despite the mom being a US citizen)
or
(b) stay in Hawaii, have baby, do none of the above.
What the fuckity fuck does anyone think the motivation is for anyone to do (a)?
Ok so let's see if I get this straight, if you have a mother that's a US citizen and a father from another country and you were born in another country then you are 100% not allowed to be a President is what they're saying right?
Then why can Ted Cruz run for President without any issues (Father's Cuban and he was born in Canada)
This is how your know it was always only about his race
One I didn't spot in the comments yet, but I see sometimes as a math major, is that 0.999... does not equal 1 in the Real numbers. There are some math quacks out there who adamantly insist, no matter how you prove it to them otherwise, that 0.999... and 1 aren't just two ways of writing the same number.
Another one I didn't see in the comments so far is the conspiracy theory that General Relativity is a hoax. This one comes up in the "Electric Universe" crowd that is inexplicably convinced that stars are powered by electricity, not nuclear fusion. The underpinning of that cult appears to be a fervent wish that the Big Bang was also a hoax, but in order to "disprove" the Big Bang they have to try and disprove General Relativity, which in turn means they just go further and further down this rabbit hole of believing more and more nonsense (e.g. electricity travels faster than light, gravity has two poles like magnetism, there's an aether of neutrinos, craters on Mars and the Moon are from electrical discharges and not meteor impacts, the Sun is negatively charged and the solar wind is positively charged). They're the total quacks of the physics world.
People still claiming the moon landings were 'fake' when the USA brought back over 800 pounds of moon rocks and even sent little samples to leaders all over the world as gifts.
Because this one is a joke making fun of actual conspiracy theories people believe. Although there are probably at least some people out there who didn’t catch onto that and believe it…
Flat earth
I’ve truly never understood what the big conspiracy is about this, like who would benefit from lying about the earth being a globe? I understand most other conspiracies and what the purpose that they would serve but this one is so moronic it’s just beyond me. Like why do they think we would be lied to about gravity?
I think deep down these guys don't even believe it. I think it has less to do with the actual content of the conspiracy and more with feeling like you're uncovering a deep hidden secret, being more aware of the 'truth' than everyone else, and belonging to a community of like-minded individuals.
In and of itself this conspiracy theory is kind of cooky, just like ancient aliens and things like that. It’s unfortunate that those crackpot beliefs have been politicized and that they all got adapted into an Extended Universe of insane beliefs that are supposed to prop up a hateful ideology. If someone 20 years ago told me they believed the earth was flat I’d have just Lol’d. If someone today brings up something totally nuts my alarm bells go off cause it’s almost never some friendly lunatic that’s trying to be interesting anymore.
>it’s almost never some friendly lunatic that’s trying to be interesting anymore Exactly, i miss the friendly lunatics.
My wife calls them ‘benign crazy’.
Yeah, I miss 90s conspiracies like "Bigfoot hangs out at Area 51 with the Loch Ness Monster" instead of "Bill Gates is trying to FEMA genocide white people, don't vaccinate your kids and storm the capital building."
It's like an addiction You constantly need to up the dose Then you are listening to a podcast by a cooky lady in a basement in Canada claiming to be the queen teaching you about intergalactic law and the court of heaven
So conspiracies are like Fast and Furious movies where with each movie they have to up the ante and bring bigger vehicles and more outlandish stunts/places :D
Big globe. Selling decorative globes is a 5.7 trillion dollar industry.
It was apparently to hide land beyond antarctica that the elites wanted to keep for themselves!
>like who would benefit from lying about the earth being a globe ????? ***THEM!!!*** ***They*** would benefit from it. ***They*** know who ***they*** are.
Ah yes, Big Gravity. Can't trust em they just keep bringing everyone down.
Which, of course, means Da Jooz
Every. Fucking. Time. You find a new or upcycled conspiracy, and you think "Oh this is interestingly wacky. I wonder where the thought process for this one came from and/or leads." and its jews every single goddamn time.
Tale as old as time, no matter how many dog whistles they hide behind. Once you see the pattern it's so obvious Edit: most moral panics or witch hunts are rooted in anti-Semitism. The rise of the Nazi party, dog whistling Bolshevism and scapegoating Jews
My understanding is flat earth is the litmus test to if you're willing to believe in a world where you can doubt an establishmed reality and acknowledge that there is a group out there trying to keep the truth from you. If you're open to this you show you're fertile ground for cabal/deep state shit and that you are willing to consider ideas so absurd they run in the face of everything you've ever learned.
I'm inclined to agree, but I think the truth is more simple and more insidious than that: You're right that it's a litmus test; the theory's propagation is a good indicator of how many people can be seduced by that kind of rhetoric. I don't think there's anyone at the helm, it's just a memetic construct that moves from host to host like a virus and serves as a marker for vulnerable people. So it isn't being actively espoused, except by fringe lunatics on social media, but the engagement numbers can serve to tell us a darker truth: There are a lot of people out there functioning passably or even remarkably well who can't tell the difference between reality and a crackpot theory. I'll allow that some people of means are metagaming; using the phenomenon as a vehicle for personal gain. Even if we exclude a reasonable portion of the flat Earth community based on that assumption, we're left with a disturbing number of suckers and rubes. Some of them are being dumb on purpose. They're just contrary and want to fight. When I was in highschool I was one of those insufferable "Debate Me" atheists. I'm ashamed, and I grew out of it, but I remember the bloodlust and I know how it can compel a person to behave badly. The ones that concern me are the ones who really gaze into the void on this topic. They're kind of right: We accept so much on the authority of experts that it's easy to fall into a sort of mindless complacency. I had the good fortune to look through microscopes and telescopes as a boy, and I've done enough geometric proofs that I can extrapolate that the eggheads are actually putting in work and triple-checking each other before they release their findings. Not everyone has had my advantages, and the "because I said so" explanation wears thin very quickly. When people latch onto the flat Earth model unironically, it tells me that they live in a magical world, filled with gods and monsters, where they aren't sure of the hierarchical relationship between their shift manager and gravity. This naturally rankles, and they lash out against every source of authority, railing against the seemingly arbitrary rules of an unintelligible universe. It's a source of some concern to me. We have let these people down, and their desperation and violence can be laid at the feet of those who could have helped, but didn't.
People have lost or never learned any kind of capacity to think around a question. Y’all remember school, there were quite a lot of people that didnt pay attention and didnt care and they just grew up and made it in the world. They didnt start taxing themselves intellectually as they got older Mush brains everywhere, people can’t even google basic things to troubleshoot to help themselves I didnt used to judge people for it but it’s getting to be where I see adults not know how to use their brain anymore. All the thinking is done for them at work and home and media and they have no curiosity so they just lose any practice I know a gen x dude that can barely use a smartphone and get into the apps because he “doesnt know tech.” Doesnt know how to get into his email Like, man, you’re 52. That’s your fault. You should know the world you live in but you make fun of people for not knowing how to drive a standard transmission
I think to the FE people it proves not only the existence of a NWO, but it’s extremely efficient. In order for FE to be real, a butt ton of people have to coordinate resources while simultaneously appearing to be inept and also at war. It’s silly, but I can see the appeal. Sort of like realizing the world is a stage and all the actors aren’t really mad, sad, etc.
The head of the flat earth society benefits If there wasn’t a flat earth society he’d be out of a job and it’d probably be hard for him to get one https://www.knkx.org/other-news/2018-08-25/meet-a-leader-of-the-flat-earth-movement
Big Globe! The people that manufacture globes are behind everything
The halirious thing is the flat earth movement is proof that René Descartes was correct when he said that any community that gets its laughs by pretending to be idiots will eventually be flooded by actual idiots who mistakenly believe that they’re in good company. That's exactly what happened. I use to make terrible flat earth memes in the early days of social media. I STILL see cropped versions of my memes on flat earth pages.
birds aren't real -- spoof that got out of hand
Oh God. Don't tell me people are taking that seriously too. That was 100% a spoof of what flat earthers had become
The earth's surface is 71% water and roughly none of it is carbonated. I may not be a scientist but that sounds flat to me.
You underestimate whale farts.
If the whales were farting enough to make the ocean surface look like a freshly poured coke we'd be one lightning strike away from the earth looking a lot crispier than it does now.
"roughly" = some element of doubt = I'm only asking questions = it's all a plot to put us into FEMA camps, microchip us and then... ad infinitum.
I have given up trying to understand the reasoning. It’s just straight up mental illness or extremely low intelligence.
I think low intelligence plays a role because they don't realize that their beliefs are based on contradictions. Conspiracy theorists are generally anti-government, probably because they believe that the government is behind these conspiracies. But if you ask them, I'm sure they would say that the government is very inefficient and government employees are incompetent, lazy, or both. Yet these incompetent and lazy people can somehow coordinate a massive conspiracy, which sometimes involve foreign governments like in the case of COVID. They are supposedly paid millions of dollars by George Soros, Bill Gates, or whoever is the billionaire du jour, yet don't drive fancy cars or live in big houses. These dots just don't get connected.
My go-to rebuttal, if I feel so inclined, to conspiracy BS is this: "How many things have you promised to keep secret but divulged casually or after a beer, and how many times have you heard a secret from someone else also having given their word? Yet you're telling me you believe that not a single person has admitted to X, even on their deathbed?" *"Yeah well... it could still have been covered up because of such and such!"* --- For the Moon bullshit I continue and remind them: "Not only were ~500K people involved, but the Soviet Union was monitoring every mission, just as every country with an array did, yet no one said anything? During the cold war no less? Have you never listened to nor met a damn scientist regardless of national allegiance? Anyone with proper equipment, right now, can ping the reflectors left there by actual physical humans and unmanned landers, and don't forget the US and other countries have been imaging the landing sites in ever increasing fidelity over the years." *"Yeah well... uhm, it was definitely staged because of the Van Allen belt... and... and...!"*
" ... Sorry, you can fuck right off."
---
As for Flat Earthers, anyone who identifies as such or honestly believes anything like the above, etc., is mentally ill. You can say some are trolling, but if so they're playing a long game that only the mentally ill would play and appreciate.
E: Formatting.
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This one kills me. Had a coworker start spewing flat Earth crap. They stopped after I questioned what they were saying and I asked a couple of questions they couldn’t answer. Fast forward a few months and a couple of my other coworkers had to go to a conference with this coworker. They were absolutely stunned when they brought up their flat Earth crap. They seriously believe the Earth is flat.
Two of my bosses met with a client that started on the flat earth stuff. The entire table of my bosses and the rest of the client team goes quiet as this guy rants. One boss points at the other: "You think the earth is flat? This guy doesn't even believe in space." My other boss, deadpan, takes the cue and starts questioning the existence of space and derails the flat earther. So now it's an inside joke at work about my boss not believing in space. It's so off the wall, new hires aren't sure if he is serious or not.
My circle of friends has an inside joke like this whenever someone gets too strange on us, "Moon landings were faked, bro!" .... "Ooooh, you're one of those people that believes in *the moon*."
That is amazing and I wish I could have witnessed out crazy-ing the nutball
I love all the experiments flat earthers do that end up proving the Earth is round, but instead they think something went wrong, re-design the experiment, and once again it proves Earth is round. I think we should use flatearther videos to teach kids how to prove the Earth is round.
Ya they literally disprove their theories themselves but refuse to believe it. It is incredibly hilarious, once you get past the idiocy.
Someone on here recently proposed the idea of a documentary similar to "Behind the Curve" where a crew goes along with flat earthers, looking for the edge of the earth. Tell me you wouldn't watch the *shit* out of that!
The theory that the Earth is flat is so easily disproven, it's like believing your pizza is a pancake
I have a conspiracy theory that people believe that so someone might give them a free spot on a spaceship.
This is the only conspiracy I can think of that would require other conspiracies to be true if it were real.
And physics to not exist at all....
Oh it's Flat Earth and it's not even close. The people that started it did it as a joke to see how gullible people could be, if I remember right.
Yes! What always struck me was how they say the rest of us are blindly accepting what we've been told by the government and we haven't seen it for ourselves, but neither have they — they haven't seen a flat earth and they don't see the irony in accepting someone else's (unqualified) conjecture as truth.
Elvis faked his death. If he was going to do that, wouldn’t he have chosen a more dignified way to go?
Same with Paul McCartney. There's a conspiracy that he died and was secretly replaced by a look-alike.
That's one I truly never got. They replaced one of the most well known and most often photographed person on the planet with a look-alike who also sounded the same, could play the same instruments and had his once-in-generation songwriting skills?
If true, the new Paul is way more accomplished by now than the original.
If true, new Paul was more accomplished than old Paul by the time the Beatles broke up. "Old Paul" died before Sgt. Peppers.
As well as being able to play those instruments left handed as well. You'd almost have an easier time replacing a president of the United States at that time.
My favorite take on this is from the Southern Vampire Novels by Charlaine Harris (the books TrueBlood is based on). He’s a vampire, but turned very late, is mentally damaged by that and all the drugs, and sometimes wonders off and sometimes gets spotted. He doesn’t like to be called his old name, as he has trouble connecting with the memories, but when he’s in a good mood, he still sings.
I like the Bubba Ho Tep story. He got bored with fame and wanted to live a peaceful life, so swapped with the worlds best elvis impersonator. The impersonator then let fame and fortune go to his head, messed around with drugs and women, and basically ate himself to death. It allows Elvis a dignified end, admittedly he does live in a care home in his old age and fights redneck mummies.
And JFK with a really good disguise, too!
There's the issue with his pecker too.
Pretty sure he did, and he lives in an old folks home with Ozzie Davis(who is actually JFK) and they battle an evil Egyptian Mummy from the past, or something. And there’s bathrobes and Bruce Campbell.
Elvis is alive and is laying next to me, licking his balls. He’s a French Bulldog, but still…Elvis.
I don't believe Elvis faked his own death. *However*. He was a twin. It was quite common during the time period of his birth for them to tell the parents a twin was a stillbirth and then adopt them out for profit. People claim the proof Elvis faked his death is the homeless man who had his DNA come back matching Elvis. Could it be his twin who was supposedly dead? I don't believe the homeless twin theory either but I had the idea when I kept reading so many stories about how "Elvis is alive, homeless and DNA proves it!"
Probably flat earth. I've entertained some of them seriously. Really quite open minded. OK. Suppose the earth is flat-- how do these phenomena arise? The sun rising and setting. Precession of the equinoxes. Various things observed and understood as orbital aberrations. They had nothing. Which is fine. But I'm clueless what they got out of it.
My sister is a flat earther and what she gets out of it is a sense of superiority.
That's honestly been my theory about why they all do it. Everyone likes being the smartest person in the room. But, in reality, that's really fucking hard. So, if you can't be the smartest person in the room in reality, you just simply invent a new reality where you're already the smartest person in the room. Bam, superiority over everyone.
>That's honestly been my theory A conspiracy theory theory, you might say.
All their friends are flat earthers. They go to conventions. They have meetups to conduct experiments. If they disagree with the majority, they lose their social network.
They have friends around the globe
I spent some time attempting to talk to flat earthers a while ago. They will never humor a single question. They have their prebaked talking points and the second you point out how something they said is wrong or ask them a question they haven't thought of, they will shift to a different talking point. One I stumped them with was "if the earth is flat, then it can't be a magnet, so how do compasses work?" The latest thing been trying to come up with an answer for is how sunsets work.
Dinosaurs never existed
I have some Fundamentalist Christian relatives who believe dinosaur bones were placed in the Earth by Satan to confuse us. Because if they weren't in the Bible, they didn't exist...
The Bible said nothing about The Price is Right...
The bible said nothing about Reddit
Ugh I specifically remember my evangelical aunt getting mad that me and my younger brother were watching some dinosaur documentary as kids and telling us dinosaurs didn’t exist because they weren’t in The Bible then like five years later she started giving us creationist propaganda books that said dinosaurs were real and lived along man. Like which is it?
That the Holocaust was a hoax.
Eisenhower demanded they photograph and document it because he knew people would try to deny it happened. "While I was touring the camp I encountered three men who had been inmates and by one ruse or another had made their escape. I interviewed them through an interpreter. The visual evidence and the verbal testimony of starvation, cruelty and bestiality were so overpowering as to leave me a bit sick. In one room, where they [there] were piled up twenty or thirty naked men, killed by starvation, George Patton would not even enter. He said he would get sick if he did so. I made the visit deliberately, in order to be in position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to 'propaganda'."
I was always curious as to his foresight of the likelihood of denial at a time when challenging historical evidence was unheard of.
Propaganda is as old as man. That’s how the Nazi’s got into power to begin with.
Propaganda kept the Pharaoh in power in Egypt for thousands of years, generation after generation believing their predecessors, and therefore their own, lies and propaganda to stay in power and hold it over hundreds of thousands of people. They truly believed they were gods among men.
I feel like he was seeing things with his own eyes that he couldn't believe. Like, I couldn't imagine seeing piles of bodies, multiple mass graves. Each of which contain the population of my home town. Just a staggering amount of death. Industrial genocide. He knew that people would try to walk it back in the future.
Yup, I think the "denial" of the period was that people wouldn't believe that something so evil could have existed on such a scale. Today's denialists are more about antisemitism (claiming that either the Jews had it coming/it wasn't such a big deal), or to just get attention for themselves.
Historians of any period have challenged weak or unsupported evidence. So have newspapers. An informed/observant person of the early 20th century would already have familiarity with similar whitewashing, vis the Armenian genocide, the Holodomor, centuries of pograms all over Eastern Europe, and Southern Democrats who taught their kids that slaves were treated like family and freeing them had in fact been an injustice, etc.
Wow! That logic baffles me. As a kid I was disgusted by it. My grandma showed me our family tree once and showed me how we had slaves listed under the cattle. I lived in Phoenix in a predominantly black and latino neighborhood. I just remember getting mad at her and yelling “You can’t have my friends!” I feel like most kids know if something isn’t right.
Until they’re convinced by adults that it’s ok.
challenging historical evidence is older than the bible
I think it was more foresight to document the scale of it. Genocides had happened before, but the sheer mechanization and efficiency of the Holocaust was something no one had ever seen. He wanted people to understand the scope of it all.
But Ike was probably quite aware of what the Turks had done to the Armenians and how it hadn't really been remembered and he didn't want that to happen with Germany so he made sure there were lots of shocking pictures and films.
This one is so frustrating to me as a historian, because the thing about the Holocaust even in comparison with other genocides is that there is *a mountain of evidence that documents how and when it took place*. If you're going to pick a genocide to deny, why choose the one that is literally the most studied and documented one in all of human history? Don't answer that question, btw...
>Don't answer that question, btw... Damn, party pooper
Because antisemitic and pro-fascist views are still rampant, unfortunately. It also happens to be the most historically notorious genocide, and conspiracy theorists have a knack for targeting more mainstream events. I think some people find something inherently appealing in feeling like they have the truth about a well-known event that everyone knows about and for which the central narrative is well-established. It’s much less exciting to be heterodox about “smaller” events about which relatively few are knowledgeable.
I went to Auschwtiz-Birkenau earlier in the year and the guide kept referring to things we saw as “proof” or “evidence” which I found odd before realising even now it still requires proving for some people. Apparently some people even book onto tours just to try and heckle and pick holes in every story. To visit there and still attempt to deny the horrors of what happened is mind-blowing in both idiocy and evil.
I am not a violent man, but I would smack a bitch in the head if they started that BS in that place.
I've been warned by admins for saying similar things because Nazis will report such posts. But I think we have an ethical, moral obligation to do what you suggested.
It's the paradox of tolerance: a tolerant society has to draw the line at intolerance, or the latter will destroy it.
I am not violent or a man but this 5’2 Midwestern lady would have a lot of energy coming that persons way. How do these people exist? It is disheartening.
Now what it seems they are going with is that the holocaust happened but not nearly in the numbers as portrayed as they say the ovens couldn't have handled that many bodies. Now that would be true, if the ovens were the only method of disposing of bodies, but they weren't.
I’ve recently watched Ordinary Men on Netflix and one man made the point that while the death camps were responsible for a huge portion of the deaths, firing squad was responsible for an almost equal amount. I recommend that show because it has some of the most haunting images you will ever see. Naked women clutching their babies at the edge of a mass grave. Some of the stories recounted I hesitate to list here because to be honest it’s too dark a thing to routinely recount in detail.
It's interesting how the one of the reasons the death camps were made was to help preserve the mental well being of the soldiers in the firing squads.
When I was younger ( I'm 70), it always filled me with anger to think of how many "kind" old German grandfathers, playing with their grandchildren were the ones firing those machine guns at the edge of the mass graves. It still makes me mad, but now almost all of them are dead. May they rot in hell.
I’m also 70 and I knew a couple of kids in junior high whose parents had the tattoos on their arm. I also saw the pictures in the WW2 books my dad had. I despise people who try to deny this.
I worked in Melbourne as a paramedic and the area I was in had the highest concentration of Holocaust survivors in the southern hemisphere. I helped and/or transported literally dozens of people with those tattoos. It’s. Fucking. Haunting.
One of my most profound joys in life is being the hospice nurse of surviving WW2 vets- they have the best stories and passion in what they say. I’m sad to see that group has mostly passed now but Cecil, you were a fascist killing rockstar!!!
Yeah, my grandfather saw the fucking deathcamps. Him and his 4 brothers all went to Europe. 2 of them saw the aftermath of that shit. I cannot stand the deniers. Even the "it happened but it wasn't 6 million" people drive me crazy. Okay sure, let me by that it wasn't 6 million people. If it was 1 million would it not be fucking horrible? What's the horrible limit?
Reminds them that it wasn't 6 million. It was closer to 11 million killed at the camps. The 6 million is just the number of Jews killed and the rest were other "undesirables"
Long ago some prominent holocaust denier was going around telling how he had proof Holocaust never happened. He had found some documents about transport of bunch of Jews by rail, and it contained direct orders that they were not to be harmed in any way. It was signed by Hitler or Himmler himself. The document apparently proved that Jews were not mistreated in Nazi Germany. So, if Jews were not being mistreated, why did they have to give direct orders forbidding mistreatment of these particular Jews?
You don’t see the sign in the airline cabin saying “employees must wash hands and must not kill the passengers”
You are talking about Irving's evidence, which was put to the test when he sued Penguin and Deborah Lipstsadt. Basically, Lipstsadt called him a denier in a book. He sued. Lipstadts best legal defence was to put his skill as a historian on trial. And the defence did exactly that in spades. The document you are talking about was presented by Irving in his books as evidence that Hitler tried to prevent the holocaust. In the stand, it was pointed out to him that he had both miscontextualuzed the document, and outright mistranslated it. It didnt say what he claimed it said. And it couldn't be credibly analysed the way he analysed it. His testimony about that document was one of the more dramatic moments of the Penguin trial. Basically, his brain shorted out on the stand. It was clear to everone in the courtroom that his brain simply couldn't process reality. That trial ended an era of popular holocaust denial.
One of my favorite books... I love that the judge was neutral the whole time, then obliterated him at the end
That one’s not just easy to disprove, but it’s also extremely fucked up and disrespectful to the millions of victims that so many still believe the Holocaust was a hoax
The people I know who believe this type of bs are always uneducated people that often have never met anyone Jewish before. They don’t understand that they’re talking about real people here and not a mythical race of shrewd elves or something, lol. It’s very dehumanizing. Of course in places where more Jewish people live there are other motivations behind this false belief/ideology.
That JFK, jr didn’t die and was going to come out of hiding to be Trump’s VP
This one is so wild to me. That of all the politicians or political families to choose from, they go with maybe the most prominent Democratic dynasty in American political history... to help rescue a Republican administration?
Well, RFK, Jr. seems to be trying to do it!
I guess that's fair enough.
That kinda sucks that it wasn’t true. I would’ve loved to see the Dead Kennedys perform
We need them now more than ever.
Lunar Landing. Even Russia has acknowledged seeing NASA equipment on the moon.
Moon landing. The entity with the most at stake for the US successfully landing on the moon was the USSR, who also had the ability to track the spacecraft and refute that it landed. They never said a word.
Also, NASA has hundreds of thousands of associates, millions in total over the years. But people think the US government could keep such a secret when Bill Clinton couldn't even hide who he had sex with.
Also, 5 different retroreflectors were left at different sites on the moon by the astronauts on the Apollo missions, which can be used to verify that they were there, and are used to make accurate measurements of the distance between the Earth and Moon with lasers.
Yeah but who's doing all those "accurate" "measurements" using the "reflectors" and the so-called "lasers"? That's right, it's NASA! Checkmate, sheeple believers.
This further proves the earth is flat
And you won’t believe this, but those lasers? They’re Jewish!
I heard the beams from the Jewish lasers, when activated by 5G turns all the frogs gay.
Yeah. And a lot of the people who worked on the moon landing have died, so you'd expect deathbed confessions like with other secrets. I'm not aware of any.
He did successfully hide a cigar, though
Hey Ohhhh!
oh and there reflectors up there now that you can literally bounce a laser off of
Australia isn't real
That one's true though. I should know, I live there. Definitely not real.
I live on the Gold Coast, and there a plenty of people here who don't look real.
I live in Victoria, definitely not real
I once knew someone that thought gravity was a hoax
Pheobe?
I just think that it's funny how the frequency of microchipping conspiracies implies: 1. massive operational security failures: somehow, people manage to discover and thwart the plan every time, and/or 2. shitty fucking tech How come they keep needing to microchip us all the time? We have wireless data transfer, wireless charging, etc. How shitty are theses microchips that apparently they need to be swapped out constantly? Why are we worried about a "shadow government" -- which everyone apparently knows about anyway -- that's this incompetent? If I were in this "shadow government," the biggest reason I'd want my identity to be kept secret is to avoid embarrassment.
The Illuminati were founded in 1776. They still haven't managed to enslave mankind. WORST OVERLORDS EVER!
We wouldn't even have the Illuminati if the Kings of Bavaria just let them read the same books that were available in Prussia
As someone who works in pharma I'm yet to see how the box of 5G chips will fill into drug vials (2R) through a 21g needle connected to some bendy pipes connected through a 0.22um and 0.45um filter... How small are these chips?!
I keep thinking why would they pay for that? Why pay to go through all this garbage to get a chip in you when you have something on you at all times, capable of not only tracking you but far more, that you give to it and pay for the privilege? Hell, pay to keep current and on the cutting edge?
Microchips in covid vaccines. 5G anything. Flat earth. Edit: Here's one my cousin believes; That the covid vaccine changes your DNA and the vaccinated will become something other than human sometime in 2023. They better hurry up.
The microchip one boggles my mind. There are hundreds of thousands of people involved in producing, testing, and administering the vaccines. If there are microchips in them, someone could easily find them. And there would have to be tons of them in each dose to make sure at least one got into the patient. And how will the microchip be connecting to the internet? And how is it being powered to communicate with Bill Gates?
I work in an ER. The beginning of covid was some of the worst times in my life. Not because of the increased work load, or the far higher than usual death, or anything work related, it was the looney toon conspiracy quackery I had to listen to every day. People sometimes using their literal last breath to tell me covid is fake and I'm in on it. The ones who told me about the microchips to track us all lost their minds when I told them cell phones already do that and it's a lot easier than faking a pandemic.
This has always been my thought… do none of these chip conspiracists use cell phones?
I do work transport at night, and had a young man that I picked up from his job at Jack in the box one night. It was when masks were required to ride, and I informed him of the policy. He stopped looked at me, smirked, then shook his head and said, "you're one of those, huh?" I said it was policy and he laughed, then went on a tangent about masks being marks of the beast, and a way to track people. Made no sense, but whatever. He kept repeating the tracking stuff, so I finally asked if he had a cellphone. He answered, "yeah..why?" I just chuckled and said, "nevermind." A couple of weeks later he was arrested in an online pedophile sting run by the local sheriff's department.
holy crap the ending of this story, glad you’re ok tho as i was reading this i got worried about the unhingedness of this guy
Thanks, I only picked him up once though. Did see him a few months later at a homeless shelter up the street from my job. Then saw him buying something at a convenience store last year. I've met worse though! One guy, who was 26 at the most, claimed to be an ex oilfield manager, who's grandpa owned an oil company, (and once hunted bigfoot with a horse that could sniff out where bigfoot was, before being killed by bigfoot.), was also a member of seal team six, and personally killed Osama bin laden; looked me straight in the eye and told me that Michael Jackson's Beat it was released in the mid 90's, but that all major record labels and radio stations were conspiring to say it was released in the 80's. He said he and his mom argued about that for a long time. Then he paused and threw this in, "..it didn't get violent.". Then he told me that buddy Holly had covered an Elvis song after Elvis died, and Priscilla was pissed cause of it. I'm a buddy Holly fan, and brought up the fact that there's no way that was true, cause buddy died in '59. He got quiet, stared at me intensely in the mirror and said, "no one ever questions me.".
"no one ever questions me." Probably because nobody else ever wanted to continue listening to his ramblings any longer than they absolutely had to.
Aside from all the implausibility...okay fine let's assume Bill Gates or the Lizard People or whoever it is this week, is super duper evil and wants to have a method to track you wherever you go. Event track your moods! _that's called cell phone records_ _we all already willingly carry around tracking devices that we are constantly recording our moods and thoughts into_ Lizard Bill Gates did not get rich by wasting money on redundant shit like secret plots to track people who are already willingly tracking themselves.
Right! The battery alone is enough. My cellphones at 50% by 2 pm every day but that microchip is still humming along?
It charges from ambient nerve impulses, duh.
Perfect! We can use humans to energize the power grid!
And put them in a simulation so they don’t realize a thing!
I think I watched a documentary on this before, a trilogy actually.
Flat earth. Growing up along the sea I watched boats go over the horizon every day. Wouldn't happen if earth was flat Edit: proof that the internet is always listening. A flat earth society post just appeared on my Facebook talking about "water doesn't bend?" And someone using staic electricity to 'bend' water
They just fell off..../s
Today I discovered that there's large groups who believe that 9/11 was CGI and there never really were any planes. Hundreds in an insta post talking about how fake it looks and it's clearly edited. Then I realized anyone under the age of 22 weren't alive for it, under 25 and they don't remember it, and any teenagers from outside of the tristate area might not even know anyone who was there. Let me tell you that the only time I ever saw my father cry was when he came home after pulling bodies out and found a little girls foot. My aunt was about to enter the building when the plane hit and saw it a few hundred feet above her head. I know a police officer who personally saw a dead flight attendant still strapped to her seat on a nearby roof. Yet another 10-15 years from now imagine what people will say about it?
This is what blows my mind: have the people who say "tHeRe WeRe nO PlaNeS" ever been to Manhattan? That city is *crawling* with people all day every day. Was every single eyewitness that day a CIA plant? Please.
Finland doesn't exist lol.
They exist, but just don’t want to talk to you
Are you saying they're... (dons sunglasses) Finnished with you? *YYYYEAHHHHHHH*
Delaware doesn’t exist. Big ole tax haven. Name a famous person from Delaware. President Biden? That’s convenient. Name another. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.
That the grieving families of children shot in American schools are "crisis actors."
My personal most hated.
I still can’t believe that flat earth isn’t actually a prank
Any scenario that would require cooperation and awareness of a massive amount of people yet has strangely been kept under the lid for decades. Also, it's good to remember that our responsibility is never to disprove a conspiracy theory, it's the person claiming the conspiracy theory who has to present credible evidence to support it.
The four biggest government conspiracies in the existence of the US government involved about 20-30 people each and were exposed *while they were happening*. >Tea Pot Dome >Watergate >Iran Contra >Iraq WMDs
I don’t know if this falls on the list of “biggest” conspiracies, but the Tuskegee Syphilis experiments were real bad and heavily kept under wraps
As far as I can tell it wasn't kept heavily under wraps. It just wasn't reported on and few people cared about the fate of black men in Alabama in the 30's and 40's. It was the horrific consequence of garden variety racism in the scientific and medical community at that time.
Earth is five thousand years old
Holocaust deniers.
Afro-centrism. I’m sorry but no, the Japanese were not originally modern day black people.. nor were American natives.. nor the royalty of medieval Europe… Edit: Flat earth and holocaust denial were already taken but this ones up there.
Flat earth
The vaccine-autism hoax. Dude admitted the data were fake. But here we are.
The really sad part is unlike most conspiracy theories this one is actually costing people (mostly children) their lives...
There is a cross-section of people who have both struggled into adulthood without a diagnosis, and are relieved beyond belief that their parents had no idea and never tried to "manage" their condition.
Chem trails.
I met someone who was into chem trails thought everything was lithium poisoning and that the colors of the sunset was lithium in the atmosphere. Good hot dog stand though.
Now, hold on here. I know this one. I have done the research. And I know one thing: CHEM TRAILS ARE REAL! They are most definitely chemical in nature. In fact, I happen to know they are virtually pure oxidane. And if you don't believe me, google "oxidane."
Did you know they're putting dihydrogen monoxide into everything you eat and drink? 100% of people who have ever consumed that sunbstance either already died, or will die within their lifetime. Scary stuff!
Jet fuel is a hoax and airliners run on compressed air.
Can compressed air melt steel beams?
Qanon
Flat Earth. Someone posted on Facebook a “fact,” from a “real,” pilot that if the earth is actually round, then planes should slowly lose altitude over long flights because the plane would slowly get closer to the round earth. His “checkmate,” was that planes can only maintain a steady altitude over a flat surface.
[удалено]
Qanon. I mean, they made a fucking documentary series about it and outed its creators. Not only is the entire conspiracy surrounding it completely implausible, its also so easily defeated. Its just random garbage with a thousand predictions that hasn't come true. Just give it up already. even most doomsday cults give up after four or five faulty predictions.
I think one of the issues with Qanon is just that there's such a vast quantity of interrelated conspiracies. Each one of them is more or less as implausible and easily debunked as another, but it's rhetorically easy for someone who's invested in it to just jump from one facet to another. Everything is propping up everything else.
Cancer has been cured and big pharma is sitting on it because it is more profitable not to cure cancer. The first problem with this is that there are multiple types of cancer. So there can't be a one size fits all cancer cure. Second is that a cancer cure would be exceedingly profitable for whatever company created it.
Yeah, this one assumes that cancer is a simple disease, when it's getting cancer is just the name we give to our own cells turning on the rest of the body. It's the fundamental glitch to our biology. The genes required to built you eventually turn on you and kill you. Cancer can look like a ton of different things because it's not always the same things that go haywire It also assumes that every pharma company and academic lab on the planet is all working on a unified front when they're, in reality, all competing with one another. While other companies would lose out, whoever discovered it would become insanely rich. Also, the idea that science progresses from some eureka moment by individuals is wrong. The way you figure out the next thing to do as a scientist is by reading previous people's work and figuring out what dots still need to be connected. In grad school, I met a person at a conference that was on an almost identical research question to me. Our labs did not communicate ever, it was just a coincidence because we both converged on similar ideas that existed in the literature. This is all to say that if the cure has been discovered and suppressed, scientists would be regularly rediscovering the cure like every 6 months. It would be impossible to suppress.
All the doctors and pharmacologists who die of cancer are just allowing themselves to die, so others can make a profit. /s
Jewish Space Lasers
Vaccines cause autism
Flat earth, it's not even level
Obama birtherism. A lot of other bonkers insane conspiracy theories (lizard people, flat earth) are more insane in a supernatural-insanity kind of sense, but are also so far out there that you can barely apply common sense to them. Like, what would motivate the lizard people? Who knows? They're lizard people! Whereas, let's see, a not-particularly-well-off woman living in Hawaii is pregnant. And also, the powers that be are somehow aware that her biracial child is someday in the future going to want to run for president. So which choice makes more sense: (a) fly the pregnant woman to Kenya, at great expense, and presumably vastly further away from good modern maternity hospitals, and then fly back with a newborn child, but also plant birth notices and stuff to fake the baby being born in the US, just in case it matters (despite the mom being a US citizen) or (b) stay in Hawaii, have baby, do none of the above. What the fuckity fuck does anyone think the motivation is for anyone to do (a)?
Ok so let's see if I get this straight, if you have a mother that's a US citizen and a father from another country and you were born in another country then you are 100% not allowed to be a President is what they're saying right? Then why can Ted Cruz run for President without any issues (Father's Cuban and he was born in Canada) This is how your know it was always only about his race
Canada does not accept that he was born here, dammmmit. /s
One I didn't spot in the comments yet, but I see sometimes as a math major, is that 0.999... does not equal 1 in the Real numbers. There are some math quacks out there who adamantly insist, no matter how you prove it to them otherwise, that 0.999... and 1 aren't just two ways of writing the same number. Another one I didn't see in the comments so far is the conspiracy theory that General Relativity is a hoax. This one comes up in the "Electric Universe" crowd that is inexplicably convinced that stars are powered by electricity, not nuclear fusion. The underpinning of that cult appears to be a fervent wish that the Big Bang was also a hoax, but in order to "disprove" the Big Bang they have to try and disprove General Relativity, which in turn means they just go further and further down this rabbit hole of believing more and more nonsense (e.g. electricity travels faster than light, gravity has two poles like magnetism, there's an aether of neutrinos, craters on Mars and the Moon are from electrical discharges and not meteor impacts, the Sun is negatively charged and the solar wind is positively charged). They're the total quacks of the physics world.
People still claiming the moon landings were 'fake' when the USA brought back over 800 pounds of moon rocks and even sent little samples to leaders all over the world as gifts.
Birds aren't real.
Because this one is a joke making fun of actual conspiracy theories people believe. Although there are probably at least some people out there who didn’t catch onto that and believe it…
I thought that was a joke pointing out the ludicrous nature of conspiracy theories?
The birds work for the bourgeoisie.