Conspiracies

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We still use slave labor, California just voted against abolishing it.

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Actually they rather start as undiscovered conspiracies until they leak enough to make people suspicious and form a theory

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Especially the ones where you would need the complicity and cooperation of thousands of people to pull it off.

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You know, I can’t stand dealing with a conspiracy theorist.

I understand why they’re crazy though.

Tuskegee syphilis experiment.
MK Uktra.
Snowden leaks.
Various governments overthrown by the CIA.

I mean, people are crazy and evil knows no bounds.

That said, I prefer to look for the best in the world. I can understand getting lost in all that crap though. People are fucked up.

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before snowden is was a conspiracy theory that the government is always listening to you

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I think there’s a danger in underestimating a government’s ability to keep a secret especially when they have the power to kill you and your family if you break it. While we shouldn’t overestimate the conspiracies they conduct (i.e. the world isn’t flat, we did land on the moon, vaccines don’t cause autism). I think it’s reasonable to suspect that your government is keeping some important information out of the public eye. Oft for the reason of “national security” aka, it would be embarrassing to us if this leaked.

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

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Down with Co-ops?

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Wikipedia CIA

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Who is "they"?

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You can long press the link and the pop-up will show the address. Or hit reply and it will show the source text.

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well there's a reason for that -- feeling like someone is reading your thoughts or that your will is controlled by someone else and so on are common presentations of schizophreniform disorders. they just made it fucking true!

JackFrostNCola

Also the difference in wow factor.
Its "we are making an even faster, better and more stealthy plane than all the previous ones we have" vs "we are convincing the entire world that we are leaving our actual planet to fly through space and land on the moon".
One of these is a significantly more juicy secret to impress someone with.

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On Jerboa, you can long press the hypertext and it'll show you the link

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Theres enough conspiracies that 1 in a million have to be true.

Don't use the one as evidence of the million.

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

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I get why memes like this are popular—they’re funny and make you think. But honestly, I think they can be a bit dangerous too. Sure, some conspiracy theories have turned out to be true, but way more often than not, they’re just nonsense.

The problem with stuff like this is that it makes it seem like most conspiracy theories are worth taking seriously, which can lead to some real issues. People start distrusting everything—governments, science, journalists—even when there’s no good reason to. It can also give way too much credibility to wild ideas that just aren’t backed up by facts.

Healthy skepticism is important, but it needs to come with critical thinking. Just saying, "What if it's true?" doesn’t really help—it just feeds into the chaos. I feel like we need more “let’s look at the evidence” and less “trust no one.”

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Issue being, a large number of conspiracy theories are just utter bonkers (moon nazis theory, etc.), would be really ineffective in practice (chemtrails, etc.), or tries to blame capitalism's problem on a small number of people within the system (International Jewry, etc.). In fact I kind of have a theory that the more "skizo" stuff was put out to make the real stuff look impallatable for people believing the institutions are serving them.

I know at least some opportunistic far-right people that use conspiracy theories to make their ideology look better, met at least one Holocaust denier that just wanted to whitewash the third reich for newbies until they prove they're ready for the truth through proof of loyalty, and one denies the CIA's involvement in toppling the Salvador Allende governance to make Pinochet look even more badass.

Cruxifux

Oligarchs.

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With Tuskegee, the conspiratorial claim is often made that the men were deliberately infected. They were “just” not informed of their infected status and discouraged from seeking medical care elsewhere. This meant that they often ended up infecting their families.

I understand Black conspiracy theorists who have elaborate claims about Tuskegee - it was such a monstrous action and violation of trust that it is difficult to balance not minimizing it with being clear about what did/did not happen.