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Occam's razor answer: They're crackpots that seek out and/or surround themselves with other crackpots. One crackpot makes the stuff up, the others eat it up. Eventually it becomes a positive feedback loop of crackpot theory feeding more crackpot theories.
Did I mention they're crackpots? Because they're crackpots.
It can be worse than that sometimes. The crackpots see some nuggets of truth, and for whatever reason, they make some leap in interpreting them that leads them to nonsense. They keep finding things that are either true, and add them to their worldview, or made by people who took compatible leaps of logic away from reality. They propagate it to others.
Taking Kennedy's assassination as a classic example: it's true that a lot of people wanted him dead, some benefited from his death, the CIA has a history of assassinations, and Lee Harvey Oswald was a communist who had once lived in Minsk. I can see why someone with just enough information to feel confident can arrive at a belief that the CIA or USSR killed Kennedy, while missing critical information to realize there's no reason to believe either is true.
There's an episode of Voyager where Seven of Nine goes down conspiracy rabbit holes that's a lot like that.
Basically, the first one turns out to be correct (although very minor), but it fuels more and more absurd theories. Essentially she goes into a feedback loop, over- and mis-analyzing everything until she's convinced that every encounter she's had with anyone has been part of a conspiracy against her.
So maybe "crackpot" was a bit harsh, at least in some cases.
Yeah that sounds like a realistic, if a bit hyperbolic, portrayal of at least some people's experiences.
I haven't personally been in any conspiracy theory rabbit holes, but I've seen a few people slide into them. There are some people who are so far out there they generate much of the nonsense, but I think there are a lot more victims than crackpots. And I think most of them have a nugget of truth or legitimate grievance in there somewhere.
Lazerpig called it a Woozle Hunt, after the Winnie the Pooh story. Pooh and Piglet think they're hunting a woozle, but in reality they're just following their own tracks around and around.
I'll have to remember that. It's much more well put than how I described it.
MK Ultra
For every real one that is eventually discovered, there's 10,000 flying around in real time that are total bunk.
Whether the 10,000 bunk ones are deliberately put out as decoys to hide the 1 real one, I will leave that up to the reader.
All I'm saying is the first attempt on MLK's life came from a schizophrenic black woman during the height of MKUltra's operations while she babbled about things the CIA hates and their favorite test subjects were disenfranchised schizophrenics.
depends on the conspiracy theory.
real conspiracies; like MK-Ultra, we find out through leaks, declassification and similar sources.
The loony-bin conspiracy theories like "moon landing hoax" (any one with a ham radio could track the apollo CSM as it went to the moon, there's no way to hide such a trip. there's really no way to fake those signals.) are mostly sourced from bullshit.
another great example of this is the Birds Aren't Real conspiracy. Which... uh... started as satire. there's plenty of ways they get started, but they all boil down to bullshit.
Hold up. Birds Aren't Real has true believers now?
the people they were making fun of... demonstrated Poe's Law.
in any case... I give you this...
it's a drone used for wildlife conservation so as to not spook whatever they're trying to track; too much.
That doesn't seem like a conspiracy. That looks like a potential legitimate bit of tech and for that purpose. Have anything a little more convincing?
in full disclosure... I'm not one of those...
I mean I build R/C aircraft all the time. one of my favorites is an 8" scale version of the 1950's Day the Earth Stood Still flying saucer for refrence
More than once, I've flown that in a park only for some MAGA-idiot to go fetch a shotgun and shoot at it. these people are not exactly stable.
That sounds fun as hell
They don't
I'm not dismissing any of their claims,
Why not? You should.
Conspiracy theories can be revealed to be true. They're not all bullshit.
In the 90s I was in the rabbit hole about Echelon and had a healthy paranoia about my privacy.
So when Snowden dropped the leaks about mass government surveillance I wasn't surprised at all. I assumed everyone knew. But nope - apparently Echelon was a "conspiracy theory" and so was all the Snowden stuff until - it wasn't.
That's my personal experience but there's others like MKUltra.
Echelon was not so much a conspiracy theory as a sad game of telephone where increasingly disturbed people projected their increasingly distorted paranoias onto an actual thing.
Same with HAARP. Yes, it as exists. No, It does not do that. Or that. Or even that.
I was in a rxxit thread with some wahoo who INSISTED that ALL global warming was caused by HAARP deliberately to somehow benefit the U.S.
I linked a wolfram alpha calc about how much energy it would take to raise the entire atmosphere 1.2 degrees.
It was equivalent to several billion Tsar Bombs.
Posted the evidence, stated that 'HAARP physically couldn't push that amount of energy into the atmosphere even if it was pumping out the physical max EM that the array could handle, every day, since the day it was first brought online. It wouldn't even be 1/2,000,000th of a tsar bomb total.
Their response "Well, that's your opinion."
And then 2 months later rxxit banned me for saying 'punching nazis is a moral good' and now the thread is lost forever.
The power comes from the sun. HAARP modulates the magnetic flux from the sun like the base of a giant transistor.
At least that’s what my local conspiracy theorist told me when I raised the same point. It’s complete bunk of course, but it sounds plausible enough for anyone who is not an atmospheric scientist. Not any less plausible to the average wing nut than the whole story about carbon dioxide emission spectra in the infrared and global warming anyway. There is science words in there.
But it did give us a damn fine concert movie from Muse, and that's indisputable.
Based on World of Tanks I think all you have to do is make a successful game and they'll just hand it over willingly.
I think that;s WarThunder that gets all the leaks of armour and armament details.
I'll take your word for it. I couldn't remember the name. Just remember the leaks kept being tanks.
Heavy misinterpretation of publicly available information is one.
Another reason is more social. I find a lot of these people want to feel important or smart by "knowing" something that others don't.
A lot of these people will jump on the bandwagon of whatever is said by fellow conspricists they're watching on YouTube.
They also learn the "gotcha" questions which allow them to fall into the rabbit hole in the first place.
Yes, Kent Hovind, a dog will only produce another dog, but that doesn't disprove evolution!
No, Eric Dubay, I can't see the curvature of the Earth from an aeroplane, but that doesn't mean the Earth is a fucking pancake!
Another curious thing is how a disproportionate number of conspricists are religious. I can't speak for other religions, but so many Christians will invoke the Bible into their arguments.
Maybe it's partly a sunk cost fallacy on their part. Spending so much of their youth believing complete fiction that it's easier to deny reality than accept their Bible isn't an accurate depiction of historical events.
Believing in conspiracy and religion requires superstitious thinking instead of thinking scientifically and skeptically.
We've all seen popular entertainment.where the protagonist connects seemingly unrelated clues to uncover the conspiracy (of course they're always proven to be right by the end of the show 🙄)
These unrelated clues could potentially be explained by a wild conspiracy. But they can always be explained in a hundred other, simpler, more plausible ways.
Superstitious thinking aims to seek out any data to prove a theory... while throws away any data that doesn't.
Scientific thinking looks for the best theory to explain all the data and throws away those that don't fit well.
People seem to be forgetting that not all conspiracy theories or theorists are crazy.
Sometimes it turns out to be true. Just ask MKULTRA and Iran-contra.
But yeah, 99.997% of them are fake and made up by one or a few people, and get repeated ad nauseum
Some of them are true, but it's impossible to know which ones until you get actual non-batshit evidence which is why it's not reasonable to believe any of them.
But if you want to have a favorite one just for fun, I think that's ok.
But if you want to have a favorite one just for fun, I think that’s ok.
Mine is probably the 'NASA wanted to fake the moon landings, so they got Kubrick in to direct. But he was such a perfectionist, he insisted on filming on location' one.
As a listener of Knowledge Fight, and thus Alex Jones Infowars, part of his explanation has something to do with god and the literal devil and (I swear) intergalactic contract law. Something about the globalists can only get away with their depopulation plans if they provide warning first, and thus we all accept the contract or something, so that's why the globalists leave clues in plain site. Cause they have to, cause intergalactic contract law.
People who meme "the frogs are gay" are truly only scratching the surface of how insane and dangerous that guy and his followers are.
As a dude with conspiracy theorist parents:
From "trusted sources".
Basically what that means is:
Any video or article that writes about stuff that they generally already believe in. My mom and dad already believe Bill Gates is evil and there exists a shadow state, so anything that so much as mentions these things are trusted almost immediately, regardless of how stupid it sounds.
Any video or article that is essentially against anything written in any news source. You can make a good prediction about what my parents will believe in by following global events and thinking the exact opposite.
Any video or article that claims to have evidence through loosely connected statements, often no connection at all, and bonus if it features basic, publicly available financial records (follow the money).
One thing Alex Jones does is parrot things a caller said several episodes ago. He'll vaguely talk about sources, shuffle some paper around for dramatic effect and claim that nobody died at Sandy Hook.
Lots of other folks do a similar thing. They will say something innocuous that some of their audience will construe to be rightwing or part of a conspiracy and praise them for it. From there they get pulled more and more into whatever ideology as their audience pills them harder and harder.
Plenty of Q anon folks claim movies and TV have secret messages in them. There are a bunch of theories about why fiction is partially true. One is, all these stories are priming the population for social control. Cultiral programming of some sort.
Another is the Bible. The flat earth conspiracy theory is based on a particularly literal reading of the Bible. The writers of the Torah probably believed in a flat earth. This isn't surprising given their lack of sea faring history, most folks with large boats realize the earth isn't flat because the bottom of the boat disappears first. Plenty of flat earthers believe that society is trying to hide that fact so we don't realize we live in a divinely created snow globe. From there they concoct theories on how such a world could exist.
Because the big bad is always all too powerful and all too weak at the same time. Turns out werewolfs are brought down by silver bullets, vampires have to sleep in a coffin and can get stabbed, demons can't go past a ring of power, aliens invaders with bacteria. No other arrangement will work. If the enemy is all powerful they just take over. If they are all weak no one cares about them. Only the exact combination of threatening but easy to defeat allows drama to exist.
So of course the government is smart enough to pull off incredible fears of social manipulation but not smart enough to hide it from some podcaster "just asking questions". No other arrangement will work. If the government is always dumb they can't do a conspiracy, if they are always smart they can pull it off and no one will know. Non-working arrangements don't get propagated and their lines die off, the working arrangements infect new hosts and spreads.
In Qanons case, Q gave them the info and was leaking it.
Allegedly anyway. It's not very hard to say you have an inside man.
Because "I'm the smart one that can see through the lies" - conspiracy theorists almost always have delusions of grandeur.
One of the important aspects that I haven't seen mentioned yet is a sense of community. I'm currently in a online censorship country so can't link it, but the ABC in Australia had a good podcast around QAnon.
Effectively there's people who feel a lack of community/companionship locally and seek this out online.
the government would never hand it over
The gov't is many people, not just one, and they have all kinds of funny humans there :)
Leaks?
Or NSA beaming info into your brain as you are a subject of a top secret test and can now directly commune with aliens
turns out all those 5G vaccine chips were good for something after all.
thanks bill gates!
Bill Gates chips? Bad.
Elon Musk chips? Good!
Take that, liberals!
Gematria
I just put "bush did 9/11" and "Wendy's 5 for 5 dollar meal is back" into a gematria calculator and they equal each other. I don't know what this means but it's fucking HUGE!!
"Q" hands it over to them in form of riddles.
I would imagine that to hide the truth that leaked they would feed nonsense on purpose so they can either find a leak and/or fill the world with so much false data that the truth is harder to find. I'm sure there is some truth in the middle of all this.
Pretty much like most other leakers of information be that film or TV shows - most don't know anything and either keep it so vague that they can claim anything as a win (a recent leak about Moon Knight season 2 said it was in development about would have at least 6 episodes - anyone could have made that up) or go so far into the deep end that it's impossible to come up with evidence to contradict it (like being part of an "away team" in an extraterrestrial exchange program where you spent a decade on another planet while a doppelganger filled in for you back on Earth).
Somewhere in there may be legitimate leakers but they get drowned out by the grifters and the mentally ill. In fact, some leakers are likely to be spreading disinformation to cover up secret goings-on or to test how leaky an organisation is.
Good luck trying to pick through that tangled mess looking for "the truth". Although I am sure it's out there, it's usually well guarded.
