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Mc Do Well
Aug 2, 2008

by FactsAreUseless
There's basically no way to reason with someone who seriously thinks the government has secret weather controlling machines.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5EcYx_D4YI

A couple years ago there was a freak small earthquake on the east coast with the epicenter near DC. Joe Biden was visiting China at the time so obviously the Chinese were demonstrating to him that they had closed the HAARP gap.

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Radio Prune
Feb 19, 2010

computer parts posted:

That and both agree there should be a separation between races (well some of the latter anyway).

Grouchy Smurf
Mar 12, 2012

"Interesting Quote"
-Interesting guy

gradenko_2000 posted:

Are there any possible rebuttals to the HAARP array / microwave beam bullshit being touted about Typhoon Yolanda / Haiyan? I've been trying to counter with how this comes up every single time a disaster happens like the Japan earthquake or the Indian Ocean tsunami

How can you debate something that doesn't even provide anecdotal evidence? With thins like 9/11, JKF, Area 51 and others there are some things that can lead to false answers if interpreted incorrectly.
With HAARP the whole argument is "They have these large antenna, so they control weather / cause earthquakes / mind control people".

Dr. Arbitrary
Mar 15, 2006

Bleak Gremlin

gradenko_2000 posted:

Are there any possible rebuttals to the HAARP array / microwave beam bullshit being touted about Typhoon Yolanda / Haiyan? I've been trying to counter with how this comes up every single time a disaster happens like the Japan earthquake or the Indian Ocean tsunami

I usually just throw more conspiracies in there.
FACT: Flouride, even in tiny does, is lethal to Reptoids.
FACT: Reptoid nagvigation systems require ionsospheric transmission, which HAARP is constantly jamming.

What's the REAL reason you don't like HAARP? Why do you only drink distilled water?

BiggerBoat
Sep 26, 2007

Don't you tell me my business again.
I know that Hunter S. Thompson was writing and saying things here and there suggesting a 9/11 conspiracy. It was pretty disappointing because I love Hunter. Then, of course, after he killed himself, Truthers linked it to the "fact" that he was gonna blow the lid off 9/11 and was silenced for running his mouth about it and for "getting too close" to the truth.

I thin he had just finally fried his brain.

Jazerus
May 24, 2011


BiggerBoat posted:

I know that Hunter S. Thompson was writing and saying things here and there suggesting a 9/11 conspiracy. It was pretty disappointing because I love Hunter. Then, of course, after he killed himself, Truthers linked it to the "fact" that he was gonna blow the lid off 9/11 and was silenced for running his mouth about it and for "getting too close" to the truth.

I thin he had just finally fried his brain.

To be fair, he had had personal contact with the lizard people.

Big Hubris
Mar 8, 2011


The difference between left wing conspiracy theories and right wing theories is weird. In many ways, left-wing conspiracies serve to humanize the right, whereas right wing conspiracy theories serve to dehumanize the left. For example, if Reagan spread/created HIV in order to kill off the promiscuous blacks/gays/leftists before the millennium ended, that makes more sense than the uncomprehending hostility they displayed when they pissed away our best chance to end it.

The Right's conspiracy theories... Well, if you don't believe them it must be because SATAN got to you with subliminal messages, HAARP, and WELFARE GAS! :tinfoil:

KomradeX
Oct 29, 2011

I don't think there's much of a difference between Right and Left conspiracy, since a Truther is also just as likely to rail against flouride, the amero and the american Union as they 9/11 and our corporate overlords who are Lizards. You see it when ever they have one of those truth conferences, or with Alex Jones and infowars. Bat poo poo nuttery is bipartisan, of course in the US the right is more likely to take advantage of these people and mobilize them for political purposes.

AndreTheGiantBoned
Oct 28, 2010
" It can't be that this one guy with a rifle and some bullshit reason shot JFK, there has to be more, it can't be that simple, it can't be that cut and dry."

Non-American guy here. I thought that it was well established that there was something weird about the JFK assassination, with the suspiciously fast conclusions that the investigative committee arrived to, the magic bullet and all that. But probably I'm influenced by that movie with Kevin Costner and such.

Is the JFK assassination a settled matter? Are there any useful links for further reading about this matter?
Why is it so preposterous to claim that parts of the secret service or military may conspire to assassinate a leader or president, if this has been seen in so many places in the world?

AndreTheGiantBoned fucked around with this message at 21:56 on Nov 10, 2013

Mc Do Well
Aug 2, 2008

by FactsAreUseless

AndreTheGiantBoned posted:

Are there any useful links for further reading about this matter?

Here's a good blog by Adam Curtis about a prominent Right Wing Texas Oil man who figures in alot of JFK conspiracies.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/adamcurtis/posts/YOU-THINK-YOU-ARE-A-CONSUMER-BUT-MAYBE-YOU-HAVE-BEEN-CONSUMED

You will never come to a definitive answer, you can only go further down the post-modern rabbit hole of possibilities.

TheKennedys
Sep 23, 2006

By my hand, I will take you from this godforsaken internet
This little gem showed up on my feed this morning from my resident crazy conspiracy ranter friend:

http://freepatriot.org/2013/11/04/fema-camps-city-to-exhile-the-homeless-its-not-a-conspiracy-theory-anymore/

I'm too tired to even try, but is there a quick debunking that doesn't involve Snopes or simply saying "freepatriot.org is a highly credible and respAHAHAHAHAHAHA"?

Strudel Man
May 19, 2003
ROME DID NOT HAVE ROBOTS, FUCKWIT

TheKennedys posted:

This little gem showed up on my feed this morning from my resident crazy conspiracy ranter friend:

http://freepatriot.org/2013/11/04/fema-camps-city-to-exhile-the-homeless-its-not-a-conspiracy-theory-anymore/

I'm too tired to even try, but is there a quick debunking that doesn't involve Snopes or simply saying "freepatriot.org is a highly credible and respAHAHAHAHAHAHA"?
Well, they link to this, which is a more credible source. It doesn't appear to have anything to do with FEMA, though. It's just a massive (though not massive enough for what it's slated to do) homeless shelter on the edge of town, run by a charity, that they are apparently making it difficult to leave.

Mr. Funny Pants
Apr 9, 2001

AndreTheGiantBoned posted:

Non-American guy here. I thought that it was well established that there was something weird about the JFK assassination, with the suspiciously fast conclusions that the investigative committee arrived to,

It took almost ten months. Had the guy in that car been Joe Blow and all the other circumstances been the same, it would have been a slam dunk investigation, wouldn't have taken a week.

quote:

the magic bullet and all that.

It's been very well established that the bullet did nothing magical. Kennedy and Connally were sitting at different heights and Connally was turned far to the right. The bullet went in an incredibly straight trajectory given that it exited Kennedy tumbling, causing a keyhole entry on Connally, blew up a rib, and on and on. Numerous experiments have confirmed that the bullet's behavior was nothing special. Also, the "pristine" line is horseshit. The bullet was flattened lengthwise and it's core extruded out the back. If anything, it was damaged more than expected.

quote:

But probably I'm influenced by that movie with Kevin Costner and such.

Unfortunately yes, you are. You are hardly unique though, that movie was a brilliant piece of craft. But even many conspiracy buffs thought that movie was bullshit. Stone had numerous theories to choose from and decided he'd take bits and pieces from the most batshit insane of them.

quote:

Is the JFK assassination a settled matter?

For those who believe in "evidence" and "logic" and "are sane", yes, it's settled. The conspiracy-minded will never find it settled. That's not what they do.

quote:

Are there any useful links for further reading about this matter?

http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/home.htm

quote:

Why is it so preposterous to claim that parts of the secret service or military may conspire to assassinate a leader or president, if this has been seen in so many places in the world?

I don't care what the claim is, I care if the evidence supports the claim. In this case, it doesn't. I don't have any trouble believing the U.S. government would do something lovely because it's done horrifying poo poo many times.

Mr. Funny Pants
Apr 9, 2001

Thought I'd add a few bullet point answers to some common JFK issues.

*Oswald didn't have enough time to fire the shots.
Answer: If you go by the original timing arrived at by the early buffs, no, he probably didn't. Though it is physically possible to fire three times and reacquire and cycle twice in six seconds, it's pretty loving hard. But that timing was based on flawed interpretations of the Zapruder film. Newer timings give Oswald a minimum of eight seconds and probably more. The extra two+ seconds makes a huge difference.

*Oswald wasn't a good enough shot to pull it off.
Answer: Two issues here. First Oswald was good enough to pull it off. He scored very well in numerous Marine Corps shooting sessions. Buffs usually ignore those and point to some not so hot sessions he had not long before he defected to Russia. More to the point, the marksmanship required was rudimentary. Those shots were all extremely close and the head shot hit when he was only 265 feet away, not even 90 yards, and the car was moving at its slowest. At those distances, Oswald probably could have got hits on body-sized targets with just the iron sights, but he had a scope to help out as well. Just for a little fun, here's video of Jerry Miculek shooting a man-sized target with no scope from 200 yards. And it's a hand-gun. A snub-nosed hand gun. Which he holds upside down and fires with his pinky finger. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIwVK_FxGZk In fairness, Miculek is probably an alien, but the point is, shooting that motorcade from the sixth floor window was not some all time feat of marksmanship.

*The gun was a piece of poo poo that wasn't up to the task.
Answer: Yep, the gun is/was a piece of poo poo, no question. But Oswald didn't need a great or even good gun. He just needed a gun that would go off three (or five, that's how many rounds he had loaded) consecutive times and score hits well within its mechanical limits. Think of it this way. If I gave you the task of driving across town, you'd prefer to do it in a Mercedes. But the task isn't demanding, even a Yugo will do the job. That Mannlicher Carcano was the Yugo in this case.

*Kennedy's head moves backwards, against the direction of the bullet, how could that happen?
Answer: JFK's head actually does move forward at first having been hit from behind. But when the bullet exits, it blows out a huge amount of brain, skull, and fluid that then pushed the head backwards. The funny thing about this issue is that any experienced hunter will tell you that when you shoot living things, they'll loving move or fall in every direction imaginable.

gradenko_2000
Oct 5, 2010

HELL SERPENT
Lipstick Apathy
Great posts, Mr Funny Pants! I learned something today.

I just want to chime in that JFK Reloaded was made specifically to show that the Lone Gunman theory was very possible

duck monster
Dec 15, 2004

Install Windows posted:

Planes move very fast, security cameras generally record at a low frame rate, especially back then, because it saved tape usage. There were no security cameras placed at angles particularly suited to catching the plane as it dived in at 300+ mph (because your ground security cameras aim at ground level to catch dudes trying to sneak up, while aerial stuff would instead be caught on radar not visual), hence no good pictures out of it.

The security cameras could probably have caught a plane landing "safely", but pretyt much anything else not really.

Yep, and it was at the earlier stages of digital video, so that meant MPEG artifacts loving up everything. When I worked in the courts we where not actually allowed to use MPEG video compression for a while because some smart arsed lawyer managed to convince a judge that temporal compression (compressing across time , rather than just frame) made it impossible to freeze the frame and say "This is the exact point where x happens" and even worse a dropped keyframe could leave someone in a scene who had actually departed. Which is actually kind of true, in theory at least. So we ended up using MJPEG for everything. Ironically a lovely format because it doesnt integrate audio streams properly.

Miss-Bomarc
Aug 1, 2009

BiggerBoat posted:

I know that Hunter S. Thompson was writing and saying things here and there suggesting a 9/11 conspiracy.
Personally I liked his other theory about how there was a secret blackmail operation going on in Washington DC where important people in the government would be drugged and taken to a secret sex dungeon where child prostitutes would do unspeakable things to them. This would be filmed, and the film used to ensure that person's cooperation from then on.

On the other hand it was always difficult to tell with HST when he was on the level and when he was just bullshitting.

duck monster
Dec 15, 2004

Miss-Bomarc posted:

Personally I liked his other theory about how there was a secret blackmail operation going on in Washington DC where important people in the government would be drugged and taken to a secret sex dungeon where child prostitutes would do unspeakable things to them. This would be filmed, and the film used to ensure that person's cooperation from then on.

On the other hand it was always difficult to tell with HST when he was on the level and when he was just bullshitting.

Without detracting from his brilliance as a writer, its worth noting HST was also a completely teeth grindingly crazy meth head. I mean the man wrote utterly mesmerising words, when he had his poo poo together, but he did so at the expense of his own sanity.

boner confessor
Apr 25, 2013

by R. Guyovich

duck monster posted:

Without detracting from his brilliance as a writer, its worth noting HST was also a completely teeth grindingly crazy meth head. I mean the man wrote utterly mesmerising words, when he had his poo poo together, but he did so at the expense of his own sanity.

Yeah. It's amazing to me how many people can hail HST for his incredible fortitude re: an unending barrage of heavy duty intoxicants and then treat the same man as if he is an impeachable, credible witness. I like the hell out of Lemmy Kilmister for managing to still draw air despite his well documented and inevitably fatal consumption of alcohol, plus the effect this has on his artistic output, but my god if he started talking about politics I'd just smile and nod my head.

Animal-Mother
Feb 14, 2012

RABBIT RABBIT
RABBIT RABBIT

SedanChair posted:

That's hugely facile and insulting. Why would you liken a simple token of black identity to a terrorist group? There's no party line against the Jews that you have to recite before picking up your medallion. Maybe if you had mentioned some specific group like the Nation of Islam, but even then the comparison is stupid.

Fair point, but conspiracy theories and antisemitism are very popular among even the most benign of Afrocentric groups.

duck monster
Dec 15, 2004

Popular Thug Drink posted:

Yeah. It's amazing to me how many people can hail HST for his incredible fortitude re: an unending barrage of heavy duty intoxicants and then treat the same man as if he is an impeachable, credible witness. I like the hell out of Lemmy Kilmister for managing to still draw air despite his well documented and inevitably fatal consumption of alcohol, plus the effect this has on his artistic output, but my god if he started talking about politics I'd just smile and nod my head.

With all that said, Fear and Loathing on the campaign trail is one of the best books about the US political system I've ever read. Even if it was totally bonkers.

woke wedding drone
Jun 1, 2003

by exmarx
Fun Shoe

gradenko_2000 posted:

Great posts, Mr Funny Pants! I learned something today.

I just want to chime in that JFK Reloaded was made specifically to show that the Lone Gunman theory was very possible

It taught me that the approaching shot is really tough. JFK conspiracy theorists (well some of them) wonder why Oswald didn't shoot as the motorcade approached the depository. Well, because he was mostly protected by a bulletproof windshield and a huge crossbar.

Gazpacho
Jun 18, 2004

by Fluffdaddy
Slippery Tilde

BiggerBoat posted:

I know that Hunter S. Thompson was writing and saying things here and there suggesting a 9/11 conspiracy.
Maybe he was. All the makers of Loose Change could come up with in 2005 was a clip of him using the word "shameful" to describe the media treatment of the events. There were reasons to say so — the rampant jingoism, the sudden kid-glove treatment of Bush, the "everything's different now" rhetoric — none of which require you to believe that anyone other than the al-Qaeda operatives pulled off the attacks.

duck monster
Dec 15, 2004

He died at the time when all the supervillians of the Nixon era where back in control of the government and all sorts of absurd and evil bullshit actually was going on with Haliburton and all the various private militaries looting and pillaging Iraq and Afghanistan. After september 11 some serious bullshit was going on towards peace protesters. One guy I know was raised by the FBI simply for having a "NO WAR" sign in his window in downtown manhattan. Environmental protesters where being framed up on bizare terrorist charges with silly sentences attached, lawyers where being given silly sentences for talking to the media about their clients. Writers where being monstered by the government and conservative cheer squads. Of course people where paranoid, and when your brain-burnt old hippie with a predisposition towards cynical paranoia, well your going to assume the worst. I would not be surprised if after all of this he had succumbed to trutherist nonsense.

duck monster fucked around with this message at 11:32 on Nov 11, 2013

Mc Do Well
Aug 2, 2008

by FactsAreUseless
I think Hunter was familiar enough with conspiracy thinking to know how useless it is to fight the official story without proof. One of the reasons he gave in his suicide note was that he saw himself becoming one of the old cranks he used to mock.

Your legacy lives on, Hunter. We won't burn ourselves out on the hard stuff this time :420: :unsmith:

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003
I WILL CUT OFF BOTH OF MY ARMS BEFORE I VOTE FOR ANYONE THAT IS MORE POPULAR THAN BERNIE!!!!!
I am losing otherwise pleasant people from my Facebook friends because I just can't help myself when it comes to conspiracy theories. Today I explained why there is no reason to believe that the Department of Homeland Security assassinated Brittany Murphy by way of heavy metal poisoning. I managed to save another friendship by keeping my mouth shut about the theory that Kevin Sullivan killed Chris Benoit. I get the mentally ill conspiracists, but why do normal people subscribe to these theories on a case-by-case basis when it involves their favourite celebrity?

Ramagamma
Feb 2, 2008

by FactsAreUseless
According to a "friend" of mine on facebook we all need to be worried because the global super power elite are feeding us genetically modified viruses through fake, laboratory grown eggs.

Heres the link if you are interested - http://asheepnomore.net/2013/11/21/bill-gates-gmo-zombie-eggs/

Retards who believe this kind of hyper fictional, Michael Crichton esque bullshit need to stop smoking dope all the time and get a loving job.

BiggerBoat
Sep 26, 2007

Don't you tell me my business again.
I thought there'd be more action in the conspiracy thread given the anniversary of the JFK assassination and all the specials running on it. There's been some really good docs on the killing, especially on PBS, and I've actually come full circle to believing Oswald acted alone to thinking it was a conspiracy and back to thinking it was Oswald.

Thoughts?

Halloween Jack
Sep 12, 2003
I WILL CUT OFF BOTH OF MY ARMS BEFORE I VOTE FOR ANYONE THAT IS MORE POPULAR THAN BERNIE!!!!!
There's nothing crazy about looking at the Kennedy assassination and thinking there must have been more to it than one lone, ingenious but crazy guy, who was killed himself before he could be interrogated about his motives. It's crazy to immediately assume it was the Cubans or the Russians or the Cosa Nostra or whoever with no evidence.

Then there are people who believe it was British royal holographic lizard-men from the 4th Dimension, which is right out.

Fuckt Tupp
Apr 19, 2007

Science
I think it all circles back to a comforting worldview. If a single person killed the most powerful man in the world, it means that chaos rules and any one person can change the world through a violent act. If a group of people conspired to do it, that means that outside forces are gathering and actively fighting against the good forces who will obviously win because we live in a just world.

It's the same reason people believe in the lizard alien rulers stuff. Humans are too naturally good to do such horrible things to each other in the name of power, so it must be an outside force that has conspired against the natural goodness of humanity. A lot of the false flag accusations are following the same logic.

OzyMandrill
Aug 12, 2013

Look upon my words
and despair

Internet Webguy posted:

It's the same reason people believe in the lizard alien rulers stuff. Humans are too naturally good to do such horrible things to each other in the name of power, so it must be an outside force that has conspired against the natural goodness of humanity. A lot of the false flag accusations are following the same logic.
That also sounds related to the view that if it weren't for religion, everyone would be murdering and raping everyone, as what else is there to stop you doing it apart from the threat of eternal damnation? This is one of the reasons religious people scare me, because if you just flip that around, they are saying that if they didn't believe in damnation they would happily murder you and rape your corpse because, well, who wouldn't?

E: The link being that these people would phrase it that 'Christians are too good', hence the streams of bile spewed forth towards any other religion or lack thereof, and the idea that athiests are one of the power groups coming to get them.

OzyMandrill fucked around with this message at 21:27 on Nov 22, 2013

computer parts
Nov 18, 2010

PLEASE CLAP

OzyMandrill posted:

That also sounds related to the view that if it weren't for religion, everyone would be murdering and raping everyone, as what else is there to stop you doing it apart from the threat of eternal damnation? This is one of the reasons religious people scare me, because if you just flip that around, they are saying that if they didn't believe in damnation they would happily murder you and rape your corpse because, well, who wouldn't?

No, if you look at the phrasing it's very rarely "if there were no religious laws I would go and kill/rape/pillage", it's usually "if there were no religious laws then lots of people would kill/rape/pillage".

OzyMandrill
Aug 12, 2013

Look upon my words
and despair

computer parts posted:

No, if you look at the phrasing it's very rarely "if there were no religious laws I would go and kill/rape/pillage", it's usually "if there were no religious laws then lots of people would kill/rape/pillage".

Not really, a good friend of mine is a recovering evangelical and his parents have effectively disowned him as they genuinely think he is a dangerous person now he has strayed.

E: Thinking more, I would generalize it into:
'The chaos is held back by people like me and other people are constantly plotting to ruin it, therefore anything bad must be the work of the other people'
Feel free to insert any insular or dogmatic group for either side...

OzyMandrill fucked around with this message at 21:32 on Nov 22, 2013

Kugyou no Tenshi
Nov 8, 2005

We can't keep the crowd waiting, can we?

computer parts posted:

No, if you look at the phrasing it's very rarely "if there were no religious laws I would go and kill/rape/pillage", it's usually "if there were no religious laws then lots of people would kill/rape/pillage".

Only inasmuch as the speaker is saying "Well, I know right from wrong, because God is real!".

Fuckt Tupp
Apr 19, 2007

Science
Here's a counterpoint to my post from a Catholic who was alive during the Kennedy murder.

Charles P. Pierce posted:

One argument with which I have no patience is that the distrust of the Warren Commission, a distrust that has remained remarkably consistent for five decades, is based in our disbelief that a great leader could be gunned down by an ordinary schmoe with a cheap rifle. This. we are told, is too much for our delicate sensibilities to handle. This is arrant, infantilizing nonsense. At the time of his death, John Kennedy had a national security establishment that was a writhing ball of snakes. (Not for nothing did he insist that his White House cooperate with the filming of Seven Days In May.) There were the ongoing plots against Castro in which his brother was intimately involved. There is a contemporary memo for something called Operation Northwoods that called for what we would now call "false flag" operations within the United States, including blowing up John Glenn on the launching pad in Florida, that could be blamed on Cuba and used as a pretext to invade. You can see a copy of it in the John F. Kennedy Library. Since then, we have seen Vietnam, Watergate, Iran-Contra. Richard Nixon sabotaged the Paris Peace Talks to help him get elected, and Ronald Reagan's people may have done the same thing with the release of the hostages in Iran. Don't tell this generation that we don't believe the Warren Commission out of some mushy, mythical notion of proportionality. There is no proportionality to the deceptions involved in official murder. We've read enough Graham Greene to know that. We watched enough happen on the television. We can see a church by daylight.
I don't know if we'll ever settle who shot from where. But I do know that, almost from the start, the government has known more about this event than it has been willing to share with the people who, allegedly, govern themselves through it. It is long past time for that to end. It has been 50 years. So many people connected, in one way or another, and by one person or another, to the events in Dallas are dead. The Soviet Union is dead. Do not protect yourselves by claiming to protect us. We have been protected for too long and from too much of what the government has done in our name. We are not children, huddled at the classroom door, wondering why the nuns are weeping, and why the world has suddenly gone so silent all around us.

He makes a distinction that I think quite a few people in this thread have pointed out. Distrusting the government about reports like the Warren Commission or the 9/11 report is different than thinking the government did it, which some people try to blur. The way the government treats it's citizens by keeping the reports classified for years after the information is relevant encourages this kind of thought. He makes a salient point about there being plenty of evidence to not just discredit every conspiracy theorist as a reflex.

Source.

Mr. Funny Pants
Apr 9, 2001

Internet Webguy posted:

He makes a salient point about there being plenty of evidence to not just discredit every conspiracy theorist as a reflex.

Source.

The problem with his point is that the initial doubting came during a time when the population did trust its government. His argument works in hindsight, knowing now all the poo poo our government has done (and continues to do). But that wasn't the case when the questioning of the Warren Report kicked in.

I don't discount conspiracy theories because I have faith that no such horrible thing could happen, I discount them because they don't have any evidence backing them.

By the way, on a special I saw today that was mostly actual news footage presented without comment, we saw the earliest inkling of conspiracy thought, thought that was as bad as the full theories we would end up seeing.

A man on a newscast immediately said that this had to be a conspiracy because hitting someone from that building, which had to be "hundreds of yards" required a shooter of high skill. Of course, he was wrong on both counts. It wasn't hundreds of yards, it wasn't even 100 or 90 yards. Given Oswald's known skill level, they were easy shots, even with the garbage rifle he used.

CommieGIR
Aug 22, 2006

The blue glow is a feature, not a bug


Pillbug
I love conspiracy theorists.

:tinfoil: "HAARP = Deep Sea Comms for Navy, and therefore controls the weather"

I pointed out that Subs use VLF, and HAARP doesn't even work in that frequency range specified.

BiggerBoat
Sep 26, 2007

Don't you tell me my business again.

Internet Webguy posted:

Here's a counterpoint to my post from a Catholic who was alive during the Kennedy murder.


He makes a distinction that I think quite a few people in this thread have pointed out. Distrusting the government about reports like the Warren Commission or the 9/11 report is different than thinking the government did it, which some people try to blur. The way the government treats it's citizens by keeping the reports classified for years after the information is relevant encourages this kind of thought. He makes a salient point about there being plenty of evidence to not just discredit every conspiracy theorist as a reflex.

Source.

Bonus points for "writhing ball of snakes". That's a good line. Hunter S. Thompson would have chuckled.

That was a pretty good rant/essay you posted there and you hit the nail on the head with your analysis. Dude is simply saying "they know more than they're saying" and that's likely true for several things, from 9/11, the Kennedy assassination, Iran Contra and practically anything else you can cite as a colossal gently caress up on a grand scale that could get a lot of people in trouble, ruin their careers and lives, see them dragged in front of congress and God knows what else.

But that's long way away from saying "everyone was in on it" and it was some grand Illuminati style conspiracy. poo poo, I've seen worse at the office; where someone fucks up and pisses off a customer, blows an account and everyone from the salesperson to the ITT guy to the managers and the janitors were scrambling to cover their asses and managed to bend the truth or tell lies of omission just to cover their own asses and not get blamed for it.

TL/DR: Sometimes people seem like they have something to hide, and a lot of times most folks do, but usually it has nothing to do with the investigation at hand but more about the reality of their alibi. "I couldn't have murdered those kids, I was loving my mistress at the time!" "Sure the bomber's e-mail was in my computer. We were having clandestine gay trysts in the afternoons." "I didn't ask where he got his money, I was merely laundering it."

predicto
Jul 22, 2004

THE DEM DEFENDER HAS LOGGED ON

Mr. Funny Pants posted:



I don't discount conspiracy theories because I have faith that no such horrible thing could happen, I discount them because they don't have any evidence backing them.



And because they start out with the theories before they have any evidence, and just morph the theories when the first theory is discredited, and the second, and the third. And each time they ignore the fact that their other arguments have been shown to be bullshit. It's never ending.

As someone else said on here: "There must be a pony in there somewhere."

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Mr. Funny Pants
Apr 9, 2001

predicto posted:

And because they start out with the theories before they have any evidence, and just morph the theories when the first theory is discredited, and the second, and the third. And each time they ignore the fact that their other arguments have been shown to be bullshit. It's never ending.

Yep. It pisses me off when they demand that documents be released. Inevitably, thousands of pages will be dumped, none of which show anything suspicious and the idiots will proclaim that the real or truly incriminating documents are obviously still being held back.

It's a faith-based system. It is self-sustaining and impervious to logic. And make no mistake, they aren't just deluded people who interpret information in a way that comforts them, they flat out lie too. One of my favorites was quoting a man who claimed to hear four or five shots, I forget which. Anyway, the quote looked something like this: "I heard three shots....then I heard two more." Hmm, what insignificant words were removed in favor of the ellipses? "I heard three shots, then a minute later, two more." In other words, the witness was full of poo poo as the entire assassination from first shot to speeding away takes place in well under a minute. So the conspiracy author eliminated the pesky words that blew up his witness' credibility.

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