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MechanicalTomPetty posted:I think its very important to remember that during the era Bell was active, a lot of the conspiracy poo poo he dealt with was seen as more "acceptable", for lack of a better word, than it is today. Like, the problems were always there just beneath the surface, but the popular opinion was that is was perfectly harmless at the time. And pop-culture was more than happy to mine that stereotype for comedy gold - look at those kooks, aren't they silly? Surely they'd never be able to pull off an insurrection! Your Dale Gribble's, that radio guy from 2012 - or for that matter, just about everything Roland Emmerich's ever done - that's what the average American thought when they heard "conspiracy theories" back in the day. More than once I've heard folks bemoan QAnon for ruining "when conspiracy stuff was fun." edit: whoa what a loving post to start a new page on, sorry
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Mar 21, 2023 02:06
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9/11 truth and Qanon has killed any chance of a Deus Ex movie
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Mar 21, 2023 02:19
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I’m gonna bring back fun alien conspiracy stuff
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Mar 21, 2023 02:36
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CelticPredator posted:I’m gonna bring back fun alien conspiracy stuff The fun alien conspiracy stuff is infested with the same bullshit, sorry.
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Mar 21, 2023 02:39
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Nothing sums it up better than what a complete misfire the X-Files revival, in early 2016, was. The first of those two seasons had 3 good goofy episodes where everyone who wasn't the showrunner did a monster of the week funtime case, and then Chris Carter wrote a war on terror episode that was thinly veiled Charlie Hebdo poo poo and a two-parter about "what if Alex Jones was RIGHT?!" where it turned out vaccines were actually going to kill us all, literally called "My Struggle, part I & II". I'm not making this up, he could not have created something to age worse if he tried.
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Mar 21, 2023 02:40
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Simplex posted:The fun alien conspiracy stuff is infested with the same bullshit, sorry. Yeah, when you realize it's "oops all antisemitism!", it becomes less fun.
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Mar 21, 2023 02:46
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secretly best girl posted:Nothing sums it up better than what a complete misfire the X-Files revival, in early 2016, was. The first of those two seasons had 3 good goofy episodes where everyone who wasn't the showrunner did a monster of the week funtime case, and then Chris Carter wrote a war on terror episode that was thinly veiled Charlie Hebdo poo poo and a two-parter about "what if Alex Jones was RIGHT?!" where it turned out vaccines were actually going to kill us all, literally called "My Struggle, part I & II".  the 90s really were peak validation for a certain kind of paranoid white guy
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Mar 21, 2023 02:48
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secretly best girl posted:Nothing sums it up better than what a complete misfire the X-Files revival, in early 2016, was. The first of those two seasons had 3 good goofy episodes where everyone who wasn't the showrunner did a monster of the week funtime case, and then Chris Carter wrote a war on terror episode that was thinly veiled Charlie Hebdo poo poo and a two-parter about "what if Alex Jones was RIGHT?!" where it turned out vaccines were actually going to kill us all, literally called "My Struggle, part I & II". He had already written something that aged worse. "In the pilot episode of The Lone Gunmen, which aired March 4, 2001 (six months prior to the September 11 attacks[5]), rogue members of the U.S. government remotely hijack an airliner departing Boston, planning to crash it into the World Trade Center, and let anti-American terrorist groups take credit, to gain support for a profitable new war following the Cold War. The heroes ultimately override the controls, foiling the plot."
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Mar 21, 2023 02:50
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Schwarzwald posted:More than once I've heard folks bemoan QAnon for ruining "when conspiracy stuff was fun." Just watched a commercial on a major streaming service for a “documentary” about “the fifth 9/11 plane” There’s absolutely no need to apologize.
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Mar 21, 2023 02:55
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Alan Smithee posted:
I remember talking to a friend about this while watching the '90s TV miniseries "Wild Palms": the rise of conspiracy culture and media had a lot to do with the "defeat" of Communism with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the thought neoliberalism had won and we were now on the verge of the End Of History. We no longer had these external enemies to fight or be on the watch for, but all the problems were still around, but no one could finger "capitalism" as the culprit because there were no longer alternatives. Instead, because people were taught about the dichotomy of East vs. West and Communism vs. Capitalism over decades, people started internalizing the threat as something beyond businesses, billionaires, and nation-states and began entertaining that there were secret societies and conspiracies operating above the law. I will end this that I come to the belief that antisemitic conspiracy theories are white people telling on themselves: its easier to project their privilege, their private laws, onto a marginalized group than actually see their own place in the hierarchy and do something about it. After all, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, that hoary old conspiracy theory that a secret cabal of Jewish people ran the world, was written by the secret police of Tsar Nicolas II, whose family, the Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, ran Russia, Britain (under Nick's cousin George V), Germany (Wilhelm II) and countless other minor imperial European nations, like Portugal and Belgium.
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Mar 21, 2023 03:12
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Simplex posted:The fun alien conspiracy stuff is infested with the same bullshit, sorry. You can’t stop me. Underground bases with aliens creating genetic monsters is badass and cool
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Mar 21, 2023 03:50
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secretly best girl posted:Nothing sums it up better than what a complete misfire the X-Files revival, in early 2016, was. The first of those two seasons had 3 good goofy episodes where everyone who wasn't the showrunner did a monster of the week funtime case, and then Chris Carter wrote a war on terror episode that was thinly veiled Charlie Hebdo poo poo and a two-parter about "what if Alex Jones was RIGHT?!" where it turned out vaccines were actually going to kill us all, literally called "My Struggle, part I & II". I was there. Chris Carter is a stupid idiot. He also made a horrible episode where Muslim terrorists pray before suicide bombing and one lives and mulder trips shrooms to go uh say something I don’t remember It was loving stupid. But the ones he didn’t make varied between lame and pretty cool like the drone one and everything darren Morgan did
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Mar 21, 2023 03:52
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CelticPredator posted:I was there. Chris Carter is a stupid idiot. He also made a horrible episode where Muslim terrorists pray before suicide bombing and one lives and mulder trips shrooms to go uh say something I don’t remember Chris Carter sucks poo poo I was so hype for that revival but I only liked the one with the psychic (?) kids and the man-beast episode. Like as soon as that episode opened up with the guy praying I was like "wow they're really gonna open up with this guy bombing something". Even at the time that whole episode was so hosed up. I actually didn't watch the rest after that. I forget didn't they do more of them after that too? Still not as funny as releasing the second X-Files movie in theaters on the same day as The Dark Knight 
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Mar 21, 2023 04:20
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They ended the first revival where the world gets destroyed or infected or something and then the next season it was all a dream. Hack poo poo
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Mar 21, 2023 04:21
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Chris Carter was always the worst thing about the X Files. Even back in the original run as a teenager, I knew if he was the writer of the episode there would be terrible dialogue, a stupid plot, and the dumb lore that was always getting in the way of the real fun of the show.
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Mar 21, 2023 04:25
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CelticPredator posted:They ended the first revival where the world gets destroyed or infected or something and then the next season it was all a dream. Hack poo poo That's almost stupid enough to be awesome but I know it's not lol, still doesn't top Dallas making like 30+ episodes of the show just someone's long dream in the 80s
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Mar 21, 2023 04:25
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I loved the dumb lore until season 6 when it ended and then kept going. But I loooove alien conspiracy poo poo so much. Greys and experiments, secret government shady poo poo. Secret space crafts. It’s just a fun vibe
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Mar 21, 2023 04:32
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"The Lost Art of Forehead Sweat" is far away the best of the revival episodes, easily in the top 5 X-Files episodes ever, and is mandatory watching if you are somebody with a lot of nostalgia and love for the series. Not coincidentally, its an episode entirely about how the X-Files no longer works in the modern world and this show needs to stop.
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Mar 21, 2023 05:07
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I bet someone could still do a pretty drat good X-files style series even in this day and age, just lean less on the conspiracy stuff and more on the supernatural or Fringe-style weird science elements. Something like a mash-up of SCP Foundation and X-Com, where you have some overworked government bureau full of operatives slowly going insane because they aren't getting funded enough to deal with all the alien invasions and eldritch horrors they're expected to deal with every week.
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Mar 21, 2023 05:09
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MechanicalTomPetty posted:I bet someone could still do a pretty drat good X-files style series even in this day and age, just lean less on the conspiracy stuff and more on the supernatural or Fringe-style weird science elements. Something like a mash-up of SCP Foundation and X-Com, where you have some overworked government bureau full of operatives slowly going insane because they aren't getting funded enough to deal with all the alien invasions and eldritch horrors they're expected to deal with every week. Stargate except they have to do accounting tricks to save up $100,000 to take a trip to Planet Pacific Northwest every six months.
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Mar 21, 2023 05:44
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my gf introduced me to gravity falls. that was a pretty fun way to scratch the weird sci-fi conspiracy itch
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Mar 21, 2023 06:04
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MechanicalTomPetty posted:I think its very important to remember that during the era Bell was active, a lot of the conspiracy poo poo he dealt with was seen as more "acceptable", for lack of a better word, than it is today. Like, the problems were always there just beneath the surface, but the popular opinion was that is was perfectly harmless at the time. And pop-culture was more than happy to mine that stereotype for comedy gold - look at those kooks, aren't they silly? Surely they'd never be able to pull off an insurrection! Your Dale Gribble's, that radio guy from 2012 - or for that matter, just about everything Roland Emmerich's ever done - that's what the average American thought when they heard "conspiracy theories" back in the day. I am incredibly glad that the King of the Hill revival is seemingly dead. I don't even want to imagine what Dale Gribble in the year 2023 would be like.
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Mar 21, 2023 06:19
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A modern X Files would have the government give up on covering things up. Just nobody cares. So what if werewolves eat a town. A swarm of contrarian grifters will say actually that’s good and the government will use that as an excuse to do nothing.
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Mar 21, 2023 06:32
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Bar Crow posted:A modern X Files would have the government give up on covering things up. Just nobody cares. So what if werewolves eat a town. A swarm of contrarian grifters will say actually that’s good and the government will use that as an excuse to do nothing. That's pretty much what the aforementioned The Lost Art Of Forehead Sweat episode posits. Mulder stumbles upon a massive conspiracy (which may or may not be real), meets the guy running it who then says Mulder is "dead"... before elaborating saying he is not going to kill him because guys like Mulder are already "dead" since the truth no longer matters and people believe what they want to believe.
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Mar 21, 2023 07:34
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Casimir Radon posted:Bond’s parents dying in a ski accident was a detail Fleming put into You Only Live Twice the novel, released in ‘64. A couple years after Dr. No was in theaters. Not sure how many movies mention it but it’s been some random trivia that I thought was pretty common knowledge about the character. Heh, definitely not common knowledge. But that they chose to remember and specifically play up that detail is a deliberate choice nonetheless.
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Mar 21, 2023 08:04
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Vandar posted:I am incredibly glad that the King of the Hill revival is seemingly dead. I don't even want to imagine what Dale Gribble in the year 2023 would be like. Do you know something more recent than the show being ordered by Hulu on January 31? That's the last I'd heard about it.
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Mar 21, 2023 09:06
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CelticPredator posted:They ended the first revival where the world gets destroyed or infected or something and then the next season it was all a dream. Hack poo poo Carter is one of those creators like Gene Roddenberry where they're owed so much for coming up with a great concept, but then you want them kept far away from the actual writing because they'll just keep pushing 'The Omega Glory' or Spock as the shooter on the grassy knoll.
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Mar 21, 2023 09:54
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I disliked the 90’s conspiracy mania before it was cool. Cause even back then when I was 1/100th as cynical as I am now, I knew that if some cabal of rich schmucks or politicians had a cache of alien ray guns, they would immediately either patent and sell them, or cut out the middleman and use them to take over the world openly. Hell they would openly brag about how their tech was from aliens in order to jack up the price.
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Mar 21, 2023 10:27
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Payndz posted:'My Struggle II' is the only X Files episode I've never seen, and when I started watching the final season I realised I would never need to because the whole thing was retconned away as Scully having a vision in 'My Struggle III'. I still lmao at the sheer loving hubris of his big post X-Files/Millennium project being a failed pilot for Amazon that failed because his pitch was "So this whole show is set in Hell, it's going to be 99 episodes because that's the number of cantos in The Divine Comedy, each episode will cost 5 million and I refuse to write a series bible because i want to figure things out as well go along". AceOfFlames fucked around with this message at 11:08 on Mar 21, 2023 |
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Mar 21, 2023 11:04
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The Department of Truth could make a potentially good 2020s-era X-File series - reality is affected by collective belief so government agents go running around trying to keep conspiracy theories like Pizzagate from getting legs and actually manifesting in the real world.
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Mar 21, 2023 11:48
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secretly best girl posted:Nothing sums it up better than what a complete misfire the X-Files revival, in early 2016, was. The first of those two seasons had 3 good goofy episodes where everyone who wasn't the showrunner did a monster of the week funtime case, and then Chris Carter wrote a war on terror episode that was thinly veiled Charlie Hebdo poo poo and a two-parter about "what if Alex Jones was RIGHT?!" where it turned out vaccines were actually going to kill us all, literally called "My Struggle, part I & II". If I remember right, Chris even retconned the original series' conspiracy. Originally it was about aliens who used to be Earth's original inhabitants coming back to reclaim the planet. Now that's apparently fake and the government is using it as misdirection. But aliens are still real because the government have been injecting people with their DNA for decades which funnily enough turns the X-Files into this quasi-X-men where every weird human that have appeared in the X-Files (fire assassin, lightning gamer, stretchy liver eater, plant witch school counselor, mind control ronin etc) got their powers from alien genes. MechanicalTomPetty posted:I bet someone could still do a pretty drat good X-files style series even in this day and age, just lean less on the conspiracy stuff and more on the supernatural or Fringe-style weird science elements. Something like a mash-up of SCP Foundation and X-Com, where you have some overworked government bureau full of operatives slowly going insane because they aren't getting funded enough to deal with all the alien invasions and eldritch horrors they're expected to deal with every week. Fringe really was the best successor to X-Files. Covers all the same weird things with interesting characters but also being original with it's overarching story. Even the theme song and intro evokes the X-Files feel without being derivative. Plus they did the X-Files-style 'special intro' better. The closest we got to an SCP show is Warehouse 13, a show about people collecting and securing strange artifacts. It's also in a shared universe with Eureka (the show about a town of geniuses) and Alphas (basically federal X-Men). The MSJ fucked around with this message at 14:11 on Mar 21, 2023 |
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Mar 21, 2023 14:04
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Terrifying Effigies posted:The Department of Truth could make a potentially good 2020s-era X-File series - reality is affected by collective belief so government agents go running around trying to keep conspiracy theories like Pizzagate from getting legs and actually manifesting in the real world. IIRC it was picked up for production. It would definitely be great to watch but not really marketable, not just because of the conspiracy angle but the gradual implication that American hegemony itself is a fiction that the Department is propping up.
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Mar 21, 2023 14:39
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The MSJ posted:Fringe really was the best successor to X-Files. Covers all the same weird things with interesting characters but also being original with it's overarching story. Even the theme song and intro evokes the X-Files feel without being derivative. Plus they did the X-Files-style 'special intro' better. Fringe rules so hard. We don't deserve John Noble. Or Asteroid
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Mar 21, 2023 14:48
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The MSJ posted:If I remember right, Chris even retconned the original series' conspiracy. Originally it was about aliens who used to be Earth's original inhabitants coming back to reclaim the planet. Now that's apparently fake and the government is using it as misdirection. But aliens are still real because the government have been injecting people with their DNA for decades which funnily enough turns the X-Files into this quasi-X-men where every weird human that have appeared in the X-Files (fire assassin, lightning gamer, stretchy liver eater, plant witch school counselor, mind control ronin etc) got their powers from alien genes. Warehouse 13 and Eureka were also both great shows
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Mar 21, 2023 15:46
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Payndz posted:Carter is one of those creators like Gene Roddenberry where they're owed so much for coming up with a great concept, but then you want them kept far away from the actual writing because they'll just keep pushing 'The Omega Glory' or Spock as the shooter on the grassy knoll. To be fair to Roddenberry, a lot of the problems later in his career were at least partially due to excessive drug use frying his brain. Even then he still helped get TNG off the ground (and then almost strangled it in its crib so y'know, world of contrasts and all that). Chris Carter as far as I can tell has been a loony from day one, he just had more people who could tell him "no" in the original run.
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Mar 21, 2023 16:09
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Macdeo Lurjtux posted:"In the pilot episode of The Lone Gunmen, which aired March 4, 2001 (six months prior to the September 11 attacks[5]), rogue members of the U.S. government remotely hijack an airliner departing Boston, planning to crash it into the World Trade Center, and let anti-American terrorist groups take credit, to gain support for a profitable new war following the Cold War. The heroes ultimately override the controls, foiling the plot." "HOW COULD WE HAVE KNOWN???" - the US government
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Mar 21, 2023 16:28
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MechanicalTomPetty posted:I bet someone could still do a pretty drat good X-files style series even in this day and age, just lean less on the conspiracy stuff and more on the supernatural or Fringe-style weird science elements. Something like a mash-up of SCP Foundation and X-Com, where you have some overworked government bureau full of operatives slowly going insane because they aren't getting funded enough to deal with all the alien invasions and eldritch horrors they're expected to deal with every week. Make it a comedy and you're basically talking Wellington Paranormal.
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Mar 21, 2023 16:39
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Vandar posted:I am incredibly glad that the King of the Hill revival is seemingly dead. I don't even want to imagine what Dale Gribble in the year 2023 would be like. It comes out this summer.
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Mar 21, 2023 16:58
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Young Freud posted:After all, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, that hoary old conspiracy theory that a secret cabal of Jewish people ran the world, was written by the secret police of Tsar Nicolas II, whose family, the Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, ran Russia, Britain (under Nick's cousin George V), Germany (Wilhelm II) and countless other minor imperial European nations, like Portugal and Belgium. Reading Richard J Evans 'The Hitler Conspiracies' last month taught me that the Protocols had a deeper history than that and it was in reality written by a bunch of people and then got picked up the secret police at one point. Speaking of X-Files, the only episode I've ever seen was the rogue computer program with the VR thing. I still remember the kill command; Ctrl-Alt-Bloodbath.
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Mar 21, 2023 17:40
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Cooked Auto posted:
This is specifically why I removed the Bloodbath button from my keyboard
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