9/11 Trutherism and what I just can't figure out about the conspiracy crowd

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > 9/11 Trutherism and what I just can't figure out about the conspiracy crowd

Luigi's Discount Porn Bin: Jul 19, 2000; Oven Wrangler

Prester John posted:

Icke is a bit different than the regular conspiracy crowd. He starts off perfectly rational and will go into detail about real events and problems in the world. He has been a pretty outspoken critic of Corporatism, both political parties in the US, Isreal, and especially the banking cartel. Actually, having attended one of his 10 hour lectures, I would say probably about 65% of the time was spent discussing pretty non crazy stuff. About 20% of his time was spent on the whole "we are all one" New Agey kind of stuff. And the rest was spent on some pretty out there ideas. He might have spent about 3-4 minutes on the reptilian alien thing. The main thing with Icke that is unlike a ton of other conspiracy theorists, his stuff is at least internally consistent. And he's not angry and shouting about it. His presentation is also very positive, especially compared to an Alex Jones. He doesn't try to terrify his audience, he tells them that no matter its all going to be okay. He emphasizes personal spiritual growth as the way to improve society. All in all he is pretty harmless and I think that is part of his charm. He talks a ton of sense and kind of just eases the nuttier stuff in there.

In my experience this isn't really true. I went to his big event at Wembley Arena last year, a gigantic 10-hour marathon of him explaining his entire worldview, and the metaphysical stuff was a huge part, probably occupying an entire 2-hour session on its own and fair chunks of some of the others (IIRC it was divided into four of these sessions with breaks in between). This is probably because he was speaking to a more committed audience than in his mass media appearances - those tickets weren't cheap. While the spiritual message was at the core of some of his weirder claims, he also advocated for a lot of things beyond personal spiritual growth, like opposing sustainable development initiatives because they're just a back door for population control.

I also noticed a lot of internal inconsistency. This is because David Icke believes in basically every conspiracy theory ever, and tries to cram them all into his weird New Age neoplatonist worldview. A lot of elements contradict each other just from the sheer scope of it all. For instance, he thinks that everything we see is a holographic projection of higher-dimensional reality, and that if we recognise this we can basically have superpowers and rely less on the constraints of the physical world. Yet this conflicts with the idea that the lizard people (not really lizard people, extradimensional beings called the Archons) need human psychic energy to survive for some reason. It's clear from some of his theories that the Archons are clued in to the whole holographic reality thing, but it's never explained why they nevertheless rely on such a weird and hard-to-control source of sustenance.

The "Archons feeding on us" component also bumps up against his love of population control conspiracy theories, where he brings out the usual suspects (Bill Gates, the Georgia Guidestones, etc.) to put forward the standard theory that the elites want to kill 90% of the population. So the same conspirators that need massive amounts of human psychic energy to survive also want to kill the vast majority of humanity. These are just a couple of examples - Icke definitely contradicts himself pretty regularly. When it comes to conspiracy theories he's too cosmopolitan for his own good. That's not even getting into his weird neo-Velikovskian catastrophist bullshit about how Saturn used to be the Sun.

# ¿ Sep 23, 2013 13:19

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# ¿ May 5, 2024 14:56

Luigi's Discount Porn Bin: Jul 19, 2000; Oven Wrangler

Ramagamma posted:

I don't get this bizarre notion conspiracy theorists have that states "you are living in a prison cell but you can't see the bars". It's fairly obvious the bars to most real world people are money, time, and to a lesser extent healthcare.

These "sheeple" should spend some time in Bangladesh working 17 hour shifts for �2 then they would maybe realize the relativity of the term freedom.

I've heard other people say this too and mean money and all that, but if you're referring to the David Icke quote from the Vinnie Paz video, he literally thinks that the bars of the prison cell are subliminal hypnotic mind control signals being broadcast by interdimensional lizard beings through Saturn's rings (which are artificial) and amplified by the Moon (which is not only artificial, but also hollow).

# ¿ Sep 23, 2013 14:16

Luigi's Discount Porn Bin: Jul 19, 2000; Oven Wrangler

Pope Guilty posted:

So where does he think tides come from?

From what I can remember I think he acknowledges that the moon causes tides, but that it's capable of doing so even if it's hollow. Basically, either the moon has an ultra dense surface such that it weighs what we think it does even while hollow, or it weighs less than what we think it does but our understanding of gravity (and therefore our estimation of its mass) has been deliberately suppressed by the conspiracy so that we don't find out the truth about the moon's structure.

Honestly, the mass of the moon is the least of the problems with Icke's conception of the solar system. He thinks that the Earth existed in an Edenic state before the Archons came and instigated a cosmic catastrophe that resulted in the destruction of the fifth planet (the debris from which is now the asteroid belt), the creation of the artificial moon, and the burning-out of Saturn, which was once a star and is now the headquarters of the Archons' attempt to mind-control humanity through the Saturn-Moon Matrix. Icke's cosmology is so utterly batshit that buying into it basically requires the belief that our entire understanding of physics is fundamentally flawed anyway, so it seems pretty trivial to think that we have the wrong idea about the moon as well.

# ¿ Sep 23, 2013 15:34

Luigi's Discount Porn Bin: Jul 19, 2000; Oven Wrangler

Prester John posted:

Wow, he never got into any of this stuff when I went to see him. I mean he went into the whole "Moon is hollow" thing a bit and touched on Saturn, but that was about it. I think it was probably because I saw him in Cleveland and it was the very first time he'd ever given a speech in the Midwest, so he kept it low key.

It might also depend on how long ago it was. I think his views tend to change a lot over time as he picks up new bits of conspiracy mythology.

# ¿ Sep 23, 2013 18:43

Luigi's Discount Porn Bin: Jul 19, 2000; Oven Wrangler

I think Sergg is talking about this 2008 study by Whitson and Galinsky. A feeling of lacking control makes people more likely to do all sorts of stuff, like see patterns in random noise, hold superstitious beliefs, and infer conspiracy in ambiguous situations.

# ¿ Sep 24, 2013 23:51

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Funky See Funky Do posted:

Is anyone able to construct a succinct and coherent narrative for what Alex Jones believes? I was an idiot about 10 years ago just following 9/11 and went down that rabbit hole a bit. I watched his show online and his movies, while reading this thread I tried to remember exactly what it was he was claiming and how it was all connected. The closest I could come was that ancient secret societies (The Bilderberg Group) completely dominate the world using Hegelian political philosophy in order to stay rich and powerful and to kill us all.

That's basically it. The elites are obsessed with population control and use fluoride, chemtrails, GMO food, and other methods to sap and impurify our precious bodily fluids. Through the financial system, the media, the medical industry, the UN, and their other various appendages they plan to reduce the world's population to 500 million people, all living within a microchipped Orwellian New World Order.

The Bilderberg Group is just the tip of the iceberg and probably take their marching orders from people even more secret and evil. The conspirators themselves are obsessed with psychedelia and the occult, especially numerology and elaborate rituals. Alex is deliberately vague about whether any of it actually works but is very angry that They are even giving it a try.

# ¿ Sep 25, 2013 00:20

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Dravinski posted:

Are there any books or papers that anyone might be able to suggest on the topic of antisemitism in conspiracy theorist groups? I'd be interested in reading more about the subject.

I think Barkun talks about it a bit in A Culture of Conspiracy, and it's a recurring theme in Jon Ronson's Them!. In a non-Western context, Viren Swami has also published an interesting study of a particular case of antisemitic conspiracism in Malaysia, which is interesting as there are pretty much no Jews in Malaysia - Swami's thesis is essentially that in Malaysia, Jews are a "safe" outgroup to accuse of conspiring, so anti-Jewish prejudice can be used as a mask for the much more relevant - and much less socially acceptable - anti-Chinese prejudice. http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00280/abstract

A Fancy 400 lbs posted:

Do conspiracy theorists ever try to claim that anti-semetism in conspiracy theories is actually planted there by the Jews to make themselves look persecuted?

This is a position that you see every so often in the Reddit conspiracy community. Stormfront poo poo has been creeping in there for a while now, and there's more and more holocaust denial and outright antisemitism in the comments, so this has provoked fights between the relative few who think that the recent trend toward Hitler-did-nothing-wrong-ism is an organized attempt to discredit the mighty /r/conspiracy and the much larger proportion of people who think that the first group are all paid shills for the JIDF.

# ¿ Dec 26, 2014 19:10

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Sharkie posted:

It's been kind of sobering how quickly antisemitism has become pervasive. I may be wrong, but I don't think it was as popular back in the day, say pre-2004 or so. As I understand it, stormfront made a concerted effort to recruit on 4chan and it worked spectacularly well, metastasizing from there to reddit and everywhere else.

There's always been an undercurrent of it in the conspiracy world, even after it became less socially acceptable after the war. Even conspiracy theorists who have no problem with Jewish people and think that all the Jewish conspiracy stuff is nonsense still draw on a long tradition of antisemitic conspiracy literature. Maybe you're a 9/11 truther and you'd never think of picking up Nesta Webster or the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, but you'd still read Bill Cooper or Gary Allen or any of their zillion late 20th-century knockoffs, you'd still rail openly against the world financial system, and so on. Then you get pulled into discussions about the Rothschilds, then it's about Israel, then it's the Khazar hypothesis, and before you know it you're advocating the idea that Jews are literally the result of Eve loving the snake in the Garden of Eden.

Post-/pol/ antisemitism is a weird one, though, and I don't really know what to make of it. I wonder where the crossing-over point is between "kill the jews lol jk" and "kill the jews lol jk... but seriously, jews are terrible"

# ¿ Dec 26, 2014 19:37

Luigi's Discount Porn Bin: Jul 19, 2000; Oven Wrangler

babies havin rabies posted:

Also that Protocols of the Elders of Zion is some crazy triple-agent poo poo where said Jews successfully planted evidence of it being a hoax.

Modern conspiracy theorists have a hilarious relationship with the Protocols. Most of them outside of the Stormfront crowd seem to acknowledge that it's a fake document, but still try to rescue their belief in it through all kinds of weird mental gymnastics. David Icke thinks that the cabal involved in the Protocols was a tiny minority that happened to be Jewish, though he only read the Protocols about two weeks before c/ping them into one of his batshit mid-90s infodump books. Bill Cooper thought that the Protocols had nothing to do with Jews, so he published a copy as an appendix to Behold a Pale Horse but encouraged readers to substitute "Illuminati" for "Jews," "human cattle" for "goyim," etc. Many others vaguely assert that the Protocols are a "true document" but have nothing to do with Jews - that they existed even before Maurice Joly and the French Revolution, and both Joly's Dialogue and the Protocols are a twisted retelling of some earlier, factual thing that actually happened among the Illuminati. Which, well, of course they'd publicise their own plan for world domination, why wouldn't they?

# ¿ Dec 26, 2014 19:52

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Dravinski posted:

Thanks, I think I'll pick up Michael Barkun's book it looks really interesting. I wonder to what extent conspiracy theorists in the West are exposed to Jewish communities, from my personal experience (which is the greatest example obviously) hate comes from ignorance.

I wasn't even aware there was anti-Chinese rhetoric in Malaysia. Again, thanks for the links.

No worries. Barkun's book might not have much about antisemitism in it - it's been a little while since I read it, but IIRC the bulk of it was written pre-9/11, so it has a lot on the Oklahoma City style antigovernment militia conspiracism and less about the post-9/11 Truther-influenced stuff. Still some fantastic stuff in there though, and it holds up very well even given the newer developments in the conspiracy world.

# ¿ Dec 27, 2014 12:51

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Illuminti posted:

He nailed it with Edward Heath though didn't he? Maybe not the blood drinking reptile stuff, but Ickes been banging on about a Westminster Paedo ring since the 90's. Think he even had Savile pegged a decade early, although that seems like it was an open secret.

He claims that he called Savile out as a paedophile way before it broke, but there's no record of him saying that - basically you have to take his word for it. It's not impossible, though. Icke thinks literally everyone in any position of power in Britain is a paedo, including the entire royal family.

The reason for this is pretty bugfuck. He thinks that everyone with political power is descended from the Archons, which is his current name for the lizard people. Rather than being literal space aliens, though, they're sort of interdimensional energy vampire ghosts. People who are descended from interdimensional astral reptoids can be possessed by the Archons more easily so that they can be used as puppets to carry out the Archons' will on Earth. This includes molesting kids because the Archons need psychic energy to survive, and the energy that comes from torturing kids is particularly tasty.

# ¿ Aug 16, 2015 06:27

Luigi's Discount Porn Bin: Jul 19, 2000; Oven Wrangler

Illuminti posted:

He briefly went nuts in the 90's with some face on mars crap but has really pulled himself back. He's certainly not the same as those Ancient Alien theorists, seems to genuinely have a brain

Briefly? He thinks that one of the primary aims of the War on Drugs is to prevent humanity from using hallucinogens to connect with psychic beings from other dimensions.

# ¿ Aug 16, 2015 15:34

Luigi's Discount Porn Bin: Jul 19, 2000; Oven Wrangler

Illuminti posted:

Hah, yes well there is his well known love of hallucinogens. I well may be wrong, but I don't think he ascribes a an actual targetted conspiracy to the war on drugs. Just a general O
orthodox resistance to the medical benefits of hallucinogens. The other demensional beings poo poo I could do without.

No, he absolutely thinks it's a deliberate conspiracy (on several levels, mostly financial). He goes into this at length in his awful TedX "War on Consciousness" talk.

# ¿ Aug 16, 2015 23:04

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Blue Footed Booby posted:

Relatively sane people can believe most conspiracy theories, but gang stalking is literally classic schizo. Like, an example you'll see in textbooks.

Psychologists generally consider the boundary between normal conspiracy theories and delusions to depend on the target of the conspiracy. Your everyday conspiracy theory is all about how they're persecuting a relatively large social group, or they're trying to get away with something. Delusions of persecution also involve conspiracies, but they're always targeted specifically at the self. Gangstalking / targeted individual theories definitely fall on the "psychotic delusion" side of the fence.

Speaking of which, there was an interesting paper published this year on the psychology of gangstalking. They looked at reports of stalking by individuals and stalking by groups, and concluded, among other things, that all 128 reports of group stalking they surveyed were delusional: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14789949.2015.1054857

quote:

From an examination of free-text responses, all 128 group-stalked cases fell into one or more of three categories: cases where the resources or elaborate organisation required to carry them out made the alleged activities highly improbable (e.g. hostile operatives being inserted in victim�s workplace and their children�s schools; 24-h electronic surveillance involving teams of men in black vans; surveillance by cameras placed throughout the city; staff of shops and libraries being amongst the group stalkers; everyone in the street being �plants� acting out roles towards the victim; �more than a thousand� people being involved; traffic lights being manipulated always to go red on approach; repeated sexual assault during sleep; horns on the street hooting to bring attention to particular sentences on the radio; collaboration between diverse agencies, such as the Automobile Association, a building society, a website and neighbours), cases in which the activities described were impossible (e.g. minds of friends and family being externally controlled; use of �voice to skull� messages; witchcraft focussed through gold objects; insertion of alien thoughts; organised electronic mind interference; remote removal of bank notes through electronic attraction; invasion of an individual�s dreams at night), and cases where the beliefs were not only impossible, but bizarre (e.g. docile family dog replaced by exact double with foul temper; remote enlargement of bodily organs).

# ¿ Aug 26, 2015 09:49

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Centripetal Horse posted:

He claims 2,300 architects have joined his organization. The American Institute of Architects, to which Gage belongs, claims 83,000 members. If we compare Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth's worldwide membership to just the AIA, only about one out of forty Architects thinks enough of Gage's theories to back them with membership in his organization. If we compare the number of architects in his organization to the number of architects worldwide, I imagine that number looks even more anemic. I guess I understand how it happens, but it still mildly baffles me that someone can look at a situation where 38/39 professionals in a large field think he's wrong, and just say to himself, "How can they be so blind?" Maybe I need to up my confidence game. When I have a position on something, and practically everybody else in the world who has access to the same information I do tells me I'm wrong, I start to think, "I might be wrong about this." I guess I'm just weak.

It's worse than that, even. Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth is mostly engineers: http://www.ae911truth.org/signatures/ae.html

Related: Chomsky delivers an excellent answer to someone asking about Gage's organization

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3i9ra-i6Knc

# ¿ Sep 16, 2015 07:55

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xthetenth posted:

What fraction are things like software engineers or the like? Computing fields are great for getting people like engineers and or science professors who have no clue about the basic knowledge of other scientists/engineers.

"Compu*" appears 32 times in the list, "software" 14 times, "information" 5 times. So not too many, though some seem to just have degrees in IT or computer science. Others don't have any qualifications or positions listed, just a name and location.

# ¿ Sep 16, 2015 16:33

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Jack Gladney posted:

Doesn't the clock read 9:57?

That's even worse!

9:57 = 9 + 57 = 66 = 11 x 6. Or if you're looking at it upside down, 9 x 11.
9:57 = 9 - 5 + 7 = 11
9:57 = 9 + 5 + 7 = 21 = 1 + 1 + 1 = 111
9:57 = 21:57 = 21 + 5 + 7 = 33. 3 x 3 = 9, and 33 = 11 + 11 + 11
9:57 = 21 + 57 = 78. What comes after seven and eight? Nine. Nine... ELEVEN?
9:57 = I (9th letter) E (5th letter) G (7th letter). IEG is, of course, the Independent Evaluation Group of the World Bank. Clear reference to globalist financier involvement in 9/11? Not only that, IEG is the international airport code for an airport in Poland. Poland was also the victim of a horrific air travel "accident" recently. Coincidence?

# ¿ Sep 17, 2015 11:35

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Shbobdb posted:

This is good but you really need to add the extra layer of exoticism and anti-semitism by translating your numbers into the Hebrew alphabet. First off, letters and numbers are the same thing there, so it makes sense (nobody really thinks of "A" as "1" but "א" is totally "1" . . . you can use Gematria with the Latin alphabet but it's a total scrub move). You'd have to play with it a little bit to figure out how to bring it back to the Illuminati as you've done here but I'm confident that it can be done.

You need to really try to overstand the issue here.

Scrub move? Someone hasn't heard that each word in Simple English Gematria adds up to 74 - much like "Jesus," "Heavens," "It's God," and even a description of the system itself, "A-B-C becomes 1-2-3." Self-reflexively proven.

957, of course, is the Simple English Gematria value of the phrase "I, lizard illjewminati, did 9/11 to destroy our rights and enslave humanity for at least a millennium"

Other 957 occurrences in Simple English Gematria, according to http://www.gematrix.org/?word=I%2C+lizard+illjewminati%2C+did+911+to+destroy+our+rights+and+enslave+humanity+for+at+least+a+millennium:

-so the sun stood still and the moon stayed in place until the nation of israel had defeated its enemies
-the order of the garter controls global banking and trading through the city of london corporation
-some sad and some terrible things happened but it will have a happy ending thats all that matters to me
-nicolas bar tsarion is nicolas sarkozy s biological name from leinstershire burkbutt anus land
-i am still not welcome at baseball games even little league wwwwwwaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhh god still be laughing

Luigi's Discount Porn Bin fucked around with this message at 10:16 on Sep 19, 2015

# ¿ Sep 19, 2015 10:03

Luigi's Discount Porn Bin: Jul 19, 2000; Oven Wrangler

Hell yes. Also tell him to post it on Vixra, the preprint publication website for pseudoscientist cranks who can't get their bullshit published in arXiv: http://vixra.org/

# ¿ Sep 29, 2015 13:26

Luigi's Discount Porn Bin: Jul 19, 2000; Oven Wrangler

I really don't think prosopagnosia is a major driving force behind crisis actor theories. When the disgruntled news anchor shot the reporter on camera in Roanoke, VA there were IMMEDIATELY crisis actor theories popping up. Same with the Charlie Hebdo shooting and the Boston bombing. The "this woman looks kind of like that woman!" stuff comes long after the immediate "this has to be fake" reaction that some people seem to have.

# ¿ Dec 3, 2015 17:48

Luigi's Discount Porn Bin: Jul 19, 2000; Oven Wrangler

"Gentlemen. Our plan to frame a Muslim couple for a mass shooting is finally in place. Let's review. At 0900, Alpha squad - Dave, Brad, Chad, and Hunter, that's you - will start running around shooting people. At 0903, Epsilon squad will begin to remove the real corpses and dump fake corpses on the streets in their place. At 0928, crisis actor teams will be deployed to give interviews on news media. I've given Beth the morning off - we used her in the last four false flags and people are starting to get suspicious. Oh, thanks, Dave, I nearly forgot - before any of this begins, at 0812, the social media team will put up memorial pages for the fake victims. Got to get the hashtags out there ASAP. Everyone ready? Good. I don't see any flaws in this plan. Soon, the guns will be ours. ALL of the guns."

# ¿ Dec 12, 2015 23:40

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Asehujiko posted:

I met somebody who claims that bows & arrows are just as effective as guns, if not more so, and the only reason we have the latter is because the government changes how we fight wars every so often to drive arms sales and also that said government forged the Rosetta Stone to hide the fact that the Egyptian Pharaohs were the most enlightened beings to ever exist and it's the fake stone causing all hieroglyphs to be incorrectly translated to be about wars and massacres and poo poo instead of guides to enlightenment. Is there any brand of conspiracy mongers that actually say this poo poo or is this all his own drug fuelled insanity?

The bow and arrow thing is great, but I don't think there's anything new under the sun when it comes to batshit theories about ancient Egypt. There's a particular brand of New Age crazy that thinks Egypt was a technologically advanced society where Masculine And Feminine Energies Lived In Harmony before the pharaoh Akhnaten started the tradition of privileging male deities over female ones and hosed everything up, and they lost their alien Atlantis cymatics technology that they used to build the pyramids. Finbarr Ross is big into this IIRC. There are theories that hieroglyphics are mistranslated, but the ones I've heard are mostly in service of trying to prove the pyramids are really 50,000 years old or whatever.

# ¿ Jan 18, 2016 16:21

Luigi's Discount Porn Bin: Jul 19, 2000; Oven Wrangler

Adorno was also never a member of the Tavistock Institute :confused:

Lewin's the real bridge between Tavistock and the Frankfurt School. I mean I guess it's natural that somebody would combine Tavistock paranoia with worries about Cultural Marxism, but the only google hits for Adorno and Tavistock together are about this exact Beatles conspiracy theory.

Interesting note on the Tavistock Institute: free-range batshit ranch Godlike Productions used to (and might still) ban people for mentioning the word "Tavistock," which of course set a lot of people speculating whether GLP was a Tavistock honeypot or limited hangout operation.

# ¿ Jan 27, 2016 10:42

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Quift posted:

Btw, has there been any discussion here about general dunford and the new American Republic?

I don't recognize the names, but it looks like a NESARA/Galactic Federation of Light thing? That's come up a few times I think. Waiting for NESARA is an excellent little documentary.

# ¿ Jun 16, 2016 23:13

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Quift posted:

This was a recreation of the tribulations from the book of revelation, with the twist ending of Satan winning.

Quift posted:

First the projection of the wall of rocks come down, symbolising the breakdown of the veil. Then the scarabs enter, symbolising the eater of the dead, and also the movers of the world/bringer of change.
Then you get plenty of stuff related to the end of time. Not the "end of times", but the end of time as a concept. Time itself falling apart. This is the part with the watches etc.
After this you get the opening of the gates of hell. The portal of eyes summoning the dark Lord into our world. He then opens up the portal from here and the demons come pouring through.

So yeah. Plenty of symbolic references to the tribulations.

Have you read Revelation? None of this poo poo is in there. Time stopping (and then things going on afterward)? Nope, unless you count the whole eternity thing after the world ends, and that's certainly not part of the tribulation, because there's a thousand years of rule by Jesus in the meantime. Scarabs? Nope - locusts, sure, the nasty ones with scorpion stingers and the faces of men with lion's teeth, sure, but no scarabs. The "eater of the dead?" That's either an Egyptian goddess or a Magic: The Gathering card, and does not appear in the Bible in any case. "The breakdown of the veil?" The apocalypse is called "the lifting of the veil" because it lifts the (metaphorical) veil of ignorance - in other words, a revelation of things unknown, hence why the book is called that. "Breakdown of the veil" is a line from a Dragon Age fanfic or something and has gently caress-all to do with anything. The gates of hell opening, portals, demons running around? Nowhere in Revelation.

# ¿ Jun 18, 2016 16:23

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# ¿ Jul 11, 2016 07:25

Luigi's Discount Porn Bin: Jul 19, 2000; Oven Wrangler

The Bohemian Grove is an actual thing, in that it's a club where a bunch of powerful men meet in the woods to get drunk and party. It's basically just a high-budget fraternity. I was in a frat for a little while in university, and aside from the cost, the "cremation of care" and spooky owl statue wouldn't have been that out of place in the new pledge initiation.

# ¿ Dec 7, 2016 10:36

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SteelMentor posted:

I absolutely love that story. What Jones leaves out is that he was there with another conspiracy theorist guy. But whereas Jones tried to sneak into the Grove, got lost and eventually got his sorry rear end dragged out by security, the other guy walked in the front door and ended up getting drunk and partying with the attending million/billionaires.

As much as a bellowing dipshit Jones is, the scary thing is just how much influence he's building. Jones clearly doesn't believe in his own bullshit, the extent of how hard he pushes his bullshit survival supplies and dick pills is testament to that, but people do and included in those people may be the goddamn President elect.

I think Jones went there with the journalist Jon Ronson, who ended up writing about it in his (excellent) book Them. IIRC, the way Ronson told it, they walked in the front door together pretending to be tech billionaires and stuck together for most of the night.

# ¿ Dec 11, 2016 00:37

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QuarkJets posted:

I love this fact, and also the fact that you can explain to a CT person directly that they have professed two completely contradictory beliefs and they just don't register it at all

I had this happen at a Skeptics in the Pub talk on conspiracy theories. After the show I got into it with a guy who thinks the CIA shot down MH17 over Ukraine. According to him there were two pieces of evidence that prove it was a classic CIA operation - the jet was diverted from its original flight path so it would go through a war zone, and after it was hit by the missile, someone said over the radio "poo poo, that wasn't Putin's plane! we shot down the wrong one!" I repeatedly tried to point out that these are not compatible at all, it couldn't have been shot down both on purpose and by accident, and he wouldn't acknowledge the contradiction at all, just kept deflecting. "No, dude, haven't you heard of Operation Ajax? And let me tell you about the Gulf of Tonkin. Not many people know this, but..."

# ¿ Jan 17, 2017 13:03

Luigi's Discount Porn Bin: Jul 19, 2000; Oven Wrangler

Or a lot of random debris from the planes and towers ended up scattered around Manhattan, but you don't hear in the news about Joe Shmoe's charred boarding pass or the styrofoam cofee cup and peanut package from seat 34C

# ¿ Jan 21, 2017 10:47

Luigi's Discount Porn Bin: Jul 19, 2000; Oven Wrangler

SteelMentor posted:

Has there ever been any academic work into why conspiracy theorists are obsessed in reading secret codes and messages in completely innocuous things? It's completely bonkers to me that people would honestly think that the Super Secret Illuminati Shadow Communist Lizards would go through all the trouble to hide their existence... only to leave loving easter eggs everywhere like it's a goddamn video game.

I know the human brain tends to look for patterns, even if there's none to be found, but surely there's an upper limit.

Conspiracy theorizing comes from the same place as seeing patterns in noise, because it's the same general principle. Your brain is basically cranking up its signal-detection and trying to make sense of what's going on in the environment. In certain states of mind people will be more likely to see patterns in white-noise images; the same state of mind also makes people more likely to perceive conspiracies in their social surroundings.

The "illuminazi reptile symbols everywhere" conspiracy theory doesn't make sense because it's not based on any sort of initial theory. It's just based on the perception that these symbols are out there, their placement is delibrate, so now we need to figure out why. A lot of people stop there but David Icke has a semi-coherent (but completely bonkers, it is David Icke after all) theory of why the illuminati are so keen on putting triangles everywhere - he thinks that the interdimensional reptoids feed off human psychic energy, and their symbols are like little ghostbuster traps that funnel your thought-energy to their lizard batteries. (Also, that's why they abuse kids - because they can reap energy from children's suffering)

# ¿ Apr 4, 2017 10:09

Luigi's Discount Porn Bin: Jul 19, 2000; Oven Wrangler

you wouldn't need milk and eggs for a party unless you were baking a cake. cake, as we all know, is 4chan slang for lolicon.

milk and eggs are necessary to create a cake, therefore milk = pencils, eggs = crippling social isolation

# ¿ Apr 5, 2017 14:26

Luigi's Discount Porn Bin: Jul 19, 2000; Oven Wrangler

Shbobdb posted:

Be mindful of the timeframe of any graphs/trends they show or discuss. For obvious reasons, the Great Depression and WWII caused a spike in illnesses. That can make it look like the disease rate was dropping dramatically before vaccines were introduced (hygiene is usually the stated reason) and can even make the actual treatment of vaccines look just like part of a trend line.

It won't convince them but it will help convince other people listening.

90% of the time antivaxers will show graphs of mortality rather than number of cases to try to show that vaccines don't work and these diseases would have gone away regardless. The number of people killed by polio and smallpox were on the decline before the vaccines were introduced - not because people were getting the diseases less, but because we got better at helping people not die when they got them.

Compare:

Luigi's Discount Porn Bin fucked around with this message at 13:01 on Apr 15, 2017

# ¿ Apr 15, 2017 08:22

Luigi's Discount Porn Bin: Jul 19, 2000; Oven Wrangler

smoke sumthin bitch posted:

you should watch his joe rogan podcast where they google and confirm whatever ""insane conspiracy" hes talking about, in real time. like 99% of what alex jones says is verifiable and true. thats what i dont get about his detractors, they refuse to go on google and research poo poo. youre like a sleeping ostrich with its head stuck in the sand.

Alex Jones remembers his weird-rear end twist on everything, so most of what he says is something that he misinterpreted on his own show weeks/months/years before into something totally different. If you'll google it then you'll find something vaguely similar but not quite the same.

One example from last year: at some point Obama was saying that it only would be reasonable for Trump to call the election rigged if he'd been leading by like 15 points in the polls and then lost. Jones took this to mean that Obama had a slip of the tongue and their internal polls ACTUALLY showed Trump ahead by 15. Then later he'd throw out it out like it was proven fact in his little asides, like "-- and Obama's admitted now, on the record, that Trump's way ahead in internal polling ---"

# ¿ Apr 22, 2017 17:12

Luigi's Discount Porn Bin: Jul 19, 2000; Oven Wrangler

Jack Gladney posted:

Cab drivers seem like such quaint material for a contemporary conspiracy theory. It should be like Uber has secretly been taken over from the top down and their app tracks people and can send out kill orders coded in innocuous ways.

I 100% guarantee there's a conspiracy theory that Uber is a way of making self driving cars palatable to the masses so the PTBs can take away the freedom to travel. Though that might just be the backstory to the Rush song Red Barchetta.

# ¿ May 5, 2017 17:27

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# ¿ May 5, 2024 14:56

Luigi's Discount Porn Bin: Jul 19, 2000; Oven Wrangler

fishmech posted:

Ehhhhhhh I mean that's more that once someone builds a conspiracy framework, it's easy for the usual gang of jewhaters to waltz in and toss "and this was done by the jews!!!!" into the middle of it.

It's very very easy to incorporate Jewish conspiracy themes into new conspiracy theories without meaning to or without even realizing it, because the idea of an ages-spanning conspiracy being laid out through careful research is catnip to most conpsiracy theorists even if they don't agree with the identity of the perpetrator. There's been enough antisemitic conspiracy literature published throughout history that they think there must be something in there even if it's nothing to do with the Jews. So you get poo poo like Bill Cooper including the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as an appendix in Behold a Pale Horse because that poo poo is dynamite as long as you search/replace all the Jew references.

Milton William Cooper posted:

This is an exact reprint of the original text. This has been written intentionally to deceive people. For clear understanding, the word "Zion" should be "Sion"; any reference to "Jews" should be replaced with the word "Illuminati"; and the word "goyim" should be replaced with the word "cattle."

# ¿ Apr 24, 2018 14:31

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > 9/11 Trutherism and what I just can't figure out about the conspiracy crowd