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I distinctly remember on 9/11/01 thinking, "okay, two huge jetliners over loving lower Manhattan, millions of people staring and every camera on earth rolling --at least there is no possible way for there to arise any idiot conspiracy theories about what just happened"
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Sep 11, 2015 17:46
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It's awfully easy to do half-reasoned demonstrations of physical effects or recreations of things that "prove" one thing or another, and it can be awfully entertaining to listen to them. I'm sure it's the same thrill you get from watching Mythbusters when you pore through a list of claims like "they found thermite" or "jet fuel burns at such and such temperature", and you feel like it's all building to something but ... nobody ever says what. That's the beauty of it. Nobody ever has to say what the gently caress sense it makes to blow up a bomb in a building you're already crashing jetliners into in full view of millions of people and news cameras. Nobody has to explain why it's "suspicious" for some nearby building to catch fire and collapse in the crashing rubble hours later, or what it proves. All you have to do is keep rattling through your list of poo poo that just does not add up and the audience ends up falling down that rabbit hole, because, well, it's fascinating! It's exciting! It makes you feel like all the facts are being laid out for you by smarter people than you! And never mind that it never says why any of this poo poo should have been necessary if all they wanted was a pretext to go to war with Saddam or whatever when they so easily could have done God knows what else so drat easily. They don't have to come up with any kind of unifying theory at all. It wouldn't make the story any more compelling to the people who are swayed by it so far.
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Sep 13, 2015 01:19
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Probably also why they'll grind for weeks to get to another level in WoW when they know it only means grinding for months for the next one.
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Sep 13, 2015 01:44
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Uh-oh, you asked "why would someone put them there", watch it get ignored like the missiles strapped to the bottoms of the airliners
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Sep 16, 2015 00:56
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Switzerland posted:I did the dirty deed: Jesus loving christ This is like those reports from wherever the gently caress that the terrorists referred to the attack as the "Porsche" beforehand, like they'd call each other and say (in English of course) "the Porsche is about to start". As though they would use American-style date formats, month-first. Or as though they would think of the date as being the important thing about it and the name everyone would come to associate with it, rather than "Operation Destroy the Great Satan's Twin Middle Fingers" or whatever they probably called it. We were equally likely to be calling it Black Tuesday or whatever, years down the line. It's so transparent as to be maddening—people live with a phrase like "Nine Eleven" for so many years, it becomes obvious to them in retrospect that that was always somehow predestined to be a significant component in the event, and then suddenly everything in the world with nines and elevens and other iconography that has become familiar to us over the years (like the shape of the billowing smoke) seems retroactively to be full of significance. "The hands were in the ninth and eleventh windows" fuuuuck me Numerology, man, it's enough to make one want to go drown in a toilet
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Sep 16, 2015 03:54
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ROBERT ZEMECKIS WAS TRYING TO WARN US, WHY DID WE IGNORE THE OBVIOUS SIGNS 
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Sep 17, 2015 12:19
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I was thinking again about that numerology thing and why it makes me so mad, and I think it's because it shows people actually do have an intellectual curiosity about the world and a desire to understand how the systems in it fit together. It's just that they pick some really loving stupid lens to view it all through. I mean, it would be one thing if people were just plain unscientific and didn't know or care about how the world worked, and disregarded science just because it didn't interest them. I could deal with that. But to see people devoting huge chunks of their lives to drawing lines of causality between things that have no basis in reality, developing theories and propounding them to each other with great enthusiasm, and actively rejecting the scientific premises that would otherwise lead them to put those efforts and that curiosity toward a productive goal—it's just maddening to see all that human potential wasted. I realize I just wrote a 13-year-old's classic "perhaps it is u" screed that can be used against all kinds of people, but dammit
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Sep 27, 2015 05:58
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Totally involved? Do you mean uninvolved?
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Oct 16, 2015 00:08
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It's a little discouraging that it takes something like a Morlocks/Eloi theory to make someone go "uhhh wait a sec"
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Nov 15, 2015 06:06
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remusclaw posted:What they should be forced to do is list the values of the whole of the container rather than that of the individual servings. Listing both would be fine, but they really should have to list the whole calorie count of a bag of chips when we all know your average customer is eating the whole god drat bag. Every few years they revamp the nutritional facts label and pledge to have "realistic serving sizes". I remember when the current format came out, for a year or two it was great—you'd get the numbers for an entire bag of chips, an entire bottle of soda, etc. But then gradually it crept back to these silly "2.5 servings in this pop-tart" kinds of portions, as it will always do
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Nov 30, 2015 01:53
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Welp, time for me to get a new strawman example 
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Nov 30, 2015 17:16
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Can refined fish melt steel beams
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Jan 5, 2016 23:28
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Dirk the Average posted:Bullshit. At no time in human history have there been more scientists and engineers with more resources at their disposal than now. There's a point to be made here about how engineers of today (in particular software engineers) don't have to be the high-caliber mathematicians and inventors and encyclopedically educated experts they did in decades past, they can rely on well-established toolsets and can cruise and lay about following tutorials and StackOverflow responses and produce results that would have been incredible to the people on the cutting edge twenty or even ten years ago.
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Jan 22, 2016 23:40
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Bold of you to peg it to Columbus.
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Jan 25, 2016 04:07
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I feel like at the center of every conspiracy theory there is a retarded numerology or spelling curiosity in which someone thinks he has discovered THE HIDDEN TRUTH.
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Feb 16, 2016 06:27
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If they had to hire people to pose in pictures in crisis situations why would they hire the same people over and over aaaaaaaasa
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Jun 14, 2016 11:27
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My only guess is that it's somebody's idea of how to bait every religious-kook conspiracy theorist in the world into an absolute frenzy. Whatever role Poe's Law plays in it probably ultimately won't matter.
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Jun 16, 2016 23:41
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Helsing posted:The tunnel is in Switzerland. What is it with the Swiss and drilling holes in things
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Jun 17, 2016 21:36
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My parents just got back from a tour of Eastern Europe where they got an earful of local social politics from their determinedly upbeat tour guide. One of the biggest issues they face, apparently, is huge population drain since the birth rate among native Czechs/Slovaks/Hungarians is ridiculously low, the implication being that after half a century of despotism and communism and revolutions most people just feel like there isn't any point anymore. Most of the cathedrals and huge buildings are now just museums and historical curiosities. (The Czech Republic apparently only has a churchgoing percentage of like 4%, as opposed to Slovakia which is 60% catholic.) The government offers huge financial incentives to couples to have more than 2 kids, but there are few takers and lots of emigration, so the GDP of these countries is plummeting; they light up the river frontages of all the cool monumental buildings to show off to the tourists on their evening boat rides, but the moment they're around the last bend all the lights abruptly shut off to save money. So these countries are super opposed to immigration since it dilutes an already moribund national identity, even if they desperately need an influx of manpower from anywhere just to keep the lights on. It's small wonder that in a situation like that you'd have nationalist/racist groups rising to defend something they see as under threat. It's easily a symptom of any society that's withering. I want to say you don't see aggressive nationalism from societies that are growing and expanding, but I'm not sure that's true (of course these are all blanket statements and it's different in every case anyway, but still).
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Jun 22, 2016 15:30
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What really gets me is the kind of numerology that gets mixed up in spellings, like counting the number of letters in a word, number of occurrences of a letter in a phrase, and so on. As though there's some great cosmic significance to the particular dialect of English we happen to speak and write today, what letters we use to encode sounds... ugh. I don't even want to dig up an example, the topic is just so exhausting to think about people being sucked into it.
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Jul 11, 2016 05:01
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Quift posted:And the bible like most ancients gives Pi as 22/7. Where?
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Jul 11, 2016 14:32
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xthetenth posted:So your idea for showing numerology works is to show you're able to look something up in a chart and free associate it with a popular aphorism? How many possible values would leave you unable to do so? To be evidence of your hypothesis, the prediction should be more unlikely than a sunrise. And I can only assume that Kabbalistic thing mentions other significant numbers like pi and e and the golden ratio, right? And 9/11 and 666? And 7.5 (being the floor from Being John Malkovich), and 12 as in 12 Monkeys? What? It doesn't?
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Jul 18, 2016 14:03
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Quift posted:I do question the D Adams narrative that the number 42 was random though. Of course it wasn't, it was generated by a PRNG of pulling scrabble letters out of a bag.
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Jul 20, 2016 18:02
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No see, you're employing the fallacious debating technique of Being Weird
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Jul 21, 2016 21:32
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People who act like "all disease" has a single root cause (particularly one that can be eliminated through one simple trick) are some of the most frustrating things about this stupid world.
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Aug 17, 2016 12:22
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And wild animals too. All that drat modern civilization, with its toxins and its subluxations.
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Aug 17, 2016 14:21
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drat that's insidious.
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Aug 19, 2016 00:03
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The coded message with the edit timecodes that were used to demarcate THE REAL MESSAGE to the illuminati must have been leaked
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Aug 26, 2016 23:48
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Oh, do your research, Shutton http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/technology/fact-check-this-pizzeria-is-not-a-child-trafficking-site.html?_r=0
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Nov 23, 2016 12:25
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So basically not "getting" FYAD is what elected Trump.
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Nov 28, 2016 16:15
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Also the Cubs won so they can't talk about the "curse" anymore.
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Dec 3, 2016 13:48
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It's either some kind of forbidden fruit thing ("it's super taboo therefore I want it"), or else latent pedophilia is really super common and nobody wants to admit it, and only the taboo aspect makes it possible for most people to hide it. I really really hope it's the former, for the sake of this loving species.
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Dec 7, 2016 17:09
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Baka-nin posted:Well at least it ended a little better than the last time someone went into a pizza place to self investigate a sinister conspiracy. quote:After the incident ended, Police Chief Reed Miller offered an assessment to reporters: "He's paranoid."[5] Oh my god
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Dec 9, 2016 12:23
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Data Graham posted:Oh my god Remember when El Niño first became a thing in the news in like 1997? It was causing all these storms and floods and wrecking people houses and poo poo. And this guy called "Al Nino" went on the news and talked about how people were calling him up and threatening him for being behind it all
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Dec 9, 2016 12:47
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Baka-nin posted:I first encountered Alex Jones on a cable documentary series on conspiracies. Alex Jones was on the one about that weird meeting place with an owl statue. He claimed that by exposing this secret cabal to the world he was confronted by two men in robes armed with daggers. Apparently Alex managed to fight them off bare handed, without getting a single scar or needing a hospital visit. Isn't he also the Brotherman Bill guy?
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Dec 10, 2016 20:18
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"Implies" is a pretty strong word. "Suggests" might be better.
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Jan 19, 2017 17:44
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~implying~
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Jan 20, 2017 00:14
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Trump did 9/11
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Jan 21, 2017 18:16
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As we all know, nobody's more obsessed with nonstop taboo-breaking sex than a bunch of septuagenarians
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Feb 9, 2017 12:39
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| # ¿ May 3, 2024 08:37 |
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With their coworkers, no less.
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Feb 10, 2017 07:17
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