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There's actually probably an interesting history of conspiracy theories that has remained unwritten up till now. Conspiracy theories remind me of tall tales or ancient mythos, basically they are stories created by a community to explain an event, and who over time the members come to internalize them with the actual truth. The most interesting thing is that there is no central source for these myths, which pokes a hole in the old "oh [group x] just made up this story for the plebs so they can control the plebs" idea, see: "did Jesus really exist" et all.
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Sep 12, 2013 13:26
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Nation posted:In a 2004 BBC article entitled "Al-Qaeda's origins and links", the BBC wrote: It's almost as though during a gigantic war against someone people will make poo poo up for page hits.
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Sep 23, 2013 12:48
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Nation posted:What are you getting at? That analysts don't necessarily know anything, and indeed outside of one or two topics probably shouldn't be speaking.
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Sep 23, 2013 12:59
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Sergg posted:As far as conservatives versus liberals, there are also well-established differences between the brains of political liberals and the brains of political conservatives, and this is something that neurological researchers have known for years. The brain of a conservative has, on average, a larger Amygdala (the part of the brain responsible for storage of memory of emotional events, primarily fear. If you have a damaged Amygdala you are literally incapable of remembering fear), and the brain of a liberal has, on average, a larger Anterior Cingulate (the part of the brain that is linked to various higher functions like reward anticipation, empathy, impulse control, and a few autonomic functions like blood pressure and heart rate). This finding has been independently replicated in numerous different studies. These studies seem to depend entirely on the questions asked and how "liberal" or "conservative" each response rates. For example, it would make sense that a "rah rah abolish private property" communist type would rate more closely with conservatives because that is an extremely emotional thing to want.
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Sep 24, 2013 13:56
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Sergg posted:Probably, but for every 1 Marxist who wants to abolish private property there will be like 20-40 moderate liberals with very nuanced views. I haven't done any research into the neurology of fringe ideologies like Marxism/Libertarianism but most of the (American) hardcore far-left Marxists I've met didn't hold those views after graduating from college and they're vastly overrepresented here in the SA forums in general. Right, but what I'm saying is that "conservative" and "liberal" (by which you mean right and left respectively) are relative terms and don't necessarily correlate with (respectively) "dumb emotional brain" and "intelligent critical thinking brain".
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Sep 24, 2013 16:02
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Gough Suppressant posted:I find it hard to be too harsh on some of the more "down to earth" conspiracy theorists given the history of things like MKULTRA with human experimentation without consent being carried out by government agencies, and as far as I know even when uncovered no one was prosecuted over it and many victims went uncompensated. The reason I don't believe it is it falls under the supposedly Fascist ideal of "believing the enemy (i.e. CIA) is simultaneously incompetent and all powerful".
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Oct 6, 2013 02:22
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Main Paineframe posted:The CIA isn't a single entity, it's a large constantly-changing organization with quite a few members. It's perfectly possible for it to be incompetent and all-powerful at the same time - for example, the CIA leadership and MKULTRA project members managed to keep a lid on the program for decades, but it was ultimately revealed when some fuckup clerk accidentally misfiled some of the super-secret documents and no one noticed when the order-to-shred was given out. And the enemies of fascists were also constantly changing organizations with many members. This is also ignoring that supposedly the same people who are doing the super secret things are also doing the incompetent things (see: "CIA doing 9/11" while also being completely stupid about events in Iraq post-invasion).
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Oct 6, 2013 02:56
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Kieselguhr Kid posted:Umberto Eco is a brilliant guy, but I think you're reading his 'Ur-Fascism' piece in a boneheadedly literal way. Having an 'enemy' that's both dumb and clever -- dumb and clever in different parts, or on different subjects, or in different situations -- is hardly a knock-down case that 'such-and-such is fascist therefore bad!' Oh I'm well aware of that (literally every organization vaguely relevant that I've seen has had this comparison done to them), it's just more poking fun at people who say "Those people I don't like = fascist *appeals to authority*".
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Oct 6, 2013 14:17
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Animal-Mother posted:Klan hood wearing white folks and Africa medallion wearing black folks converge in opinion on the most vital of subjects: Whatever happened, the Jews were behind it. That and both agree there should be a separation between races (well some of the latter anyway).
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Nov 10, 2013 07:12
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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".
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Nov 22, 2013 21:25
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Larry_Mullet posted:
Would you like to explain this point? quote:why the "radiation" was killing only some starfish species, and not everything off the coast including fish, seaweed, otters, and oh yeah ALL THE OTHER STARFISH
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Jan 3, 2014 16:37
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Alkydere posted:
It's not even starfish in general, it's a particular species of starfish.
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Jan 3, 2014 18:09
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MizPiz posted:Why do people think it's so hard to keep a conspiracy hidden? Ignoring that any half way decent conspiracy will disguise the actions taken in some plausible, unrelated way, it's not exactly hard to get something by the general public. Given the amount media that's produced on a daily basis, the fact most people are spread extremely thin with their day to day lives, and the general complacency of the public, they would barely be a factor in the conspiracy equation. Because for some strange reason none of the educated people can pick up on the conspiracy either, it's just the people who are prescribed medication for crazy pills.
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Jan 22, 2014 04:25
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All Else Failed posted:I'm not sure it's constructive to paint all conspiracy theorists as mentally ill in one broad stroke. Surely, they are a subset (and probably a larger one). However, I really liked what Noam Chomsky has said about conspiracy theory, that it is a symptom of the lack of transparency citizens in a democracy are forced to deal with. Without an absence of concrete information, the need to let the human brain do its thing and fill in the blanks would be severely hampered. Lack of concrete information has been the norm for all of human history though (arguably it still is - ask a random person whether a genuine forensic report looks accurate and they probably won't know). We've also had conspiracy theories long before any exponential technological increase (the obvious example is the Protocols of the Elders of Zion but pick any religious apocalypse movement).
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Feb 10, 2014 01:41
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E-Tank posted:Canadians have a habit of hating America, not entirely unjustified mind. Its not entirely surprising that they'd be fine with spreading 9/11 bullshit. The funniest/most pathetic thread in this forums was that guy who pretended to be Canadian when traveling abroad because a cabbie was rude to him one time. Getting back to the whole bus ads thing, I was pretty sure that something similar was happening in the NYC subway or maybe the London Underground?
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Mar 8, 2014 15:09
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Ray and Shirley posted:So how long exactly has Alex Jones been on RT's payroll? His take on Ukraine aligns so perfectly with the Kremlin's that it can't be coincidental. Years and years.
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Mar 18, 2014 00:05
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Fitzdraco posted:How exactly did we manage to wipe out Smallpox? Was it just luck or was it enforced small more harshly? I know there were dumb antivaxers back then as well, were they ignored? Could it be repeated with enough money and effort or was Smallpox a particularly easy virus to eliminate> It literally took 150 years (the first major vaccination attempts were started around 1810) and it was a coordinated effort by a lot of major governments.
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Mar 22, 2014 16:34
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Gorilla Salad posted:I've always felt it was the opposite. Up until 9/11, Bush was a complete nothing of a president. He spent half his time on holiday at his 'ranch' and the rest of the time he just seemed to be half-arsing it as much as he had done when his daddy gave him all those companies to run into the ground. Bush & co were making plans to invade Iraq basically the moment they got into office. They weren't really looking at Afghanistan but it's pretty clear we would have had war in Iraq sooner or later.
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Mar 23, 2014 14:00
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Install Windows posted:Still, it's funny that Bush took like 2 years after 9/11 to actually get into Iraq. It was more like a year and a half (at least from 9/11) and there was a CIA team put in back in July of 2002 to try to kill some supposed Al-Qaeda allies in Iraq.
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Mar 24, 2014 03:37
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Miss-Bomarc posted:Right, I guess that's why it took two years after September 2001 for the invasion to actually happen. It took 1.5 years for actual troops to come in and The CIA was there less than a year after 9/11.
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Mar 24, 2014 04:35
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Evil Fluffy posted:How will a race without FTL travel even traverse the galaxy in 200,000 years, let alone colonize it? Generational ships.
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Jul 23, 2014 16:02
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muscles like this? posted:The funny thing about the whole Supernatural situation is that the show has literally called those kind of people out and said that they're being super gross. At one point in the series the main characters learn that someone is writing "fictional" novels about their adventures and that it has a small crazy fanbase. They find out about the incest shipping and go on about how "They know we're brothers, right? That's gross." And then that dude is hinted to be God so it's literally the in character avatar of the creator saying "yeah you people are kind of crazy".
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Sep 4, 2014 02:49
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twistedmentat posted:You can't deny that Jones and others like him have made Conspiracy Theories mainstream. Before they were limited to crackpots and people who did lots of direct mail order books. The internet gave them a platform to get their messages out, but it was still on the fringes. They made specific conspiracy theories mainstream but the idea of conspiracy theories is present in most human circles (or other fictitious renderings on the truth). They standardized the specific conspiracy theory spouted but they didn't make a new thing appealing to people.
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Sep 28, 2014 19:53
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Seventh Arrow posted:I don't think you can minimize or leave out the effect that Watergate had on national cynicism. I mean, I'm sure people thought politicians were crooked before Nixon, but I think the idea that the President could do something serious enough to get impeached was quite a shock to a lot of people. That just shows they forgot about Teapot Dome.
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Sep 28, 2014 21:45
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site posted:This is pure speculation since I wasn't there, but yeah Hoover's decline/death, and the revelations of the extent of his paranoia and illegal surveillance probably didn't go over too well, especially since he was sold as the American's American, Man of Justice and all that bullshit. Seeing two major political figures go down as self-serving criminals a decade after losing one to assassination would probably gently caress with your head a little. That's why it's going to be interesting to see what life is like when most of the people who lived then are dead (so probably 25 years or so).
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Sep 29, 2014 03:08
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BBJoey posted:Are there no moon landing deniers who draw the line there and don't go in for the deeper illuminati/reptilian stuff? It was pretty funny when this showed up in Interstellar.
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Nov 24, 2014 22:32
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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 was literally a Law & Order episode from like 1997 about an anti-Jewish gang so no it's been around for a while. I personally don't notice it because there aren't many Jews here, but I imagine it's more of a thing on the East coast.
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Dec 26, 2014 19:59
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point of return posted:So what do the conspiracy theories popular among Jewish communities use instead? Seems to be Muslims if we look at Israelis.
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Dec 27, 2014 07:02
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SedanChair posted:Well, Lysenkoism and Mao's policies sure killed a lot of people the government may not strictly have intended to kill. Yeah, the Great Leap Forward is probably the best example of that (and of "a good wartime leader but a poo poo peacetime leader"). Even that was magnified by the sheer population of China though, they had nearly 600 million people in 1953 compared with just over 100 million in the USSR at the same time.
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Jan 11, 2015 17:43
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Apr 11, 2015 19:23
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Xiahou Dun posted:So fluoride makes you like gay people is the argument? Lack of fluoride. It's a lefty source: https://allegedlyapparent.wordpress...data-by-county/ quote:If favoring civil rights, liberty, freedom of choice, celebrating diversity and nonconformity have something to with brain health, then fluoridation-induced brain damage would make one less likely to take a stand, right? Next, I’m going to see if there’s suggestive statistical evidence for this…
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Apr 11, 2015 19:43
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Miss-Bomarc posted:hah! This was a plot point in Pratchett/Gaiman's novel "Good Omens", where a demon messes with the layout of a freeway to turn it into the symbol for a magic spell that creates an awful psychic atmosphere and drives people insane. Apparently the reason why a lot of old houses feel creepy is that there's usually something generating a sound that's so low pitch that we can't hear it but can still feel it.
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May 1, 2015 17:36
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ToxicSlurpee posted:The national guard is generally beholden to the states they exist in if memory serves. So each state has its own set of guard units which are made up of locals that are in theory more loyal to their home states than the federal government. Granted in this case it's far more likely the government is deploying the guard to make it look like he's standing up to the evil federal government rather than actually standing up to it. It's a dumb thing to do but given the Tea Party beast that the GOP unleashed and how far down Insanity Ln. the right is expected to be right now it isn't really surprising. That's the state that gave us Cruz, after all. The national guard can be taken over by the President. There is a separate State Guard that can't be.
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May 10, 2015 01:58
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Sir Tonk posted:9/11 conspiracies are going to even more entertaining in like forty years. So many videos have been made about it in a relatively short period of time, it'd be fascinating to see all of that content as a student a few decades from now. It's going to be the Kennedy stuff except without Fidel Castro behind it.
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Jun 1, 2015 20:13
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Moose-Alini posted:What's so bad about a one world government anyway? Some guy accosted me in the street ranting about it, and couldn't explain why that's bad. No money conversions, passport to anywhere, no war. Sounds pretty cool to me! Imagine George W Bush in charge of the world.
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Jul 20, 2015 23:35
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Jul 30, 2015 20:38
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E-Tank posted:Just planned obsolescence the likes of which makes Microsoft drool. Any sort of obsolescence would make Microsoft drool. Windows 10 still has a 32 bit version. In 2015.
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Aug 1, 2015 04:23
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DONT CARE BUTTON posted:I heard that there was an accident with the LHC in 5 or 6 years that causes time to reset back to the beginning of the experiment and we have been living the same time over and over again like that moebius episode of Star Trek. It would explain why my iPhone isn't getting much better.
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Oct 8, 2015 14:15
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Spazzle posted:Has batman ever lost to superman? He will in about 4 months.
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Nov 14, 2015 14:23
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Back where I was growing up they didn't fluoridate the water so during elementary school they had us go out in the hall every so often, and swish that fluoride liquid stuff that the dentists had back in the 90s. Why it was only a few of us I don't know, maybe because our parents wrote some angry letters about having their children's teeth rot due to idiots.
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Nov 19, 2015 14:20
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