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Deep Thought
Mar 7, 2005
False-flag attacks and secretive agendas (whether within the CIA, the KGB or even a supra-national entity like 'the West') do happen. With that in mind it's not surprising that people who've accepted this will try to make up the difference between what they are told is happening and what they fear is happening. It's just too bad that almost all of the 'subversive' literature on the subject has been an outlandish mix of Ufology, Christian Millennialism and New Age spirituality - which is where all the craziness comes from.

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Deep Thought
Mar 7, 2005

Sergg posted:

Basically conservatives think with their amygdala. They're afraid of the 'other' and feel insecure and need protection. Thusly, they love guns, the military, and authority figures. The president is the ultimate authority figure, yet he is not of their tribe. A black liberal socialist. They must deny the reality of his authority for their worldview to make sense, and so they create a reality where he is somehow fake, illegitimate, not the 'real' president.

This pathologising of beliefs is about as mystified as David Icke's stuff in my opinion.

Deep Thought
Mar 7, 2005

Sergg posted:

Oh yes, how could I forget how easy it is for a perfectly logical and rational person to believe the president of the United States is not a genuine US citizen despite the fact that he has released all of his birth certificates openly to the public. Silly me. Doesn't have anything to do with authoritarian personalities being deeply racist. They must have weighed the evidence and come to their conclusion based on intelligent and thoughtful criteria.

EDIT: I don't know if you read this thread all the way through where literally somebody was a hardcore conspiracy theorist whose conspiratorial thoughts went away when they started taking anti-psychotic medication. I'm gonna go ahead and apologize for being snarky towards you because I went through your post history and read that your "go-to news source" is Russia Today, which means that you likely harbor conspiracy beliefs and probably are taking it personally when I pathologize certain beliefs.

Hey no need to apologise to me, this is a snarky forum. I actually wouldn't mind hearing about how birther beliefs and disarmament paranoia are really the displaced manifestation of someone's racially-aggravated Koro syndrome. It's just that your pop psychology cliches are more tired and just as baseless.

Deep Thought fucked around with this message at 18:21 on Sep 23, 2013

Deep Thought
Mar 7, 2005
Oh God, a one-sided thread where people with boring interests moan about 'retards' and do mong impersonations and pop-psychology, I'm a bad poster and even I'm asking: is it me or has this community been getting worse for years? No offense, just mean that it peaked with "im gay", there was no way but downhill after that.

For a a different opinion (because sometimes it's good to play devil's advocate ya know?), conspiracy theories have only grown because there's truth to them.

Ever seen the JFK movie?
The 9/11 references in Back to the Future?
The Freemasonry reference in Time Bandits?
The Holy Mountain?
and the heaps of TV shows with hidden meanings for the initiated.

Is there a general opinion in this thread of why people believe in certain conspiracy theories? Will that opinion stand up against doubt? Nah, by now you'd need to invent a conspiracy theory to explain the rise of conspiracy theories. The other kosher explanation I can think of is that society has become vulnerable to mass psychosis and that free speech is at fault. What else could the reason be?

Under the vegetable posted:

robert anton wilson spent his entire career trying to trick conspiracy theorists into thinking rationally and he's most remembered by them as "the guy who revealed all the illuminati's secrets" or whatever

Is that right? He described himself as against all ontologies and illuminatus! is a mix of truth and lies, a loving good read too. I considered him more of a humourist who doesn't believe in anything.

Deep Thought
Mar 7, 2005

Data Graham posted:

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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Deep Thought
Mar 7, 2005

Popular Thug Drink posted:

actually i think the government's plan to make sure conspiracy theorists stay unorganized and ineffective is "do absolutely nothing at all"

Maybe, although the NSA and their Anglosphere partners do record everyones emails, their phone conversations and their browsing history [1], the military has contracted PR services to create socketpoppets on social media netorks in the middle east for spreading public diplomancy [2], which is also legal for them to do in the US [3] and if you've gone to 4chan in the last two years or so, some users find the majority of the postings are automated repeats [4], but otherwise you're right, no government agency cares enough about a growing minority of kooks to be proactive about them [].

[1]http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/27/nsa-data-mining-authorised-obama
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sockpuppet_%28Internet%29#Government_sockpuppetry
[3]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7LmxyZXMw0
[4]http://imgur.com/a/MwAmI


Lightning Jim posted:

I decided to search to see if there were any good "9/11 was an Outside Job" images out there, and came across this blog post.

https://theupliftingcrane.wordpress.com/2010/10/04/jon-stewart-trashes-911-truth/

I love the link to the (now non-existent) article on how Jon Stewart and Steven Colbert were selling us on a Neo-con agenda...

Yeaaaah, that link is pretty crazy, "Ridicule is the first and last weapon of fools" and a bunch of obviously untrue or at most irrelevant facts. Thanks Alex Jones, but the ridicule of the plainly ridiculous is the most effective way of shutting idiots downs, whereas trying to analyse madness only encourages it.

Deep Thought
Mar 7, 2005

Peztopiary posted:

Basically, it's really impolite to call bullshit on entire countries. It's also hard for people to understand how one person can have enough power to do that. Thus, conspiracy theories. (Soros acted the way a Capitalist should, that the results were monstrous has everything to do with the nature of Capitalism. )

Don't hate the player hate the game~

Deep Thought
Mar 7, 2005

Lightning Jim posted:

OMG
I was making a "Jet Fuel Can't Melt Steel Beams" joke with a co-worker when another co-worker turned it into a serious discussion.... And he brought up WTC7.
GDI I hate even knowing a lot of the 9/11 conspiracy theroy stuff I do, and I really hate talking about it now.

I do like how I keep cutting him off on his train of thought, though. "Yeah, you know WTC7 that fell, that wasn't hit by a plane?" "Yeah, the one that was hit by massive amounts of debris from the towers' collapse?" and he would pause for a moment and couldn't really pick it back up.
And yes, I had to do the "You're right, you don't have to melt steel in order to have it start to fail!"

You could show your friend this picture of WTC7 completely snowed under by debris; like it's not even visible, maybe that would hammer the point home?

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Deep Thought
Mar 7, 2005

zeal posted:

I wish I could find a picture of the side of Building 7 that faced the towers, I've seen examples before and it was a flaming ruin, but there's still this from the non-wrecked flank before the building came down:


IIRC, when the planes hit there was a lot of executive wooden furniture that got shredded and ignited in the jet fuel explosion, blowing countless shards of quality burning hardwood through the windows of WTC 7.

Deep Thought
Mar 7, 2005

The Chairman posted:

No, WTC7 is the trapezoidal building in the lower right there.

Its facing facade is certainly being pummeled by that debris cloud, though.

Seems to be falling just short of it by my perspective but from this 5 seconds of footage https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=972ETepp4GI, I concede you could be right if debris clouds can do that. That appears to be a debris cloud demolition, which is what you're saying?

Deep Thought
Mar 7, 2005

Vulture posted:

hey guys. i heard a undergroun nuclear bomb brought down the twin towers. is this true??? tia.

also i hear no one can explain what happened to wtc 7. what happened there.

Haven't you heard of reading the last page? Ah but if you type in baby style it means you need to spoon fed, so open up, here comes the aeroplaneee falling debris cloud.

http://postimg.org/image/vr7ixfi7f/ http://postimg.org/image/ca3g1ald5/

Deep Thought fucked around with this message at 00:04 on Nov 27, 2015

Deep Thought
Mar 7, 2005

Armani posted:

My beef is showing conspiracy theorists true blue, decades long plots and they just don't give a gently caress because it's - my guess- not sexy or fantastical enough. A lot seem to cling to poo poo you can't prove 100%, even in their favor. It's backwards, but many act (and have acted) like their life, self-worth, and self-esteem depends on it.

E: formatting

So you have conspiracy theories or something similar, yet these other people are designated conspiracy theorists?

What are you, the person trying to pass them off, if not a conspiracy theorist? A conspiracy propagandist?

blowfish posted:

millenials and anyone younger in the developed world have never experienced true misery, by which i mean the illuminati need to start ww3 to straighten everyone out

Easy grandad. Sure millenial conspiracy nuts are soft and have never known the horrors you personally went through as a two-year old, but the illumaughty are working with the undead presidents at the round table in camelot and they said they'll bring them back, just for you. Rest easy.

Deep Thought fucked around with this message at 14:54 on Dec 11, 2015

Deep Thought
Mar 7, 2005

Prester Jane posted:

I believed it because I thought the "enemy" that the human race was being oppressed by must be so incredibly intelligent and so shockingly malicious that there was just no way it could be human.

Not to say Icke and timecube and co are right, but that doesn't sound like an uncommon experience. If the complexity of the modern world is unfathomable for a man, then it must take a higher form of intelligence to understand it all and to direct it, otherwise it'd be chaos.

That kind of nous might not come to someone whose mind is fixed on their next meal ticket and other things, but it might develop in someone up in the clouds and looking down on life. If to them people start to look like ants and they don't ever need to come down and rub shoulders, its not a stretch to imagine the attitude could become malicious. Add to that the power of altered states of mind, heightened awareness, peak experiences and we have a recipe for convincingly demonic intelligences.

I think it's weird that you switched your ways of thinking twice. Do you think you could flip back again or do the drugs keep you in check?

Deep Thought
Mar 7, 2005

ToxicSlurpee posted:

Humans look for patterns first off. We look for them based on pre-conceived knowledge. If you're told "the gods did it " your whole life for things you don't understand then everything you don't understand is caused by gods.

Conspiracy nuts ride confirmation bias into the same mindset. They believe that there is a shadowy illuminati behind everything. If there wasn't why do they keep finding evidence everywhere they look? They sacrifice time to the conspiracy god who rewards them with The Truth.

Are all conspiracy theorists, conspiracy nuts? Don't you find that offensive to actual nuts? Aren't conspiracy theorists trivialising the mental health challenges that real certified nuts face each day of their lives? Shouldn't we be asking how can we empower nuts to take back their voice, which has been usurped by the bickering of conspiracy-splaining and mental-illness-splaining cis people? Real nuts have problems like being Napoleon or Cleopatra, and they can't just back away from youtube to escape that reality. It's time to craft a different pigeonhole for conspiracy theorists, and let nuts speak for themselves, ok?

Besides, what's so crazy about being weirded out by those 'innocuous patterns' like the Blink 182 album cover with the traffic lights, where it has what looks like an airplane, the twin towers and a jacket with a "G" (masonic) in there, pre 9-11? And that 1+8=9 and +2 to that makes 11?

Deep Thought
Mar 7, 2005

Literally The Worst posted:

source your quotes crazy man

That 'G' is a motif in freemasonry? Self-evident I thought, it's in a lot of those square and compass designs.

QuarkJets posted:

Numerology is one of the most interesting conspiracy theory things because it's so much like playing Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, except then they take those relationships and assign serious significant meaning to them where none exists

I don't think the idea that significance lies in numbers is any less crazy than putting it in the idea of theoretical 'God' particles. If the world can be thought of as governed by numbers in the form of dates, time and measurements, then it's possible for significance to arise in that framework, isn't it?

Even if not, it makes work for the mind to notice numberological significance, and if that does not become an obession, it may be more helpful to the mind than wandering and distracting thoughts about good video game design.

blowfish posted:

It's basically cargo cult maths.

Unless you live in Brave New World. Do you think Huxley was an unhinged conspiracy nut? I remember BNW included Numerology as one of the fields there scientists were investigating; the theory of numbers relating to biology and destiny or something like that.

Three famous icons born in 1947 each died of cancer this year within days of each other, so is it reasonable to infer there's some significance there?

Deep Thought fucked around with this message at 13:04 on Jul 10, 2016

Deep Thought
Mar 7, 2005

blowfish posted:

You don't understand science. You also don't understand the difference between lovely reporting about ~god particles~ and science.

No, because good video game design at least has the potential to make other people happy, and doesn't cause you to become a certifiable nutcase.

*furiously feeds events into all number systems from base 2 to base eleventy zillion to generate ~deeper patterns~*

Those first two lines are right but until you can do the last one, your judgement on numerology is flawed.

QuarkJets posted:

"I read about scientists in a book studying Numerology so that must give it legitimacy" -- wrong

Numerology has no legitimacy, it's all bullshit

All bullshit? Those would make famous last words for a cryptanalyst.

Wait a minute.



Brain is trying to find the square root of Beverly Hills 91210, I suppose that illustrates your point.

quote:

No

You seem sure, fair enough then.

CaptainViolence posted:

No. How many 1947-born icons died of cancer last year? How many will die next year? Those are hard to answer just based on what qualifies as an icon, so how many 1947-born people in general died of cancer in those same few days? You keep rolling the dice long enough, coincidences like that happen. Eventually you get snake eyes three times in a row. It doesn't indicate a larger trend or that the dice are controlled by the Illuminati. It doesn't indicate anything other than the fact that people get old and eventually they die of something.

Ok. There's not any real significance just in three famous English people (can't really class Rickman as an icon in the same way) dying shortly after each other, plus Lemmy died a month before hand, so I concede. But don't you find it at all strange that Rickman played a Dr. Lazarus, Bowie made a song called Lazarus and Lemmy's death was reported in the RadioTimes by a 'Susasanna Lazarus' (ok that one is a stretch)?

And there were other correlations like 69; the age they died (cept Lemmy who was four days over 70), being the zodiac sign of cancer when turned the right way, but it's headache enough without bringing astrology into it.

Deep Thought
Mar 7, 2005

Baka-nin posted:

It was unclear because you are only now bringing this up, I'm sorry but this is not what you have been saying earlier, you were quite explicit in talking about things that predate the Vatican by thousands of years. So I just don't get why your changing it now. It also doesn't actually change anything of substance, because it requires numerology to be correct, and you or someone else to be able to crack them otherwise you wont be able to learn anything from these workds. To go back to that video you linked, the man didn't actually learn anything even though he clearly thought he did because his methods were wrong.

You also appear to have switched from numerology to code breaking, if someone hid a message in a message that's a code not numerology. Numerology is about the deeper meanings of numbers (the video you linked) not using number sequences to hide from the man. You know this is the case so I don't see why your trying to shift things now.

So if a code is embedded somewhere and it takes numerology to be deciphered, for instance if an influential mystery school or secretive society gave out codenames to its agents corresponding to numerology, so that in the future initiates could, through participating in the bonkers numerological belief system, gain insider's clues to what otherwise would become mysteries or fuddled historical accounts -- that would not prove the validity of numerology as a subject, because you'd class that sort of thing as code-breaking and there'd be too many false positives which could be drawn to make it actually useful, and so on. Is that fair?

Reveiled" posted:


My mistake, it should've been the shared age 69, not birth year 1947. Still, that's three consecutive years (1945, 46 and 47) and three consecutive months (December, January and February) in their birthdates. I guess 6 and 9 are consecutive multiples of 3 too. I'm joking, I dont really take it seriously, but it's a little interesting to see what coincidences can be made, and how significant they can be made to appear.

Deep Thought fucked around with this message at 18:14 on Jul 11, 2016

Deep Thought
Mar 7, 2005

fishmech posted:

Correct, that would not prove "numerology" as a subject because "numerology" covers literally tens of thousands of mutually exclusive systems purported to encode completely different meaning from the same numerical input.

It's much like how astrology can never be true as a whole, because there are so many systems of astrology that have completely different results for the same inputs.

That calls for a splitting up into a lower and a higher numerology. Higher numerology; the mathematical conception of existence, may be unworkable and unprovable, but lower numerology, concerning the significance of numbers in myth, like in Quift's idea of a hidden meaning of the bible, would be compatible with the variety of recorded systems and may prove to be an insightful subject. What else would it be called if not numerology?

Joshmo posted:

...you have to remember that between any two people (or three, or five) you could find a number of things that are seemingly linked, but an entire galaxy of things that are completely different in every way. See also: "Great musicians seem to die tragically at 27".

I agree, and there are probably weirder coincidences that happen on earth without any numbers involved.

Deep Thought fucked around with this message at 18:49 on Jul 11, 2016

Deep Thought
Mar 7, 2005

Baronjutter posted:

It's always sort of depressing when actually mentally ill people come into this thread to try to defend their own delusions :(

Recurring feelings like that may be part of an underlying mental illness. You might want to up the dose of your prefered bouncy bubble beveridge.

QuarkJets posted:

If Numerologists ran the Large Hadron Collider then they would have looked for just one collision with a Higgs-like signature and then declared the long search over. "We found it! Here's the collision where it happened!"

If numerologists were given trillions of funding to find proof, they might invest in a megaplex of supercomputers and come up with nothing. If they wanted to prove themselves to the scientific community, they'd cut one out of cardboard and use the funds directly.

Deep Thought
Mar 7, 2005

fishmech posted:

No, it doesn't call for "splitting up into a lower and a higher numerology". You're just wording at us. When things are intentionally encoded into a corpus, that's simply cryptology. If things are unintentionally encoded, then that's pretty much just coincidence, or rarely a case of someone betraying something unknowingly in their writing style and choice of words - which isn't really numerology either, but rather would fall under psychology.

You also need to keep in mind that anything that was intentionally recorded in the books of the bible has likely been irretrievably damaged or lost entirely by now. True steganographic techniques that were intended by the original author of any given book would rely on the exact wording and spelling (and possibly even page/scroll layout!) in the original language, which may have been quite transformed by the time we get to the earliest known copies in the original language - and any translations could only preserve it if the translators themselves knew of the hidden message and devised a way to encode it in the new language!

So the subject of numerology is baseless, but 'numerology' as a discipline within cryptology is not baseless, though you think it almost useless? OK then.

Certain things in the bible might stay fixed, like 'five kings of the Amorites', so and so's 'seven sons and seven daughters', the 'three wise men' and so on. The choice of numbers, like the example of five kings can seem odd, because if it were being read literally you'd expect to hear 'the king', not 5. Not really my interest though.

Deep Thought fucked around with this message at 16:40 on Jul 12, 2016

Deep Thought
Mar 7, 2005

Octatonic posted:

At any rate wouldn't studying "numerology" as a means of analyzing a text really be philology or maybe cultural anthropology anyway? You're not studying these texts to divine some mystic meaning, you're trying to find out what the number patterns signified to the people who wrote the texts you're talking about.

But to do so involves studying and observing the numerology system, which is 2/3rds of what the numerologists do, the missing 3rd of that being the belief that numbers have some kind of transcendental meaning.

QuarkJets posted:

Numerology is not a discipline within cryptography. The two fields are completely unrelated, and I hesitate to call numerology a field because it's really just a belief system. Like fortune telling and other forms of divination, numerology is only accurate if you cherry-pick your data.

I get that they're distinct, but fishmech said when numerology has a use in codebreaking, like in the event a numerological system is needed to decode markers within a text, that use needn't be classed as numerology. I thought dividing numerology into mystical and non-mystical parts would sanitise it as a thing of inquiry, but I guess it doesn't really matter.

Deep Thought fucked around with this message at 22:23 on Jul 12, 2016

Deep Thought
Mar 7, 2005

McDowell posted:

There's one episode in the gospels where Jesus lectures the disciples about the number of loaves and the size of crowd and the amount of broken pieces. I tried to puzzle it out and was stumped, I feel if George Price hadn't killed himself and done some work in economics it might have come to something.

Through gematria I found the mystery to your puzzle is "Jesus loaves you", but whether it's a pun on love or something other, I cannot say.

Deep Thought
Mar 7, 2005
Just for the sake of argument

SatansOnion posted:

This latest argument seems to boil down to "Makes you think, though... :raise: " which is not a very persuasive argument imo. It's basically saying "this is interesting because it contains concepts that are of interest"

You've moved the goalposts from the impossible to the tautological, as far as I can tell

Hang on, he said it was interesting with the implication was that there may be hidden meanings in texts to be found using numerology, put there by practioners. How does that boil down to tautology?

fishmech posted:

No, I never said that. Numerology is literally just making things up - if you accidentally do something that works with it, it stops being numerology. Then you have cryptology, which was used both by the writer of the corpus and the people decoding it.

Consider how alchemy that actually works is just chemistry, and "alternative medicine" that actually works is just "medicine".

They're different branches of thought. An alchemist could not have been doing chemistry when it had not been invented, and the herbologist or witch doctor was not a practitioner of 'alternative medicine'. It's like you're trying to divorce out of those old subjects whatever had/has value, and then marry that value to a different subject -- so the useage of 'numerology' in making a code, instead becomes the usage of cryptology to make a code, and the numerology involved is semantically 'gerrymandered' out of existence, creating a few verbal puzzles concerning where it went and how it became cryptology. If you had a syllogism as to why Numerology cannot have uses in code, I should be able to understand you much better.

Isn't it simpler and clearer to call the useage of numerology in whatever capacity, just numerology?

Deep Thought
Mar 7, 2005

QuarkJets posted:

Nope, the historical record disagrees: you're really just misusing terms. Ancient Cryptography dealt with the encryption and decryption of messages between people. Ancient Numerology was the belief in the mystical importance of numbers, either as a form of divination or some sort of "universal truth" where everything is related to everything else by just understanding numbers in a special way. These are completely different fields. What you're doing is akin to arguing that linguistics is a sub-specialization of speaking in tongues.

Numerology and cryptography were distinct schools of thought as far back as the ancient Greeks, the former being the mystical and the latter being the practical. Naturally you can apply numerology to cryptography (because you can apply numerology to anything where numbers are involved) but Cryptography is definitely not a type of Numerology.

Oh come on. Talking about Ancient Cryptography and Ancient Numerology; as if they were distinct studies with identifiable figures and ideologues; possibily in conflict with each other and thematic of reason against superstition, what a story to make! You'd think the backstory was that archaeologists just unearthed an cache of Ancient Numerology and Ancient Cryptography tablets buried underneath the Athens Polytechnic, lain undisturbed for 3000 years, informing us exactly how separate these fields were, like no kidding, they really were strict in their separation, there were no cryptanalysts getting admitted into numerological studies, ever, and if one was found out, the numerologists would break marble chunks from statues, pelt the unbeliever and chase them, and that's why there can't be any inkling of similarity; because it'd be anthropologically inaccurate.

Anyway, if it was phrased that cryptography is numerology wherever numerological systems have been used, then the phrasing is bad because it pits the two in opposition, diverting into a false discussion which is like arguing that codes chiselled onto a block of wood must be either a use of cryptography or of carpentry. It's academic. Would a reasonable, non-university going person insist on the sole use of one term just to exclude the other? They'd probably permit the use of either. Language (by nature) is cross-contaminated. According to the philosopher who was mentioned above, sophists try to succeed their arguments with accusations of word errors and the playing offverbal puzzles, which is what you're doing by insisting on this terminology about the uses of Numerology not being of numerology but 'applications' of numerology to cryptography -- a diversion into a maze of semantics, escaping the point that Numerology has uses.

quote:

Numerology is based on belief.

Now that's a tautology.

Deep Thought
Mar 7, 2005

Radirot posted:

I could kind of understand why someone might be persuaded to believe in the various conspiracies out there but I felt it wouldn't stick personally because I'd always know that I'd just be lying to myself. I've also been lucky with family in-laws too, I'm 99% sure none of them would even know anything related to what has come up in this thread.

Imagine how awful it must be to have a truther father or mother. My friend is in that situation. He's living with his truther parents and whenever he gets onto the topic (happens a lot I gather) his dad always says: 'SO IF THOSE CONCRETE TOWERS TURNED INTO DUST BY FALLING, THAT MEANS IF I DROP A CONCRETE BLOCK ON YOUR HEAD FROM MY ROOF, YOU'LL BE FINE? LET'S GO OUTSIDE AND TRY THAT THEN SHALL WE?!' which is obviously crazy and threatening, not an argument at all, but the guy acts like he's been proved right by the stunned silence after that. I've advised my pal to :sever: but I guess it's not always convienent, nor does it help the crazy people to just abandon them to their madness.

I occasionally worry that people unintentionally linked to truther social circles are at risk of truther stockholm syndrome. The best thing is obviously for those people to get out of such dysfunctional relations, severing as much crazy people as possible; without becoming a freaky reclusive hermit, but it's not always an option. If only there was a charity that could provide shelter for children (thankfully my friend is an adult and free to make up his own mind) or dependents whose care provider is nuts, or like a support network for normal people who feel alienated from their peers-turned-crackpots and potential terrorists.

Deep Thought fucked around with this message at 15:40 on Jul 30, 2016

Deep Thought
Mar 7, 2005
drat, I missed the 9/11 discussion a few pages ago. Isn't it incredible that they found one of the 9/11 hijackers passports blocks away from the site? Did you guys hear about that? I suppose if a woman can fall from a plane 33 thousand feet in the sky and survive, stranger things can happen, but still, it sounds pretty unlikely to me.

Deep Thought
Mar 7, 2005

Joe Mama Poonana posted:

I can't wait until scientists find out the "explosion" of autism in specifically the US is due to something taken from the mothers while pregnant. Psychotropic meds that entered the fetus's bloodstream? whatever other commonly used drugs that have been popularized since the 90s? perhaps something else

yeah go ahead and say I'm dreaming this up, i don't blame you. I'm only saying this because I personally see vaccines as the last thing that can cause such a dramatic brain rewiring at a post-birth age that anti-vaxxers claim affects their kids

Uhh, you mean like this?

This buzzed on 4chan in 2015 when someone claiming to be a forum/imageboard/facebook shill did an expose, and said this is a story that the PR/media company they worked for was trying to bury.

edit: Now that I think of it, what are the chances that I, someone who knew the the very story you describe would see your post? It's almost like there is a universal force of synchronicity or coincidence that works as a kind of magnetism on peoples activities. It reminds me of the time I was thinking about buying a Greenhorn Fjallraven light blue jacket and saw on the same day a guy wearing one in the local shop. Also the time I saw the girl falling off the dam scene in Oldboy, only to then watch a Resident Evil youtube which happened to be of Ada falling from the dam after letting go of Leon's hand, exactly like the movie I'd watched.

Cardboard Box A posted:

The truth is you've been conned by charlatans and instead of admitting your own failure you're doubling down.

That's how you end up with Alex Jones avatars.

That's all? How much further down the rabbit hole do I have to go before I get me an Alex Jones avatar? I wouldn't mind if it's the BBC Alex Jones, I get fed up looking at the guy.

Deep Thought fucked around with this message at 11:53 on Apr 18, 2017

Deep Thought
Mar 7, 2005

QuarkJets posted:

think of the trillions of little things that you've thought about but that didn't result in some coincidental encounter or observation

Even little things that register mentally can raise the chances of an encounter, that seems like one of the principles behind TV advertising.

Jack Gladney posted:

A lot of people don't realize what's really goin' on. They view life as a bunch of unconnected incidents and things. They don't realize that there's this, like, lattice of coincidence that lays on top of everything. Give you an example, show you what I mean: suppose you're thinkin' about a plate of shrimp. Suddenly someone'll say, like, "plate," or "shrimp," or "plate of shrimp" out of the blue, no explanation. No point in lookin' for one, either. It's all part of a cosmic unconsciousness.

This quote is pretty apt, but how sure can someone be that aptness isn't coincidental knowledge seeping though a unified cosmic unconsciousness, making it seem like a quote derived entirely from having good taste in cult movies?

Deep Thought fucked around with this message at 13:45 on Apr 18, 2017

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Deep Thought
Mar 7, 2005

xthetenth posted:

Who the gently caress made you the arbiter of toxicity? Because guess what, it's not toxic in those doses.

'Toxic' is a misleading label because toxicity is defined by the FDA. It's not going to kill someone to imbibe fluoride. It's not a toxin, it's an industrial waste product which is very good for teeth and has other health benefits. Educated people can understand that even paint stripper is fine in a microdose, anything can be: Roman senators would drink little amounts of venom to build immunity to it for goodness sake. Fluoride is sugar water compared to venom and paint stripper, yet if the ingredients were reversed and toothpaste was spiked with deadly snake venom (in a safe dose) you can guarantee the same hysterics wouldn't care, because 'it's a natural substance, dude'. Total hypocrisy but then what else is new?

A non-poisonous dose of anything can be good for you, and fluoride more so than most things. Sodium Laurel Sulphate on the other hand is pure evil -- or is it? No, of course it's fine in a small dose.

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