FactsAreUseless posted:

What makes conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones so effective is that the U.S. has legitimately done a bunch of crazy poo poo that sounds like conspiracy theories. MK Ultra, basically every single thing we did in the South America during the Cold War, Iran-Contra, every single thing about J. Edgar Hoover and the Dulles brothers, we sent pallets of cash to Iraq that vanished (this isn't even a conspiracy, just a baffling fuckup), the CIA sold cocaine to fund arms trade, the Tuskegee experiment, etc. etc. It all sounds exactly like the made-up theories, just with different nouns. The only difference is it's proven history.

America has done some completely nuts stuff, so how hard is it to believe a few more?

walgreenslatino posted:

Zinc cadmium sulfide doesn't make people sick.
They literally dumped it over the entire country in 1957 and 1958, so I'm not sure why this would be a causative agent in a St. Louis woman's cancer but not everyone elses.

As for the other stuff, the article was really vague. "Investigators created a radiation field inside a building at North Hollywood High School during a weekend in the fall of 1961" Well its a weekend, so nobody was in the school, and its not like the effects of a radiation field would linger. I'm not sure how harmful the injected isotopes of iron are.

Obviously there was not informed consent in any of this and it was unethical. I hate to be the skeptic, it's not like they're not capable of it. Is there a link to her dissertation or something?

quote:

In the mid-1950s, and again a decade later, the Army used motorized blowers atop a low-income housing high-rise, at schools and from the backs of station wagons to send a potentially dangerous compound into the already-hazy air in predominantly black areas of St. Louis.

Local officials were told at the time that the government was testing a smoke screen that could shield St. Louis from aerial observation in case the Russians attacked.

quote:

"I feel betrayed," said Brindell, who is white.

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

hallebarrysoetoro posted:

conspiracy theorists also lay claim to be smarter than everyone, and conspiracy theories that "prove" jfk was killed by zionists or w/e are a way of proving they're smarter, because everyone else just can't see that there was a cipher in the protocols in the elder of zion foretelling it

there's probably some mortality salience involved too, infowars can say that the las vegas massacre was a false flag so that antifa can secretly be trained by isis and people can shield themselves from the fact that the chances of you dying at any moment are out of your control sometimes. there was some good article arguing that politics are almost entirely defined by mortality salience, it makes a lot of sense when you see studies sort of peripheral to it, like a strong link between fear of germs/disease and links to conservatism

Main Paineframe posted:

Conspiracies are not largely restricted to the right, it's just that they mostly only get coverage on the right because the media cares far more about a few wealthy white celebrities' thoughts on vaccines than about the African-American mistrust of the medical industry caused by abuses like the Tuskegee Experiment.