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Why is it that any form of natural disaster, pandemic, regional event or whatever is always pounced upon by conspiracy theorist oddjobs these days? I know one guy from school who is straight round the U-bend with stuff like this.
Are they just terminally bored? IS there something missing in their lives where they need to make something up to feel superior and smart, under the guise of "question everything, prove that this is XXX"?
Basically, trying to start conspiracy theories and make them stick has become something of a sport for people. The more outlandish the better. Points for believers.
See, Birds aren't Real.
But there are climate engineering machines…
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Surely those big fans I see around the country could be capable of creating a hurricane if they were all switched on at the same time?
Because Web 2.0 has created a vast network of facebook groups, Discord channel and forums where like minded people can go round in circles telling each other how clever and right they are and that everyone else are outsiders who just don't understand.
50 years ago if you wanted to engineer that kind of dynamic you had to start a cult, now it just happens organically.
Well hold on a minute, Trump lives in Florida and that imbecile's hot air must affect the weather.
We have nutters outside our shop on Sundays.
One of them was holding a bit of cardboard moaning about geo engineering . Most of them are still moaning about COVID.
I'm sure hurricanes will give them something new to focus on.
****s.
Serious answer, I think in many cases this stuff gives some people a sense of belonging and purpose that they do not otherwise have in their lives.
well, i guess technically, humans have assisted in engineering this, just uncontrollably, although i guess that's kinda counter engineering...
For some of them its a business i.e. content creators.
Find a niche (in this case conspiracy theories), create content, attract subscribers, monetize content. Rinse and repeat.
Alex Jones (Infowars) being one major example, the business model of which has been magnified a thousand times by easy access to cheap content creation technology and dissemination platforms like YouTube, FB etc.
I genuinely believe that most of the top conspiracy content creators don't believe in any of the crap they put out. The aforementioned Jones is on record saying he doesn't personally believe any of it. It just helps him sell his radioactive water purification tablets and apocalypse survival vitamins.
I’ve heard some groups of nutters suggesting that riding bicycles off road is a good idea when we all know there are perfectly good roads available.
[i]I’ve heard some groups of nutters suggesting that riding bicycles off road is a good idea[/i] - Not on here you haven't!
50 years ago if you wanted to engineer that kind of dynamic you had to start a cult
Or enlist the Pentagon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Popeye
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Stormfury
I’ve yet to see the evidence, but most conspiracy theorists would attribute these weather extremes to HAARP.
President Kennedy did say that “we now possess the means to control the weather”.
Maybe he was thinking of MegaCity4?
maybe the only way to put such theories to the test, is for some University to build its own HAARP.
The aforementioned Jones is on record saying he doesn’t personally believe any of it.
Are you sure? My own view - based on podcasts like Knowledge Fight and listening and watching dispositions during his Sandy Hook trials is that he wholeheartedly believes the claims he makes. That's partially why the Sandy Hook trails went the way they did (as well as his refusal to comply with the process) is that he couldn't claim it's just 'entertainment'. I know he uses it to sell products, and he chooses the message according to the audience - but that him self-censoring, rather than acknowledging it's made up. For instance, in an ep of Infowars only this year, he still made the claim that Sandy Hook was staged/fake
I think @Duggan has it though, for some folks, the simple direct answer to some these complex and intractable issues gives them comfort, a sense of comradeship, and the ability to tune out news about things like climate-change. If you 'know' its all fake, you can ignore it all completely and go about your life. Must be a bunch easier on your conscience to fill your F-150 that way.
My daughter... she's 9... in school they're "debating" whether the moon landings are real. Her pals are watching YouTube videos and concluding that it wasn't real "because the flag is blowing in the wind, and there is no air in space".
Yay to YouTube.
There have always been nutters on the one side and the easily persuaded on the other. Unfortunately, in the age of the interweb the nutters have the means to find a wider audience and the easily persuaded can more readily find a source to verify their misconception.
The moon landings are entirely fake, NASA didn’t have the tech. Unfortunately they enlisted Kubrick to film the publicity materials and he insisted on doing it all on location.
System 1 thinkers - fast, instinctive and emotional. See this article.
Also feeds into things like doping conspiracy in sport, i.e. "Pogacar wins everything so he must be doping, it's obvious".
A friend of mine, a well educated university lecturer, otherwise completely normal woman thinks the moon landings were faked. We've more or less silently agreed that we just won't talk about it.
Because there are now different channels of information dissemination. How did you actually know the earth is flat? Its because everyone else said it was.
If the BBC told you that Norway was moving troops along its boarder with Sweden, you'd probably believe it and mention it to your friends as a fact.
For those who take their info from social media and their associated networks its the same principle.
I used to work with a guy like that.
Started off with an unhealthy obsession with military hardware to the extent that he knew muzzle velocities of tanks, firing rate of machine guns, payload of nuclear bombers and so on.
Then it developed into how "they" (the military primarily) were controlled by Government to "do stuff" and evolved into more Government control, vaccines (Covid was an absolute godsend for him), weather, the whole works.
Yes, currenly have one in my team, its a struggle to keep professional with him at times
This morning, the team were talking about the regeneration of our town...levelling up £20m plus another 20m, its now actually starting work, thanks tories LOL, etc etc
His contribution..a knowing smirk followed by "15 minute cities!"
In the shop e have a tea towel of 60s icons.
On it you have shitty old cars, trains and push bikes.
Then you have Concorde and man on the moon. Stuff that's not old fashioned because they haven't been bettered .
Therefore I do struggle with the moon landings purely because it was such a mind boggling thing to happen "all that time ago".
Soon we won't believe Concorde was supersonic either.
He admitted under oath during his trial that he didn’t actually believe Sandy Hook was a hoax
Sure, but he also thinks that the US courts are rigged, and has said that he feels no obligation to participate. Part of the reason one of the trials collapsed and the judgement was made against Jones was that he pretty much refused to co-operate with the court. He has said subsequently on his show that he still thinks that Sandy Hook was faked. As I said, Jones will self-censor if he thinks it's in his interest, or dependent on what audience he's talking to, but otherwise he really does think that he's been chosen by God - who has downloaded all the world's knowledge to his brain while he was eating fried chicken in a restaurant; to spread 'truth'
Edit: Jones was broadcasting during one of his trails that he still thought Sandy Hook was faked. It's why there's an court-appointed auction in a couple of weeks time to sell off everything he owns to pay the massive fines he has
His contribution..a knowing smirk followed by “15 minute cities!”
My Mum lives in a Low Traffic Neighbourhood - first put in in a trial form during COVID but now permanent.
The local area FB group is basically a bunch of frothing gammons claiming that the whole thing is a woke conspiracy, all the council data is flawed or manipulated or just plain fake and that, as they have Free Movement under Magna Carta, this amounts to a violation of their human rights.
Anyone even suggesting that actually the LTN is good cos it's quieter, their kids can cycle to school etc is immediately denounced as a council plant or a stooge for the local pro-cycling weirdy beardy group.
There's an interesting documentary called Behind The Curve all about Flat Earthers.
The arch-flerfer is Mark Sargant. You may have seen him on TV and not known who he was, he's the go-to "expert" for this stuff. It's funny of course but it's also pretty tragic. The guy has devoted his life to flerfing, it is literally who he is and who all his friends are. He also has the screaming thigh-sweats for some lass halfway across the globe who appears fairly disinterested in any sort of romantic notions.
So the answer to "IS there something missing in their lives where they need to make something up to feel superior and smart?" is yes. Because if they lose that, they have nothing else.
That said, I rather suspect that there's a percentage of them (certainly on the Internet) who don't believe a word of it and just enjoy trolling people who think they're intellectually superior. You think they're stupid but they're laughing their heads off as they reel in another one. (See Poe's Law)
the flag is blowing in the wind, and there is no air in space
There's a website devoted to debunking all the moon landing myths. The flag is an easy one to field though, there's a horizontal spar across the top. It would have been a bit of a dropped bollock for NASA to build a moon rocket, get into space with a flag, then go "whoops, there's no air, now what?!"
I saw a documentary about a US weather control device. It stopped the earths core from spinning and some scientists had to go an fix it with nuclear blasts.
It was all hushed up so not surprised you guys don't know about it.
Wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if some of the online activities promoting geoengineering/Chemtrail nonsense ultimately have links to fossil fuel interests or the right wing think tanks and arms length influencers that operate in public realm on behalf of fossil fuels. It's about moving on the conversation away from 'how do we stop this getting worse' and who should compensate the people who have been affected by it' and filling public discourse, radio phone ins and talk shows with guff about weather modification instead.
It all helps with reducing the political consensus needed to rapidly switch away from intensive fossil fuel use
Therefore I do struggle with the moon landings purely because it was such a mind boggling thing to happen “all that time ago”.
The answer to that is quite simple and pretty much proof that they did indeed land on the moon.
We know this because otherwise every Russian stand up comedian since the 1970's would start their set with ' Hey, do you remember when the Americans landed on the moon ? '
If you're interested in this stuff, there's a good podcast; Some Dare call it Conspiracy which is hosted by two former conspiracists who're now devoted to busting the myths and nonsense. It covers a huge amount of this thread's subject and because its told from a conspiracists POV is really quite revealing about the motivations
The answer to that is quite simple and pretty much proof that they did indeed land on the moon.
We know this because otherwise every Russian stand up comedian since the 1970’s would start their set with ‘ Hey, do you remember when the Americans landed on the moon ? ‘
This.
The tagline at the time was "The World Is Watching." At the height of the Cold War. Gemini/Apollo only existed at all in order to give the Red Threat a bloody nose. If there was even the remotest of whiffs that they might have faked it, the USSR would have been on it like a tramp on hot chips.
Anything else about stars or flags or shadows or whatever is just noise, it's nonsense. The fact that in the subsequent 55 years - and doubly today so given the anti-West headbanger currently in charge - Russia hasn't whistle-blown in all that time is all we need to know. "The moon landings were faked because I don't know how sticks work" is about right for that class of 9-year olds.
Therefore I do struggle with the moon landings purely because it was such a mind boggling thing to happen “all that time ago”.
There’s an excellent video on YouTube of a NASA rocket scientist giving a guided tour of a Saturn 5 rocket. It’s fabulous and almost in itself proves the landings were real. Definitely shows they were possible. Don’t have a link as it’s late and I CBA to search for it but there was a link in a thread in here somewhere…
The moon landings are entirely fake, NASA didn’t have the tech. Unfortunately they enlisted Kubrick to film the publicity materials and he insisted on doing it all on location.
I have no doubts that they landed on the moon but if someone suggested that a few of the pictures were done on the set of 2001 because annoyingly the film that came back wasn’t useable, I wouldn’t be surprised :-).
They spent a ‘lot’ of money and the only thing they would have to show to public would be the pics so they would have to be good.
The trouble is that leap from faking some good footage for the posters ends up getting translated to its all fake, but tbh I just think a lot of peoples minds still seem to be unable able to move on with the future, back in the day they still believed the world was flat and you’d die if a train went too fast.
The actual source code to the computer landing is available online - it’s interesting stuff.
The moon landings are entirely fake, NASA didn’t have the tech. Unfortunately they enlisted Kubrick to film the publicity materials and he insisted on doing it all on location.
Ah but they did have the stuff from the Roswell crash site, so they had the tech 🙂
We've always had cults and conspiracy theories spouting the most unbelievable rubbish based on nothing more than someone somewhere wrote it down. The gullible and people seeking self meaning have flocked to these groups in droves.
For millennia it was organised religion.
For millennia it was organised religion.
Came on here to say much the same.
I taught a kid who would come in weekly with another conspiracy theory and we'd laugh at it. I told him all conspiracy theories were put out by the government to stop you thinking about the truth.
Last I saw he was writing for the Catholic times having gone full on religion. Can't win them all.
Regards cycling , I always go full car driver and say that more people we can get on bikes the shorter MY commute will be. Leave the roads for people like US who need to use cars.
There’s an excellent video on YouTube of a NASA rocket scientist giving a guided tour of a Saturn 5 rocket.
Moreover, you can actually go and see one with your own eyes today. As hoaxes go, they've gone to a lot of trouble to give someone every opportunity to catch them out. There's three left, two are made up from the parts bin but the one at Johnson Space Center is flight-certified. It would have been a lot safer to go "there's nowt left, sorry."
I have no doubts that they landed on the moon but if someone suggested that a few of the pictures were done on the set of 2001 because annoyingly the film that came back wasn’t useable, I wouldn’t be surprised :-).
They spent a ‘lot’ of money and the only thing they would have to show to public would be the pics so they would have to be good.
Why risk a deception if they knew they were going back?
As CT's go "The moon landing was faked" is perhaps the least convincing. I mean, thousands of people still alive worked on it, there must millions of feet of film made about it, most of the men who went there are still alive, the things they traveled in still exist, and you can, with a powerful enough telescope, see the bits that they had to leave up there, and they bought bits of it back with them.
It so demonstrably stupid
Young Earthers.
Not exactly the same as conspiracy theories but the same delusion of access to a secret inside world view.
I know a YECer, any attempt at discussion goes around in circles with increasingly elaborate explanations.
It's depressing that seemingly rational people would go to such lengths to close their eyes to the real wonders of the universe.
But arguing with him is just a total waste of time. Maybe he's better now, I don't know.
Weather conspiracy shit getting out of hand at a very sensitive time in the US. The irony is obvious to anyone with a functioning brain cell, but that’s not a prerequisite for voting.
What i like about conspiracy theorists is that they believe every single conspiracy going. They’re never selective – EVERYTHING is a conspiracy.
Yeah. The problem here is that, occasionally, conspiracy theories do actually turn out to be true. So if you're of a mind predisposed to this stuff, it immediately adds credence to every other threat to swiveleye-sation going.
There was an absolute goldmine of a thread on Mumsnet years ago which went viral from someone claiming that dinosaurs were all a conspiracy. Christians Against Dinosaurs.
They never existed (cos God, creation, the evolution lie...), all the skeletons were put there by bored Victorians who could then go and dig them up to "discover" them and also they were bad role models for children cos ... I dunno, something about big sharp teeth and lack of family values.
It was absolutely insane and the resulting piss-take was both devastatingly sarcastic and hilarious.
Young Earthers.
The best bit about countering young earth conspiracists is that you can counter-claim that it is in fact a conspiracy created to get Christianity manipulated into school curriculum through 'science' classes. It bows their minds
conspiracy theories do actually turn out to be true.
COINTELRO and Project Ultra spring to mind
Wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if some of the online activities promoting geoengineering/Chemtrail nonsense ultimately have links to fossil fuel interests or the right wing think tanks and arms length influencers that operate in public realm on behalf of fossil fuels
Err. Yep. That's exactly how it works. The American right has been doing this for decades, read any James' elroy novel. Fill credulous ignorant folks heads full of shite and pump them for money/votes
By concocting a conspiratorial cabal that is behind all the bad things that happen what you're really doing is giving yourself the belief that bad things can be prevented. It's much more comforting to think that disease, weather etc are part of some planned operation becuase you can then believe that they can be prevented. It's far more depressing to accept that bad things happen with no reason, plan or schedule and that we'll alway have terrible things in our life to deal with. Key though is to believe that bad things could stop if the bad actors behind the could be defeated, but also that they are so shadowy and powerful that theres nothing you can actually do. So in combination you have hope that life can be better, you get to flatter yourself by declaring that you can see this and no-one else can, and you also get to be quite lazy becuase the solutions are beyond your control and/or the problems themselves aren't real.
In the states in particular (but increasingly so here) conspiracy theories tend to sit in the right of the political spectrum. On climate in particular acceptance and denial of climate change correlates with party allegiance.
At its heart the Republican Party is the party of small government, minimal regulation and individual freedom. The problem with issues like climate is they can only be addressed by government - both in terms of prevention (legislation and regulation) and through mitigation (infrastructure spending). So if you accept manmade climate change is a problem the reality is conservative governments don't offer the solutions and actions that we need.
So the GOP has the choice to either present itself as a party that acknowledges climate change but out of principle will do nothing about it - cowards basically, and a party who seeks likeminded cowards to elect it. Or they have to take the position that they are the party that proudly points out that the problem isn't real and that therefore and that they are therefore the party that instead treats the solutions to climate change as the thing that they'll battle. Basically a way of dressing up doing nothing as doing something.
y concocting a conspiratorial cabal that is behind all the bad things that happen what you’re really doing is giving yourself the belief that bad things can be prevented. It’s much more comforting to think that disease, weather etc are part of some planned operation becuase you can then believe that they can be prevented. It’s far more depressing to accept that bad things happen with no reason, plan or schedule and that we’ll alway have terrible things in our life to deal with. Key though is to believe that bad things could stop if the bad actors behind the could be defeated, but also that they are so shadowy and powerful that theres nothing you can actually do. So in combination you have hope that life can be better, you get to flatter yourself by declaring that you can see this and no-one else can, and you also get to be quite lazy because the solutions are beyond your control and/or the problems themselves aren’t real.
Organised religion in a nutshell.
There was an absolute goldmine of a thread on Mumsnet years ago which went viral from someone claiming that dinosaurs were all a conspiracy. Christians Against Dinosaurs.
There is a "Christians Against Dinosaurs" Facebook group which is very clearly a pisstake yet reels folk in. I think there's a "Dinosaurs Against Christians Against Dinosaurs" group also.
COINTELRO and Project Ultra spring to mind
MKULTRA is what I was thinking of, yes.
A friend of mine, a well educated university lecturer, otherwise completely normal woman thinks the moon landings were faked
I know someone, also a well-educated, qualified professional who disappeared down the anti-vax conspiracy wormhole during covid and never came out
His social media feeds are now a constant deluge of conspiracy theory nonsense, his favourite being chem-trails. We’re all apparently being pacified by the chemicals constantly being sprayed into the air from planes by the government
Its all completely insane, but he’s absolutely convinced it’s true.
To be fair to organised religion, it was trying to make sense of nature and the world when no-one had any idea how it works.
Very true.
Modern day conspiracists are inventing meanings for stuff we already know.
This would hold more water if religion had subsequently gone "oh yeah" and stopped. Modern-day mainstream religions often either try to retcon their teachings to fit the world as we know it today and claim that's what they meant all along, or vilify anyone who dares challenge their faith.
We’re all apparently being pacified by the chemicals constantly being sprayed into the air from planes by the government
In which case, a) it's demonstrably not working because the populace is the least pacified I've known it in years and b) if that were true than it's both a very visible and a terribly inefficient way of dispersing a pathogen when you could just pollute the water supply.
Getting back to the OP though, the weird things about CT about the storms in Florida is that some folks are having to hold in their head the simultaneous and competing theories that climate change is a hoax and that human activity isn't changing the weather while at the same time, believing that the Democrats can in fact; change the weather over Florida
That's pretty special.
Why risk a deception if they knew they were going back?
Why not, they needed a nice portfolio of pictures to win the space race and keep the money rolling in for further missions 🙂
Its not a cheap thing to do
The United States spent $25.8 billion on Project Apollo between 1960 and 1973, or approximately $257 billion when adjusted for inflation to 2020 dollars. Adding Project Gemini and the robotic lunar program, both of which enabled Apollo, the U.S. spent a total of $28 billion ($280 billion adjusted).
Fair assessment
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/11/hurricane-milton-elon-musk-natural-disasters
“Once upon a time, relatively recently in the scheme of things, a looming natural disaster would have felt like a fairly ineluctable fact. You couldn’t “debate” a natural disaster any more than you could disagree with gravity. There is a point, we used to say, where you really can’t argue with reality. There is a point where shit gets real. But is there, any more?”
Its not a cheap thing to do
The United States spent $25.8 billion on Project Apollo between 1960 and 1973, or approximately $257 billion when adjusted for inflation to 2020 dollars.
That's $15bn/year in a country whose GDP is $25 trillion. So, what, 0.06%? It's pocket change.
I’ve heard that cars cause Chemtrails.
Their fuel is full of stuff that kills us.
Khan is trying to set up freedom zones to stop us getting poisoned but The Man has corrupted the Sheeple so that they want to be diseased and more controllable.
That’s $15bn/year in a country whose GDP is $25 trillion. So, what, 0.06%? It’s pocket change
There was a video of some guy interviewing people in the street around the time of some big space news - final shuttle voyage or something - asking them what % of the USA GDP they thought went to NASA and people were guessing at 20, 30%.
It's about 0.3% most years.
One guy I know bleats on about all government being paedophiles and teachers teaching kids to masturbate in class. He's otherwise a good guy whose hobbies would see him fit in well here.
I agree that some in government could be paedophiles but that doesn't mean all are. As for teaching kids to masturbate in class.... That's bonkers. I'm sure my teenage niece and nephew may have mentioned it, Sex ed for my 6 year old revolves around "pants are private".
Someone I've known for about 25 years just posted this. He's never been 'normal' he's always been into some bizarre stuff but recently he's convinced that the sky is constantly grey and overcast because they're spraying it to make us depressed.
3 likes as well. There's some special folks about fo'shure
Looks like he's on one today! He usually gets loads of comments. Most of them are in agreement, certainly no one criticising him or suggesting that's he's speaking bollocks.
As for teaching kids to masturbate in class…. That’s bonkers.
Different times. Back in my day we got told off for chewing gum.
teaching kids to masturbate in class
Back in my day we got told off for chewing gum.
I thought it was gum stuck to the underneath of the desks. I'm starting to question that idea...
@sharkattack - introduce him to WindsorDebs on Twitter. She is full-on batshit crazy about chemtrails, weather modification, geoengineering, etc. Her posts make great reading.
There's no wind...
Yeah, at ground level maybe, but at the sorts of levels that cirrostratus and cirrus clouds form? Damn, being drawn in, there's no telling these folks
The problem is that you can’t argue with stupid.
They’ll drag you down to their level and beat you with experience.
Weather conspiracy shit getting out of hand at a very sensitive time in the US. The irony is obvious to anyone with a functioning brain cell, but that’s not a prerequisite for voting.
It’s why the American ‘education’ system is so completely disfunctional, Republikkkans WANT poorly educated cult members who are easily led by the nose into voting for them, which then will give them the power through the House and Senate, and a loaded SCOTUS, to have a Putin in power, someone who basically rules for life. Project 2025, or whatever it’s called, is working on that, Diaper Don has stated that on winning in November, he’ll be a dictator on day one…
As far as a flat earth is concerned, if it was flat why aren’t there cats all along the edge, pushing everything off?
Re: the moon landings, the best live video footage got accidentally wiped, apparently, but the still film photos taken on the surface, which were taken with Hasselblad 6x6 cameras, which were left on the surface, but the rolls of film have fairly recently been taken from storage and new very high resolution scans have been taken of them, and it’s actually possible to see stars in the sky, one of the arguments against them having been taken on the moon’s surface. The fact is they were taken in daylight and you can’t see stars in daylight on earth, because the atmosphere scattering the light prevents it.
Without an atmosphere, away from the direct sunlight, it’s possible to see the very brightest stars.
Same as I can see most of the brightest stars from my garden with all the street lights on, I can even see the Milky Way on a very clear night. You wouldn’t be able to from a fully lit football stadium, though.