It's never that I think they aren't evil enough, I just don't trust conspiracies that require too much competency. I think most of them are too dumb and uncoordinated to pull off most of the conspiracies I hear about.
If you’ve ever tried to coordinate more than 50 people to do a thing, you quickly realize why people refer to management and leadership jobs as “herding cats.”
If someone gave me the option of faking the moon landing or going to the moon, I’d gladly strap a submarine to a missile.
It be fucking impossible to coordinate hundreds of people on the world’s biggest secret, then make them and their families abide by media training for half a century.
I think there’s a danger in underestimating a government’s ability to keep a secret especially when they have the power to kill you and your family if you break it. While we shouldn’t overestimate the conspiracies they conduct (i.e. the world isn’t flat, we did land on the moon, vaccines don’t cause autism). I think it’s reasonable to suspect that your government is keeping some important information out of the public eye. Oft for the reason of “national security” aka, it would be embarrassing to us if this leaked.
You ever heard of a little trillion dollar operation known as the NSA?
It’s not the size of the organization, it’s the size of the team with a particular piece of information, and the monetary or moral pressure to release a particular piece of information.
Also, the NSA famously has had leakers. The biggest and most notable being Snowden in 2013.
Yeah, especially the COVID conspiracies are mostly brain dead stuff
The whole world pretty much stopped, which helps absolutely no one, but somehow those guys think, that a dark force is trying to kill the economy for...profit?
Also all the scientists and doctors are together in bed and just want people to stay indoors, because... I have absolutely no clue
It just didn't make sense from the start.
Although I do get scepticism against new vaccine methods, but when someone tries to "explain" to me, that mRNA somehow overwrites my DNA and I should drink bleach instead...I usually don't even know where to start to correct them
I mean, if the dark forces were billionaires and you look at their wealth growth explosion since the pandemic....someone could be forgiven for thinking there was a conspiracy there. Means and motive, alongside a sociopathic disregard for the common person..
You should advise them to drink bleach and prove its efficacy. For science.
Yeah. Conspiracies feed a need to believe that there's some easy reason why things are fucked. In reality... things are fucked for a great many reasons, and 'evil people in power' is middle of the pack, at best.
The most believable conspiracies are the ones where it's full of incompetence. Like ZunZuneo
It's never a question of how evil they're capable of being, but how competent.
Plenty of conspiracy theories don't work because they'd require hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of people to completely shut up.
Yeah. MK Ultra tracked, faking the moon landing didn't.
I feel like Conspiracy theories are at least partially the result of a lack of regulation and oversight for governing bodies and corporate entities.
For example... the atomic energy commission approved experimenting on disabled children by feeding radioactive oats to them.
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/spoonful-sugar-helps-radioactive-oatmeal-go-down-180962424/
It's one of the reasons we have laws like informed consent now.
Everytime we run into something new, like radiation, some company or government branch does some seriously unethical shit with it and new laws and regulations are written.
So it's like we're all just waiting to find out what new fucked up thing has happened, and how many corporations are gonna fight any proposed regulations regarding it.
And that's why i say that US law is one of the most reactive.
how else are we supposed to get data on how radiation effects children? Fukushima? Hiroshima? No, neither of those was controlled and both of thosehad goals like "reducing exposure" and "saving lives" by the local government.
Conspiracies and conspiracy theories are two very different things. The reason people scoff at conspiracy theories is because they are often times wrong and/or vague. How many *verified conspiracies actually started as a 'conspiracy theory'.
Edit: * added for clarification
before snowden is was a conspiracy theory that the government is always listening to you
How many verified conspiracies actually started as a 'conspiracy theory'.
All of them? If you're questioning the official narrative you're "just a conspiracy theorist" until proven right
Actually 🤓 they rather start as undiscovered conspiracies until they leak enough to make people suspicious and form a theory
You know, I can’t stand dealing with a conspiracy theorist.
I understand why they’re crazy though.
Tuskegee syphilis experiment. MK Uktra. Snowden leaks. Various governments overthrown by the CIA.
I mean, people are crazy and evil knows no bounds.
That said, I prefer to look for the best in the world. I can understand getting lost in all that crap though. People are fucked up.
Let's be fair, if I told you that a UFO cult led by a sci-fi writer performed a massive infiltration of the US government (the largest ever detected) in order to whitewash itself in official records you'd have thought I was wacko before Operation: Snow White came to light. The same UFO cult also had a number of their agents insert themselves into the life of a journalist who had written negative things about them in an attempt to get her to either off herself or be institutionalized, dubbed Operation: Freakout which was only uncovered in the aftermath of the discovery of Operation: Snow White.
The UFO cult in question is Scientology.
Issue being, a large number of conspiracy theories are just utter bonkers (moon nazis theory, etc.), would be really ineffective in practice (chemtrails, etc.), or tries to blame capitalism's problem on a small number of people within the system (International Jewry, etc.). In fact I kind of have a theory that the more "skizo" stuff was put out to make the real stuff look impallatable for people believing the institutions are serving them.
I know at least some opportunistic far-right people that use conspiracy theories to make their ideology look better, met at least one Holocaust denier that just wanted to whitewash the third reich for newbies until they prove they're ready for the truth through proof of loyalty, and one denies the CIA's involvement in toppling the Salvador Allende governance to make Pinochet look even more badass.
Alex Jones amd David Icke are CIA
If they didn't exist. The CIA would create one. They need lunatics like that to leak documents to if they want the information within to be discreditted.
The bottom fox should look the same as the top fox. After they've believed it for decades, their ego is on the line. They will argue that the evidence is bad, or it was always obvious, or that it's overblown.
bottom fox
Poor choice of words.
Phrasing, Lana!
is there a convinient list somewhere of all the times this has happened?
Wikipedia CIA
I get why memes like this are popular—they’re funny and make you think. But honestly, I think they can be a bit dangerous too. Sure, some conspiracy theories have turned out to be true, but way more often than not, they’re just nonsense.
The problem with stuff like this is that it makes it seem like most conspiracy theories are worth taking seriously, which can lead to some real issues. People start distrusting everything—governments, science, journalists—even when there’s no good reason to. It can also give way too much credibility to wild ideas that just aren’t backed up by facts.
Healthy skepticism is important, but it needs to come with critical thinking. Just saying, "What if it's true?" doesn’t really help—it just feeds into the chaos. I feel like we need more “let’s look at the evidence” and less “trust no one.”
But "look at the evidence" IS "trust noone". Neither science nor journalism has been built on "trust me bro", religion and politics was.
The line of thinking you're promoting is how dedicated political party fans behave, they distrust anyone who says the party has done something wrong. That's also the exact mechanism of how child rapes have been and are happening in the catholic church. The good priest may have told little Pete to suck him off, but he's an authority and why should we trust a kid over him.
People still don't believe their tax dollars are being spent to hurt them after being shown these documents.
Proverbs for Paranoids
—Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
Theres enough conspiracies that 1 in a million have to be true.
Don't use the one as evidence of the million.
The McDonald's ice cream machine conspiracies do truly confirm 9/11 being an inside job.
Okay but there actually was a huge McDonald's Ice Cream Machine conspiracy that turned out to be true. McDonalds sells the machines made by Taylor Company to the Franchise Owners, then mandates that only Taylor can fix the machines which are needlessly complicated to clean and maintain, and the machines being unreliable was a design flaw known internally the entire time. When a company named Kytch created tools to make fixing them fast and easy: Taylor sued. Then Taylor made their own tool by reverse engineering Kytch's tool, so Kytch sued Taylor back for $900M USD.
Dude you are preaching to the choir, I've been following it at work as some kind of coping mechanism for never getting ice cream lol
I read a mainstream biography about Aristotle Onassis recently - something that was on the NY Times bestseller list back when it was published in 2004 - and near the beginning it casually comes up that the Secretary of State or head of the CIA (they were brothers at the time) was having an affair with the Queen of Greece. It wasn't even the point of the chapter. Instead, it was just a element in the US governments behind the scene manipulations as they used private intelligence firms to sink a deal between Onassis and the Saudis to fund their own shipping fleet.
And you're a fool if you think they ever stopped.
If 1 in 20 conspiracy theories are correct then you'll be 95% correct if you disbelieve all of them.
If you pick one to believe in you'll be about 90% correct on average.
If you pick 10 you'll be about 50% correct.
I don't get the middle statement. If you pick just one, the chance is 5%
Looks like Big Math got to you
MK Ultra moment
Every fucking time.
It's easy to recognise some super convenient propaganda, or follow the money, but sometimes it's not that simple.
The government wouldn't do that!
this is unrelated, but do any Lemmy clients have a tool or option to show what a hyperlink is linking too? just had an unexpected YouTube video blast full volume and feeling very foolish rn
The reason why reality and what people believe about reality diverge so heavily is because reality is based on mathematics while people's belief about reality is based on their experiences of the past. And past experiences fail to predict things like exponential growth or new theories or developments in technology.
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