• explodicle@sh.itjust.works
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    3 days ago

    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.

  • boonhet@lemm.ee
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    3 days ago

    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.

  • JovialMicrobial@lemm.ee
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    3 days ago

    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.

    • WorldsDumbestMan@lemmy.today
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      3 days ago

      It’s why we should regulate them into the ground, and give them 0 trust. Get rid of lobbying, screw profit, the economic damage from all the scams, suffering, and death in the long-term is more than enough to make any gain in profit meaningless.

    • desktop_user@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      3 days ago

      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.

    • desktop_user@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      3 days ago

      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.

  • ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    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.

  • Bamboodpanda@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    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.”

    • oldfart@lemm.ee
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      3 days ago

      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.

  • gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de
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    3 days ago

    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.

  • finitebanjo@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    Theres enough conspiracies that 1 in a million have to be true.

    Don’t use the one as evidence of the million.

      • finitebanjo@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        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.

        • SynopsisTantilize@lemm.ee
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          3 days ago

          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

  • TwoFacedJanus1968@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    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.

  • thesohoriots@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    Proverbs for Paranoids

    1. You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures.
    2. The innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportion to the immorality of the Master.
    3. If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.
    4. You hide, they seek.
    5. Paranoids are not paranoid because they’re paranoid, but because they keep putting themselves, fucking idiots, deliberately into paranoid situations.

    —Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

  • UnculturedSwine@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    4 days ago

    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

    • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org
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      3 days ago

      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.

      • TimewornTraveler@lemm.ee
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        4 days ago

        well there’s a reason for that – feeling like someone is reading your thoughts or that your will is controlled by someone else and so on are common presentations of schizophreniform disorders. they just made it fucking true!

    • floquant@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      4 days ago

      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

      • lugal@sopuli.xyz
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        4 days ago

        Actually 🤓 they rather start as undiscovered conspiracies until they leak enough to make people suspicious and form a theory

        • theangryseal@lemmy.world
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          4 days ago

          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.

          • andros_rex@lemmy.world
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            3 days ago

            With Tuskegee, the conspiratorial claim is often made that the men were deliberately infected. They were “just” not informed of their infected status and discouraged from seeking medical care elsewhere. This meant that they often ended up infecting their families.

            I understand Black conspiracy theorists who have elaborate claims about Tuskegee - it was such a monstrous action and violation of trust that it is difficult to balance not minimizing it with being clear about what did/did not happen.

            • Notyou@sopuli.xyz
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              3 days ago

              Tuskegee is why I would understand some black people not wanting to trust in the covid-19 vaccine.

      • Awesomo85@sh.itjust.works
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        4 days ago

        No. It’s not a REAL conspiracy until the 4th Estate says so! They are the ones we should trust without question! They have NEVER proven themselves to be just another part of the control system!!

  • zxqwas@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    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.

      • zxqwas@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        If you pick one you’re 5% likely to pick the right one and be 100% correct.

        You’re 95% likely to pick the wrong one. Then you miss the conspiracy that is true and you believe in one that is not true so 18/20 = 90% correct.

        Average out the probabilities and it should turn out to be something like 90.5%.

        Edit:I may be off on the maths now that I think about it.

  • stinky@redlemmy.com
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    4 days ago

    People still don’t believe their tax dollars are being spent to hurt them after being shown these documents.

  • Evil_Shrubbery@lemm.ee
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    4 days ago

    Every fucking time.

    It’s easy to recognise some super convenient propaganda, or follow the money, but sometimes it’s not that simple.