| Indrid Cold |
04-03-2021 04:09 PM |
The Conspiracy Thread
I've been studying why people get into conspiracies for a long time and admit that I have gotten nowhere with trying to understand it. I remember when I first encountered conspiracies. It was about all the "secret" symbolism in Washington DC and the Great Seal and the Federal Reserve and the Bilderbergers and the Trilateral Commission and the New World Order and all that. These were either run by or were an amalgamation of the Illuminati. This was back in the 70s. I was young so there was this initial period of fascination. I read the Illuminatus! Trilogy and learned there really was a Bavarian Illuminati run by an Adam Weishaupt but I learned that there really wasn't anything all that remarkable about it. There were other Illuminatis as well such as Emanuel Swedenborg's. I had also read Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo and Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. Fortunately, I read them before I read Illuminatus which is necessary because the latter work refers to them. Once I had the time to really think about it all, I realized none of it was likely to be true and I grew bored with it.
In the 80s, I encountered the white supremacist conspiracies. A lot of it I was already familiar with--the Federal Reserve, New World Order stuff, etc. The only difference was that the racists put it all on the Jews. The Jews caused everything bad. When I read long white supremacist polemics about how Jews had cheated the white Europeans out of their own heritage, I couldn't help but notice that none of their accusations and "facts" were footnoted. It was just old garbage vomited up from the John Birch Society, repackaged with Christian Identity and vomited back out to morons too stupid to notice that nothing is footnoted and therefore it is impossible to know where these "facts" came from. They just went and believed it and didn't care it if was true or not. To me, the racist wight conspiracies had long been consigned to the bin of "boring" as far as I was concerned and I had no interest in it. Christian Identity is so unforgivingly stupid that you are automatically a blithering idiot if you believe in any of it--period.
Today, we can see the racist wights of America are still at it with the same old garbage along with this QAnon thing. QAnon is mind-bogglingly stupid and yet people get hooked on it. It's disturbing how something can be wrong about every prediction it has made and yet its members refuse to give it up. But then, it doesn't matter how wrong or stupid it is, people just want to believe in it. For example, there is the Flat Earth Society who believe the earth is flat which is so self-evidently wrong that one can only wonder how anyone buys into it. Then there is the "Paul McCartney is dead and was replaced by Faul" camp. Let's take a look at each.
Could the earth be flat? No. It's just that simple. Go to your kitchen table and put objects on it to represent surface features. Now switch off the lights. Take a flashlight--a simple penlight will do--and simulate the flat-earther's version of how sunrise works. Does it? No. The flat-earthers (hereafter referred to as "flerfs") say the sun doesn't actually go down but that it moves further away. When you ask how far away it moves so that we can't see it at night, you get no real answer. It can't move that far away because the flerfs believe the entire flat earth is under a dome of some sort and the sun and moon are simply lights that revolve around each other under this dome. Yes, really! But shining your penlight on the kitchen table will show you that that entire table surface is illuminated all at once not gradually. If you live in a mountainous region, drive down the road before sunrise and watch he mountaintops. As the sun rises, the mountaintops are lit up first and then the rest of the earth's surface after that. Flerf fail right there.
I also asked them to explain an aurora. If the sun is just a light revolving around under the dome, where do all the charged particles come from? If there is no magnetic field to catch the particles then what catches them? Can't be the dome because then the aurora would reveal the shape of the dome. Flerf fail right there.
What about satellite images that clearly show the earth is spherical? CGI. All CGI. This is actually flerf reasoning: If the earth was a sphere, then everybody below the equator would fall off. When you point out that gravity holds us to the surface and that it pulls down to the center of the earth, they call you a brainwashed idiot and yet when you ask that if there is no gravity when what force would pull people off the earth below the Equator, you get no answer.
Their favorite criticism of the globe earth (they call those who conclude that the earth is a globe "globetards") is how does water stick to the surface of a ball? Water, they say, is flat and any attempt to bend it will result it it running to another level where it can be flat. So how does it stick to the globe earth? Obviously, gravity acts on each water molecule and wants to pull it to the center of the earth. One guy sat in a boat out on a lake, held a regular bubble level to the water surface to show it was flat. This is how they see scientific evidence. Very precise laser measurements over large enough bodies of water actually DO reveal the surface is curved in accordance with the earth's curvature but because they can't sense it with their eyes, they reject this evidence wholesale.
As for the Paul is dead crowd, the level of certainty that Paul actually is dead is truly astonishing. I pointed out the absurdity by saying so Paul died and was replaced by a guy that looked just like like him, played with Paul's style lefthanded, sang in his voice and wrote songs just like him and just in time for the next album. That, right there, should point out how absurd it is. But then I received responses as, "Well. that is exactly what happened." Another said that Faul (whose name is something like William Shears Campbell) actually didn't look like Paul initially but only after plastic surgery and he posts a pic of this Campbell fellow who indeed did not resemble Paul in the slightest. I didn't bother to explain that there is no way that you can use plastic surgery to look like someone else you don't resemble in the slightest. FBI witness protection agents will tell you that many mob guys tried to do that but they still looked like themselves in the end. It doesn't work. Another guy said, Paul had recorded most of the new material before he died. So, they are contradicting each other: Paul died and Faul replaced him playing and looking just like him except Faul didn't look just like Paul until after plastic surgery and he didn't play just like Paul because all the stuff released by the Beatles after Paul's death was recorded by Paul before he died. Gotcha. Clear as mud.
I hope ol' Billy Shears was good at stooping because they say he is 6 feet 4 inches. Paul is 5 feet 11 inches. This Faul impostor is NOT 6 feet 4. And who is this William Campbell? It's some made up guy. But wait!! He wrote a memoir of his time with the Beatles pretending to be Paul!! Right. So did Ishmael when he wrote about chasing a white whale all over the ocean. Anybody could have written that!!
Aside from the sheer impossibility that Paul could have died and it been kept a secret, the rest of the Beatles would have been devastated by his death. How could they have gone along with such a hare-brained scheme as replacing Paul with an impostor?
One of their favorite bits of "evidence" that Paul is dead is the lyric from "Glass Onion" saying "Here's a clue for you all, the walrus was Paul." How is that proof of anything???? How does that prove that Paul died??? Actually, John, in an interview, once explained that line. In his public squabbles with Paul, the public tended to side with Paul and made John a bad guy. So, John wrote a song saying he was the walrus. He was referring to Lewis Carroll's poem about the Walrus and the Carpenter. John had thought the walrus was the good guy. He said later he reread the poem and realized the walrus was the bad guy so he changed his statement to say the walrus was Paul. Now, that explains the line in "Glass Onion". Paul being dead does not.
I'm supposed to buy all these allusions in the lyrics. Okay. What about Ringo's statement in John's song "I'm the Greatest": "Yes, my name is Billy Shears." Whoops! Looks like they forgot about that one and none of them has as yet explained it.
What gets to me, I suppose, is not that people believe stupid garbage so much as the sheer arrogance they display while spouting it. What is inside them that they get hooked on this stuff? I see a woman on Youtube vlogging about her belief that Biden stole the election and she made the statement. "Q is the most important thing in my life!" I don't get it. Why? How could that be more important to you than anything else in your existence?? How pathetic are you. lady? Another woman actually told her husband, "I choose Q over you." But she is just one among hundreds of thousands who have done something similar.
The flerfs actually cast themselves as heroes! We have all been brainwashed to believe the earth is a globe but they are here to set us free!! They have yet to prove even a single assertion of theirs but they are here to liberate us from conspiracy-addled science. The racists are here to save the white race!! The Jews are the spawn of Satan who have tricked us into interbreeding with the mud races but thanks to people who worship Hitler or who wear hoods while burning crosses, we are SAVED!!! QAnon is here to save democracy not destroy it!! Without Q, you'd all be living in tyranny and getting your dna altered by covid vaccines!! We're saving your freedom by refusing to wear a mask in public!! On your knees and and thank us!
Maybe people are getting stupider. Americans certainly seem to be. Who with a brain actually thought Trump would make a great president? Remember when people voted for George Bush over John Kerry because Bush seemed more like the kind of guy you'd like to have a beer with?? I've had many beers with many guys and NOT ONE of them would make a decent president. That's NOT how you should be choosing a candidate.
Remember when people were up in arms when Edward Snowden revealed that the Obama administration was listening in on people's phone calls? People were outraged!!!!! How dare they listen in on us!!!!! The only problem was, this exact same program was started by the Bush administration and when it was revealed to the public back then, the public did not say a damn word against it. Obama merely continued the program. Maybe because Snowden stole information and revealed it that we thought that somehow it was more valuable then when the press leaks it. It proves that we don't pay attention unless people first create a big hullabaloo around it. The hullabaloo should consist of surreptitiously revealed data. If you cloak it in a "you're not supposed to know this but..." envelope of false secrecy, people will believe more than if you read it on the front page of a newspaper--then it's fake news--despite it being the exact same data.
We are so terribly easy to control. The louder we rebel against control, it seems, the more controlled we are.
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