I’ve been thinking about this thread for a while, and this Reader’s Digest felt like a fair starting point that floated across my news feed today
But also
So if you’re interested in the phenomenon of conspiratorial thinking, or want some comic-relief/steam-venting from the madness that is the social media fuelled information age, this thread is for you
Here’s a useful heuristic for people who have trouble distinguishing which “conspiracy theories” are correct and which are not, 30 years before the newspapers finally print the truth one way or the other: if They tell you straight up that They are conspiring to do something, They probably are. If the things that They say they’re planning start happening, it’s probably Them doing it.
If you yourself come up with some way-out-there explanation for why they can’t possibly be doing what they say they’re doing, it might be you who is indulging in conspiratorial thinking.
Just show me the evidence.
I jokingly went for a supercut of lizard people accidentally exposing themselves on video that I saw years ago, talking heads with flashes of slit eyes and forked tongues. Strangely, and despite trying multiple different search terms, it seems to have disappeared
My theory is, absence of evidence is evidence of a powerful conspiracy!
I’m not sure if this belongs here, but whatever. Part 1 is the relevant part of the video. It offers up a little experiment that looks fun to try with regards to Flat Earth.
Only watch Part 1, though. Don’t you dare watch Part 2. There’s nothing to see there, the lede has not been buried.
A friend got me a ticket for a David Icke show tonight. That will be interesting.
Only a 5-hour show as opposed to his usual all dayer.
The venue will be announced 90 mins before show time to prevent corporate fascist useful idiots from stopping the show.
I don’t agree with all of his conclusions or findings, but some of his research from the past has come to fruition (they admitted it and the plans were out there if you looked hard enough - in some cases before the internet).
This is not a serious thread, more for venting steam than anything. Some of the more serious threads get pretty heated, i hope here we can keep calm and level (level, like, the earth!)
I had to look him up
And lizard people, don’t forget the lizard people
How many monkeys at how many typewriters?
I’m on the fence about the lizard people, part of me hopes he’s right and part of me doesn’t
Anyways, sounds like an entertaining evening. Hope you have a nice and safe time 
IMO David Icke is a crackpot, but he’s not stupid, and he’s certainly interesting to listen to in small doses (I’m not sure I’d have the patience for five hours). Let us know how it goes. It wouldn’t surprise me if he’s been right on several occasions simply because there are so many conspiracies going on at any one time; it’s pretty hard not to run across one just by accident these days.
Incidentally, does anyone remember in Current Year that Adam Smith was a conspiracy theorist?
“The peace and stability of the European continent was imperilled by the conspiracies of the merchants, who goaded politicians into fighting wars to protect home markets, or acquire foreign ones. After all, being granted militarily-backed private monopolies was far easier than having to compete on the open market by lowering prices and improving quality. The merchants in this manner constantly conspired to capture the state, defrauding the public by using political power to promote their own sectional advantage.”
Hey ho. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Interesting
Lol, and this
Shout out to Dan Olsen. I think this video has been posted in the breadtube/left tube thread as well.
oh ffs. The Taylor Swift thing is just a meme. I’m pretty sure this is not a widespread belief among “the right” in America. The fact that this article is authored by someone who wrote “American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy” really tells you all you need to know here.
The modern right’s detached-from-reality paranoia stretches back to the frenzied McCarthyism of the 1950s that claimed the Russkies had infiltrated all nooks and crannies of American society.
As it turns out, they were actually right. And the AP article is amusing with the benefit of hindsight, since a lot of the “conspiracy theories” mocked therein have since proved to be either entirely accurate, or admitted by the conspirators, or to be at least over the target (see the “Epstein list”, for example).
The ‘argument’ being presented here is of essentially the same form as “people who don’t believe in COVID vaccines are so stupid they think they’re being microchipped and monitored by 5G”. To the extent that any such people even existed, it probably was some sort of psyop - an idea spread by counterdisinformation wonks - to co-opt mentally unstable people and hold them up as examples of People Who Don’t Believe in the Government and You Don’t Want To Be One Of These People Do you. The author is claiming here that right-wing people are proving themselves to be all completely stupid, because left-wing people believe they’ve invented a conspiracy theory about Taylor Swift. Which draws on about the same intellectual tradition as “I know you are, but what am I?”.
God only knows what’s happened to Mother Jones. They were always hard ‘left’, of course, but back in the day they used to have some pretty interesting articles.
So the real conspiracy theory here is not right wingers believing in some conspiracy theory involving Taylor Swift, the actual conspiricy theory is secretive government agencies coming up with a psyop whereby they create a ridiculous conspiracy theory centered around Taylor Swift with the objective of zooming in and giving all their attention to any right wing types who fall for their psyop in an attempt to use a broad brush and depict all right wingers as conspiracy theory loons who will believe anything they are told?
Definitely the right thread anyway.
I was referring there to the “5G and microchips” thing, but I’m not sure if it even merits the term “conspiracy theory”. I think a lot of these things are just TPTB messing with people’s heads (by massively inflating their significance). They’re distractions, not “conspiracies”. In this case, yes, there seems to be some deliberate attempt to get people chattering about Taylor Swift - because, I am guessing, if they’re busy talking about Taylor Swift, they’re not talking about things that actually matter.
And of course the people spreading The Message benefit enormously. Mother Jones has nothing meaningful to talk about because it is, apparently, run by midwits who are incapable of rational thought. Instead, they can sell their product with the (highly successful) method used by National Inquirer and their ilk: just make up or adopt some random nonsense that people enjoy reading.
Meta 
