I guess this is something Black celebrities have talked about on TV, so maybe this is better known among those who--unlike me--actually watch TV, but I visited a friend of mine recently who insisted that Stevie Wonder isn't really blind. Had not heard that one before.

I've met people who earnestly believe that aliens are real and living on Earth among us but they vibrate on a higher frequency so they're invisible to everyone who hasn't properly adjusted their auras. The government is aware of this and trying to supress the info.

A friend's cousin believes that NASA blew up the Moon and replaced it with a hologram.

The term "conspiracy theory" was created by Karl Popper and utilized by US intelligence to discredit people from pointing out the actually proven and declassified things done by US intelligence.

The idea of the ‘conspiracy theory’ was developed by the anti-Communist philosopher Karl Popper in his 1945 The Open Society and Its Enemies. Popper was against the view that war, unemployment, and poverty were the ‘result of direct design by some powerful individuals and groups’. Theories of society – such as Marxism – which attempted to understand the social mechanisms of war and unemployment could be softly dismissed as merely conspiracy theories. Popper pointed out that conspiratorial groups were paranoid and – like Nazism – would lead to totalitarianism and genocidal policies. Popper’s liberals viewed any left-wing criticism of the US state and society as conspiratorial; the actual conspiracy theorists – such as Joe McCarthy and the John Birch Society – were sniffed at, disparaged, but not taken seriously (after all, as Daniel Bell wrote, the Communists – unlike the John Birch Society – had a conspiracy that ‘was a threat to any democratic society’). This was not a principled objection to conspiracies, but a class attack on any criticism of capitalism and imperialism.

The idea of the conspiracy theory was used to de-legitimize genuine investigation of covert behavior by the government. Implicit faith in the goodness of US power generated the view that the US government would never use illegal means to secure its ends, and that if there was any suggestion that the US had fomented a coup – that suggestion was dismissed as a conspiracy theory.

For example, those who suggested that the US/United Fruit perpetrated a coup against the Jacobo Árbenz government in 1954 would be roundly mocked as conspiracy theorists. Later, when the documents proved that the critics had been correct it was too late.

"Weird" conspiracy theories like pizzagate, Qanon, Flat Earth, Large Hadron Collider being a gateway for Shiva, Finland not existing, lizard people, ancient aliens, etc. are a mixture of pop culture nonsense, antisemitism, sincerely held quasi-religious beliefs, and strawman conspiracy theories deliberately seeded by US intelligence to resemble and discredit more reasonable theories that actually align with historical materialist thought.

A guy blaming bad weather on... Russian and American weather machines? I assume it was some kind of very elaborate level of climate change denial, where you can't just not acknowledge the obvious changes to the weather, but you also can't acknowledge climate change, so you somehow end up believing it's the result of some kind of secret Russo-American weather machine brinkmanship.

I once spoke to a woman who thought that she was the reincarnation of a famous pharao and because of this the secret police had kidnapped her to build a computer based on her brain, which they had scanned. The fascinating thing about it was that she was pretty clear that she was now out of danger. The secret police had treated her reasonably well, and they were certainly not going to kidnap her again now that they had their brain scan.

LMAO great story, the guy was having fun pretending to be deranged.

I recently was in the greengrocery queue when suddenly a 60-something yo woman started vomiting ALL, I shit you not, ALL the conspirancies about covid / 5G / vaccines I had heard of. She linked them all in such a strong stream of imbecilities that kept going and going, like a huge dam of derangement that collapsed over a poor town, I was completely awed.

She even said "the virus doesn't exist, but they make rain so there are mosquitoes to make us sick so they can vaccinate us".

like yeah, we now control the rain, good news people!

Christianity :attlee-fedora:

First time I encountered real no-shit antisemitism white supremacy was a trip. Ah, youthful innocence.

The actual more harmless weird stuff is from when I worked at a drug store and someone with shizophrenia or whatever needed an emergency top up because their delusions were getting bad and they lost their previous prescription. Stuff like "the infinite space carrot has flown down and put metal needles in my arms so I can hear radio waves, also the ghost of my dad doesn't want me to sign the agreement the executor of his estate came up with."

I was once getting my car towed and made some funny small talk with the driver. Apparently he believed that when they fired the first rocket into space it popped a hole in the ozone layer and this hole is what is causing global warming. He said the reason they have to wait for certain times to launch rockets is so they can do it when the hole passes overhead so they don't make another one.

:meow-popcorn:

I was on a civ 4 modding discord talking about what I thought was the game's rather late introduction of the ancient egyptian faith, when the conversation eventually turned into the guy saying that the ancient sumerians and pre christian vikings actually believed in the same gods because "Loki" and "Enki" sounded similar, and apparently similar theological structures were also found in countless other cultures including the fucking mayans for some reason? Apparently this meant that sometime well over 10,000 BC there existed some globe spanning super culture and the only reasons archeologists don't talk about it is literally because they're too prideful to admit they were wrong

It was one of those things where obviously I wasn't even arguing with someone grounded in reality at that point so I shut up but what the fuck? This doesn't make sense for countless reasons

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Weather is controlled by people's vibes. Like bad storms happen because people get mad and if everyone were just happy all the time we'd have perfect weather

I live in Colorado, where there's a bunch of conspiracy theories surrounding the Denver airport and its underground baggage handling system. One of my old co-workers said that there were secret tunnels connecting the airport to various military bases in the area, including Cheyenne Mountain and Area 51 (which is like 700 miles away). The same guy claimed that the Aurora movie theater shooting was coordinated by rival film studios to ruin the premiere of the Batman movie.

Another co-worker at another job believed basically every conspiracy theory you can think of: Qanon, flat earth, new chronology, 5G causes coronavirus, vaccines contain microchips, etc. As near as I could tell he wasn't anti-Semitic, or at least he hid it well. I sometimes listen to Qanon Anonymous so occasionally I'd egg him on if I was bored, but it got tedious and a little sad after a while.