We’ve got a bunch of new people now so let’s bring back a classic post. What low stakes conspiracy theory do you believe that you cannot prove but feels right to you?
I’ll start: I believe that dating apps have made a concerted effort to smear in person meeting people and tie it to being “creepy” through social media so you are forced to meet people online(which was the creepy option just 15 years ago)
Public programs are purposely underfunded to make it easy for people to point to why they don’t work (the average person doesn’t think about/care whether they get funding), making it easier to continue the process of privatizing everything.
Many conspiracy theories aren’t actually conspiracy theories but a consequence of profit-driven motives that give the illusion of a conspiracy theory.
Public programs are purposely underfunded to make it easy for people to point to why they don’t work (the average person doesn’t think about/care whether they get funding), making it easier to continue the process of privatizing everything.
I 420.69% believe this is 100% true. It’s such a great feedback loop for someone wanting to dismantle it. It doesn’t work so no one uses it, no uses it because it doesn’t work, and it doesn’t work because it was underfunded and ill-equipped, and it was underfunded and ill-equipped because they didn’t want it to work. It doesn’t work so no one uses it, its perceived value is lessened so it then doesn’t work.
And then you can make great use of absolute numbers over more contextualized relative numbers/ Here’s a made up example:
why did it cost 700 million to vaccinate every American??
$700 million / 300 million Americans = $2.33 per vaccination, insanely cheap. Less than you spent on gas tax getting to and from work today.
I’m always immediately suspicious when someone starts throwing around absolute numbers like that.
I’m always immediately suspicious when someone starts throwing around absolute numbers like that.
Agreed! Anyone who uses tries to use math to justify why a bad thing is a good thing goes to super hell. The one where the Doom Slayer just goes buck wild. That’s where they go.
Yeah, afaik this is pretty widely acknowledged. Both the GOP and the Dems do it. The notable example I can think of is all the public housing projects the US grudgingly built in response to Soviet housing programs, then deliberately starved of resources to convince people they don’t work.
Starving education of resources so it can be privatized has been ongoing program for decades. Everyone’s in on it - Tech Billionaires wanted to control education so they could proletarianize coding and they largely won. Christian Fascists wanted Charter Schools so they could re-impose segregation. Democrats wanted to privatize everything so they could loot public education funds and divert the money to magnet and charter schools, while also stripping resources going to minorities. The whole purpose of property-tax funded education was to ensure that class was rigidly enforced.
“Nobody cares” tier stakes, but I think Nintendo made games in the dying days of the Wii U that didn’t use the gamepad at all so they could later easily directly port them over to other consoles and thus sell them to people twice.
I totally believe this, they really did give up on that controller
It would be so cool if the next console could stream menus to a Switch haha
if the next console isn’t just a switch with the same form factor and dock and controllers but a different, slightly better graphics chip and CPU, i’m going to be very unhappy
I think the story about the passengers fighting back on United flight 93 is fake and it was shot down by the military.
United flight 93
Idea for a bit: Hexbear passengers on United Flight 93 having a struggle session on whether it’s okay to critically support our hijackers if they really do intend to fly the plane into the Capitol building.
I could see Mel Brooks or Monty Python pulling that. I don’t know who the equivalent screwball black comedy people are these days. Eric Andre?
Both can be true. The story is entirely plausible, though. People had cell-phones and the towers had already been hit.
I think there’s a cultural memory hole thing going on - Hijackings used to be really, really common and were usually resolved without too much violence. Being hijacked would definitely ruin your day, but the general wisdom was to just sit tight and wait to be rescued or ransomed or whatever. A lot of the time passengers would be released after the hijacker’s demands were met.
Pretty much the only reason 9/11 worked as well as it did is because up until then no one had tried it. Once the people on 93 knew what the stakes were it was, what, 150? 200 people against four or five armed with small knives? Most people aren’t fighters but those are still really, really bad odds.
Incredibly low stakes but still technically a conspiracy theory.
There’s a town in Wales called Beddgelert. They have a story about how the town is named after a loyal hound who was mistakenly killed in revenge by Llewellyn the Great who believed Gelert killed his infant son. They have a statue and all the typical tourist trap shit.
Cute story except for one thing.
It’s all a lie. The story of Gelert was made up in the 18th century by the owner of a local hotel, David Pritchard, who was looking to drum up tourism. There’s no record of the story before then, the burial mound was erected some time shortly before he started circulating the myth, Gelert wasn’t a name before then. The town was actually named after Celert, an 8th century missionary who settled there, and 13th century censuses that list the town as Bedkelert seem to support this assumption.
Eryri tourist board has taken you for fools!
The guy literally just copied this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Guinefort
Dating apps deliberately match you with incompatible people so you keep returning and paying for premium.
there’s no way this isn’t true. i have personally experienced this on those apps.
When I am using dating apps, I completely delete my account and remake it every few weeks.
From my experience, they give your profile a lot of extra reach in the first 2-3 weeks or so before throttling it.
It’s been a while since I’ve done this, though, I imagine they’ll eventually start combating that strategy if they’re not doing it already.
