• EleventhHour
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      402 months ago

      The reason I absolutely believe this to be true? Because I’ve used this on my little brothers since we were kids. I’m 45.

      It’s called “reverse psychology.”

      • Zagorath
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        42 months ago

        It’s a bizarre and (afaik) unfounded conspiracy theory, but I don’t think this reasoning works as a refutation. It’s still very possible that the experiment got out, and even if not they still needed policies to protect all the people they didn’t want to be affected because the targeting isn’t perfect.

    • @overcast5348
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      222 months ago

      How are China’s stringent lockdowns explained in this conspiracy theory? Also, where do I sign up as a member?

        • @[email protected]
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          152 months ago

          A repressive regime that becomes less repressive during a global pandemic is highly suspicious. Gotta keep up appearances.

            • IndiBrony
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              2 months ago

              I like you.

              Like, this is what conspiracy should be - actually somewhat believable - and not dumb shit like flat earth.

              I always held that 9/11 was dubious. Not an “inside job” per se, but definitely a case of “we’re gonna turn our backs for just a second, and you terrorists better not do something silly while we’re not looking!”

              One of the biggest things that will always stick out to me: the WMDs. They were adamant Iraq had them. They said they had actual evidence. None of it was true. It all came across as an excuse for ol’ George to go in and try to finish what daddy started in '91.

              Just to be clear as well, I think other conspiracies such as the controlled demolition of the towers and the fake plane at the pentagon are bullshit. I don’t have my tinfoil hat on that tightly.

              • @[email protected]
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                22 months ago

                I always held that 9/11 was dubious. Not an “inside job” per se, but definitely a case of “we’re gonna turn our backs for just a second, and you terrorists better not do something silly while we’re not looking!”

                But why? What they won letting that happen?

                • @SuperIce
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                  The Patriot Act gives the government practically unlimited permission to spy on all citizens. It was created and passed as a result of 9/11.

              • @Knock_Knock_Lemmy_In
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                12 months ago

                other conspiracies such as the controlled demolition of the towers

                Maybe not WTC 1 or 2 but WTC 7 looks exactly like a controlled demolition.

    • @[email protected]
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      182 months ago

      Can confirm this is true because the same was true for my mum. She was against the COVID vaccine, but then she started believing that the theories were started by the Chinese government to target people who don’t listen to the authorities.

    • Karyoplasma
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      62 months ago

      The one child policy has been abolished a good while before covid.

      • @[email protected]
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        82 months ago

        That doesn’t change the distribution of demographics by itself. Even assuming the birth rate skyrocketed after the nixing of the one child policy, it takes ~20 years before those people are working age.

        • Karyoplasma
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          2 months ago

          The big problem China faced and why the one-child policy was abandoned after all is that there was a staunch focus on having a male child to “keep the bloodline alive” (cultural reasoning) which led to a stagnation in the 0-14 years age group due to an overpopulation with males. This is not fixed by killing off your elderly.

          Covid was most deadly for the age group of 65 and above and in 2019, they had proportionally less people aged 65+ than the US (13.50% in China vs. 16.4% in the US). Either China’s scientists failed immensely or the virus stemmed from bad hygiene practices in livestock markets selling bats.

    • @[email protected]
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      2 months ago

      My personal conspiracy theory is that the Chinese government did engineer (or at least selectively cultivate) COVID

      The theory I’d believe more is that the U S of A govt or one of its agencies engineered and released it in China.

      China and India are growing economies, with decent populations and a pandemic would seriously delay their growth and help the U S of A keep it’s top place for a bit longer or destroy its competitors.

      I’ve heard the theory being given decent thought by non-western people. And it’s equally, if not, more believable than the other one.

      The US is the only country that has ever used nuclear weapons on civillians, so them using biological weapons on civillians would not be a big moral barrier for them or a big stretch to think about.

      They probably didn’t think it’d spread this much and their own citizens n even president would be idiotic enough to be against vaccines and masks, when people were dying.

      • @[email protected]
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        32 months ago

        The theory I’d believe more is that the U S of A govt or one of its agencies engineered and released it in China.

        They did a stupid ass job them, killing the older only gonna help China, and it didn’t even killed enough people to make a difference and it backfired in the US, the conspiracy that China was engineering with it and shit escaped make more sense

        • @[email protected]
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          2 months ago

          They did a stupid ass job them

          They probably didn’t expect their president to be idiotic enough to be against vaccines and recommend stuff like bleach.

          They’re a developed nation and could’ve had better control.
          They were able to hinder Chinese trade a bit.

          And didn’t they try and fail to kill Castro in many stupid ass ways?

          I think them doing it is more likely than China doing it to their own, considering the trade issues that the virus caused for China at the time.

          And again, they were the first to use nuclear weapons on civillians. Did it twice even.
          I don’t think they’d have an qualms about using biological weapons, if they thought that it’d give them an edge.

          They also can float the ‘China virus’ conspiracy to confuse the public and make them anti-China too.

  • @coffee_whatever
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    1102 months ago

    “Moon landing was fake!!!” “You still believe the moon is real?”

    • @[email protected]
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      442 months ago

      This was highly effective when I used it in real life.

      The conspiracy theorist got real mad demanding I name sources, I kept telling him to find it on the internet with fake search terms.

      • @coffee_whatever
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        242 months ago

        I would have screamed “do your own research!” before just leaving.

      • Match!!
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        172 months ago

        congress is full of marxist-leninist-pelosi-ists who intentionally cause inflation to distract us from finding obama’s birth certificate! google “MLP inflation” if yu don’t believe me!

    • @[email protected]
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      62 months ago

      I once got on the topic of the moon lending with a creationist co-worker. He said he wasn’t sure, but that if it happened we should be able to see it from satellite pictures. So I said “yeah you can”, pulled it up, and zoomed in on a landing site. You couldn’t see footprints or anything, but you could see the shadow of the flag next to clearly man-made debris

      I showed him exactly what he agreed would be proof in a difficult to fake form, and it just temporarily nudged the needle for him

      Now, I fight conspiracies with the opposite conspiracies.

      Earth is a 4D hypersphere, the earth isn’t hollow, Agatha is just another part of the surface reached by holes

      The elites are hiding all the best vaccines, like the ones that cure cancer

      • @coffee_whatever
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        52 months ago

        I recently watched “Brief history of the Wrong Earths” by Hardcore Sci-Fi, not many of these are well known so you could have so much more ammunition for fooling around like that with people.

        “flat earth? Nah, it’s expanding bro! Oh wait actually it’s 9 hollow earths one in another!”

  • @[email protected]
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    902 months ago

    My best friend has an unnatural talent for this sort of thing and really enjoys toying with conspiracy theory nuts.

    When folks start talking about crazy shit, it makes me very anxious and I tend to shut down. Not my buddy. He eggs them on, encourages it, and gets them to say things or agree with things that are even more outlandish than where they conversation started. Things will start at “China invented covid to kill off old people” and somehow end up at “Hillary Clinton paid to have her chromosomes added to the covid vaccines so that DNA evidence can no longer be used against her in the courts”.

      • nickwitha_k (he/him)
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        52 months ago

        I think that basically is yeah. Then, when they saw that it had gathered a following, admins on a #chan who were pro-Trump and think that they’re super smart because they use Haskell took over to pump up fringe support.

        • @[email protected]
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          32 months ago

          Yeah, but how do I know that what you just wrote isn’t another conspiracy theory? I’m just so confused

        • @DMCMNFIBFFF
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          12 months ago

          It’s possible the name might be related to some TV series that’s been largely un-watched by flyover state boomers who spend 1000s of hours a year listening to MW and SW radio.

  • @kromem
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    I fondly remember reading a comment in /r/conspiracy on a post claiming a geologic seismic weapon brought down the towers.

    It just tore into the claims, citing all the reasons this was preposterous bordering on batshit crazy.

    And then it said “and your theory doesn’t address the thermite residue” going on to reiterate their wild theory.

    Was very much a “don’t name your gods” moment that summed up the sub - a lot of people in agreement that the truth was out there, but bitterly divided as to what it might actually be.

    As long as they only focused on generic memes of “do your own research” and “you aren’t being told the truth” they were all on the same page. But as soon as they started naming their own truths, it was every theorist for themselves.

  • Random Dent
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    542 months ago

    I once tried to get a conspiracy theory going that Flat Earth was a fake conspiracy started by the government to cover up the real conspiracy - that the moon is flat. That’s why we only ever see one side of it and why we were able to land on it. It didn’t take lol.

    • atocci
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      I just need people to know that they didn’t fake the moon landing, that really happened. They faked the moon. It didn’t exist prior to the 1960s when it was created by the US government in order to move the goalposts in the space race.

      The insider knowledge that there would soon be a moon to land on gave NASA the head start they needed on the Apollo program to finally beat the Soviets, who were thoroughly blindsided by the sudden appearance of the moon.

      • @Agent641
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        2 months ago

        This is bullshit. What we see as the moon is actually the earth, after the reptillians ruined it. What we live on is actually a domed space station orbiting the moon-earth.

        We didnt go to the moon, we went back to the moon.

    • @[email protected]
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      why we were able to land on it.

      This is why you failed. Everyone knows the moon landing was fake and directed by Kubrick.

      • Random Dent
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        32 months ago

        I was hoping to sneak that in, get people balling on one conspiracy theory to get in on another one lol

  • @[email protected]
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    462 months ago

    Jet fuel indeed doesn’t burn hot enough to melt steel. Forging temperature, OTOH, no issue.

    • @[email protected]
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      You don’t understand, steel is either solid or melted. No in-between. No idea what you mean by forging temperature, swords for example are forged by pouring liquid steel to a form, it’s in so many movies!

      /s obviously.

      • Buglefingers
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        I know the /s but I also want to introduce you to amorphous solids! (Because I like them so now you get to read this lol) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amorphous_solid

        Which is essentially a “solid” structure without a proper crystalline structure. This will cause it to move as a liquid at incredibly slow speeds. Such a glass for instance. Extremely old historical glass can be seen to be thicker at the bottom than the top. Not because it was built this way, but because over hundreds of years it has “poured” down [1].

        *This is a simplified explanation and therefore may not be acutely accurate for sake of simplicity

        TL;DR Some solid stuff is really just super slow liquids. I.E. Glass

        [1]: See link in comment reply. Glass is an amorphous solid but sources say that glass pane construction is the cause of thicker bottoms rather than it’s movement over time.

    • @[email protected]
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      Yeah let’s ignore the fact that it loses 70% of its strength at like 800 F, that fact invalidates my meme catchphrase!

  • @[email protected]
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    212 months ago

    When I started reading these comments I didn’t expect them to be full of actual, unironic conspiracy theories. 🤔

    • Ricky Rigatoni
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      242 months ago

      Dinosaurs are a lie created by the wizards to hide the existence of dragons.

      • skulblaka
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        92 months ago

        The wizards hunted dragons to extinction because their wings made good spell components and they want to dodge responsibility for it.

        Its ugly, but it’s true.

        • Jolteon
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          22 months ago

          Then the warlocks killed off all the wizards for taking away their sources of power. It’s why you don’t see magic in use today. The wizards have all been killed off and the warlocks have no entities left to pact with.

  • @[email protected]
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    202 months ago

    Jet fuel doesn’t need extra tanks of mind control agent, they’re already using leaded fuel

    • @[email protected]
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      2 months ago

      lead is in avgas for prop planes, not jet fuel.

      *I guess turboprops also use jet fuel so I should have said small GA planes but you get the point.

      • Liz
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        22 months ago

        We really need to get rid of that.

        • @[email protected]
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          12 months ago

          decomissioning millions (?) of perfectly good planes doesnt seem practical and modding old airplane engines to use different fuel doesnt seem like the safest way to solve this problem.

          how do we even begin?

          • Liz
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            22 months ago

            I thought that you can still sell new props that need leaded fuel, is that not the case?

  • @[email protected]
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    162 months ago

    I like to just be the crazier one. Flat earth? You still believe in an earth, you silly goose egg.

  • @Aceticon
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    122 months ago

    Lies!

    Everybody knows that the terrorists on the planes aimed them at the floor containing the Illuminati outpost and it was the fire from the cooling liquid for the supercomputers used to mind control everybody in New York that melted the support steel structure.

      • @Aceticon
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        Actually, if you want to take what I said seriously, cooling liquids just have a high termal capacity and decent or high termal conductivity as well as being at the liquid stage at the temperature range they’re supposed to work in: a cooling liquid by itself it does not cool anything, it just absorbs heat from the environment on one side of the circuit, carries that heat somewhere else and releases it to the environment there and after that it circulates back to absorb some more heat and so on - the name “cooling liquid” is somewhat deceitful since those liquids work by transporting heat from a hot side to a cold side rather than making things cooler by their mere presence.

        There are plenty of combustible fluids which fit the criteria and could be used as liquid coolants. Whether it would be wise to use a combustible liquid (worse, one which would burn at a high enough temperature to melt, or at least to soften, steel) for cooling computers is an entirelly different matter altogether.

        The idea of a cooling liquid that’s combustible is actually the “it’s absolutelly possible” part of my post and not the “stupid” part.

        • @[email protected]
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          22 months ago

          yeah sorry bud but i’ve done my own research and cooling liquids burn cold, i won’t fall for your industry propaganda.