It’s a curious thing. I’m not dismissing any of their claims, but I find it a bit interesting that they can so easily uncover everything that the government doesn’t want you to know when it’s hidden for a reason.

  • FuglyDuck@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    depends on the conspiracy theory.

    real conspiracies; like MK-Ultra, we find out through leaks, declassification and similar sources.

    The loony-bin conspiracy theories like “moon landing hoax” (any one with a ham radio could track the apollo CSM as it went to the moon, there’s no way to hide such a trip. there’s really no way to fake those signals.) are mostly sourced from bullshit.

    another great example of this is the Birds Aren’t Real conspiracy. Which… uh… started as satire. there’s plenty of ways they get started, but they all boil down to bullshit.

      • FuglyDuck@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        the people they were making fun of… demonstrated Poe’s Law.

        in any case… I give you this…

        it’s a drone used for wildlife conservation so as to not spook whatever they’re trying to track; too much.

        • meco03211@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          That doesn’t seem like a conspiracy. That looks like a potential legitimate bit of tech and for that purpose. Have anything a little more convincing?

    • CashewNut 🏴󠁢󠁥󠁧󠁿@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Conspiracy theories can be revealed to be true. They’re not all bullshit.

      In the 90s I was in the rabbit hole about Echelon and had a healthy paranoia about my privacy.

      So when Snowden dropped the leaks about mass government surveillance I wasn’t surprised at all. I assumed everyone knew. But nope - apparently Echelon was a “conspiracy theory” and so was all the Snowden stuff until - it wasn’t.

      That’s my personal experience but there’s others like MKUltra.

      • vzq@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        9 months ago

        Echelon was not so much a conspiracy theory as a sad game of telephone where increasingly disturbed people projected their increasingly distorted paranoias onto an actual thing.

        Same with HAARP. Yes, it as exists. No, It does not do that. Or that. Or even that.

        • mods_are_assholes@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          I was in a rxxit thread with some wahoo who INSISTED that ALL global warming was caused by HAARP deliberately to somehow benefit the U.S.

          I linked a wolfram alpha calc about how much energy it would take to raise the entire atmosphere 1.2 degrees.

          It was equivalent to several billion Tsar Bombs.

          Posted the evidence, stated that 'HAARP physically couldn’t push that amount of energy into the atmosphere even if it was pumping out the physical max EM that the array could handle, every day, since the day it was first brought online. It wouldn’t even be 1/2,000,000th of a tsar bomb total.

          Their response “Well, that’s your opinion.”

          And then 2 months later rxxit banned me for saying ‘punching nazis is a moral good’ and now the thread is lost forever.

          • vzq@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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            9 months ago

            The power comes from the sun. HAARP modulates the magnetic flux from the sun like the base of a giant transistor.

            At least that’s what my local conspiracy theorist told me when I raised the same point. It’s complete bunk of course, but it sounds plausible enough for anyone who is not an atmospheric scientist. Not any less plausible to the average wing nut than the whole story about carbon dioxide emission spectra in the infrared and global warming anyway. There is science words in there.

    • GBU_28@lemm.ee
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      9 months ago

      He’s indicating he’s not looking to get in on any particular topic, not stating support or disagreement with anything

  • Alexstarfire@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    Based on World of Tanks I think all you have to do is make a successful game and they’ll just hand it over willingly.

  • Transporter Room 3@startrek.website
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    9 months ago

    People seem to be forgetting that not all conspiracy theories or theorists are crazy.

    Sometimes it turns out to be true. Just ask MKULTRA and Iran-contra.

    But yeah, 99.997% of them are fake and made up by one or a few people, and get repeated ad nauseum

    • Yeller_king@reddthat.com
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      9 months ago

      Some of them are true, but it’s impossible to know which ones until you get actual non-batshit evidence which is why it’s not reasonable to believe any of them.

      But if you want to have a favorite one just for fun, I think that’s ok.

      • Lemming421@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        But if you want to have a favorite one just for fun, I think that’s ok.

        Mine is probably the ‘NASA wanted to fake the moon landings, so they got Kubrick in to direct. But he was such a perfectionist, he insisted on filming on location’ one.

      • Dr_Satan@lemm.ee
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        9 months ago

        You have to do some careful research and reasoning. Arrive at your conclusions the hard way.

        But then they call you crazy.

    • Tattorack@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Texas sharpshooter fallacy.

      Problem is that conspiracy theorists believe that the theories that have actually been proven true are fake and meant to throw people off from the real truth.

    • Dkarma@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Those weren’t conspiracies. The government just covered them up. Truths are never conspiracy…it’s kind of the definition.

      • otp@sh.itjust.works
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        9 months ago

        Truths are never conspiracy…it’s kind of the definition.

        No, it’s not.

        conspiracy

        noun

        a secret plan by a group to do something unlawful or harmful

      • Pegajace@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        No, a conspiracy is when people get together and conspire, i.e. they develop a secret plan of action for nefarious purposes. In the strictest sense, the term “conspiracy theory” just means that you’re theorizing that some people have secretly planned to do something. If you theorize that some wrongdoers have developed or enacted a secret plan, and it later turns out your suspicion was correct, then by definition you had a true conspiracy theory.

  • NevermindNoMind@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    As a listener of Knowledge Fight, and thus Alex Jones Infowars, part of his explanation has something to do with god and the literal devil and (I swear) intergalactic contract law. Something about the globalists can only get away with their depopulation plans if they provide warning first, and thus we all accept the contract or something, so that’s why the globalists leave clues in plain site. Cause they have to, cause intergalactic contract law.

    People who meme “the frogs are gay” are truly only scratching the surface of how insane and dangerous that guy and his followers are.

  • IndiBrony@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    Heavy misinterpretation of publicly available information is one.

    Another reason is more social. I find a lot of these people want to feel important or smart by “knowing” something that others don’t.

    A lot of these people will jump on the bandwagon of whatever is said by fellow conspricists they’re watching on YouTube.

    They also learn the “gotcha” questions which allow them to fall into the rabbit hole in the first place.

    Yes, Kent Hovind, a dog will only produce another dog, but that doesn’t disprove evolution!

    No, Eric Dubay, I can’t see the curvature of the Earth from an aeroplane, but that doesn’t mean the Earth is a fucking pancake!

    Another curious thing is how a disproportionate number of conspricists are religious. I can’t speak for other religions, but so many Christians will invoke the Bible into their arguments.

    Maybe it’s partly a sunk cost fallacy on their part. Spending so much of their youth believing complete fiction that it’s easier to deny reality than accept their Bible isn’t an accurate depiction of historical events.

    • agent_flounder@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Believing in conspiracy and religion requires superstitious thinking instead of thinking scientifically and skeptically.

      We’ve all seen popular entertainment.where the protagonist connects seemingly unrelated clues to uncover the conspiracy (of course they’re always proven to be right by the end of the show 🙄)

      These unrelated clues could potentially be explained by a wild conspiracy. But they can always be explained in a hundred other, simpler, more plausible ways.

      Superstitious thinking aims to seek out any data to prove a theory… while throws away any data that doesn’t.

      Scientific thinking looks for the best theory to explain all the data and throws away those that don’t fit well.

  • Tattorack@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    As a dude with conspiracy theorist parents:

    From “trusted sources”.

    Basically what that means is:

    Any video or article that writes about stuff that they generally already believe in. My mom and dad already believe Bill Gates is evil and there exists a shadow state, so anything that so much as mentions these things are trusted almost immediately, regardless of how stupid it sounds.

    Any video or article that is essentially against anything written in any news source. You can make a good prediction about what my parents will believe in by following global events and thinking the exact opposite.

    Any video or article that claims to have evidence through loosely connected statements, often no connection at all, and bonus if it features basic, publicly available financial records (follow the money).

  • pearable
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    9 months ago

    One thing Alex Jones does is parrot things a caller said several episodes ago. He’ll vaguely talk about sources, shuffle some paper around for dramatic effect and claim that nobody died at Sandy Hook.

    Lots of other folks do a similar thing. They will say something innocuous that some of their audience will construe to be rightwing or part of a conspiracy and praise them for it. From there they get pulled more and more into whatever ideology as their audience pills them harder and harder.

    Plenty of Q anon folks claim movies and TV have secret messages in them. There are a bunch of theories about why fiction is partially true. One is, all these stories are priming the population for social control. Cultiral programming of some sort.

    Another is the Bible. The flat earth conspiracy theory is based on a particularly literal reading of the Bible. The writers of the Torah probably believed in a flat earth. This isn’t surprising given their lack of sea faring history, most folks with large boats realize the earth isn’t flat because the bottom of the boat disappears first. Plenty of flat earthers believe that society is trying to hide that fact so we don’t realize we live in a divinely created snow globe. From there they concoct theories on how such a world could exist.

  • afraid_of_zombies@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    Because the big bad is always all too powerful and all too weak at the same time. Turns out werewolfs are brought down by silver bullets, vampires have to sleep in a coffin and can get stabbed, demons can’t go past a ring of power, aliens invaders with bacteria. No other arrangement will work. If the enemy is all powerful they just take over. If they are all weak no one cares about them. Only the exact combination of threatening but easy to defeat allows drama to exist.

    So of course the government is smart enough to pull off incredible fears of social manipulation but not smart enough to hide it from some podcaster “just asking questions”. No other arrangement will work. If the government is always dumb they can’t do a conspiracy, if they are always smart they can pull it off and no one will know. Non-working arrangements don’t get propagated and their lines die off, the working arrangements infect new hosts and spreads.

  • dragontamer@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    In Qanons case, Q gave them the info and was leaking it.

    Allegedly anyway. It’s not very hard to say you have an inside man.

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    9 months ago

    Because “I’m the smart one that can see through the lies” - conspiracy theorists almost always have delusions of grandeur.

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    9 months ago

    One of the important aspects that I haven’t seen mentioned yet is a sense of community. I’m currently in a online censorship country so can’t link it, but the ABC in Australia had a good podcast around QAnon.
    Effectively there’s people who feel a lack of community/companionship locally and seek this out online.

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    9 months ago

    Leaks?

    Or NSA beaming info into your brain as you are a subject of a top secret test and can now directly commune with aliens

    • gregorum@lemm.ee
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      9 months ago

      turns out all those 5G vaccine chips were good for something after all.

      thanks bill gates!

    • evidences@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      I just put “bush did 9/11” and “Wendy’s 5 for 5 dollar meal is back” into a gematria calculator and they equal each other. I don’t know what this means but it’s fucking HUGE!!