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I don’t really like conspiracy theories in general. But it the Panama Papers and Epstein files have taught me anything is that there are indeed a bunch of nefarious conspiracies going on.
List of proven conspiracies
MK Ultra is the stand out for me. I thought it was Hollywood fiction.
Faking the moon landing and flat eartherism are conspiracy theories.
Acknowledging that the global elite are depraved pedophiles who create global catastrophes just to profit off the chaos and misery, just means you accept reality.
If anything, the Epstein emails showed me that I wasn't cynical enough... and I thought I was pretty cynical.
The annoying thing is conspiracy just means a multiple people orchestrating crimes together, conspiring with each other.
But the word conspiracy also means a fake conspiracy, which is a real "inflammable means flammable" type situation.
I've often heard that the delegitamizing of the idea of conspiracies is itself a conspiracy to get people to think conspiracies don't happen, which I fully believe.
The cover up of the files is what a real conspiracy looks like. There is overwhelming evidence that powerful people are intentionally suppressing.
No need to make wild conspiracy theories when literally everything about this is a fucking conspiracy.
Seriously, though, there's a key difference: Conspiracy theories require an ever-growing legion of circumstances and co-conspirators to make them work. Like for chemtrails. A secretive government plot to poison us with chemicals sprayed from airliners? Seems simple, but: Pilots have to be in on it. Airline mechanics have to be in on it. Chemical companies have to be in on it. There has to be a transport network and storage facilities, so truck drivers have to be in on it. The tanks have to be loaded onto aircraft, so airport workers have to be in on it. Et cetera.
Real conspiracies, by contrast, reduce down to simpler explanations. You can take moving parts away, and it still makes sense. Tax havens? Shell corporations? Corrupt prosecutors? Corrupt courts? Sex trafficking? Pedophiles? That's lots of specifics that all point to one thing: Rich and powerful assholes doing rich and powerful asshole things because nobody can stop them.
The theories also get misrepresented. One could argue that Cloud seeding and other geo engineering proves the chemtrail theory to be correct.
Conspiracy theories are not inherently incorrect. Most of them are, but as proven by the Epstein files and others, some conspiracy theories are true. Just because there was an actual conspiracy doesn't mean that there wasn't a conspiracy theory.
Yup, I believe that's what I said, with some thoughts on how to tell the difference.
I mean, if you can put an additive in the fuel that doesn’t burn up in the engine, you could do something like this. Only the oil companies need to know. Workers and mechanics can be told it’s something else, a stabilizer or something.
It’d have to be a simple element or a very strongly bonded molecule, which means its application would be extraordinarily limited. So no, it’s probably not useful enough to ever have been pursued.
Well, oil companies did put a poisonous additive in fuel for decades, but they did it right out in the open. They advertised it on gas station signs, and said it was for anti-knock purposes. They still put it in some general aviation fuel. Why should we presume they'd have to do it secretly?
They still do the additives they put in fuel are still toxic, there is poison in like everything we use. They put pfas on food packaging for god's sake. There is pesticide on your food, in your food. They spray electronics with carcinogen, they impregnate furniture with carcinogenic flame retardants (that don't work to slow fires,) and the list goes on.
It's way worse than you think. They don't have to make a grand secret conspiracy we all trust they wouldn't do mass harm stuff and they do.
The NSA was indeed spying on Americans, that was a conspiracy. Plastic recycling is largely a scam, that was a conspiracy. Its generally accepted now that Covid-19 came from a chinese lab, that was a conspiracy. It is still very controversial with conflicting evidence on both sides.
As far as I'm aware the earth isn't flat but some conspiracies do reflect the truth. The covid release may not have been intentional like some theories propose but its not impossible it came from a lab.
Edit: here is a link to Ken Lacorte's research into the covid-19 lab theory and he tends to be well researched and trustworthy.
The former...Fox News executive? Who killed the Trump-Stormy story before the 2016 election... uhhh.. yeah im not fucking trusting that dude.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_LaCorte#Alleged_Fox_News_Trump_cover-up
That document is laughable. In only the first few paragraphs, I ran across reliable indicators of pseudoscience scams, like asserting that there's some "scientific establishment" that he's up against. Not a very powerful mafia then, because there are tons of dipshits pushing the lab leak hypothesis. Then, there's the Absence of Evidence Fallacy. (It is not evidence of absence.) That's as far as I got.
Go ahead and call me closed-minded, but c'mon, Ken should put his best evidence up front. If he has it, which I doubt. Especially when the alternative explanation is so damn plausible: The Wuhan Institute for Virology was put in Wuhan to study the viruses in local wildlife because Chinese authorities recognized the potential for human transmission, and so they built a lab to study the viruses. And that's why the lab would've had the virus in it. Maybe it did have a leak, and some infections came from there, but biological systems are messy and imprecise; the virus probably jumped to humans many, many times over many years, and set up the conditions for a pandemic.
Consider the HIV/AIDS epidemic in North America. We used to think that it all traced back to Patient 0, a flight attendant who liked to get busy around the world. Then, researchers found the virus in stored blood samples going back to the 1950's. The virus had been in the human population for decades before blowing up.
Reality is often complex, without intuitively-clear lines of cause and effect. The abstract thinking needed to understand it is beyond many people, so they latch on to simple, obvious, and wrong explanations, like the lab leak theory.
propublica looked at the lab leak evidence and it is pretty likely that was it. The senate collected a lot of the information, which has better investigative powers than a news organization, but they got their hands on a lot of email from the wuhan and virology people and the national health and the like and the messaging all but said it got away from them there.
Indeed, it seems plausible. The background of my comment is that the lab-leak dipshits are the ones who push the idea with a subtext implying that the lab created the virus, or cultivated it for bioweapon purposes. But genetic studies show that it clearly came from wild animal populations, so I very strongly doubt the lab was the first and only introduction into the human population.
The idea is not science fiction Leaked Grant Proposal Details High-Risk Coronavirus Research.
The question is whether or not this project (or something similar) was moved to China to avoid government oversight.
A lot of the loudest lab leakers were arguing in bad faith and just incidentally might have been right somewhat I think. The origin of the virus almost certainly was from the exotic animal trade, which remains an existential threat to health, as it brings endangered animals to extinction for cures that don't work, and dredges up new viruses.
That said, we should leave well enough alone after we find these things. These gain of function tests of viruses are reckless even with proper lab security. The sad truth of the matter however, is that for military purposes we dig up these viruses and find ways to weaponize them for doomsday viruses, along with vaccines.
One would think we already have doomsday covered but it's like collecting billions of dollars it's never enough I guess.
I as well heard the lab leak proponents talking about proof it's been weaponized, and read that's incorrect, idk all the details I stopped following it after a while. But the lab leak people are out of their minds, a good share of them, the joe rogans of the group are cynical and delusional manipulators with an axe to grind to be sure. But we should use this as a wake up call to put more of a leash on bio weapons programs, even if the escaped virus here was not that, half the reason it was brought to the lab from some unfortunate pangolin in the first place was the desire for new bio weapons.
We aren't in need of new doomsday weapons we have plenty already. And we need to focus more on lab security of all such projects, here in the US we have gotten lucky with communicable diseases escaping bio controlled facilities as well. People assume we run secure operations and it's not necessarily true unfortunately.
Also consider that COVID-19 is just “SARS 2”, and we know that coronaviruses exist in nature already and this ain’t the first time one has mutated this way…Occam’s razor is that a lab wasn’t needed for this to happen.
We bungled the detection/response and it spread. Largely due to misinformation and inaction of authorities.
Simple as.
Alleged accusations. Its the reporters word against his. Maybe it was for trump, maybe the evidence wasn't strong enough and Lacorte wanted to avoid a Trump lawsuit. You could argue that is a conspiracy in itself.
And discrediting the Ken Lacorte portion on my comment, the other 2 conspiracies are still valid. My point is we cannot dismiss information just because it is labeled as a conspiracy. For example, if trump rigs the midterms and wins, he will very likely call accusations of his rigging a "leftist conspiracy." The truth is often somewhere between the conspiracy and the narrative.
I'm not sure you know what that word means. Did the accusations happen or not?
The problem is that “conspiracy” has been diluted culturally to mean silly far-fetched ideas. Propaganda can have that effect.
Exactly. A conspiracy theory isn't by definition wrong. It may or may not be wrong. However, our media and common parlance has made it so that many people believe that there's no such thing as a real conspiracy.
Yes the NSA illegally spies on whoever they want, yes plastic recycling is a PR stunt by the plastics industry.
However no, the lab leak theory of covid 19 remains unsubstantiated nonsense pedalled mostly by china-hawks in the US who think we have a slightly better chance of winning if we start ww3 now.
Propublica did a thing on it and it convinced me.