The Fortean/paranormal/conspiracy thread

[Keith Houchen]

You know how conspiracy theorists can turn anything into a bad thing? Well I’d heard the expression “15 minute cities” a lot and thought they sounded great. 
 

Essentially, the concept is an urban design that means everything you need, shops, amenities, work, parks, bars, healthcare etc, would be no more than 15 minutes drive/cycle/public transport ride from where you live. It promotes sustainable living, less reliance on cars and a more healthy lifestyle. 
 

Because I hate myself more than this forum does, I thought I’d take a look at why people oppose it. Apparently, and this is true because someone said so, you’ll be fined or imprisoned if you go beyond the 15 minute border. “But how will they know you’ve traveled that far” I hear you ask. BECAUSE YOULL BE MICROCHIPPED AND THEY WILL BE TRACKING YOU OF COURSE. MUH FREEEEEDOMMM

The opposition also say how it’s the slippery slope to global communism but they say it like that’s a bad thing. Could be something to keep an eye on, certainly on the social media accounts of the friends and family members you only follow to laugh at them. 

[gmoney]

I've heard someone talk about a 15 minute city conspiracy theory, and couldn't be arsed to look up what these troubled cunts were on about, so thanks for explaining. 

Edited February 19, 2023 by gmoney

[Keith Houchen]

2 minutes ago, gmoney said:

I've heard someone talk about a 15 minute city conspiracy theory, and couldn't be arsed to look up what these troubled cunts were on about, so thanks for explaining. 

This bloke seems to be getting a few pelters with him contradicting himself, and saying what he was protesting about doesn’t seem to be true anymore, but I think it’s a failing of actual information countering deliberate misinformation/outright lies. Some Tory cunt MP has called them a global socialist plot so that got picked up. Still, at least if he was imprisoned it would only be 15 minutes away so he’d get visits. 
 

I might join in the convo and say how I am an inside agent implanted within the government and they’re worried about the hit the economy will take because of tourism vanishing. So you’ll be allowed 2 excursions a year. You just know some fuckers will take it as gospel because they want to believe it. 
 

 

[SuperBacon]

Only in this country could we turn making something that sounds really lovely, into something 'dark and disturbing'

We really are a nation of plebs. 

[HarmonicGenerator]

Is the idea not the same as the old-school high street, where every town had everything you needed and you wouldn’t need to trek anywhere for any of it? You’d have thought that kind of throwback idea would appeal to these types.

[wordsfromlee]

Has anyone else seen that Polish girls Instagram page that seems to be doing the rounds recently who claims to be Madeline McCann? It's quite sad to see in a way because she’s massively clutching at straws as she’s very obviously not her but I think is using it to get some form of exposure and help that she wasn't getting before.

https://www.instagram.com/iammadeleinemccan

[neil is brill]

8 hours ago, wordsfromlee said:

Has anyone else seen that Polish girls Instagram page that seems to be doing the rounds recently who claims to be Madeline McCann? It's quite sad to see in a way because she’s massively clutching at straws as she’s very obviously not her but I think is using it to get some form of exposure and help that she wasn't getting before.

https://www.instagram.com/iammadeleinemccan

Strangely enough, she’s massively clutching at straws claiming that she might be Maddie. However, she does have a more striking resemblance to missing German child Inga Gehricke.

Coincidentally, Gehricke is also an assumed victim of Christian Brueckner, who happens to be the “prime suspect” in the Maddie case.

It’s all a bit weird, but if this girls story is true. She might very well have been abducted as a child. Having moved out of her “parents” home and now in a position of safety to be able to make these claims.

Or, she’s just a nutter looking for her 15 minutes.

[lanky316]

On 2/19/2023 at 4:42 PM, HarmonicGenerator said:

Is the idea not the same as the old-school high street, where every town had everything you needed and you wouldn’t need to trek anywhere for any of it? You’d have thought that kind of throwback idea would appeal to these types.

It's not just the old school high street. The "15 minute city" or whatever they want to call it has been the standard template for civilization since we moved out of caves. The core of any settlement was that you had everything you need so a place would have access to water - usually in the form of a river, steam or coastline - a convenient central point which would eventually become known in every town and city in the world as "market square", from which at least one inn for people travelling through on the river or common travel routes once roads became a thing will be placed with homes around it from then on. The only times this drifted were generally in nomadic or rural societies... where you basically were living off the land/your own livestock and occasionally had to go to nearby towns to offload goods but had all your essentials.

Hearing that we live in "the information age" and how knowledge should be easier to find and share... It's astonishing that some nutter shouts "wake up sheeple!" and it goes crazy on a mad conspiracy with this sort of madness when it's just... basic common sense and something that's happened for millennia is suddenly evil and a sign of The Others doing something to harm us.

Disclaimer - I have lived in a good old fashioned market town all my life and never felt the need to drive because there is a range of jobs and amenities in the area and reasonable public transport links which makes it relatively easy to travel should I need to. I've also been groomed for nearly 40 years by the WEF as part of The Great Plan ready for our big movement to Control You All in 2031.

[BomberPat]

stuff like the 15 Minute City protests show that there's really nothing any government can suggest that won't be seized upon as evidence of a vast conspiracy, and also that there's just whole worlds out there that are basically invisible to us - I try and keep some kind of tabs (though less than I used to) on conspiracy circles, and this one completely took me by surprise, because it's probably all circulating in closed Facebook groups and TikTok and other places I'm not seeing. It's always been the case that a new conspiracy surfaces - usually in the form of a bad MS Paint graphic covered in text - and your immediate response is, "fucking hell, what's this about?", but they seem to gather steam quicker than ever now, to the point that there's hundreds of people out protesting before I was even aware this was an issue.

I've been listening to a podcast called It's Probably Not Aliens, about debunking pseudohistorical and pseudoarchaeological claims by the likes of Ancient Aliens - that's about where my energy is for this sort of thing now; tackling the contemporary stuff is exhausting and depressing, but sticking to claims about the past I can at least have the headspace for. They did a two-parter on David Icke, and one thing they mentioned that he says a lot is "Problem-Reaction-Solution". That's his theory that when the government create, or rally behind, a problem, they engineer a reaction that justifies a solution that they always wanted in the first place, which is always intended to move them closer to their eventual end goal of world government, surveillance culture, depopulation and so on. It's Icke, so he doesn't square the circle about why he thinks that's their end goal when he also claims that we're already in that situation, but ignore that part. So if the problem was Covid, then the reaction is fear, and the solution is to get everyone vaccinated, which is either a means of microchipping everyone for surveillance reasons or killing them for depopulation reasons, depending what side of the bed he got out of this morning.

When you start to look at the world through that lens, that every pronouncement by anyone that's in a position of power as the precursor to a "solution" that furthers those goals, I can usually see how you can spin these things into conspiracy. But even with all that in mind, this lot are fucking idiots.

[Keith Houchen]

The “Counter Conspiracy” if you will, is that fossil fuel and automotive industries are behind the opposition to 15 minute cities as it’s the reliance on them, and thus the profits, that’s being affected. 
 

Cheers for the podcast recommendation, I’ll give that a whirl!

[BomberPat]

2 minutes ago, Keith Houchen said:

 The “Counter Conspiracy” if you will, is that fossil fuel and automotive industries are behind the opposition to 15 minute cities as it’s the reliance on them, and thus the profits, that’s being affected. 

I think there's probably an element of that, though I'm always dubious how much stock to put in claims like that. When the conspiracist right claim that leftist or liberal protests are all funded by George Soros (or any other Jewish hate figure du jour), we rightly mock them and believe that everyone at that protest made their own mind up to be there and made their own conclusions, they weren't getting bussed in and paid by some puppetmaster, and it would be hypocritical to not extend the same courtesy to protests on the right. I know that we're not being quite that literal - Exxon-Mobil aren't going around handing out cash to your man from Banbury to make up a placard and head down the town centre - but I think people are capable of reaching these idiotic conclusions without there being anything in the way of dark money behind them, and that conspiracies are disturbingly good at self-propagating without much external support.

Though, at the same time, it wouldn't surprise me in the least if those companies were quietly paying for adverts in all the right places and giving donations to the politicians who'll give this sort of thing credence. Another problem with conspiracies circulating in fairly closed loops on social media is that it amplifies the lack of empathy that comes with algorithmically curated newsfeeds - if we both see the same clip on TV of a news story about "15 Minute Cities", we might come to different conclusions about what it means, but the source material was the same, so we can at least in theory work backwards and understand how we came to those conclusions, but I can't see the precise configuration of Tweets, recommended videos, and "you might also be interested in..." headlines that make up your newsfeed and influence your thinking. 

The problem with trying to debunk and argue against conspiracy theories is that it quite often involves a lot of drawing connections between disparate points, and you very quickly start to look like you're the one with all the newspaper clippings pinned to your wall, drawing arrows between completely unrelated news stories and ranting and raving. But that gets us back to the article from a few pages back, about how if the conspiracy is genuine you can remove one of those connections and it still functions, while "conspiracy theory" generally relies on every tenuous link needing to be intact for any of it to add up.

 

On the podcast front, it's by a couple of YouTubers, one American and one Canadian, and the usual "one knows the story, the other's going in blind" format, so depends on your mileage for that kind of thing whether you'd enjoy it or not. There's points where I find one of them slightly annoying, or the jokes a bit cringeworthy, but the content's usually good enough.

[Keith Houchen]

Oh I do agree, I couldn’t think of an apposite term so went for “Counter Conspiracy” in quotation marks. I’ve no doubt there is lobbying being done around it. 
 

I do like the one how Just Stop Oil are funded by the Getty family because one of them is on board. The belief is big oil promote them as useful idiots because they aren’t going to get any public support due to their tactics, so oil companies give them patronage to continue looking like idiots to the public. 

[Chris B]

There are a lot of protests about Low Traffic Neighbourhoods in my borough and across London as well - which seems to be fairly closely tied to the 15-min-cities protests. There's an element of understandable frustration to this, but it's been really amped up, and you definitely get some attitudes in there that it's all about taking cars out of the equation for some nefarious control purposes - so anything that aligns with that must be for the same purpose. So climate change must be a lie, because it backs up the removal of cars.

 

16 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

Though, at the same time, it wouldn't surprise me in the least if those companies were quietly paying for adverts in all the right places and giving donations to the politicians who'll give this sort of thing credence. Another problem with conspiracies circulating in fairly closed loops on social media is that it amplifies the lack of empathy that comes with algorithmically curated newsfeeds - if we both see the same clip on TV of a news story about "15 Minute Cities", we might come to different conclusions about what it means, but the source material was the same, so we can at least in theory work backwards and understand how we came to those conclusions, but I can't see the precise configuration of Tweets, recommended videos, and "you might also be interested in..." headlines that make up your newsfeed and influence your thinking. 

A friend of mine talked about how Russia has played the cyber-ops game, and did so in a way that made more sense than most conspiracy theories tend to. The idea wasn't that it all started as a full plan, but was more like spread-betting. They put some money into different approaches to destabilisation and spying, and saw the results in terms of how effective social media was as a dividing tool - and how adding constant petrol to the fire meant that you'd basically end up causing all kinds of internal issues for organisations. So, you end up with astro-turfing all over the place, convincing more and more people that the real enemy is within, and it ends up causing genuine destabilisation and difficulty. To a certain extent, it's weaponising the attitudes that lead people to believe in conspiracy theories, and embedding stuff deep - because it turns out, all a lot of people needed was a gentle shove.

[lanky316]

The "core" of how this is some big evil plan seems to be linked in with how this is in part down to an eco movement. The traction around it is that the implementation around Oxford is one of the many ideas of "an alternative to a standard congestion charge" and while a lot would just say "maybe it'll work sensibly or maybe it won't" and move on. There will be a subsection who have to put it down to the Climate Change Myth pushing an evil agenda to keep us all in our little pens and reduce the population as certain "cities" are left to die. It therefore plays into an already preconceived faction which makes it easier to mobilise. I've also seen it playing into a "class war" element with 15 minute cities being "destroyed" by 12 year olds on tik tok saying how they're forbidden from seeing friends because they live in another "city" and essentially They are trying to avoid mobility and forcing people to only be around "their kind". In it's way, pushing it strongly against various different factions makes it easier for the protest to grow quicker.

While I can look at logic and see the core idea and say "that's always been the basic logic of settlement planning" it's easy to see how in the social media and clickbaity era can play on a lot of preconceptions - especially in a world where we are aware of "bad actors" even if most will ignore the ones on their own "side" - getting people to buy in to the story fairly quickly. It's fascinating to me from a social perspective, something that a lot of us would have touched upon in school and shrugged off or perhaps come across in the myriad of city builder games we've seen over the years is raised in a "new way" and presented in a certain way and suddenly it blows up into a huge movement. While technology has tweaked some of the traditional fortean/paranormal/conspiracy elements away (any "ghost picture" can be written off as photoshopped or tweaked in some way so is almost a dead subject apart from during silly season in the media for example - why bother looking over it like older photos and stories?) it's interesting to be able to look at things and how they change and grow with how easy it is for things to go viral and gain momentum. We might not be spending hours trying to spot the seams in a grainy picture of a guy in a gorilla costume but at least there's still something to look at as things evolve.

[Tommy!]

55 minutes ago, Chris B said:

There are a lot of protests about Low Traffic Neighbourhoods

I'll be honest, I'm dead against it. I mean, people forget that traders need access to Dixons, even if they do say it'll help people in wheelchairs.