The Fortean/paranormal/conspiracy thread

[BomberPat]

18 minutes ago, Keith Houchen said:

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. 

When Insulate Britain were first becoming a thing, I couldn't shake the feeling that there was something like that going on. It's probably my most genuinely conspiratorial belief of the last few years, though I don't really think it any more. They seemed to come out of nowhere, and suddenly get a ton of press, yet every time their top bloke was interviewed on TV he came across as a complete idiot, and caught out in some hypocrisy or other. If you wouldn't to create a phony protest group to piss people off and undermine support for any similar group, you couldn't have done a better job. 

I've now seen enough of the posher side of South London's Extinction Rebellion middle class mums and trust-fund kids to realise that, no, most of them are just that rubbish.

Though, again, if it were proven tomorrow that oil companies are bunging them a few quid, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised. Though oil companies being involved in environmental movements shouldn't be surprising - they're not going to just cease to exist once we move away from oil, they're going to want to have significant investment and control over green tech to maintain their market position. It was a pretty commonplace left-wing conspiracy position 20+ years ago that the big oil companies had already perfected green energy, but were just sitting on it until oil ceased to be profitable. 

14 minutes ago, Chris B said:

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.

 

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.

There's a lot of flyers around LTN stuff near me too. I don't drive, so never give it much attention. There are valid reasons to oppose them, though - if you're displacing traffic from one place, it has to go somewhere, and that somewhere is going to be a more deprived area, and then there's always understandable complaints from tradesmen who need vehicles for work and see this sort of thing as unfairly disadvantaging them, and I don't know enough about it to know how fair those criticisms are. But then there are the others who tie it into something bigger and more nefarious, particularly as the introduction of them really amped up during Covid, so at a time when people already inclined to see government conspiracy had ample evidence for it.

I think Covid and lockdowns really fucked us in this regard. Conspiracy theories have been around forever, and had gradually been getting worse for years, but Covid brought out the worst in it, and saw them spread worse than I've ever seen before, and usually just from a point of uncritical selfishness; for example, a bloke I know started out lockdown complaining that the gyms weren't allowed to open, making all kinds of arguments about how and why they could be opened safely. That was all he wanted - to be able to go to the gym. When those arguments didn't work, he started arguing about gyms being good for people's mental health and lockdown being bad for it. From there, to broader anti-lockdown conspiracies, and next to believing that the whole thing was a hoax. Because it stopped him from doing what he wanted, and he just uncritically swallowed every argument that he felt could get him closer to doing that thing. I saw the same among DJs and musicians - they wanted to be playing live, they couldn't be, and the more apparent that became, the more inclined they were to believe anything that supported their sense that they specifically were being hard done by. I suppose there is a counter-narrative to be made of conspiracies bringing people together during a time of national trauma, as a kind of perversion of collective action and community spirit, but in every case I saw where I could chart how people got to those beliefs, it grew out of a self-centred frustration that they couldn't get what they wanted.

I think where people went wrong was not meaningfully telling these people why they were wrong. We either ignored them, called them idiots, or assumed that the information just vaguely being out there in the ether was enough to educate people. But when people are already predisposed to believe that scientists are either making it up as they go along, or part of a vast cover-up, then things like symptoms changing over time, politicians saying they wouldn't lockdown one week then doing it the next, and over-promising on what things like masks or (in the short-term) vaccination programmes could achieve, all looked like shifting goalposts.

Throw in that rich and powerful people were getting away with still going to parties and hanging out together, and it's all fuel to the fire. It's the same thing with climate change - when all the people telling you to take action to prevent climate change are flying around on private jets, I can see how you can arrive at the conclusion that they don't believe what they're saying, and therefore nor should we. So much of conspiracy belief relies on the assumption that the rich and powerful are immoral hypocrites sheltered from the consequences of their actions, and irredeemably corrupt. And you know what? They're not wrong. Where they're wrong is assuming that there's a grand plan dictating that corruption, or assuming that their hypocrisy is evidence of any deeper truth. 

Failing to meaningfully engage with that kind of conspiracy gets us into real issues. If there are, even on a small scale, health risks associated with Covid vaccines, the correct approach isn't to just handwave it away. If young people are suffering heart problems at higher levels than usual (this is a really common refrain about young athletes having heart attacks - it's overstated, and likely overreported, but I don't actually know the figures compared to usual baselines), then the solution isn't just to pretend there's no issue, but to address why there might be one - because at the moment, the Covid conspiracists are the only ones with a narrative there. When David Icke has been saying for decades, and every corner of American conspiracism that coalesced into QAnon has been saying, that the rich and powerful are all paedophile sex criminals, then the likes of Jeffrey Epstein's flight logs and Project Yewtree make a lot of them feel that they were right all along, about everything. The counter-narrative shouldn't be that these things don't happen, but an examination of the power dynamics that allow them to happen, and what can be done to prevent that, because again, it's a matter of endemic corruption and abuse, not of organised, ritualistic conspiracy. 

 

I'm touching on way too many topics here, but I'm reminded of stuff that Martin Gardner and James Randi used to write about how scientists, academics, and other intelligent people have been fooled by conmen and pseudo-scientists for decades. It's because by approaching things scientifically, they assume their subjects are behaving in the same way, and presenting their findings in good faith. There's no expectation that someone would be actively trying to mislead them. So when it came to things like psychic ability, psychologists were fooled, but the likes of Randi and Gardner, who both understood stage magic and sleight of hand, were able to see the tricks easily. That's how the mainstream should be dealing with conspiracy theorists - not either ignoring them or arguing their points as if they're being made in bad faith, but picking apart the tricks and the lies and the obfuscation. Some of that can be by highlighting their source of funding and the company that they keep, and connections to Russian troll and bot farms was a big part of that in recent years, but that only goes so far - the (wholly understandable) reason why a lot of the American right kicked back so strongly against suggestions that the Trump campaign was tied to Russian interests was that they could all say, quite honestly, "well, no Russian told me how to vote". But then, in trying to explain the history and the power dynamics at play, we're back to the point where we sound like the ranting, raving conspiracy nutters.

I think the point on destabilisation is key, though. I don't think Russian (and other agents were at play - it's not just Russia, and I'm convinced that in decades to come, the likes of Cambridge Analytica will be exposed as far bigger players in the politics of the last two decades than we understand them as now, but I'll stick to Russia here) interests were in getting one party or one candidate chosen, so much as spreading distrust, disinformation and chaos, so that trust in the various pillars of objective truth in our society were eroded. But I also think that we've been doing a pretty good job of that ourselves without their help. One of the problems - and this is a bigger concern in America than the UK - of assuming Russian, or increasingly Chinese, influence behind any objectionable political movement or action is that it removes responsibility from the countless homegrown far-right and conspiracist movements that don't need any encouragement from a shady Russian bot farm. America has never needed much help in fostering fascism. 

[Egg Shen]

this just popped up in my twitter feed, any thoughts on this? Sky News are covering it too.

The top comment on the tweet potentially spoils of the fun but I thought it was still worth posting.

 

Edited February 22, 2023 by Egg Shen

[Keith Houchen]

It’s a weight used to moor buoys to stop them drifting. Or an alt right satellite used to lure boys to stop them grifting. 

[gmoney]

That's a decoy moon. 

[BomberPat]

On 2/22/2023 at 11:23 AM, gmoney said:

That's a decoy moon. 

I bought this in our local second-hand bookshop recently, and started reading it yesterday:

 

About halfway through, and it's a lot of the usual guff about ancient civilisations being far more "advanced" than we appreciate, and assuming a network of communication that didn't exist. They do the classic grifter thing of making two points next to each other so that you assume that there must be a connection, and it's only when you go back and read it over again that you realise they didn't actually make one. 

Their main arguments so far is built around lots of guff about levels of mathematical accuracy and coincidence, which largely relies on the megalithic yard (probably not a thing), and lots of rounding of numbers, or multiplying in one place while dividing another, so that the result is always amazingly accurate, without stopping to think that if you just keep doing different sums until you get the results you want, you're always going to get the results you want, especially when you're happy to fudge the numbers and accept "close enough" as evidence when you're making an argument for something that's allegedly millimetre-accurate. It's basically numerology disguised as engineering - it reminds me of something going around Twitter recently, about how the longitude and latitude of the Great Pyramid of Giza is almost exactly the same as the speed of light in metres per second, and how that can't possibly be a coincidence. For it to not be a coincidence, the Ancient Egyptians would have to understand not just the speed of light, but the concepts of metres and seconds, which aren't measurements they'd have used, and not just have an understanding of longitude and latitude, but to have calculated the position of the pyramid using Greenwich as their frame of reference, which would have been a bloody strange choice in 2500 and some BCE. Also, the number isn't exactly the same, it's another "close enough". And why metres per second and not miles per hour or miles per second, or any other measurement? Again, if you throw numbers together in every possible combination until you get a significant result, you'll always get a significant result.

After that, a lot of it comes down to just not understanding the science, or the usual "renegade expert" arguments that scientists reject anything that doesn't fit their world-view, along with some rambling about "politically correct academia".

A large part of their argument is around things that they consider extremely unlikely - that it's the gravitational pull of the Moon that likely keeps Earth habitable for advanced life, that the distance between the Earth, the Moon, and the Sun means that the latter two match up perfectly during a solar eclipse (they don't), and so on. That line of reasoning essentially boils down to "this is very unlikely, so it can't have happened" (while criticising scientists repeatedly for making the same kind of deductions). I would have thought that the unlikeliness of of it all is fairly self-evident, from the fact that we haven't encountered any other planets capable of supporting life, so it obviously is very unlikely, yet has happened regardless, and that while that's scientifically interesting, it doesn't cry out for any more complex or esoteric explanation than that.

 

I've yet to get to the second half dealing with WHO BUILT THE MOON and why, and I'm hoping that they go off the deep end there, because so far it's all been pretty dull for a book with a bonkers proposition. The authors mostly deal in freemason conspiracy and "ancient advanced civilisation" nonsense, after all. 

[CavemanLynn]

28 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

The authors mostly deal in freemason conspiracy and "ancient advanced civilisation" nonsense, after all. 

That's a shame. I really enjoyed the Hiram Key (my dad got it, as he spent some time as a local Grand Master), and especially liked their linguistic approach to reading the scriptures. The two-Christ theory and the humanising of the plight that grounding all the "zombie wizard" bollocks in metaphor does make for a much more interesting story than the actual Bible.

Edited February 27, 2023 by CavemanLynn

[BomberPat]

I don't know enough about Biblical history to know how much of the Hiram Key is accurate or worthwhile, but it's a better read than this one even if it's all speculative. From what I remember, it does rely on a lot of cherry-picking bits that support their argument and ignoring what doesn't - it's similar to the magical numerology I talked about earlier; you can "prove" almost anything in historical texts when you get to freely decide which parts you're going to interpret literally and which as allegory, and just arrange them all in whatever means best suits your hypothesis.

I think Knight and Butler probably believe the conclusions they reached, and don't recognise the flaws in their methodology, and get a bit carried away with it all. I think there's an innocence to that which stops me being angry at them, the way I would at the likes of Von Daniken that are just shameless grifters. 

[BomberPat]

Their conclusion is that the Moon was built by humans who travelled back in time, building the moon to ensure that the Earth developed correctly to the point that humans could evolve. They acknowledge that there's a paradox, and their response is basically "lol, nah". As insane as it is boring.

[David]

On 2/19/2023 at 3:39 PM, Keith Houchen said:

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

I've read similar, but the "tracking device" was specified to be electric cars that could be programmed to stop working when you leave a certain area, which is at least somewhat plausible I guess. Although that wouldn't stop you physically leaving, it would just stop your car from leaving.

Regardless, it's another reason for me to continue cutting about in my Capri and sticking two fingers up at that Elon Musk prick, so I'm onboard.

[BomberPat]

On 2/19/2023 at 3:39 PM, Keith Houchen said:

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. 

There's a decent summary of 15 Minute Cities in The Skeptic:

https://www.skeptic.org.uk/2023/03/15-minute-cities-the-latest-big-bad-of-the-conspiracy-theory-ecosystem/

It's effectively the usual climate change denialist nutjobs mixed with Sovereign Citizen types, but making use of the networks and effective mass organising of Covid conspiracists and anti-vaxxers.

[Loki]

It’s an old fashioned UFO story!

https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/world-news/non-human-spacecraft-recovered-us-30158888.amp

I always used to love these stories, where a highly credible US military person decided to reveal all the secrets about aliens, and the story would rattle around for months until inevitably no evidence appeared.

There was a guy called Bob Dean who used to talk at ufo conventions who was super eloquent and plausible.  Loved listening to his talks.

 Are these people cranks or part of ongoing disinfo? What motivates someone to put themselves out there like this?

@Astro Hollywood would have loved this one, wherever he is now.

[BomberPat]

2 hours ago, Loki said:

 Are these people cranks or part of ongoing disinfo? What motivates someone to put themselves out there like this?

I think cranks, really. For all fringe beliefs, but massively in UFO circles, any suggestion of credibility - especially a military or government position - is a huge draw, and they'll get platformed for it. But you have to remember that an important job, or expertise in one area, is no guarantee of rational thought or belief in another - a bloke in the military or the government is just as susceptible to believe bullshit as anyone else, and to find evidence for their beliefs wherever they look, because the belief comes first.

Then there's the pattern you see with a lot of UFO types of being embraced by a wider community, making money on speaking circuits spreading their story, and then the urge - conscious or otherwise - to keep adding new details to your story, or finding new "evidence", else the community moves on and the money dries up.

[Loki]

Another round of Ancient Alien Mummies, this time being presented to Congress in Mexico - 

https://www.marca.com/en/lifestyle/world-news/2023/09/13/65011a37ca4741e5678b4580.html

That's quality craftsmanship!

 

[BomberPat]

These stories usually end up being pretty bleak. There have been cases of hoaxers - and the guy in this story has been involved previously - using actual Peruvian mummies, and potentially altering and disfiguring them to look more "alien". It's grotesque, really. 

 

Edited September 13, 2023 by BomberPat

[Merzbow]

Looks like he's getting a blowie..