Your Conspiracy Theory Free Pass

[King Mal the Glorious]

Entirely plausible, I've seen Scanners.

[wordsfromlee]

Not exactly a conspiracy theory, but remember when the actor Terrence Howard said that he’d created a logic language that proved that 1x1=2?

I remember reading through his reasoning for it and for a split second completely getting it and understand his thought. Then I read through it again and it was all waffle. It was like looking at a Magic Eye picture and it clicking, then disappearing before you could work out that it was. 

[air_raid]

Ultimate Warrior died and the bloke that turned up at Mania VIII was somebody else. FIGHT ME.

[simonworden]

Probably not the strangest one. I'm convinced governments and large corporations use our phone mics and cameras to record our audio and eye movements to know exactly what makes us tick, guage our opinions, interests and on the more sinister level work out how tame a population is about a matter and if they need placating. 

Plenty of times I've had a conversation about something and get adds for it which goes beyond coincidence. But it's the government using monitoring equipment and AI to guage a countries opinion. To me it's why governments feel free to fuck over the population so happily these days as they can monitor and placate people. If they genuinely saw a red flag such as massive riots or civil war they would pivot. To me that's not going to happen when the tech says "just up the tik tok" , "let the UK get a bit further in the world cup" or "have Sami win the belt". 

 

[Carbomb]

11 hours ago, Nostalgia Nonce said:

9/11 was allowed to happen in order to stir up public support for an invasion of Iraq.

Somewhere in the back of my mind I'm sure I saw something about how declassified documents showed that the FBI/NSA/similar knew in advance about the 1993 bombing of the WTC, and allowed it to happen as they felt the risk to life was justifiable in relation to the intelligence they'd continue to gain from the perpetrators. 

When 9/11 came round, they again allowed it to happen because they could use it to justify invading Iraq, under the guise of it being retaliation. They figured a plane hitting the Tower would be similar to when a plane crashed into the Empire State Building. A monumental (in the literal sense of the word) amount of damage, a few dozen deaths, and fuel for the cause.

Unfortunately, they underestimated the amount of death and destruction that occurred. This is why when George Bush was given the news at the school he was visiting, his reaction was more in line with someone thinking "What have I done?".

Maybe it was just because it wasn't as mental as the hologram planes hiding missiles, lasers from space, controlled demolition, or those that think the towers are still there and are being hidden in some way, but it's not implausible.

It's perfectly plausible, as there's already well-established precedent that has been made public, i.e. Churchill allowing Coventry to be bombed without any evacuation to keep the Germans thinking the allies hadn't cracked Enigma yet.

Also, when you take into account that the US' intelligence services have their tentacles in almost all parts of the world, the shit the US has perpetrated around the world both openly and covertly (and later admitting to it or being exposed has having done it), and also how much the US had to do specifically with the rise of the Taliban, Bin Laden, and Al Qaeda, it's well within reason to suspect that the story the world was given via the news about 9/11 wasn't the whole one.

That's not to say I specifically think they deliberately allowed 9/11 to happen, or that there really was anything more to it than what we saw. Let's just say that, if that, or any other Machiavellian machinations came to light about it in later years, my reaction would be an utter lack of surprise.

EDIT: Actually, on reflection, if there was anything that would surprise me, it would be the "inside job"/holograms one. That one seems like total bollocks.

Edited January 10, 2023 by Carbomb

[WyattSheepMask]

11 hours ago, Nostalgia Nonce said:

9/11 was allowed to happen in order to stir up public support for an invasion of Iraq.

Somewhere in the back of my mind I'm sure I saw something about how declassified documents showed that the FBI/NSA/similar knew in advance about the 1993 bombing of the WTC, and allowed it to happen as they felt the risk to life was justifiable in relation to the intelligence they'd continue to gain from the perpetrators. 

When 9/11 came round, they again allowed it to happen because they could use it to justify invading Iraq, under the guise of it being retaliation. They figured a plane hitting the Tower would be similar to when a plane crashed into the Empire State Building. A monumental (in the literal sense of the word) amount of damage, a few dozen deaths, and fuel for the cause.

Unfortunately, they underestimated the amount of death and destruction that occurred. This is why when George Bush was given the news at the school he was visiting, his reaction was more in line with someone thinking "What have I done?".

Maybe it was just because it wasn't as mental as the hologram planes hiding missiles, lasers from space, controlled demolition, or those that think the towers are still there and are being hidden in some way, but it's not implausible.

So your saying that George W watched Wag The Dog?

[BomberPat]

11 hours ago, Fog Dude said:

I've been to the Cryptozoology Museum in Maine, which has a statue of Bigfoot outside as their kind of mascot. I'd say their take on him has a smidgen of credibility whilst being relatively harmless (unless it's somebody's gateway drug to wilder conspiracies). 

While I was in Florida last year, I went to "Skunk Ape HQ" - Skunk Ape being the Everglades equivalent of Bigfoot. The guy working there had three teeth, and it took all of five minutes for him to go from talking about whether he believed in the Skunk Ape (non-committal, but probably not, though he did believe that there were much larger panthers than have ever been recorded) to how "millions of people didn't vote for Joe Biden, millions of dead people did", and I politely made my excuses and left. 

I don't believe in Bigfoot or the Yeti, or really almost any variant of it - certainly in North America, there's no fossil record of great apes whatsoever, let alone an extant species - but really want to believe in Orang Pendek in Sumatra, though rationally I find it very unlikely. 

11 hours ago, Nostalgia Nonce said:

9/11 was allowed to happen in order to stir up public support for an invasion of Iraq.

This is one that I alluded to in another thread. I don't believe it, but equally wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to be true. 

The main reason I don't believe it is that it's messy and unnecessary. If it were concocted or permitted to happen to allow for an invasion of Iraq, then you'd think the evidence tying the attack to Iraq in the first place would have been much more coherent. Beyond that, America's never needed such an elaborate excuse to get involved in the Middle East before. It would have been a lot of wasted life and wasted effort for something that Bush would have likely been able to do anyway.

Were the US opportunistic in using 9/11 to provide justification for the invasion of Iraq? Absolutely. But there's a difference between cynically taking opportunity of a tragedy and sharing responsibility for that tragedy in the first place - and I think that's where a lot of conspiracy theory comes from, seeing the end result and imagining prior motive. 

6 hours ago, Jonny Vegas said:

I've always been facinated by the pyramids of similar size, shape and measurements spanning numerous diffent continents that aren't believed to have any means of communicating with each other and their astrological ties.

The easy answer is that this is all bollocks. The idea that Pyramids are aligned with anything astrological doesn't really hold up to scrutiny - Bauval's theory that the pyramids of Giza line up to Orion's Belt relies on ignoring the pyramids in that area that don't fit the pattern, for example.

In terms of similarity, there's not much, nor is it a case of multiple civilisations all stumbling on the idea of pyramids at the same time. The earliest estimate for the age of the Pyramid at Chichen Itza is the 8th Century AD, with some as late as the 12th Century, while the Great Pyramid of Giza was built in around 2500 BC. There's literally thousands of years separating them - frankly, it would be more surprising if multiple civilisations hadn't come up with Pyramids during that time. 

Not only that, but architecturally they're really nothing alike beyond the broad pyramid shape, nor do they serve the same purpose. They're both Pyramid-shaped, because a Pyramid is basically a mound. It's the most naturally occurring shape for a man-made structure to be, and the most effective way of building tall buildings with no external scaffolding. 

[Jonny Vegas]

27 minutes ago, BomberPat said:

The easy answer is that this is all bollocks. The idea that Pyramids are aligned with anything astrological doesn't really hold up to scrutiny - Bauval's theory that the pyramids of Giza line up to Orion's Belt relies on ignoring the pyramids in that area that don't fit the pattern, for example.

In terms of similarity, there's not much, nor is it a case of multiple civilisations all stumbling on the idea of pyramids at the same time. The earliest estimate for the age of the Pyramid at Chichen Itza is the 8th Century AD, with some as late as the 12th Century, while the Great Pyramid of Giza was built in around 2500 BC. There's literally thousands of years separating them - frankly, it would be more surprising if multiple civilisations hadn't come up with Pyramids during that time. 

Not only that, but architecturally they're really nothing alike beyond the broad pyramid shape, nor do they serve the same purpose. They're both Pyramid-shaped, because a Pyramid is basically a mound. It's the most naturally occurring shape for a man-made structure to be, and the most effective way of building tall buildings with no external scaffolding. 

Thanks for the logic and factual information Pat but you've ruined my Tuesday. Haha

I'd read before that regarding the pyramids of giza, several geologists had placed them as being significantly older than widely reported and there was also mystique over how cleanly and accurately cut the stones were due to disrepancies with the tools used and available at the time being capable of doing so.

Also a theory that fhe Sphinx used to have different heads which had eroded and new ones carved.

Can you dispel these for me as well? 🙂

Also, if you have the time...is my father coming back with the milk? It's just that you're making me question a lot of the imformation I've been told over the years now and on reflection, 27 years seems a long time to walk to the shop and back.

Edited January 10, 2023 by Jonny Vegas

[BomberPat]

2 minutes ago, Jonny Vegas said:

Thanks for the logic and factual information Pat but you've ruined my Tuesday. Haha

I'd read before that regarding the pyramids of giza, several geologists had placed them as being significantly older than widely reported and there was also mystique over how cleanly and accurately cut the stones were due to disrepancies with the tools used and available at the time being capable of doing so.

Also a theory that fhe Sphinx used to have different heads which had eroded and new ones carved.

Can you dispel these for me as well? 🙂

I probably could, to be honest, because we likely read the same books! I grew up on stuff like Graham Hancock, Robert Schoch and Robert Bauval, and have a couple of friends with Archaeology degrees who did the same - reading their stuff was the gateway drug that got them interested in the subject, and thankfully the more they learned the happier they were to put some distance between them and the pseudo-history, rather than doubling down and insisting that everyone else was wrong.

I can't remember the name of the book that I first read the idea that the Great Pyramid is much older than previously thought, but it hypothesised that we basically got the age of the Pyramids backwards - that the bigger and more impressive ones are older, and the smaller, less sophisticated ones represented a degradation of the style, rather than a period of improvement. I can't remember the "science" behind it, and probably wouldn't fully understand it - or the science debunking it - if I did. 

But the thing with the Egyptian Pyramids is that they're not nearly as mysterious as we like to think they are. Yes, there are architectural features that we haven't made sense of, hidden chambers, and other exciting stuff, but in terms of who built them, when, and why, it's actually pretty well understood. If nothing else, because the people who built them wrote it all down - because they were, understandably, pretty bloody proud of themselves. Whatever evidence the likes of Hancock use to argue that the pyramids are older relies on just ignoring or explaining away considerably more evidence that dates them, and their construction methods, a lot more accurately.

The thing with the accuracy of cut stones is an easy one to explain - it's just not true. There are barely two stones on the Great Pyramid of Giza that are the same size, plenty of them don't fit together particularly well at all, and just generally there's a lot of variation and none of the "pinpoint precision" you hear about. All perfectly possible with tools available at the time. Which, actually, is kind of a defining feature of this kind of pseudo-history - the conspiracist argument, if we accepted that the stones were constructed with that level of precision, is "the people of that time didn't have these tools, so someone else must have done it", whereas a rational historical argument would be that it calls into question what tools were available to these people, not whether the people themselves were incapable.

A lot of this, as far as my understanding goes, comes from Biblical and Islamic myths about the Pyramids - a lot was made up about them after the collapse of Ancient Egypt, and once a lot of their original purpose and means of construction had been forgotten. Those myths pass down through the kind of Biblical literalists that were around in the Victorian era, and informed subsequent generations of pseudo-historians, who largely build their work on repeating other people's claims, all the way down to misunderstandings and translation errors, usually with a side helping of Victorian racism and Atlantis bullshit.

I'm not really familiar with the idea of the Sphinx having a different head, but I suspect it's bullshit with similar provenance. 

[Keith Houchen]

1 hour ago, Jonny Vegas said:

Thanks for the logic and factual information Pat but you've ruined my Tuesday. Haha

If it’s any consolation, I once worked with a lad who got things arseways and thought the pyramids were used as Wi-Fi towers by the ancient Egyptians. 

[Merzbow]

The Giant of Kandahar story has been going around again with these new giant sightings being reported, apparently the US military killed a giant in Afghanistan in the early 00's and covered it up.

[Jonny Vegas]

Which leads us nicely onto SEAL Team 6 didn't really trace or kill Osama Bin Laden and the helicopter crash that killed them all was staged/didn't happen to make sure they didn't spill the beans.

[Chris B]

2 hours ago, BomberPat said:

The thing with the accuracy of cut stones is an easy one to explain - it's just not true. There are barely two stones on the Great Pyramid of Giza that are the same size, plenty of them don't fit together particularly well at all, and just generally there's a lot of variation and none of the "pinpoint precision" you hear about. All perfectly possible with tools available at the time. Which, actually, is kind of a defining feature of this kind of pseudo-history - the conspiracist argument, if we accepted that the stones were constructed with that level of precision, is "the people of that time didn't have these tools, so someone else must have done it", whereas a rational historical argument would be that it calls into question what tools were available to these people, not whether the people themselves were incapable.

I can't remember exactly which theory it was, but it was adjacent to the type of thing you're talking about here - my partner talked about how one of these 'must have been aliens' theorists made the point that the precision of the angles of the pyramids (or something similar) was really important, and had a whole thing on TV about it. And it was how they were exactly 51.5° or something - and it turned out that they just hadn't been measured, and when they were measured, it was more a range of 49°-52°. And he then pivoted to saying the exact degrees weren't the point, despite them being the entire point.

[The King Of Swing]

2 hours ago, Jonny Vegas said:

Which leads us nicely onto SEAL Team 6 didn't really trace or kill Osama Bin Laden and the helicopter crash that killed them all was staged/didn't happen to make sure they didn't spill the beans.

Which reminds me of an old favourite of mine, that Bin Laden was actually killed not that long after 9/11 and actors were used in his place to keep the war on terror going.

A more modern favourite is the Dead Internet Theory.

Basically it's a theory that the majority of the Internet is now populated by bots.

[Merzbow]

We hear all the time about "Russian bots" but I'd expect disinformation bots to come from pretty much everywhere now, every major power.

Who's a bot here?