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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   739 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 7, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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It's been a while since I've done one of these- what's a small scale conspiracy theory you're willing to go to bat for?

Now, by 'small scale conspiracy theory' I do not mean grand unified theories of the jewlluminati or lizard people, or major government direction, or whatever. It's small-scale.

Some things I think are likely true-

The 'Marriage penalty' in US welfare law is- or was- an intentional experiment to prove that marriage was outmoded in late-industrial societies. It fits the zeitgeist of the time and we know there were other reckless experiments going on in first world countries(like German pedophiles). It was not based on the assumption that single mothers need the help more.

Coyote predation on small children is far more common in the USA than commonly acknowledged(note that a huge increase over a trivial base is still trivial), and those toddlers who just disappear and everyone assumes the parents killed them but they're never charged because nobody ever finds the body were mostly snatched by coyotes. Wildlife departments and law enforcement agencies prefer to cover this up to discourage reprisals by poisoning, which has substantial knock on effects. The only confirmed coyote kill of a child(there is also a case of a hippie musician who wandered near a den, but this probably wasn't a predatory attack) was interrupted during the attack rendering it undeniable.

Conventional health wisdom overstates effect sizes because it originated in attempts to explain the rise of chronic disease in the mid twentieth century. In reality, these diseases became common because people lived long enough to get them(largely due to reduced disease burden), with effects from rising waistlines, sedentary lifestyles, etc.

It's been a while since I've done one of these- what's a small scale conspiracy theory you're willing to go to bat for?

Now, by 'small scale conspiracy theory' I do not mean grand unified theories of the jewlluminati or lizard people, or major government direction, or whatever. It's small-scale.

Be in forum full of wordcel super geniuses with great reading comprehension. Thread asks for small scale conspiracies.

Look at comments. See 9/11, Covid, all of modern architecture cited as "small scale."

Update priors on Oklahoma University student writing an essay that bad.

Anyway to answer the OP:

-- Musk never intended to buy Twitter, he wanted to buy enough stock to force the company to give him a board seat so he could advocate for the company to change some policies. Unfortunately, when he bought that stock, the SEC started investigating the way he did it, and the company informed him of all the things he wouldn't be allowed to say if he was on Twitter's board unless he wanted to face a shareholder lawsuit. The only way out was through, so he upped the stakes and put in an offer to buy the company, figuring that it would fall apart one way or another before being consummated and in the process he could shed the lawsuits. Unfortunately, right about then every social media stock dropped 20-30%, and the company officers had to hang onto his offer because it would maximize shareholder value, and so he was ultimately forced to purchase the company. This explains a lot about the shambolic way Twitter has been managed with DAU dropping by about 50% since the purchase.

-- The NBA orchestrated the Luka Doncic trade in exchange for fixing the draft lottery to get Flagg to the Mavs. The Buss family wanted to sell the Lakers, but their buyer balked at buying the team when its current incarnation consisted of the aging remnants of the 2020 championship team with no clear way forward. The NBA wanted to see the sale happen. So they convince the Mavs to trade Luka to the Lakers. Now LA has a young, good looking, marketable, MVP candidate for the next ten years. The team is sold for $10bn and in the process the value of every other NBA franchise goes up by, what, ten figures? We're talking about ~$30bn in value created! In turn, the Mavs win the NBA draft lottery despite 1/50 odds, and get Cooper Flagg, who if he turns out to be as good as Tyrese Maxey is the most marketable NBA player since Lebron. Luka for Anthony Davis and change is a terrible trade, Luka for Anthony Davis and Cooper Flagg might be decent business. The NBA also doesn't mind fixing the lottery to make sure Flagg goes to the Mavs, because they want to see him on a franchise that has historically been well run and has the ability to put pieces around Flagg immediately and get him into the playoffs, they don't want to see their Great White Hope first overall going to perpetual fuck ups like the Hornets, Wizards, or Sixers.

-- Opposite party politicians get along better than we think they do, same party politicians get along worse than we think they do.

-- I cannot provide details for professional reasons, but major consumer corporations have Indiana Jones style warehouses full of better mousetraps that they have determined it would not be profitable to market, but don't want to let anyone else license to compete with their existing products. I don't think the cure for cancer is in there, but it wouldn't surprise me if a better pill bottle and a better paperclip were.

-- Right wing twitter recently melted down when location was shown for accounts, and it turned out that 70% of users with a name like DefendTheWest turned out to be from India and Nigeria. I suspect that if we could do a similar reveal, it would turn out that a huge percentage of prominent identitarian authors on the left would turn out to be white ghostwriters with a black face attached. Tiffany Haddish's memoirs, for example, were ghostwritten by Tucker Max. We'll never find out, but I suspect that a lot of people aren't who we think they are.

The NBA orchestrated the Luka Doncic trade in exchange for fixing the draft lottery to get Flagg to the Mavs.

Interesting in the context of the preexisting small scale conspiracy theory that the giant casino company which owns the mavs deliberately traded him to reduce the team’s fortunes, because they think a losing team gives them more political influence.

Right wing twitter recently melted down when location was shown for accounts, and it turned out that 70% of users with a name like DefendTheWest turned out to be from India and Nigeria.

Also revealed a giant percentage of man hating feminists were from South Asia and sub Saharan Africa.

Coyotes are pretty well-hated and oft-culled because of their attacks on pets and livestock, though, and there's also the 'dingos ate ma baby' option of simple incompetence. That said, if you really want to go nuts on coyote conspiracies, the degree that coyote populations have exploded and the individual coyotes themselves have gotten much smarter in <10 generations is a real fun question.

For fun conspiracies I actually believe:

  • Piggate wasn't real. For all it Took Down A National Government, Cameron was already a political dead man walking before the drop, and it was just a really convenient way to force him out without actually engaging with the political controversies that had undermined his party. The same behavior is totally consistent with an already-unpopular prime minister getting smeared by a schmuck he'd pissed off badly enough, and then found that none of his 'friends' were willing to pay the political capital to back him up.
  • There was a coverup one direction or the other for the Bloomberg Supermicro thing: either a lot of people who could prove it were told not to do so at the risk of destabilizing international relationships, or a lot of people who could disprove it were told not to do so lest they destabilize US financial markets (and get blackballed). I'm not very confident on this one, but it's just such a weird goddamn story.
  • A number of serious industrial or transportation sector accidents were really Reinvented Suicide As A Group Activity, but various incident analysis groups have instead used them for purposes ranging from getting unrelated political goals to deflecting from local political or social problems to just shaking down foreign businesses for cash. There's been a handful of these situations where jurisdiction friction has lead to them getting 'caught' -- aviation is particularly prone to it, with SilkAir 185, EgyptAir 990, and the recent Air India 171 -- but I think they're far more common than anyone wants to admit or even mention publicly, especially since there's a risk that publicizing them could incentivize further or larger attacks of the same kind. Basically, most large countries have a bunch of CEAF 5735 in a thousand different fields. The SL-1 incident is the safest one to mention, but there's some electrical and chemical processing examples from the tens to hundreds of deaths.
  • A lot of 'advocacy organizations' related to industry regulations are wholly-owned government groups, and are explicitly-but-nonpublicly threatening to bring the weight of those government orgs to bear if targeted companies don't agree. Yeah, boring, almost too obvious to be worth mentioning for the obvious cases, between Ofcom and NCOSE existing, and X Twitter's recent fine in the UK. But there's a lot of these orgs running at <100 person levels regulating through smoke-filled backroom deals; a lot of what's 'weird' about the modern era is just the ability of those orgs to impact companies with large impacts but not the large scales of pre-internet companies.

That said, if you really want to go nuts on coyote conspiracies, the degree that coyote populations have exploded and the individual coyotes themselves have gotten much smarter in <10 generations is a real fun question.

Shoot, baby. I'm pro coyote, because A) I think they're neat, B) My school team was the Coyotes, C) my wife's grandmother used "Coyote" as a racial slur to refer to me.

This is interesting, as I was never under the impression that Cameron stood down as a result of Piggate. He nailed his colours to the mast on where he stood on the Euroscepticism issue and put it to a referendum to settle the matter definitively, gambling that most Brits broadly shared his view. The gamble didn't pay off, and that was that.

I still think that Justin Trudeau might be a Castro. There was an attempted debunking, but i read a debunking of that debunking and, well, how hard would it be to get a little Trudeau DNA and a little Castro DNA? A rich person could surely do it.

I am sort of fully in on the "certain things get invented to ruin bad SEO". Like this recent "Dubai Chocolate" fad. Surely it was started to detract from certain nasty scatological rumors about high end treatment of escorts in Dubai. This is along the same lines as Disney creating the movie Frozen to take cryogenic search results away if you looked up famous old Walt rumors, aka googling Disney Frozen no longer takes you to snopes.

100% agree on Trudeau, he looks nothing like his ostensible father.

I believe that the ugliness forced on us everywhere we turn (architecture, modern "art", etc.) is deliberately done in an attempt to break us, using the method C.S. Lewis wrote about in That Hideous Strength. The extreme version in the Cheka Vallmajor cannot yet be fully replicated in public, but already we have seats that we can't sit on, public spaces that intentionally play unappealing music to get people to move along, and the various other elements of "hostile architecture" made by people who hate us and try to break us. (As always, the sensible solution — imprison/institutionalize/rehouse the people that make "hostile architecture" "necessary" — remains steadfastly untried.)

That…doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Spiky benches are chosen for deterrence, and deterrence is at odds with reeducation. Conversely, if you imprisoned every homeless person, it would do approximately nothing to the demand for ugly art.

That the department of defense shot down the plane over PA on 9/11and faked the calls and the heroic story of the passengers crashing the plane to boost national morale.

Similar to your coyote theory, I have a deep belief that there is a self-sustaining mountain lion population in the Appalachian mountain range. I know too many people who are generally trustworthy who claim to have seen them, and I'm pretty sure I've seen tracks myself deep in West Virginia. I've also seen something in Northern PA once, but I can't discount that it might have simply been the biggest bobcat I've seen in my life. The light was terrible.

The more conspiratorially-minded members of my family suggest that the reason they aren't acknowledged is because it would play merry hell on local industry due to the endangered species act. I've also heard tales that they were intentionally introduced to keep the deer population in check.

Second this one, I'm of the mind that it's true myself, though I think that simple bureaucratic inertia plus public safety concerns, when taken together, is more than enough to explain the conventional wisdom.

  1. Smoking is genuinely really bad for you, but was used as scapegoat for cancers caused by numerous industrial chemicals. Cancer rates have not reduced as much as they should have given the massive decline in smoking.

  2. President Garfield’s assassination was part of a conspiracy to ram through significant changes to the structure of the federal government that allowed for the formation of an entrenched deep state

  3. Due to widespread corruption in the New York Construction industry in the 1970s, the twin towers were not nearly as fire-resistant in reality as they were on paper.

  4. Bill Gates and other big tech entrepreneurs are simply front guys for the CIA, which actually founded their companies.

  5. DARPA and intelligence agencies have had access to AI since the late 1980s or early 1990s. The public internet was created to allow for the formation of massive training data sets for more advanced models.

  6. Tactical nuclear weapons have been used in various conflicts, and the various nations with detection capability have decided not to publicize this.

  7. The woke mania and economic decline of the United States is an intentional Boys from Brazil style attempt to recreate the social and economic conditions of Weimar Germany in order to provoke a future fascist backlash.

  8. The Apollo program was scotched because a sharp increase in solar weather activity starting in early 1973 made it too dangerous. In particular there was a large solar flare about two weeks after the Apollo 17 mission that scientists calculated would have killed the crew had it happened during the mission. This I actually have some confirmation for. That’s why you could go to the moon in a tin can in 1968 but now Elon Musk and NASA are now constantly talking about why there has to be multiple-foot thick shielding for any manned mission outside low earth orbit.

Do you have specific conflicts in mind, in which nukes were deployed?

Point 3. is a new one for me but makes a lot of sense.

My 9/11 conspiracy theories are: a) there was a systemic coverup of evidence that the government had heard and (understandably) brushed off warnings ahead of time, and evidence that the emergency response procedures did not function adequately and could have mitigated the impact of 9/11 after the first impact. b) immediately after the event, there was a fairly rushed and slipshod propaganda response to both tie al-Qaeda unquestionably to the attacks with public evidence (i.e. without revealing any sensitive intelligence) and to make them look bad that involved faking some stuff (e.g. the famous strip club Koran).

I also suspect AQ might have remained an unreliable but still associated CIA proxy even as they started escalating attacks against US forces and installations overseas. So I think there may have been some covering up of the fact that CIA personnel were communicating with and possibly providing aid to AQ potentially right up until the attack. They might have even been rooked into unwittingly providing some material aid for the attack itself. This could also explain some of the intelligence failure, since CIA might have been convinced that AQ were mostly-controllable good boys (even if they occasionally got rowdy) and not likely to do something that drastic against the mainland US.

Unlike a lot of 9/11 conspiracy theorists, I’m not particularly wedded to a single theory and I have contemplated a lot of different narratives.

On point 6, I've never been able to shake the suspicion that Aum Shinrikyo conducted a nuclear test in Australia back in the day.

I haven’t heard of this, can you elaborate?

Back in the early 90s, Aum shinrikyo bought a remote sheep farm in Australia. Not long after, a "seismic event" was recorded in the area, with a few truckers in the area reporting a massive explosion and fireball.

The official explanation was an earthquake. The official explanation ignored that Aum was interested in building a nuke at the time, seemed to be actively mining uranium, and might have actually had the capacity to do so, having recruited some nuclear engineers.

Good lord. Maybe that’s how they got caught, that would be detected by satellite. How long was this before the subway attack?

About two years

I don't personally consider the following to be a conspiracy theory, but quite a few people do:

I'm pretty sure that COVID-19 was created (modified) in the lab and (accidentally) leaked.

And the cover-up was done not only by the commies in typical style in China, but also by the professional community who don't want their gravy train to stop.

Edit: another: I suspect that the heavy focus in school on the "oppression of women" throughout history is there to establish a subtle but impactful sexism in favor of women ("the oppressed" who should be lifted up, despite current generations not being victims) and against men (collective punishment of young boys who did not take part in past crimes). There's also the issue of how one-sided the portrayal is. You don't get explanations of how a lack of modern technology made it sensible to divide labor along gender lines, or how misandry has probably also always existed.

There are a lot of things that make me believe the same. The first is that biolabs, and Chinese biolabs in particular, have a pretty bad track record when it comes to keeping the viruses inside the cordon. If it's happened before, why should be we be surprised that it happened again. I think the Bayesians here use the term "priors" on that topic.

The other thing that nags me about it was the general expert framing of the situation in general. It went something like this:

Person 1: I think this came from a lab.

Experts: a bioweapon? Why would you suggest that this was a bioweapon? There's no way the Chinese would have released a bioweapon on their own people. Only a madman would even consider creating a highly contagious bioweapon in the first place. Shame on you for suggesting it's a bioweapon, you foil-hatted lunatic.

And here I am wondering where the bioweapon topic even came up.

I'm old enough to recall the videos we got coming out of China back when Covid was just reving up. People spontaneously dropping in the streets, apartments being welded shut with tenants inside, the works.

My personal conspiracy theory is that Covid was bio-engineered in a lab, and when they realized it had gotten out, they didn't know which variant had escaped - and that there were much, much nastier variants than the one we got.

Hence China's initial reaction looking like something out of a zombie movie.

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