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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2842 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.

That producers of stuff that is packaged in tubes - like toothpaste make it on purpose to throw their product away. I am fairly sure that most tubes are thrown probably with 30+ percent of their content. Even with dedicated squeezer - When i opened one with a knife I was able to coax 5-6 ml more.

Another one:

I think CTE is kind of a fake or exaggerated concept. It might have some relevance to boxers or NFL players, and even that seems sketchy to me. But it's vastly exaggerated how much getting hit in the head in casual ways by ordinary people is going to hurt you long term. It just doesn't add up when you consider how common getting punched in the head in a fight, or falling off something, or playing some form of tackle football, or fighting in a war, or getting thrown by a horse was throughout history. While everyone has always understood that a sufficiently hard kick to the head by a donkey will make a man retarded, there's no enduring folk wisdom of head shots making men change over time.

I tend to think it's an easy medicalized explanation for how men who are selected for their utility at violence are increasingly out of step with the world.

That's funny. My low-key conspiracy on CTE (and brain damage more broadly) is that it's actually far more common than anybody really wants to admit.

Around me, nearly everyone has stories about the normal guy who got a little "funny" over time. A lot of them are veterans or guys who work jobs that officially require hard hats but they don't wear them. I can't rule out things like PTSD or late onset schizophrenia. However, when the arty guy who got out of the army and immediately started working as a framer eventually loses the ability to remember what he had for breakfast or pronounce "penance", I can't help but think something somatic is involved.

Not a conspiracy theory (well, sort of).

TBI is shockingly common (especially in the military) and not shockingly...it is very bad for you.

TBIs aren't CTE, but damage to personality, substrate, and function from injuries is a known issue in the military and elsewhere.

When I consider it, I think that you wouldn't fight that often, and when you did, it wouldn't emphasize knockout blows; that while you would fall often you would naturally mind your head; that casualties of fights in wars were fewer than casualties on the march. In fact I suspect that there was no folk wisdom of head shots making men change over time because there was no career where you would intentionally put yourself in the way of many blows to the head and survive that for long enough.

(Anecdotally, Lermontov's The Song of the Merchant Kalashnikov specifically describes a formalized fistfight at the city fair. The titular merchant, his wife disgraced by the tsar's official, deliberately strikes him in the head and kills him. It can be assumed that head shots were forbidden or at least heavily discouraged - he is tried for manslaughter, as opposed to the outcome being judged an unfortunate but natural outcome of the fight).

I always kinda thought the Dubai Chocolate meme was a way to cover up the whole "instagram whores getting shit on by Arabs in Dubai" thing. That people had started calling poop "Dubai chocolate" at some point and their government or whoever stepped in and made the campaign to drown out search results. I have 0 evidence of this it's all vibes.

Depending on how you define "conspiracy theory"… two come to mind:

  1. That Carolyn Bryant Donham was telling the truth about what happened to her, and that Timothy Tyson is lying when he claims she secretly, off the record, recanted to him.

  2. That the jury in Fulton County convicted the right guy for the murder of Mary Phagan.

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.

The trade was so bad it spawned instant conspiracy theories, but the payoffs only became apparent over time.

And I didn't even realize there were man hating feminist accounts from South Korea! What do they post? I'm surprised they even lied about it.

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.

group activity

Is that…Trek?

advocacy organizations

Not exactly unusual—didn’t Scott write about ADA enforcement in these terms? The main limiting factor is the difficulty of bringing a case. Technology has to have reduced that cost, so a given org can target smaller companies.

I dislike this class of law for other reasons, but I think we’re seeing a difference in degree, not in kind.

Is that…Trek?

Nextwave (cw: sound, mild profanity)! Only Warren Ellis comic I can unconditionally recommend. Very short series, sadly.

Not exactly unusual—didn’t Scott write about ADA enforcement in these terms? The main limiting factor is the difficulty of bringing a case. Technology has to have reduced that cost, so a given org can target smaller companies.

I think so, but I can't find it now. The ADA (and the Texas abortion pill thing) are laws or at least regulations on the books, even if they're probably getting stretched to their breaking points. A lot of this stuff isn't a strict rule, or even necessarily written down anywhere, so much as it's just Understood at ultimately one-on-one scales. Sometimes that's unavoidable: in aviation, I think you could get five opinions from three DERs if you bring up flutter analysis. But it ends up in a world where a lot of things are theoretically allowed, and you can even find people doing them quite publicly, but also prohibited.

Old news, but I just ran across it when it went viral again recently and the Bloomberg story reminds me of it:

"How many similar devices with hidden functionalities might be lurking in your home, just waiting to be discovered?"

Exploitable systems are so much easier to create than secure systems that it's hard to attribute even actual proven exploitability to malice! Aside from the software issues in that discussion, consider the hardware. Fifty years ago, if something you brought into your business had a tiny secret microphone, that would have been proof-positive that someone with major signals-intelligence chops was trying to bug you. Today, it just means that the fastest way to create a special-purpose electronic device is to just grab some general-purpose computer board and flash it with your own special-purpose software, and of course your general-purpose-computer designer threw in a 3.5-cent-each MEMS microphone because why not?

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.

Yeah, that's probably a more honest engagement with the events. I've just seen a lot of people say it was a big important deal that tells us about falling modern standards, so it really bugs me that it's just such a mess.

Funnily enough you just reminded me that I dressed up as Cameron for Halloween '15, with a papier-machê pig's head attached to my waist. Annoyingly, several people at the party I went to thought I was dressing up as "the guy from Black Mirror", which I hadn't even seen at the time.

... I'm almost afraid to ask, but did you have the pig's head facing in, or out?

In. There was also a papier-machê member protruding from my fly going into the pig's mouth.

That's an impressive amount of effort for a Halloween costume, and some remarkably unobservant partygoers.

Yep - Piggate was eminently survivable, and did more damage to the people pushing it than it did to Hameron. It was hilarious, but everyone including Corbyn knew that it was nothing more than that. The source was an unsourced allegation in a book by a bitter donor who hadn't received the peerage he thought he'd bought and paid for.

Brexit, on the other hand, was total political self-destruction.

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.

I'm not conspiracy minded but the Trudeau thing is irresistible to me. I hope it gets confirmed or refuted in my lifetime.

I wonder if AI will be able to tell from facial features.

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.

Plausible -- I live in a place where nobody disputes that there's ample cougars (also bobcats etc), but I've seen exactly one of each in my (40+, pretty outdoorsy, lives literally in the woods) life.

Up here, anywhere you go that's not 100% paved, you are probably in the territory of some cougar -- but they don't want to be seen, so you don't.

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 of a sharp increase in solar weather activity starting in early 1973 that 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 how there has to be multiple-foot thick shielding for any manned mission outside low earth orbit.

  9. Australia became a nuclear weapons state sometime in the past few years.

  10. American football is fixed like professional wrestling.

DARPA has had AI since at least 1969. I heard a presentation by a very senior (in both age and rank) DARPA scientist and he mentioned that his research program in machine learning started that year. He also mentioned that he was awarded his PhD in 1964 and I believe his doctoral work was also in ML, though I'm not 100% on that. In any case, his work was in ML speech detection. Incidentally, he was very bearish on AGI and called out nearly everything we hear about the topic as lies and marketing. This was a couple of years ago.

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.

Can you unpack this a bit? Who's doing it? How? Why?

I’m not sure who exactly would be doing it. I know there were influential families (the Fords, the Bushes) and titans of industry in the 30s and 40s that were fairly sympathetic to naziism. There was also a decent amount of contact between the OSS and German intelligence during the war. Allen Dulles, the later head of the CIA, was back-channeling with Heinrich Himmler to try and negotiate a separate peace between Nazi Germany and America so that the Nazi government could remain standing and be used by the west as a bulwark against Communism. Some Nazi intelligence divisions were basically rolled intact into the American intelligence apparatus after the war ended.

You could say that America resembles Weimar Germany just because there are certain characteristics that sick or declining societies all have, but some of it seems awfully specific.

  1. There is a giant coordinated push for Marxism in the early 2010s, both the old school kind and the new Bio-Leninist kind.
  2. There seems to have been a giant coordinated push to weaponize American black people as a Cossack class to oppress American white people. This doesn’t seem like it would work on its own, but it did an awfully good job of putting white Americans into a defensive crouch. This culminates in near-genocidal Hutu-style rhetoric against white people in 2020.
  3. There are suddenly suspiciously organized glowie-adjacent communist street fighters that took their name and logo from the communist street fighters in Weimar Germany. They generally seem to be trying to act as unsympathetic as possible.
  4. The controlled detonation of the American economy in 2020, inducing hyperinflation.
  5. The coordinated lockstep pushing of transgenderism and prostitution culture. This and Antifa is what really started to make me suspicious, because those were both phenomena that was specific to Weimar Germany.
  6. In 2022 there is a sudden, at least partially astroturfed push to associate Jews with the prior events I described in the last several paragraphs. There was definitely organic anti-semitism in the years before that, and some genuine bad behavior by prominent Jewish people in America. But 2022 is when you start seeing very consistent very intense anti-Jewish rhetoric on Reddit, which is very odd given that Reddit Turbo-jannies were and are such prudes about literally everything else. I have hung around on 4chan long enough to know what organic anti-semitism looks like, and what I started seeing in 2022 looked different, odd. It looked more like organized shill behavior that I had previously associated with left wing stuff like transgenderism and astroturfed pro-Ukraine sentiment on Reddit. Crucially, I started noticing this a full year before October 7 and the bombing of Gaza, which is usually marked as the beginning of wide scale public anti-semitism.
  7. October 7 happens in 2023 (which stinks to high hell but that’s an entire post on its own). The invasion of Gaza starts and now you suddenly have a left-right triangulation against Jewish people. The Israeli government seems to be working very hard through all this to act as unlikeable and shady as humanly possible.
  8. Ever since then there has been just a full-bore shill campaign against Jews on Reddit, Twitter, TikTok and 4chan. I used to hang out on 4chan when half the posters were literal Stormfront users, and it was never this intense. It definitely smacks of organized shilling and not just people who genuinely dislike Jews.
  9. Then a sudden coordinated push to rehabilitate Naziism. First for liberals with the glowie-affiliated Azov Battalion (“Shut up Chud, It’s just the Ukrainian skull and pinwheel of good fortune!”) and then for conservatives with Tucker Carlson and Darrell Cooper (who both have connections to CIA and the defense industrial complex).

So to me it looks like there was potentially a coordinated push to induce Weimar problems and then present Weimar solutions.

I agree with basically everything here, but my deduction is different.

There's strong signs that it's jews who are in charge of all this. Whoever is doing this is clearly powerful. The woke clearly hate everything they can relate to the holocaust, to the point that their hatred of nationalism led to an almost global consensus that borders are immoral. Whoever is behind this is also trying to destroy Christianity and its traditions. A lot of people who have warned against jews historically have been assassinated (e.g. JFK). The woke is also driven by the media - and jews are extremely over-represented in the media. If you've been on 4chan, you've seen the image I have in mind right now. It also happens that jews aren't at home in America, and they're therefore in a position in which they can harm America without harming themselves. Only globalists and those without strong roots can benefit from causing this much harm.

I've never been on 4chan, but even I know that a lot of users predicted our current events, warning that the jews would do these things. And historically, these issues have also been blamed on freemasons, FBI/NSA/CIA/GCHQ, "the system", satanism, feminism, communism, the illuminati, NWO, globalism and on elite families tied to banking (Goldman Sachs, the Rothschild family, Rockefellers, etc), and many other groups, and most of these claims aren't wrong, the question is just which group is in charge, if any.

While there might be some non-organic anti-semitism, the jews could be spreading that in order to legitimize their victimhood. And Trump said "America first", only to start sending billions of tax-dollars to Israel. Of course this results in a spike in anti-semitism, anything else would be strange. The reason that even Reddit has some anti-semitism is likely because jews overplayed their hand.

You know a lot of things, so you should have a clear picture, and yet you discard the most likely conclusion. Of course, you may have valid reasons for doing so. Have you heard the translated speeches of Hitler? They don't sound old, they contain things which are still relevant today, and Hitler blamed them on the jews. Given the jews strong representation in positions of power, and their high average IQs, I find it unlikely that there's somebody above the jews who is manipulating them.

You focus a lot on recent events, but most of these issues started decades ago.

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

I have seen videos of bombings that the Saudi Air Force conducted in Yemen and that the IAF did in Lebanon with explosions that seem to be far, far beyond the size of anything that they have the capability to carry on the planes they have (to my knowledge neither have heavy bombers). Also there was a Ukrainian attack on a Russian facility in I believe Toretsk where it looks like the damage is consistent with around a 15 kiloton explosion. Also the documented fact that a hydrogen bomb went off in the middle of the Indian Ocean in 1979 and supposedly no one can figure out who did that (I’m guessing the US and USSR both knew and just didn’t say).

I have seen videos of bombings that the Saudi Air Force conducted in Yemen and that the IAF did in Lebanon with explosions that seem to be far, far beyond the size of anything that they have the capability to carry on the planes they have (to my knowledge neither have heavy bombers).

I am ignorant of that conflict. What would have motivated the use of such a weapon in that case?

Despite what wags online will tell you, nuclear weapons would actually be very useful in retail combat. The reason for their lack of usage is for political reasons to maintain the nuclear taboo, not because they aren’t useful.

I do know that the Houthis and Hezbollah both use very deep underground fortifications of the kind that would be hard to take out even with multiple 20,000 pound bunker busters dropped from a B-2. Much less trying to take those apart with fighter-bombers, which can carry a 2,500 pound munition.

The Vela incident was almost certainly an Israeli nuclear test.

Wasn’t the 1979 bomb South African?

I’m going to call BS on the Ukrainian nuke- if they had one, they’d hit Moscow.

@cablethrowaway @hydroacetylene

But notice that there was never any kind of official statement on who did it by any of the countries that were capable of investigating and verifying. They were content to leave the public in the dark.

I’m going to call BS on the Ukrainian nuke- if they had one, they’d hit Moscow.

It wouldn’t necessarily have been a Ukrainian nuke. But yes, that puzzles me too, I don’t know why you would drop one tactical nuke on some warehouse complex in Toretsk without elaboration or credit or apparently any further strikes, and apparently no response from the Russian government. Maybe it was a foward-deployed 380 KT Russian nuclear weapon that fizzled when it got hit by a conventional strike and produced a 15 KT yield.

I don’t buy the official explanation either, which is that an entire warehouse of S-400 interceptors were sitting in a warehouse five miles from the front line. And even accepting that, it seems like way too big of an explosion. Fire storms 12 kilometers wide, picked up on satellites for monitoring wildfires.

1979 was believed to be either South African with Israeli help or Israeli with South African help. The explosion appeared to be only a few kilotons-equivalent, though, so it could have been a fission bomb rather than a "hydrogen bomb", and if it was a fusion bomb then it was almost certainly a neutron bomb, designed for "low" explosive yield in favor of radiation.

I can't imagine Ukraine would invite nuclear reprisal by nuking Moscow, not unless the tanks were literally rolling into Kyiv at the time, but Toretsk would be an even less likely target.

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.

The thing is they kept up that reaction long, long after we knew what it was.

But yeah I'd like to see a documentary on the Chinese response. There's tons of great footage out there and some of it is the most dystopian stuff I've ever seen. Drones flying by apartment blocks telling people not to go out on their balconies and sing, and marking those who do.

It's really the most charitable explanation for the Western response as well -- I've personally settled on the theory that most first-world government agencies are a bitchin combination of evil and incompetent -- but if high-level officials had back-channel (ie. not publicly sharable) information from China that this virus was a potential bioweapon, what they did actually makes sense and might even have been a good idea.

The blackpill theory is that the virus was a bioweapon, designed to make ~everyone a drooling retard -- Mission Accomplished! (source: my lyin' eyes)

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