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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   943 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.

  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?

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).

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

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