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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   5876 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 21, 2023

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Fellow Motteizans, what are your small scale conspiracy theories? I'm not talking grand narratives here. What minor, apolitical conspiracy theories do you explain to the next table at a diner.

For myself, I think at least some large portion of lottery drawings are not random. I base this belief on the fact that of repeat lottery winners, a suspicious number of them are math professors.

These two aren't necessarily small-scale, but they are relatively compact by conspiracy standards (ie, they could be true while the rest of the world is still basically Blue Pilled)

-- Edward Snowden's NSA revelations were a work. Snowden is a deep-state public Kamikaze, by revealing that the government was doing something hard that the NSA was bad at doing (finding target communications in the haystack that is general communications streams), no self-respecting terrorist or spy or drug lord would use the public channels that the NSA is known to be monitoring. Then the terrorists all download the "encrypted" supposedly secure apps...which the NSA either puts out itself, or has a backdoor into, or just finds it easier to monitor who is using the secure apps than it was to go through all the insecure communications. So they set up this big scary leak that publicized it better than any other effort possibly could.

-- Affirmative Action is not primarily targeted at increasing diversity or reparations or whatever the fuck. It serves the primary purpose of stripping the Talented Tenth from URM communities, preventing those communities from ever really improving or forming alternate cultural power bases. If you're a fairly high-iq, conscientious, young Black or Hispanic male, and your choices are between starting a business in your (normally shitty) community or going to Harvard, which are you gonna pick? And a community needs smart and talented men to make the (normally stupid) decision to start a business. Charles Murray has written a lot about the Big Sort of High IQ individuals as a result of educational/professional meritocracy and the negative effect that can have on community; but think about it, it is so much sharper for Black students.

These are much smaller

-- Elevator buttons do nothing. The door doesn't close any faster if you press the button but it gives you something to do.

-- The Bachelor Season 25 producers removed a contestant from the show and edited her out of the earlier episodes in post production. Either because she got Covid, literally died, or did something so horrible that it couldn't be associated with the show at all.

-- Trump 100% originally ran for President on a dare from Bill Clinton. It was supposed to be a joke run to weaken JEB! and Ted Cruz and soften them up for HRC in the general, then he got there and thought huh maybe I can win the damn thing. None of the principals involved can admit to it after it went the way it did.

-- Significant portions of accepted history are misinterpreted fiction, and we have no way of proving which are which.

Edward Snowden's NSA revelations were a work.

This depends on which version you think is an accurate description of what Snowden revealed. For example, the version @2rafa gives:

capable of effectively trawling trillions of Facebook messages or emails that raised flags

...just isn't the sort of thing that Snowden's documents revealed. Most of the discussion was around two different programs: 702 and 215.

702 was never about trawling trillions of FB messages/emails. It was that if they found a specific term that was uniquely associated with a foreign intelligence target (e.g., they rolled up Terrorist A, got into his computer, found the email address for Terrorist B), they could go to various companies and said, "Give us anything that crosses your wire that has this email address for Terrorist B." This is eminently doable; not really even that hard, even.

215 was an attempt at bulk collection of metadata (who talked to who, for how long), which didn't include the content of those comms. This would be, on its face, useless for trawling for specific messages that raised red flags. Instead, it was just things like, "Well, Terrorists A, B, and C all talk to this other number, so prooooooobably we should check that number out," or, "Terrorist A's number, which had been talking to Person B and Person C on a regular basis, suddenly disappeared, and at the same time, this other new number started talking to Person B and Person C with approximately the same regularly. Mayyyyyyybe, that's Terrorist A's new number." This is much more "needle-in-the-haystack" type of a problem, and they pretty publicly admitted that it was much less effective at doing much (was able to do some things, but much more inefficient).

So, a possible refined version of this conspiracy theory would have to be something like, "We'll use Snowden to target some 'vulnerable' journalists (who are 'vulnerable' to wildly exaggerating), and hopefully, to paraphrase the old saying, the wild exaggerations will travel the world before our consistent media push to describe it more circumspectly can get its shoes on." In this case, you'd sort of have to posit that the entire push to rein back in the perception was, itself, a sort of second-order psyop, because if they just wanted Snowden to make all the people who are most likely to pay close attention to sources and methods freak out and change their behavior, they'd want to just be silent and let Snowden make everyone believe that they're omniscient.

While strictly speaking they didn't admit to searching all comms, they did show that they could do so. If I'm a terrorist or a foreign hostile operative, I'm very much going to treat "NSA can search my comms" with "NSA will search my comms." Because I wouldn't want to spend the rest of my life in Cuba.

I mean, it depends on what you mean by "could". Like, they're trying to be in a position so that they 'could' search Vladimir Putin's comms... and if they're ever in that position, then they probably 'could' search some rando terrorist's comms.

-- Significant portions of accepted history are misinterpreted fiction, and we have no way of proving which are which.

While not exactly the same thing, a tremendous amount of the popularly imagined history in the English speaking world is actually the fantasies of the 19th century. A minor but obvious example is knights in shining armor. Most armor was dark and unpolished, if not outright colored black. The armor is still around and there are tons of paintings.

Oh very much so. This goes back much further than the 19th century. The weapons, clothing, social structures, and language of the Homeric epics or the Mahabharata probably reflected more closely on the time of their writing than on the time period they proposed to portray.

And then you think of all the statues to fictional characters that are built! And for that matter, even for events that are within living contact for me, I worked with Vietnam Vets growing up and they told me the best way to understand it was to watch Full Metal Jacket and Platoon. Fiction over time can become part of our understanding of history. A few hundred years hence, these distinctions can get lost. Especially once you get into Epistolary or Diaristic novels.

I guess that’s a corollary to people thinking the peak of Renaissance artisanal armor was perfectly normal for the year 900.

I really don’t think the NSA’s tech (certainly in 2013, long before modern AI) was capable of effectively trawling trillions of Facebook messages or emails that raised flags.

It might have been possible, they might even have been doing it! But it's so much easier if all the terrorists just start using Telegram or Signal or .onion nonsense and rather than look through every FB message, you just look through the tiny number of encrypted messages.

Honestly I’d be curious how much illegal activity was conducted through in game chat for PC games. I’d imagine that would be incredibly difficult to monitor, especially older games. Seems like a pretty sneaky way of getting messages through.

Have you seen Four Lions? https://youtube.com/watch?v=xR5rKr-p6lc

I remember seeing a bunch of weird Grand Theft Auto images on imgur years ago that were supposedly Russian number station posts.

The Bachelor Season 25 producers removed a contestant from the show and edited her out of the earlier episodes in post production.

Can you expand on this? What's the evidence?

If you need more explanation of the show feel free to ask me, but I don't want to explain the whole concept again and make this comment too long.

Basic facts that pointed to conspiracy (keeping in mind this was like two or three years ago now and I'm going from memory)

-- This was one of the covid seasons which took place entirely on a single isolated resort, Nemacolin in PA.

-- Between episodes 2-4, the count kept being wrong between the contestants shown on screen and the quotes from contestants. ITMs would have contestants saying "OMG THERE ARE EIGHTEEN GIRLS HERE HOW AM I SUPPOSED TO GET ANY TIME?!" and then they'd announce the lineup and it would only have seventeen girls.

-- Multiple early group dates were team competition/sports dates where the girls were split into teams, but despite having the easy option of either leaving one more girl home or taking one more girl with, the group taken was an odd number. Why would you bring 13 girls for a sports competition and end up with uneven teams? And if you did, why didn't we hear the team with 6 girls complain that the other team had 7?

-- Whole dates were filmed, and teasers/previews leaked from outside sources that came in to host confirmed it, but were never shown on camera. Tens of thousands of dollars and hours of time spent on putting it together, and then just disappeared.

-- ITMs and other sudden cuts seemed to indicate that events or people were edited out. Whole days seemed to disappear, or ITMs would seem to refer to someone not shown.

The simplest explanation for all of these is a secret contestant who got Covid and was removed. There were eighteen girls, and they edited the voiceovers/announcements to remove her name. The team competition was run fairly, and then they eliminated one name. The dates that were cut entirely featured the cut contestant in a leading role/exclusively, to the point where it was better to cut them entirely than to butcher them. The cut contestant was promised a leading role in a later season, the rest were bribed with Paradise or threatened with lawsuits.

According to the linked Wikipedia article, it seems it was a simple case of cancelling:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bachelor_(American_season_25)#Controversy

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bachelor_(American_season_25)#Controversy

You misread the article, Rachel won the whole show. She got the most screentime of anyone.

I like these. You say we can't prove which parts of accepted history are fiction, but do you have any specific examples you believe are off base?

Not at all.

I just see how fiction develops in our own times. Certain fictional characters, Sherlock Holmes for example, become stock characters for a time period, they are written and rewritten, and many adaptations present themselves as "factual" if you aren't in on the joke or don't notice where it is shelved in the library. And I see how much of ancient literature and history we lost, we often only have one or two sources for significant periods of history. If a thousand years from now they had no real sources about early 20th century England, but they found various Holmes stories and references, they might think he was real.

ETA: I think a good example of someone who might be fake is Socrates. We have no writings from him directly, only from students who use him as a mouthpiece, and a few references from other contemporaries using him as a trope. It's not hard to envision Plato creating this character, Xenophon adapting him, and Aristophanes mocking him, etc.

-- Trump 100% originally ran for President on a dare from Bill Clinton. It was supposed to be a joke run to weaken JEB! and Ted Cruz and soften them up for HRC in the general, then he got there and thought huh maybe I can win the damn thing. None of the principals involved can admit to it after it went the way it did.

Hmmm .... imagine you are a boxer hired to participate in fixed match. You are supposed to convincingly fight for few minutes and then lose, but your opponent is so bad that you KO him by mistake and win.

You can enjoy your victory, but have lots of explaining to do afterwards.

This could explain Trump's lackluster campaing in 2016, this could explain Trump's face when he saw the states going red and number of delegates going up, this could explain why Trump had no victory speech prepared.

Most of all, this could explain the extreme rage that Trump inspired and extreme attempts to bring him down.

The plan wasn't to have him win the primary and take a dive in the general, it was to have him enter the Republican primary, force the "serious" Rs like Bush and Rubio and Cruz to take ridiculous unpopular positions and look silly arguing with Trump, ultimately lose the primary, and then HRC crushes a Bush or a Rubio who took absurd positions in the primary campaign. The early Trump campaign was intensely flamboyant, and seemed highly unserious by contemporary political standards, everyone assumed the establishment would rally and knock him down.

What happened then was some combination of

  1. Trump's "absurd" positions turned out to have a massive following among everyday Americans. He started winning. He knocked out like seven serious R contenders one after another, and at first knocking out Jeb Bush and Chris Christie was helpful for HRC, but he got addicted to it, and pretty soon there weren't any R contenders left.

  2. Bannon, who in this theory was a patsy they all thought was a nut who wouldn't achieve anything, the equivalent of the director they hire in The Producers, took it seriously and was extremely talented. Springtime for Hitler was hit!

  3. Trump realized he liked winning, and would give it a shot. He started drinking his own kool aid, buying his own sales pitch.

  4. Clinton (et al) tried to puncture the Trump surge by attacking him personally and leaking info on him. Trump took offense at this, and said OK you're gonna try to hurt me, I'm not taking a dive. He was willing to take the L, but the other guy has to pull his punches in that situation, if you make it a survival problem the Tomato Can has to fight back.

I have a heavy prior against this conspiracy theory based on the fact that running a presidential campaign is incredibly stressful and chaotic yet Trump (despite running a, shall we say, creative campaign) never had a major logistical or basic operational fuck up. He didn't miss a debate or a big event to my knowledge.

But.....

I remember reading articles about him being chronically late to rallies. This was often portrayed as Trump being a prima donna and resisting taking the stage until he was damn well ready. But what if it was actually a Benny Hill scene behind the scenes and he was arriving just in time (or very fucking late) to event after event and just getting up to the stage and saying whatever the hell was on his mind. Therein lies my second "Damn it, @FiveHourMarathon might have something here" idea --- Trump's relationship with his rally crowds was legendary. It really was him at his Zenith. I wonder how much that turned into a forest fire creating its own wind and propelling Trump into the mindset of "no, actually, voters want me to be President."

This is where point 2 comes in, the staff they put together turned out to be shockingly competent. The plot never recovered.

never had a major logistical or basic operational fuck up

You think Fours Seasons Landscaping rally mix-up was a deliberate joke?

I love the Producers theory and I would love to see a movie made one day of this scenario.

Elevator buttons do nothing. The door doesn't close any faster if you press the button but it gives you something to do.

This one is definitely not true. I've timed how long doors take to close normally, and then validated that pushing the button will immediately close (ahead of the normal time). It could be true for some elevators, but it's not true for all (and the theory doesn't qualify its claim as being only about a subset of elevators).

The Americans with Disabilities Act prescribes a minimum time an elevator door must remain open regardless of what buttons are pressed

This is correct. Even on older models the control panel is highly configurable by the owner/operator. The primary purpose of the firefighter key/code is to unlock full control of the panel for emergency services or a technician. In the US most of them will be in a rather restricted configuration considering our special mix of idiocy and litigiousness.

Which continent do you live on? I've convinced myself that elevator door close buttons only work about 10% of the time in North America and the rest of the world but about 90% of the time in East Asia. Maybe I'm just more inclined to follow rules and expect things to work in East Asia though.

I live in Northern Europe and if there is a button to close the doors in the first place (there isn”& always), it works much more often than not.

I live in the US.

They work almost all of the time in South Asia. I was aware of the 'myth' in question, but unquestionably validated that they did do what they advertised pretty much everytime I checked.

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