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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   5876 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 21, 2023

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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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.

Here's an inverse conspiracy theory that's also technically a conspiracy: Flat Earthers don't exist.

It's held up as the archetypical example of conspiracy theory believers, but I'm convinced that pretty much everyone who expresses support for Flat Earth theories - well over 99% - is knowingly playing along in a giant hoax, for a sense of community and the amusement of getting ridiculous stories published in serious newspapers. (Some of them don't actually realise this and think that only they themselves are roleplayers while the rest of their group are serious).

Here is inverse inverse conspiracy theory: modern flat earthism, when it suddenly appeared about 2012 - if you remember, you would remember deluge of slick, professionally made Youtube videos - was not product of believers, was not a joke, but experiment how could disinformation and fake news spread on then new social media (it turned out it can spread like wildfire).

Anyway, if the Earth is not flat, it should be. See you on Kek island.

I think it's just hardcore in-group testing. "We wanted to create a group where just getting into it meant demonstrating extreme commitment ... but in a purely "I BELIEVE" way." My main evidence for this is the Behind The Curve documentary which shows that the main Flat Earth dude was just looking for a girlfriend and the main Flat Earth lady was just looking for a boyfriend (I think after a divorce or death?) and so they pre-tested the hell out of each other with the Flat Earth community and now have super hard to break enforced bonding via shared delusional belief.

If the world were as big as that chart it would be so much more interesting.

Crazy how much lower res the continents get as you go out. Hopefully some day cartography will advance enough that we can see the truth.

I believe this one. “The Flat Earth Society” used to be a fictional group cited to mock people, like calling someone “president of the The Narcissists’ Fan Club”.

I remember someone once telling me it was a skeptic’s group dedicated to promoting scientific thinking, by providing challenges such as defeating the view cited in its name. However, I did a few Google searches a few years ago and found no evidence of such a group ever having existed.

I remember joining the flat earth society on a lark, and it seemed like most of the people in their forum had joined on a lark. There were a few zetetic schizoposters ranting about mass graves for former guards of the antarctic ice wall but I was never that sure they weren't trolls.

I remember being in school during geography and actually signing up for this. I signed up on a school email, which is now lost to time, but I specifically remember them being a legit web site.

I choose to believe it's a psy op.

I suspect that the flat earth society is a lot like many so-called "right wing militias", nine hundreds feds rationalists and one sincere autist who will be used by said feds/rationalists to justify why normies suck and ought to be disenfranchised.

As the joke goes, 14/88 stands for 1 FBI agent, 4 state troopers and 8 8th-graders, a typical composition of a right-wing extremist cell.

And it breaks up when the State troopers lose patience with the FBI agent's increasingly violent rhetoric and decide he needs to be taken out before he blows up a building.

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