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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.
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.
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