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