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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.
I'm not entirely serious, but I am enthusiastic about moon landing conspiracy theories. If nothing else, I enjoy challenging friends on whether they've actually thought about just how weird the official story is and how many weird things have happened since.
I am a firm believer that many major sporting events have been rigged and that the leagues do everything they can to keep this quiet. If you can watch this game or this game and come away feeling like someone wasn't trying to get a desired result, I don't know what to tell you.
I've always thought that for conspiracy theories, it's best to analyze the counter-factual story rather than the official story. Lots of weird stuff happens in reality, but it's hard to tell how much weird stuff is the difference between, this obviously didn't happen that way and huh, I guess stuff is just weird sometimes.
For the moon landing, IMO any remotely plausible counter-factual is far more full of holes than the official story:
We were in a bitter competition with the Soviets at the time, who had plenty of space, radar, and radio tech themselves. If there was anything the least bit hinky about it, why wouldn't they have called us out? I'm sure they tracked the trajectory of the rockets and modules, the transmission source and content, etc.
Rocketry hasn't advanced all that much since then, but electronics and special effects have. Maybe we could make some nice fake videos of it now, but it probably would have been impossible to fake the video with 60s-era special effects technology. It's also a lot more plausible that, in the 60s, the government was far ahead of the private sector in rocketry, versus being far ahead of Hollywood in video special effects.
There's a hell of a lot of people who worked on the Apollo project, and a hell of a lot of artifacts of it lying around in public view. It's pretty implausible that all of it is fake and every single person is lying and has continued to lie consistently for decades, in many cases up to their deathbeds and through various types of dementia, with no obvious signs of massive amounts of money being thrown around. It's probably cheaper and simpler to actually go to the moon than to organize all of that.
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