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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   4225 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 10, 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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I'm doing another low-stakes/small scale conspiracy theory thread(I think I'll probably start doing these once a quarter or so in the SSQ thread). What are your minor conspiracy theories? Not things that dramatically change how the world works(eg "the davos group is behind the simultaneous rise in both house prices and interest rates in the United States to eliminate home ownership"), nor that would be too interesting and sexy not to be common knowledge if they were both true and had sufficient evidence(eg "Bush was behind 9/11"). What are your boring, small scale schizo posting?

Bullets from me:

  • General health advice about salt is knowably false to most well-informed people. I think the same thing is probably true about cholesterol, but with the added motivation of public health advisors taking bribes from eg Kellogg and Coca-Cola to understate the effects of sugar, so they blame cholesterol instead.
  • The effects of Freon(R-22) on the atmosphere were drastically overstated to keep dupont's control over the provision of refrigerant at around the time the patent on R-22 was expiring.
  • School districts as a group resist adopting the best pedagogical practices to prevent enough improvement in student outcomes for the public/lawmakers to conclude they don't need more money.
  • The world population is probably massively overstated because officials in corrupt countries routinely inflate population figures in their areas of responsibility to try to seek budget increases/international aid.

I’ve always believed that the US government blamed Oswald because they couldn’t actually solve the crime but were afraid of both the potential for nuclear war with Russia and the crisis of confidence that would result from the case being known to be unsolved. The rapidity of the arrest is pretty weird to me — within hours the man was in custody, there was an official story, and the weren’t looking for accomplices or other potential shooters or co-conspirators. They were firm that there was only one shooter despite witnesses stating that there were shots coming from the grassy knoll.

Aliens are a cover story for advanced weapons.

Amusingly I've always been reasonably certain that Oswald did do it and equally certain that it was a hit planned by either by the mob, or by the CIA using the mob as intermediaries, and that's why he had to be bumped off before getting his day in court.

Likewise, I know that at least one semi-prominant UFO incident resulted the crew of a classified flight test program getting chewed out for "flat-hatting".

By "know", do you mean you know personally about the UFO story, or just that it's a theory you feel certain is true?

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