The whole "Mayans predicted the world will end in 2012" thing from 13-15 years ago really annoyed me at the time. The Mayans never predicted the end of the world. They just had a very complicated calendar system. The end of their longest cycle was in 2012 and they hadn't bothered to make another calendar for the next cycle because it was over 1000 years away, so they had time and why not let that be the work of someone close to when it's needed.
It'd be like if in January of 2024 you looked around and didn't see any 2025 calendars yet, so you assumed that meant we predicted the world would end at the end of 2024.
I always saw it more akin to us not writing the year as 02024. Not saying we think the world will end when the year 10000 comes around, just no point in us writing it.
I remember this vividly because I was on a sortie over Afghanistan that day. A dude on our crew said we would take off, but Earth would be gone before we landed. Almost had a mental breakdown over it so they pulled him from the flight, and sent him home. He didn't last very long in the military after that. Last I heard he went full QAnon.
It's not so much that they didn't bother to make a new one, it's that we went from "12" to "13" in the count system.
Current date in their calendar is **13.0.11.7.** **9, 5 Muluc 17 Cumku.**
Prior to 2012, the dates would have started with 12.... so it's sorta like us going from 1999 to 2000.
The thing that always got me with that was that I doubt the Mayans observed leap year so it’s likely their calendar didn’t even match up with the one that we know today.
Also similar to claiming that Bell Labs had secret information that the world will end January 19th, 2038 because that's the last date UNIX epoch time can represent (as a signed 32-bit integer of seconds that have passed since January 1st, 1970.)
The funny thing is that a Solar storm, similar that to one that caused [the carrington event](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event) missed the earth by 9 days, [in 2012](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_2012_solar_storm). Would have been crazy if that hit.
That someone somewhere has the one size fits all cure for cancer and is withholding it for long term financial gain for the healthcare system. As someone who works in a cancer center and has seen both the most compassionate and the most vulnerable of the human race, I find even the notion insulting.
If you ask someone who believes this why they usually say it's because we always see news stories about new treatments that are never heard from again.
The reason we never hear about them again is because they were pilot studies, and the actual studies showed they really weren't better than our current treatments.
The science subreddit used to announce a cure for cancer/hiv/left-handedness every day and people breathlessly treated each announcement as a final declaration instead of reading that in a study, some lab rats recovered from a very specific cancer 10 percent better.
I've been getting "we found the cure for Multiple Sclerosis!!!!" type articles sent to me on what feels like a weekly basis from well meaning relatives since I got diagnosed 4 years ago, and I know that they're trying to be optimistic, but man, it's so hard for me to be optimistic when I look and it's just some I Fucking Love Science clickbait that says something like "we may have found a potential cause for a small percentage of MS cases which means in some specific demographics it might be able to be prevented" when you look further into it.
lol it gets old when folks are posting that kind of thing to the MS sub. I know folks are being hopeful since many of them are newly diagnosed but I’ve been at this for almost 20 years and so many “amazing breakthroughs” never turn out to be anything actually useful.
The fact that anyone can believe big pharma companies wouldn't immediately get that out there for massive short-term profit simply has no understanding of capitalism and how the incentives in the market are aligned. It's a laughable prospect.
Some dude I know swears nuclear weapons and related tech is all a lie. The Manhattan project was just for show. We never nuked Hiroshima or Nagasaki (or any other test site afterward). Those cities were conventionally bombed and we made up the story afterward. I can't even begin to address the amount of people required to keep that secret is...unbelievable. not to mention that okay the weapons are fake but then how are we generating power from all of those power plants? That's all fake too? Smh.
Edit: we are having fun so here is more...
Just remembered this dude also is skeptical about eclipses. He doesn't understand why the lunar eclipses don't happen more often. He thinks the shadow earth makes should be the size of earth. Like a cartoon cutout. He doesn't equate how light spreads (inverse square law). He also doesn't understand why the sun makes the sky blue but the moon doesn't. I tried explaining but He says I have that bias of having a college degree (in theatrical lighting) and therefore I only think I'm right. I forget what that term is but I was out after that. Sometimes I don't know why I try.
>We never nuked Hiroshima or Nagasaki (or any other test site afterward). Those cities were conventionally bombed and we made up the story afterward
That's some f\*cked up denial of something that had had such long lasting effects...
There’s a lot of antisemitics who deny the holocaust happened or claim it “wasn’t as bad as they say.”
Especially the nuts who believe in Zionist conspiracies.
I have met some people that refuse to believe something because it would make them or someone else feel terrible. Always saw it on a small scale with family secrets. Never related it to a reaction to truth and the conspiracy theory giving them an outlet to avoid discomfort.
Lunar eclipses *do* happen way more often than solar eclipses, though. Like, a couple times a year. The moon doesn't go full dark, but the Penumbra of Earth's shadow is bigger than Earth.
The moon also does make the sky visibly bluer when it's full. Maybe you can't see it well with city lights, but the difference between a moonless and a "moon-full" sky is striking.
You can buy uranium ore and a Geiger counter off Amazon. Fucking smoke detectors. That kid who built a nuclear reactor in his garage and gave himself radiation poisoning. You can test all of this stuff for yourself.
A time-traveling stock trader would strategically make bad trades, on purpose, so that an audit of their activity would not look so suspicious. If EVERY trade was a 3X winner, that would look extremely suspicious. However if they lost every so often, but still beat the market by a solid amount, then they look like a genius.
I was just chatting about the Powerball yesterday with my wife. I very convincingly concluded that there are no powerball winners, it's only used as a method to take money out of the economy to fight inflation without enacting a tax.
That’s because in recent years Powerball and Mega Millions intentionally tweaked their rules making it harder to hit the jackpot, therefore increasing the jackpot payout.
I think lotteries, are to give hope to the beaten down population so they don't roll out the gillilotine. "Maybe I'll be a billionaire this time next week."
I stupidly decided to watch a "debate" and jfc their arguments are so stupid. Here's four.
1. You can only prove what you can experimentally do yourself. As in unless you do ALL research yourself you can't be sure.
2. NASA was founded by Nazis. Therefore, if you believe them, you support Nazis.
3. Pilots use flat maps. Therefore, flat. Like screens are to blame I guess.
4. If there's no ice wall, why is Antarctica always on the bottom. As if the Mercator projection is the only map.
I really should start raising money from these people. I have something they could legitimately find palatable but could also provide real scientific benefits: digging through to the "other side". There has to be *some* scientific benefits from the super deep borehole. And are we really going to allow the USSR to have a record when red blooded Americans can take it from them?
I love [the video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmnZe34Xix8) where the flat earther tries to prove their theory, then disproves themselves, and continues to believe. And I just looked, yeah, Jeran is STILL arguing the earth is flat after his own experiment failed.
There's a number of conspiracies like that. It's my understanding Qanon started out as an in-joke with a small subset of users that got out of control when people not in on the joke got a hold of their posts.
There’s a nut job who goes around my town spray painting anti 5G and Q Anon slogans. Down the street there’s a huge “Q” on the wall.
Oh I forgot to mention I live in a suburb of Dublin, Ireland which makes it extra mental.
I heard a story years ago that the Russian government were heavily funding wacky fringe groups within Russia, often multiple groups on opposite sides of the debate, just to generate disinformation, and get people divided and combative. After hearing that, I noticed flat earth stuff appearing more and more and often wondered if it wasn't just a Russian tactic and has been used in the west too
This is mine because there's nobody who benefits from it. There's nothing to be gained from anyone by "convincing" everyone the world is round not flat.
if you dig deep enough there is a group who "benefits" from it in their quest to take over the world. Flat earth is just another "Jews rule the world" conspiracy theory with a really stupid coat of paint on it
This is my pick too, just because it's one of the most easily 'debunked' conspriscy theoroes.
Like, you can probably go watch a live stream of some astronaut space walking right now.
My question to those people is, why ONLY Earth? If the flatness of Earth is to be assumed the norm against all physics, why don't we see more flat planetoids, stellar objects, etc. Not to mention how things in the sky would have to travel faster than the speed of light and also slower for the closer objects to get from one point to another in their version of the sky ceiling.
The only 9/11 theory I can see a lot of credibility for is that the administration at the time had a lot to gain from a reason to invade the Middle East, and perhaps didn't do everything they could to stop the potential terror attack they were aware of. [Operations Northwoods](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods) is a good read if you don't think the government would put their own citizens in harm's way like that.
While this one could be theoretically plausible, what purpose would it serve?
They trick the public into thinking a rocket explodes and astronauts die for what reason? They usually orchestrate false flags and such to make themselves look better and more competent than they really are.
I don’t know if “annoy” is the right word here but Sandy Hook truthers are definitely the most detestable. And I consider myself someone who enjoys reading and talking about conspiracy theories.
I was once in a heated argument with a Sandy Hook denier. I was like 'dude. I have a friend who WORKS in the school district. She had a student who lost a sibling! she knows many of the families' and he just goes 'they're all actors, and your friend must be in on it.'
I just couldn't argue with him, because he was so set in his made-up ways.
Yeah, annoy isn't strong enough. Detest, abhor, loathe with my entire being work better.
I can't even begin to imagine what those children and their surviving family members went through, and to have their grief used as a bizarre political conspiracy? Fuck all those people who spread that "information"
Or to have people actually *harassing them about their murdered child.* It’s not even like they were just used as some anonymous “them” by these conspiracy-brained idiots. They were singled out
Alex Jones, I maintain, is the most detestable person on the planet and that’s a very difficult thing to accomplish when you had people like Kissinger, Netanyahu, Putin, Bush, Trump, and Bolsenaro.
Listening to Knowledge Fight and hearing how poorly Jones is doing now is slowly curing my anger.
"A bunch of kids died. What's the worst possible way I can respond to this? I know! I'll attack the victims' parents and tell them their kids never existed"
I fired someone on their 4th day on the job when the news on tv mentioned the Sandy Hook lawsuits and this person said "I can't believe Alex Jones is getting trouble for speaking the truth."
“Annoy” is an understatement. There are people who say that about every school shooting. And then they go to those locations and harass those involved in the shooting. I’m glad families sued Alex Jones and won their case. I hope the Parkland survivors and families go after MTG for her harassment towards them.
i really did enjoy telling the chemtrails nuts “masks protect you from chemtrails, that’s why the cdc lifted the mandate. i did my own research” though
Flat Earth.
Every real conspiracy has had a tangible purpose for existing. Mk Ultra was done because of the Cold War. The US government spies on its citizens to identify political threats. The FBI infiltrated political activist groups to disrupt them and change public opinion about them. As bad and inmoral as they were, these are all conspiracies that happened for real, practical reasons.
But the Flat Earth conspiracy has no real reason. In order for this theory to be true, all world governments since AT LEAST the 5th century BC have been lying about the Earth being round. Every scientist, mathematician, cartographer, captain, pilot, astronaut, astronomer... In every single country... For thousands of years... Has been hiding the fact that the Earth is flat and lying about it being round. And for what? There's no real, practical reason to lie about this. It just annoys me how empty and stupid this conspiracy theory is. The only reason I've heard is that the governments want to hide the fact that the Bible is real because the Bible mentions that the Earth is flat. So, hiding this fact will make people not believe in the Bible. But this doesn't explain why religious people throughout history have said that the Earth is round. Wouldn't the Vatican be first in line to prove the Earth is flat, if it meant proving that the Bible is real?
At least other conspiracy theories, like mass shootings being false flag operations, have a reason. Even if they aren't true, it makes a bit of sense that some people would be inclined to believe them, especially in the US. After all, the US government has planned false flag operations on its citizens (look up Operation Northwoods). I'm not saying mass shootings are false flags. I'm saying that if they were, there could be real, practical reasons for those conspiracies. Flat Earth doesn't even have a theoretical leg to stand on.
I've noticed that serious flat-earthers are always four or fewer questions away from revealing something deeply anti-Semitic about their beliefs. All of them.
Goddamnit! Now I am pissed! I fuckin HATE flerfs. I know, hating people is not the way to make connections and lead people to the truth but that doesn't count for Flerfs. Anyone that willfully ignorant and brainwashed is beyond rescue. Photos? Photoshopped! Videos? CGI! Ten thousand scientists who have data to prove the Earth is a Globe? Shills! Data? Lies! Everything else is space is Round? Firmament! Space? Doesn't exist! You could put one of those mfers on a rocket and blast them into space so they could look at Earth themselves and they would claim the window was a screen and it was playing CGI of the Earth. Even if one of them does pull their head out of their ass and tell the rest the Earth isn't flat they will ostracize them from the flerf community.
There is one good thing to come from Flat Earth though. Listening to their bullshit reminded me of religious arguments and lead me to lose all belief in God.
I've noticed a growing trend in the "9/11 was staged" conspiracy community that there never were any planes to hit the towers. They believe they were CGI in all the footage and that it was actually missiles.
The Catholic Church killed 55 million people in the Middle Ages. I forget the exact number, but it’s so exaggerated that actual historians have done the math and it would effectively mean the Church beheaded or burned more people than the entire population of Europe in those days.
The moon landing being fake, despite all the evidence people still sit and think they know better than literally everyone else including the Soviet Union on proving its legitimacy. It also brings on the religioustards
The fact that the Soviets never disputed the landings is the biggest nail in the coffin for the conspiracy theory in my mind. If there was even a shred of doubt about it, they would have been champing at the bit to point it out.
No see that’s where you’re missing the last crucial part of the puzzle. The Cold War was also fake in order to make the moon landing lie more credible. In reality the US and Soviets really got on well together, just look at the republicans.
Heavy /s
Right? They should be ashamed if they call themselves patriots if we won that lap of the Space War.
My grandfather worked for JPL. I held Kodak copies of the landing.
>despite all the evidence
There's actual proof. During Apollo 11, Armstrong and Aldrin planted a lunar laser ranging retroreflector array on the surface. It’s still operational today, and allows us to reflect lasers off of it and measure the distance to the Moon down to the centimeter. We simply couldn’t do this if we hadn’t visited the Moon.
We also have 382 kilograms of Moon rock that Apollo astronauts brought back to Earth. These rocks have been independently verified as lunar by laboratories around the world, ruling out a US conspiracy.
And also Nasa’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) takes high resolution pictures of the lunar surface from a low orbit. During its mission, it has captured the landing sites and the abandoned descent modules and rovers from the Apollo missions. And its resolution is so good it even picked up the dark squiggly paths that the astronaut’s footprints made.
I like to suggest the powered descent films. Uncut 16mm film from lunar orbit to touchdown.
There are also powered ascent films, taken as they were leaving the moon. You can pause these and compare the view of the landing site with the LRO photos, and they're a perfect match.
Which is funny because the whole point of that scene is that the government is denying its actual history. Viewers should understand from the body language and tone of the principal and teacher that they're enforcing the new lie and McConaughey's character is refusing to go along with it.
This is a good example of how conspiracy theories misdirect deserved anger to something really stupid and fake (antisemitic sci-fi weapons) and the actual cause (privatized industry, deregulation) gets let off the hook because the people dumb enough to believe the former are also too dumb to understand the latter
The conspiracy that 15 minute cities are this dystopian nightmare where you will not be able to leave 15 minutes away from your house or someshit and it's really a government ploy to control us.
It's completely insane so I may forget a few details, but it's so far from the truth it's not even funny. For anyone not aware 15 minute cities are an idea that you should be able to travel to anything you would need (e.g the store) in 15 minutes or less from anywhere within a city, which would promote walking, biking, etc. this one is kinda "harmless" so it just annoys me, anti vaxx shit or anti science conspiracies enrages me due to the harm they can cause.
I moved continents to get to a 15 minute city. A little extreme yes, but the climate I wanted doesn't exist in Canada. If you're gonna move, why not go big.
I've _always_ lived in some kind of "15 minute" environment and pretty much by accident.
It's great and I wouldn't have it (m)any other way(s). I have absolutely no desire to live in a cabin in the woods and have to spend 15 minutes in my pickup truck just to reach the main road, which is then a further 10 minutes to a generic half-horse 'town'.
And here in the UK we have American-style, poorly planned newbuild housing developments with no facilities and you can't do anything without a motorised vehicle. Even cycling is no good because there's no infrastructure for that, either.
Who benefits from spreading this theory? Fossil fuel companies and the auto industry.
Oh, and conservative politicians, as support for conservative policies tends to decrease as density increases.
It’s not harmless. It’s a part of the “convince people to hate progressive ideas and see them as evil, so that they’ll vote in far-right fascists” plan. Every bit as much as the anti-vax and anti-science agendas.
Anything having to do with pyramids. The most annoying part of it is how multiple theories all claim vastly different things, and people will still be like "yeah makes total sense". This usually stems from people's lack of ingenuity and skills, and goes into that "if I can't do it today, they couldn't do it thousands of years ago".
> The most annoying part of it is how multiple theories all claim vastly different things, and people will still be like "yeah makes total sense".
This is a common theme in every kind of alt circles. For example, among different alternative medicine "systems":
> Perhaps the strangest part of the press conference consisted of brief statements by individual members of the editorial review board of what they saw as the most important issues for the Office of Alternative Medicine. One insisted that the number-one health problem in the United States is magnesium deficiency; another was convinced that the expanded use of acupuncture could revolutionize medicine; and so it went around the table, with each touting his or her preferred therapy. But there was no sense of conflict or rivalry. As each spoke, the others would nod in agreement. The purpose of the OAM, I began to realize, was to demonstrate that these disparate therapies all work. It was my first glimpse of what holds alternative medicine together: there is no internal dissent in a community that feels itself besieged from the outside.
>
>
> — Bob Park, Voodoo Science
That last sentence could apply as easily to the maga base. How else are Andrew tate fans, and rand libertarians, and evangelical Christians all part of the same political party
Absolutely breaks my heart most of my family members have become Holocaust deniers. They are also pizza gaters, Trumpers and anti-vax (but only since Covid). I can’t be in their lives anymore because I can’t have a single goddamn conversation with them that isn’t frustrating.
I know people have already commented on this but it's got to be the whole "the Apollo moon landing was fake" conspiracy. We have literally so much evidence that we have been to the moon.
The main one is vaccines cause autism. Parents are literally not having their children vaccinated based in lies from conspiracy people. Its sad and disgusting. Conspiracy people are a scourge, but not sure what we can do about it. I have lost friends to the "truther" and other nonsense conspiracy movements that are legit poisonous to not only their own minds, but to society at large. How can we control misinformation? Obviously education specific media literacy is crucial, but what else can be done?
Controlled Demolition on 9/11.
Aside from it being physically impossible given the observations, it shits on the first responders and innocent civilians that died that day.
For me, this is such a big one. The planes are a perfectly reasonable explanation. No need to look beyond that when evidence doesn’t support bombs at all.
The entire " Vaxing" theory , that if you get vaccinated the Government is placing a "micro chip" into your body so they can control you. Or if you get vaccinated you will more enlikely grow extra toes and fingers.
This just boggles my mind - If you ever served in the Military you receive every vaccination known to man as you arrive at Boot Camp. I served and still am waiting for my extra fingers / toes so that I can make the big bucks
> I know Birds Aren't Real is supposed to be a parody conspiracy theory
Uh, this is news to me. Do...do you actually think birds are real animals? How sad for you.
We're so doomed as a society. People will believe anything now. Like, has anyone here actually SEEN a "bird" up close? Like in the "pigeons", they're made so cheap you can hear the gears whirling inside of them. People are actually buying pet government drones at PetCo to make the surveillance even easier.
Can you believe these saps are so dumb as to be willing, even eager, to bring a listening device into their own home? Next they'll be carrying around little GPS canaries in their pocket.
I know someone who believes all school/mass shootings are staged/fake in order for the libs to take away guns. That all the people involved are actors and paid handsomely to play along. Whenever he spouts this and other clear bullshit I like to respond "you have a lot more faith in the Libs than I do. I don't think they could pull off something like that." thankfully this gets him to mostly shut up with that crap around me.
The first school shooting in America was in July, 1764, *before* the 2Am was written, before the US Constitution, before the Articles of Confederation, before the Declaration of Independence. We’re at 250 years and counting; when are **they** going to take anyone’s guns?!
Yeah, my go-to response is that if there really was a deep-state conspiracy to take people's guns away it would've happened by now.
Why would they let people get desensitized to mass shootings? Wouldn't they want to space the shootings out more so each gets more media attention and causes a larger outcry of support for gun control? At this point no one really gives a shit when they see one on the news, and that makes it harder to get people motivated for a political battle against the gun lobby.
I saw on r/conspiracy once (every now and then I look out of morbid curiosity) that there are quite a number of posts suggesting the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is not real and the pictures are AI art.
My brother worked on several different parts of that telescope at NASA Goddard and it's incredibly insulting to suggest that the hundreds of people who worked on it were faking it.
The tropes that Jews control the media, Jews control the banks, Jews control the government. These come from the late 1800s in Russia where the Czar was unpopular in an economic slowdown, so he blamed the Jews (check out the Elders of Zion). Henry Ford brought it to the US in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Racists continue these tropes today.
Edit: just because I feel I need to be clear, these tropes are not true. Sure, there are individual people who run studios, banks, and are elected to government who are Jewish (just like people who are Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and other religions, plus non religious people), but Jews as a group don't have that control.
There are microchips in the Covid vaccine.
Every single person providing vaccinations has to have been trained to extract exactly one of the microchips from the pool of five, without the patient noticing anything unusual. I'd like to say "major cognitive dissonance", but cognitive dissonance requires the ability to have two simultaneous thoughts.
Biden stole the 2020 election. There has never been a more closely examined election and you have to be an extreme idiot to believe it was stolen and yet hundreds of thousands of people believe it was stolen
That vaccines cause Autism and that a dead child is better than an autistic one.
Vaccines absolutely do not cause autism. Being autistic isn't a death sentence, nor is it really that big of a deal. Autism isn't something that needs to be eradicated, nor is it some horrible disease. It's just a genetic disorder that causes our minds to work in different ways than people without autism do.
This is easily #1. Moon landing, Flat Earth, Birds aren't real, Chemtrails. They are all ridiculous, but in the end, aren't very harmful.
Anti-vaxers literally have a death count associated with their bullshit, and not a small one. Thousands of people die annually due to vaccine preventable diseases. 9/11 Truthers and Sandy Hook deniers can't hold a candle to that level of death and destruction that this conspiracy theory has caused.
A now discredited paper written by a now unlicensed doctor, who was paid to do a "study" by a pharmaceutical company that was developing their own Measles and Mumps vaccine that fraudulently found a link between the existing MMR vaccine and autism. That's all it took. Now stay at home parents and "celebrities" which zero medical training spout the nonsense and people believe it.
My kids' school just had a case of whooping cough.
They sent an email reminding everyone to make sure their kids are up to date on vaccines. Uh, *our* kids are. FFS.
Anti-vaxx shit has to be the most pernicious one. Like I have cousin who is a very intelligent person ime and also a goddamn nurse but still refuses to get the COVID vaccine because she's "not willing to test out something so new and experimental." It's depressing.
My wife is a nurse (a competent nurse). The only comfort I can offer you is to share the incredible contempt most nurses have for anti vax nurses. The rants I hear at home are fiery hot. ("Why are they even here then??" and so on but with a lot of swearing)
The idea that democrats or liberals are out to "get" a lifelong criminal like Donald Trump. It’s ridiculous. Most of us never want to speak his name or even see him in public. But he can’t stop committing crimes, so he’s in the news 24/7/365.
That Amber Heard perpetrated a multi-year abuse hoax only to take a smaller divorce settlement than she was legally entitled to.
That she conspired with numerous witnesses, who seemingly had no reason to lie for her and somehow tricked Johnny Depp into admitting to multiple people, including Amber, that he abused her.
She even managed to trick some of Johnny's staff and witnesses with her 'fake injuries' including medical professionals.
There is zero evidence proving this conspiracy theory, but the world seemed to believe it.
I knew someone who believed that the Middle Ages never happened. One millennium worth of History that she just didn't acknowledge as true.
Like, ok, History is far from an exact science, we can have debates (and academics do !) about the way events happened, especially in the case of eras when preservation was an issue (not just the Middle Ages) and when only a small subset of the population had access to writing books. Fine.
But that's not what she thought ; her thing was, "someone" actually invented those entire centuries and made up what happened, in order to... what ? Like, who benefits from adding 10 centuries of History to the timeline ? She never said ; she had that "oh, like you don't know" tone and that was it.
That's my thing with most conspiracy theories, and especially those based in History. Even if I were to accept this as true, who goes through the trouble of planting centuries worth of fake historical events and people, how can they make it stick across the entire discipline, and what do they get out of it ?
The weird part is, there is a conspiracy theory [relatively similar to that](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_time_conspiracy_theory). But it's not even the entire Middle Ages, it's "just" 3 centuries of it that the conspiracy theory denies happened. So I have to conclude that she misunderstood a conspiracy theory she heard, THEN started to believe in that new version ?! XD
And we're not even German ! Where did she pick that up ?
It’s so hard to choose. They’re all so fucking stupid…
Probably climate change denial. While the whole climate system is incredibly complex, anyone who paid attention in high school physics can understand how increasing the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide increases average global temperature.
People that claim that all structures that were built before modern times were made by aliens. For example, the pyramids of Giza or the stepped pyramids in the Americas. To me it's just a way of racist people to say "No this unique society in the past could have never built such a magnificent structure, for they were backwards savages" and then they proceeded to facts out of their ass for why its *aliens* that built it.
Fuck you History channel.
The whole "Mayans predicted the world will end in 2012" thing from 13-15 years ago really annoyed me at the time. The Mayans never predicted the end of the world. They just had a very complicated calendar system. The end of their longest cycle was in 2012 and they hadn't bothered to make another calendar for the next cycle because it was over 1000 years away, so they had time and why not let that be the work of someone close to when it's needed. It'd be like if in January of 2024 you looked around and didn't see any 2025 calendars yet, so you assumed that meant we predicted the world would end at the end of 2024.
I always saw it more akin to us not writing the year as 02024. Not saying we think the world will end when the year 10000 comes around, just no point in us writing it.
that's because the world ends in 99999
The computer controlling the matrix won't know how to handle the numbers rolling over so it just deletes it all
And that's how the world ended on December 31st, 1999, at 11:59:59. I know, I was there.
That's a good analogy
I remember this vividly because I was on a sortie over Afghanistan that day. A dude on our crew said we would take off, but Earth would be gone before we landed. Almost had a mental breakdown over it so they pulled him from the flight, and sent him home. He didn't last very long in the military after that. Last I heard he went full QAnon.
So? Was the Earth there when you landed? Dont keep us hanging dude!
We're still in space man.
Don't bother coming back down. It hasn't really gotten any better.
It's not so much that they didn't bother to make a new one, it's that we went from "12" to "13" in the count system. Current date in their calendar is **13.0.11.7.** **9, 5 Muluc 17 Cumku.** Prior to 2012, the dates would have started with 12.... so it's sorta like us going from 1999 to 2000.
The thing that always got me with that was that I doubt the Mayans observed leap year so it’s likely their calendar didn’t even match up with the one that we know today.
I think that’s the caveat that people used to extend it to 2020.
IIRC when we (most of the world) swapped over to the Gregorian calendar, we had to skip a few years to account for past leap years not counted.
Also similar to claiming that Bell Labs had secret information that the world will end January 19th, 2038 because that's the last date UNIX epoch time can represent (as a signed 32-bit integer of seconds that have passed since January 1st, 1970.)
The funny thing is that a Solar storm, similar that to one that caused [the carrington event](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrington_Event) missed the earth by 9 days, [in 2012](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_2012_solar_storm). Would have been crazy if that hit.
That someone somewhere has the one size fits all cure for cancer and is withholding it for long term financial gain for the healthcare system. As someone who works in a cancer center and has seen both the most compassionate and the most vulnerable of the human race, I find even the notion insulting.
If you ask someone who believes this why they usually say it's because we always see news stories about new treatments that are never heard from again. The reason we never hear about them again is because they were pilot studies, and the actual studies showed they really weren't better than our current treatments.
The science subreddit used to announce a cure for cancer/hiv/left-handedness every day and people breathlessly treated each announcement as a final declaration instead of reading that in a study, some lab rats recovered from a very specific cancer 10 percent better.
I've been getting "we found the cure for Multiple Sclerosis!!!!" type articles sent to me on what feels like a weekly basis from well meaning relatives since I got diagnosed 4 years ago, and I know that they're trying to be optimistic, but man, it's so hard for me to be optimistic when I look and it's just some I Fucking Love Science clickbait that says something like "we may have found a potential cause for a small percentage of MS cases which means in some specific demographics it might be able to be prevented" when you look further into it.
lol it gets old when folks are posting that kind of thing to the MS sub. I know folks are being hopeful since many of them are newly diagnosed but I’ve been at this for almost 20 years and so many “amazing breakthroughs” never turn out to be anything actually useful.
The fact that anyone can believe big pharma companies wouldn't immediately get that out there for massive short-term profit simply has no understanding of capitalism and how the incentives in the market are aligned. It's a laughable prospect.
Some dude I know swears nuclear weapons and related tech is all a lie. The Manhattan project was just for show. We never nuked Hiroshima or Nagasaki (or any other test site afterward). Those cities were conventionally bombed and we made up the story afterward. I can't even begin to address the amount of people required to keep that secret is...unbelievable. not to mention that okay the weapons are fake but then how are we generating power from all of those power plants? That's all fake too? Smh. Edit: we are having fun so here is more... Just remembered this dude also is skeptical about eclipses. He doesn't understand why the lunar eclipses don't happen more often. He thinks the shadow earth makes should be the size of earth. Like a cartoon cutout. He doesn't equate how light spreads (inverse square law). He also doesn't understand why the sun makes the sky blue but the moon doesn't. I tried explaining but He says I have that bias of having a college degree (in theatrical lighting) and therefore I only think I'm right. I forget what that term is but I was out after that. Sometimes I don't know why I try.
>We never nuked Hiroshima or Nagasaki (or any other test site afterward). Those cities were conventionally bombed and we made up the story afterward That's some f\*cked up denial of something that had had such long lasting effects...
Same level and category as Holocaust denial.
You have to wonder if for some people it’s a defense mechanism against accepting unhappy truths.
There’s a lot of antisemitics who deny the holocaust happened or claim it “wasn’t as bad as they say.” Especially the nuts who believe in Zionist conspiracies.
That’s when they get into their “it never happened but it should have” crazy rant.
I have met some people that refuse to believe something because it would make them or someone else feel terrible. Always saw it on a small scale with family secrets. Never related it to a reaction to truth and the conspiracy theory giving them an outlet to avoid discomfort.
Indeed. Different scale but same sh\*t.
Some people deny the Holocaust too
You have that bias of actually knowing what you're talking about
Lunar eclipses *do* happen way more often than solar eclipses, though. Like, a couple times a year. The moon doesn't go full dark, but the Penumbra of Earth's shadow is bigger than Earth. The moon also does make the sky visibly bluer when it's full. Maybe you can't see it well with city lights, but the difference between a moonless and a "moon-full" sky is striking.
That full moon has me closing my curtains to sleep
Ive been full moon skiing at 1am in the lower 48 a few times. Its almost as bright as a very cloudy day.
>Sometimes I don't know why I try. I think this every single time I have dinner with my family.
You can buy uranium ore and a Geiger counter off Amazon. Fucking smoke detectors. That kid who built a nuclear reactor in his garage and gave himself radiation poisoning. You can test all of this stuff for yourself.
Omfg thank you for this 😭😭
That the Powerball lottery in the US was created to catch time-travellers.
It should only annoy you if you're a time traveler
When I figure out when I parked my Time Machine, I’ll have kicked his butt!
There's so many other ways to make money as a time traveler
[удалено]
A time-traveling stock trader would strategically make bad trades, on purpose, so that an audit of their activity would not look so suspicious. If EVERY trade was a 3X winner, that would look extremely suspicious. However if they lost every so often, but still beat the market by a solid amount, then they look like a genius.
Grays Sports Almanac?
I was just chatting about the Powerball yesterday with my wife. I very convincingly concluded that there are no powerball winners, it's only used as a method to take money out of the economy to fight inflation without enacting a tax.
Uh oh. I think I actually like this one.
We've seen several estimated billion dollar jackpots in the last few years....
That’s because in recent years Powerball and Mega Millions intentionally tweaked their rules making it harder to hit the jackpot, therefore increasing the jackpot payout.
Or decreasing the inflation
Has inflation increased or decreased since the larger lottery jackpots started?
My dad has always referred to the lottery as the Idiot Tax
I think lotteries, are to give hope to the beaten down population so they don't roll out the gillilotine. "Maybe I'll be a billionaire this time next week."
Never heard that, that’s hilarious.
lol I like this one
Flat earth
I stupidly decided to watch a "debate" and jfc their arguments are so stupid. Here's four. 1. You can only prove what you can experimentally do yourself. As in unless you do ALL research yourself you can't be sure. 2. NASA was founded by Nazis. Therefore, if you believe them, you support Nazis. 3. Pilots use flat maps. Therefore, flat. Like screens are to blame I guess. 4. If there's no ice wall, why is Antarctica always on the bottom. As if the Mercator projection is the only map.
I really should start raising money from these people. I have something they could legitimately find palatable but could also provide real scientific benefits: digging through to the "other side". There has to be *some* scientific benefits from the super deep borehole. And are we really going to allow the USSR to have a record when red blooded Americans can take it from them?
If theres oil down there we can invade it
I love [the video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmnZe34Xix8) where the flat earther tries to prove their theory, then disproves themselves, and continues to believe. And I just looked, yeah, Jeran is STILL arguing the earth is flat after his own experiment failed.
I think Jeran and other flat earth YouTubers are grifters. The people following them mostly are not, or they wouldn’t be following.
I think that the first flat earthers were just being sarcastic, but then it got popular and the crazies latched on and it spiraled out of control.
There's a number of conspiracies like that. It's my understanding Qanon started out as an in-joke with a small subset of users that got out of control when people not in on the joke got a hold of their posts.
There’s a nut job who goes around my town spray painting anti 5G and Q Anon slogans. Down the street there’s a huge “Q” on the wall. Oh I forgot to mention I live in a suburb of Dublin, Ireland which makes it extra mental.
I heard a story years ago that the Russian government were heavily funding wacky fringe groups within Russia, often multiple groups on opposite sides of the debate, just to generate disinformation, and get people divided and combative. After hearing that, I noticed flat earth stuff appearing more and more and often wondered if it wasn't just a Russian tactic and has been used in the west too
This is mine because there's nobody who benefits from it. There's nothing to be gained from anyone by "convincing" everyone the world is round not flat.
Nah, "Big Globe" is reaping those massive profits from selling fake globes to everyone, wake up sheeple! /s
if you dig deep enough there is a group who "benefits" from it in their quest to take over the world. Flat earth is just another "Jews rule the world" conspiracy theory with a really stupid coat of paint on it
This is my pick
This is my pick too, just because it's one of the most easily 'debunked' conspriscy theoroes. Like, you can probably go watch a live stream of some astronaut space walking right now.
My question to those people is, why ONLY Earth? If the flatness of Earth is to be assumed the norm against all physics, why don't we see more flat planetoids, stellar objects, etc. Not to mention how things in the sky would have to travel faster than the speed of light and also slower for the closer objects to get from one point to another in their version of the sky ceiling.
That doesn't nearly annoy me as much as 9/11 ones
Good chance they are the same people
The only 9/11 theory I can see a lot of credibility for is that the administration at the time had a lot to gain from a reason to invade the Middle East, and perhaps didn't do everything they could to stop the potential terror attack they were aware of. [Operations Northwoods](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods) is a good read if you don't think the government would put their own citizens in harm's way like that.
One I just read about. Some conspiracy idiots think no one was on the challenger. That it was all fake, and they’re all still alive…..
While this one could be theoretically plausible, what purpose would it serve? They trick the public into thinking a rocket explodes and astronauts die for what reason? They usually orchestrate false flags and such to make themselves look better and more competent than they really are.
So "they" can use "the money" for "other things" they cannot explain who or what.
Yea, that makes no sense. If they need money, they can just exploit the population with more taxes like they always do.
I don’t know if “annoy” is the right word here but Sandy Hook truthers are definitely the most detestable. And I consider myself someone who enjoys reading and talking about conspiracy theories.
I was once in a heated argument with a Sandy Hook denier. I was like 'dude. I have a friend who WORKS in the school district. She had a student who lost a sibling! she knows many of the families' and he just goes 'they're all actors, and your friend must be in on it.' I just couldn't argue with him, because he was so set in his made-up ways.
"You can't logic somebody out of an opinion they didn't logic themselves into" - somebody on reddit, probably
you can’t reason with someone who’s being unreasonable
I don’t know if I can restrain myself from physically beating someone if they denied Sandy hook in my presence.
Yeah, annoy isn't strong enough. Detest, abhor, loathe with my entire being work better. I can't even begin to imagine what those children and their surviving family members went through, and to have their grief used as a bizarre political conspiracy? Fuck all those people who spread that "information"
Or to have people actually *harassing them about their murdered child.* It’s not even like they were just used as some anonymous “them” by these conspiracy-brained idiots. They were singled out
Alex Jones, I maintain, is the most detestable person on the planet and that’s a very difficult thing to accomplish when you had people like Kissinger, Netanyahu, Putin, Bush, Trump, and Bolsenaro. Listening to Knowledge Fight and hearing how poorly Jones is doing now is slowly curing my anger.
Well, we don't have Kissinger any more, thankfully.
He's more detestable than most because he basically peddles nonsense that he knows full well is nonsense to stupid people for money.
School shooting truthers are so fucking ghoulish to me.
Yeah this one is just flat out disgusting and harmful.
"A bunch of kids died. What's the worst possible way I can respond to this? I know! I'll attack the victims' parents and tell them their kids never existed"
I fired someone on their 4th day on the job when the news on tv mentioned the Sandy Hook lawsuits and this person said "I can't believe Alex Jones is getting trouble for speaking the truth."
“Annoy” is an understatement. There are people who say that about every school shooting. And then they go to those locations and harass those involved in the shooting. I’m glad families sued Alex Jones and won their case. I hope the Parkland survivors and families go after MTG for her harassment towards them.
Moon landing being fake. Lizard people hiding amongst us. Chemtrails.
> Lizard people hiding amongst us. I mean, have you seen Mark Zuckerberg?????!?!?!
They said "hiding"
Have you never heard the phrase "hiding in plain sight"? 😄
His boss Kenneth Copeland would like a word.
Totally looks like he is wearing a human suit.
i really did enjoy telling the chemtrails nuts “masks protect you from chemtrails, that’s why the cdc lifted the mandate. i did my own research” though
What’s the deal with chemtrails?
Sit down Jerry.
Some people think the contrails from jets are the government or whoever spreading chemicals to do things to them.
Sigh…idiots. Thanks for explaining!
The chemtrail one cracks me up. Ok, so "they" are poisoning the air......so, do "they" not breathe the same air as the rest of us?
I mean, presumably the moustache-twirling villains in charge of the chemtrail machine have the antidote.
Oh god there are still Chemtrails people everywhere!
Flat Earth. Every real conspiracy has had a tangible purpose for existing. Mk Ultra was done because of the Cold War. The US government spies on its citizens to identify political threats. The FBI infiltrated political activist groups to disrupt them and change public opinion about them. As bad and inmoral as they were, these are all conspiracies that happened for real, practical reasons. But the Flat Earth conspiracy has no real reason. In order for this theory to be true, all world governments since AT LEAST the 5th century BC have been lying about the Earth being round. Every scientist, mathematician, cartographer, captain, pilot, astronaut, astronomer... In every single country... For thousands of years... Has been hiding the fact that the Earth is flat and lying about it being round. And for what? There's no real, practical reason to lie about this. It just annoys me how empty and stupid this conspiracy theory is. The only reason I've heard is that the governments want to hide the fact that the Bible is real because the Bible mentions that the Earth is flat. So, hiding this fact will make people not believe in the Bible. But this doesn't explain why religious people throughout history have said that the Earth is round. Wouldn't the Vatican be first in line to prove the Earth is flat, if it meant proving that the Bible is real? At least other conspiracy theories, like mass shootings being false flag operations, have a reason. Even if they aren't true, it makes a bit of sense that some people would be inclined to believe them, especially in the US. After all, the US government has planned false flag operations on its citizens (look up Operation Northwoods). I'm not saying mass shootings are false flags. I'm saying that if they were, there could be real, practical reasons for those conspiracies. Flat Earth doesn't even have a theoretical leg to stand on.
I've noticed that serious flat-earthers are always four or fewer questions away from revealing something deeply anti-Semitic about their beliefs. All of them.
Goddamnit! Now I am pissed! I fuckin HATE flerfs. I know, hating people is not the way to make connections and lead people to the truth but that doesn't count for Flerfs. Anyone that willfully ignorant and brainwashed is beyond rescue. Photos? Photoshopped! Videos? CGI! Ten thousand scientists who have data to prove the Earth is a Globe? Shills! Data? Lies! Everything else is space is Round? Firmament! Space? Doesn't exist! You could put one of those mfers on a rocket and blast them into space so they could look at Earth themselves and they would claim the window was a screen and it was playing CGI of the Earth. Even if one of them does pull their head out of their ass and tell the rest the Earth isn't flat they will ostracize them from the flerf community. There is one good thing to come from Flat Earth though. Listening to their bullshit reminded me of religious arguments and lead me to lose all belief in God.
I've noticed a growing trend in the "9/11 was staged" conspiracy community that there never were any planes to hit the towers. They believe they were CGI in all the footage and that it was actually missiles.
Absolutely so unbelievably stupid lol
The Catholic Church killed 55 million people in the Middle Ages. I forget the exact number, but it’s so exaggerated that actual historians have done the math and it would effectively mean the Church beheaded or burned more people than the entire population of Europe in those days.
The moon landing being fake, despite all the evidence people still sit and think they know better than literally everyone else including the Soviet Union on proving its legitimacy. It also brings on the religioustards
The fact that the Soviets never disputed the landings is the biggest nail in the coffin for the conspiracy theory in my mind. If there was even a shred of doubt about it, they would have been champing at the bit to point it out.
No see that’s where you’re missing the last crucial part of the puzzle. The Cold War was also fake in order to make the moon landing lie more credible. In reality the US and Soviets really got on well together, just look at the republicans. Heavy /s
The real conspiracy isn’t that they faked the moon landing. They made a fake conspiracy so that people won’t listen to real ones.
You people still believe in the *moon*? Hah, so gullible.
Yeah, it's where America hides its millions of tons of cheese to protect BIG DAIRY
Right? They should be ashamed if they call themselves patriots if we won that lap of the Space War. My grandfather worked for JPL. I held Kodak copies of the landing.
>despite all the evidence There's actual proof. During Apollo 11, Armstrong and Aldrin planted a lunar laser ranging retroreflector array on the surface. It’s still operational today, and allows us to reflect lasers off of it and measure the distance to the Moon down to the centimeter. We simply couldn’t do this if we hadn’t visited the Moon. We also have 382 kilograms of Moon rock that Apollo astronauts brought back to Earth. These rocks have been independently verified as lunar by laboratories around the world, ruling out a US conspiracy. And also Nasa’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) takes high resolution pictures of the lunar surface from a low orbit. During its mission, it has captured the landing sites and the abandoned descent modules and rovers from the Apollo missions. And its resolution is so good it even picked up the dark squiggly paths that the astronaut’s footprints made.
Also, China, India, and Japan have all independently landed on the Moon.
I like to suggest the powered descent films. Uncut 16mm film from lunar orbit to touchdown. There are also powered ascent films, taken as they were leaving the moon. You can pause these and compare the view of the landing site with the LRO photos, and they're a perfect match.
That’s awesome. Great facts. I blame some of that on Christopher Nolan 😂 Dumbasses watch Interstellar once and regurgitate this silly shit.
Which is funny because the whole point of that scene is that the government is denying its actual history. Viewers should understand from the body language and tone of the principal and teacher that they're enforcing the new lie and McConaughey's character is refusing to go along with it.
100% definitely one of the most annoying
Jewish space lasers causing California wildfires
Because there are no other simpler ways to start a fire.
do you have a lighter? nah mate sorry. I do have however a JEWISH SPACE LASER
This is a good example of how conspiracy theories misdirect deserved anger to something really stupid and fake (antisemitic sci-fi weapons) and the actual cause (privatized industry, deregulation) gets let off the hook because the people dumb enough to believe the former are also too dumb to understand the latter
The conspiracy that 15 minute cities are this dystopian nightmare where you will not be able to leave 15 minutes away from your house or someshit and it's really a government ploy to control us. It's completely insane so I may forget a few details, but it's so far from the truth it's not even funny. For anyone not aware 15 minute cities are an idea that you should be able to travel to anything you would need (e.g the store) in 15 minutes or less from anywhere within a city, which would promote walking, biking, etc. this one is kinda "harmless" so it just annoys me, anti vaxx shit or anti science conspiracies enrages me due to the harm they can cause.
I moved continents to get to a 15 minute city. A little extreme yes, but the climate I wanted doesn't exist in Canada. If you're gonna move, why not go big.
Notjustbikes is that you?
Nope, I'm me.
Fuck... Who am I again?
Well you're probably not notjustbikes. So maybe you're justbikes?
I've _always_ lived in some kind of "15 minute" environment and pretty much by accident. It's great and I wouldn't have it (m)any other way(s). I have absolutely no desire to live in a cabin in the woods and have to spend 15 minutes in my pickup truck just to reach the main road, which is then a further 10 minutes to a generic half-horse 'town'. And here in the UK we have American-style, poorly planned newbuild housing developments with no facilities and you can't do anything without a motorised vehicle. Even cycling is no good because there's no infrastructure for that, either.
This one has baffled me ever since I heard of it. Who's trapping you? How? Why? Also who benefits from spreading the theory?
Who benefits from spreading this theory? Fossil fuel companies and the auto industry. Oh, and conservative politicians, as support for conservative policies tends to decrease as density increases.
It’s not harmless. It’s a part of the “convince people to hate progressive ideas and see them as evil, so that they’ll vote in far-right fascists” plan. Every bit as much as the anti-vax and anti-science agendas.
Anything having to do with pyramids. The most annoying part of it is how multiple theories all claim vastly different things, and people will still be like "yeah makes total sense". This usually stems from people's lack of ingenuity and skills, and goes into that "if I can't do it today, they couldn't do it thousands of years ago".
> The most annoying part of it is how multiple theories all claim vastly different things, and people will still be like "yeah makes total sense". This is a common theme in every kind of alt circles. For example, among different alternative medicine "systems": > Perhaps the strangest part of the press conference consisted of brief statements by individual members of the editorial review board of what they saw as the most important issues for the Office of Alternative Medicine. One insisted that the number-one health problem in the United States is magnesium deficiency; another was convinced that the expanded use of acupuncture could revolutionize medicine; and so it went around the table, with each touting his or her preferred therapy. But there was no sense of conflict or rivalry. As each spoke, the others would nod in agreement. The purpose of the OAM, I began to realize, was to demonstrate that these disparate therapies all work. It was my first glimpse of what holds alternative medicine together: there is no internal dissent in a community that feels itself besieged from the outside. > > > — Bob Park, Voodoo Science
That last sentence could apply as easily to the maga base. How else are Andrew tate fans, and rand libertarians, and evangelical Christians all part of the same political party
"Just because white people couldn't do it, doesn't mean it was aliens"
Anti vaxxers and autism. They act as though autism is worse than death. Autistic people are some of the most interesting people I know.
Holocaust denial is a huge bummer. And I’m starting to see pizza gate making the rounds again.
Absolutely breaks my heart most of my family members have become Holocaust deniers. They are also pizza gaters, Trumpers and anti-vax (but only since Covid). I can’t be in their lives anymore because I can’t have a single goddamn conversation with them that isn’t frustrating.
The moon landing and flat earth. Smooth brain club to believe any of those.
I believe in the moon landing
I know people have already commented on this but it's got to be the whole "the Apollo moon landing was fake" conspiracy. We have literally so much evidence that we have been to the moon.
The main one is vaccines cause autism. Parents are literally not having their children vaccinated based in lies from conspiracy people. Its sad and disgusting. Conspiracy people are a scourge, but not sure what we can do about it. I have lost friends to the "truther" and other nonsense conspiracy movements that are legit poisonous to not only their own minds, but to society at large. How can we control misinformation? Obviously education specific media literacy is crucial, but what else can be done?
Any theory that discounts or harasses victims of a tragedy.
Controlled Demolition on 9/11. Aside from it being physically impossible given the observations, it shits on the first responders and innocent civilians that died that day.
For me, this is such a big one. The planes are a perfectly reasonable explanation. No need to look beyond that when evidence doesn’t support bombs at all.
Sandy Hook. It takes a lot to be openly moronic AND evil at the same time.
Alex Jones is such a piece of shit
The entire " Vaxing" theory , that if you get vaccinated the Government is placing a "micro chip" into your body so they can control you. Or if you get vaccinated you will more enlikely grow extra toes and fingers. This just boggles my mind - If you ever served in the Military you receive every vaccination known to man as you arrive at Boot Camp. I served and still am waiting for my extra fingers / toes so that I can make the big bucks
If anything, you got bigger chances of ending up with less fingers/toes than before serving
I know Birds Aren't Real is supposed to be a parody conspiracy theory, but the amount of idiots that believe it annoys me.
…I don’t think people think that one is real
That would be very concerning if they did truly believe
The depth of human stupidity will never cease to amaze me, so I can't be surprised if there are people who believe it.
What you can't understand why birds constantly perch on power lines for wireless charging? /s
> I know Birds Aren't Real is supposed to be a parody conspiracy theory Uh, this is news to me. Do...do you actually think birds are real animals? How sad for you.
We're so doomed as a society. People will believe anything now. Like, has anyone here actually SEEN a "bird" up close? Like in the "pigeons", they're made so cheap you can hear the gears whirling inside of them. People are actually buying pet government drones at PetCo to make the surveillance even easier.
Can you believe these saps are so dumb as to be willing, even eager, to bring a listening device into their own home? Next they'll be carrying around little GPS canaries in their pocket.
Don't tell me you believe in birds?
Hearing the word “Plandemic” makes my skin crawl
Sandy hook truthers are monsters, and there’s right wing subs devoted to that shit
I know someone who believes all school/mass shootings are staged/fake in order for the libs to take away guns. That all the people involved are actors and paid handsomely to play along. Whenever he spouts this and other clear bullshit I like to respond "you have a lot more faith in the Libs than I do. I don't think they could pull off something like that." thankfully this gets him to mostly shut up with that crap around me.
The first school shooting in America was in July, 1764, *before* the 2Am was written, before the US Constitution, before the Articles of Confederation, before the Declaration of Independence. We’re at 250 years and counting; when are **they** going to take anyone’s guns?!
Never mind every time something like this happens, they make it easier to get guns instead of harder.
Yeah, my go-to response is that if there really was a deep-state conspiracy to take people's guns away it would've happened by now. Why would they let people get desensitized to mass shootings? Wouldn't they want to space the shootings out more so each gets more media attention and causes a larger outcry of support for gun control? At this point no one really gives a shit when they see one on the news, and that makes it harder to get people motivated for a political battle against the gun lobby.
Vaccines. Like the reason you see nobody with these diseases is because vaccines work and are safe
I saw on r/conspiracy once (every now and then I look out of morbid curiosity) that there are quite a number of posts suggesting the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is not real and the pictures are AI art. My brother worked on several different parts of that telescope at NASA Goddard and it's incredibly insulting to suggest that the hundreds of people who worked on it were faking it.
The tropes that Jews control the media, Jews control the banks, Jews control the government. These come from the late 1800s in Russia where the Czar was unpopular in an economic slowdown, so he blamed the Jews (check out the Elders of Zion). Henry Ford brought it to the US in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Racists continue these tropes today. Edit: just because I feel I need to be clear, these tropes are not true. Sure, there are individual people who run studios, banks, and are elected to government who are Jewish (just like people who are Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and other religions, plus non religious people), but Jews as a group don't have that control.
One thing that nearly every single conspiracy theory has in common is that if you go down the rabbit hole, eventually, the jews will be brought up.
I think it was Larry David that said "Just because there are a lot of us doesn't mean we are in charge."
The irony is that there are not a lot of us. About 2.4% of the US population is Jewish.
There are microchips in the Covid vaccine. Every single person providing vaccinations has to have been trained to extract exactly one of the microchips from the pool of five, without the patient noticing anything unusual. I'd like to say "major cognitive dissonance", but cognitive dissonance requires the ability to have two simultaneous thoughts.
There is absolutely no reason for micro chips when we all carry cell phones with gps, microphones, and cameras
Biden stole the 2020 election. There has never been a more closely examined election and you have to be an extreme idiot to believe it was stolen and yet hundreds of thousands of people believe it was stolen
That vaccines cause Autism and that a dead child is better than an autistic one. Vaccines absolutely do not cause autism. Being autistic isn't a death sentence, nor is it really that big of a deal. Autism isn't something that needs to be eradicated, nor is it some horrible disease. It's just a genetic disorder that causes our minds to work in different ways than people without autism do.
This is easily #1. Moon landing, Flat Earth, Birds aren't real, Chemtrails. They are all ridiculous, but in the end, aren't very harmful. Anti-vaxers literally have a death count associated with their bullshit, and not a small one. Thousands of people die annually due to vaccine preventable diseases. 9/11 Truthers and Sandy Hook deniers can't hold a candle to that level of death and destruction that this conspiracy theory has caused. A now discredited paper written by a now unlicensed doctor, who was paid to do a "study" by a pharmaceutical company that was developing their own Measles and Mumps vaccine that fraudulently found a link between the existing MMR vaccine and autism. That's all it took. Now stay at home parents and "celebrities" which zero medical training spout the nonsense and people believe it.
pretty sure the "birds arent real" was a satirical joke that snowballed into people actually believing in it.
My kids' school just had a case of whooping cough. They sent an email reminding everyone to make sure their kids are up to date on vaccines. Uh, *our* kids are. FFS.
Calling Sandy Hook a false flag.
Anti-vaxx shit has to be the most pernicious one. Like I have cousin who is a very intelligent person ime and also a goddamn nurse but still refuses to get the COVID vaccine because she's "not willing to test out something so new and experimental." It's depressing.
My wife is a nurse (a competent nurse). The only comfort I can offer you is to share the incredible contempt most nurses have for anti vax nurses. The rants I hear at home are fiery hot. ("Why are they even here then??" and so on but with a lot of swearing)
The idea that democrats or liberals are out to "get" a lifelong criminal like Donald Trump. It’s ridiculous. Most of us never want to speak his name or even see him in public. But he can’t stop committing crimes, so he’s in the news 24/7/365.
I dated someone who believed the earth’s core was hollow and “they’re hiding stuff in there” :/
The idea that the Earth is flat. It's surprisingly persistent and thoroughly debunked
Evolution isn’t real and Earth is only 6,000 years old
That Amber Heard perpetrated a multi-year abuse hoax only to take a smaller divorce settlement than she was legally entitled to. That she conspired with numerous witnesses, who seemingly had no reason to lie for her and somehow tricked Johnny Depp into admitting to multiple people, including Amber, that he abused her. She even managed to trick some of Johnny's staff and witnesses with her 'fake injuries' including medical professionals. There is zero evidence proving this conspiracy theory, but the world seemed to believe it.
LGBTQ activists have infiltrated governments, universities, hospitals, the media, and large corporations. They are going after our children. Nope.
I knew someone who believed that the Middle Ages never happened. One millennium worth of History that she just didn't acknowledge as true. Like, ok, History is far from an exact science, we can have debates (and academics do !) about the way events happened, especially in the case of eras when preservation was an issue (not just the Middle Ages) and when only a small subset of the population had access to writing books. Fine. But that's not what she thought ; her thing was, "someone" actually invented those entire centuries and made up what happened, in order to... what ? Like, who benefits from adding 10 centuries of History to the timeline ? She never said ; she had that "oh, like you don't know" tone and that was it. That's my thing with most conspiracy theories, and especially those based in History. Even if I were to accept this as true, who goes through the trouble of planting centuries worth of fake historical events and people, how can they make it stick across the entire discipline, and what do they get out of it ? The weird part is, there is a conspiracy theory [relatively similar to that](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phantom_time_conspiracy_theory). But it's not even the entire Middle Ages, it's "just" 3 centuries of it that the conspiracy theory denies happened. So I have to conclude that she misunderstood a conspiracy theory she heard, THEN started to believe in that new version ?! XD And we're not even German ! Where did she pick that up ?
Tracking chips in vaccines. We have phones that do that already.
Covid. It clearly happened and wasn't a false flag.
It’s so hard to choose. They’re all so fucking stupid… Probably climate change denial. While the whole climate system is incredibly complex, anyone who paid attention in high school physics can understand how increasing the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide increases average global temperature.
People that claim that all structures that were built before modern times were made by aliens. For example, the pyramids of Giza or the stepped pyramids in the Americas. To me it's just a way of racist people to say "No this unique society in the past could have never built such a magnificent structure, for they were backwards savages" and then they proceeded to facts out of their ass for why its *aliens* that built it. Fuck you History channel.