If you look up that film stabilized [1], it becomes really apparent that it's just a guy in a ape costume. The shaky camera is the only thing that makes it harder to determine what's going on.
9 out of 10 experts agree. It's that last one. That one person is just enough for people to latch on. Then, of the 9, 6 of them get tired of yelling at clouds and quit. The 6 get replaced with those that believe the one so that there's not 7. That goes on for long enough, you get people in charge that do away with vaccinations and measles has a come back.
That's not actually how the measles thing happens.
What really happens is that the one nutter stands in the town square ranting about lizardmen and 99.99% of people ignore him, or an actual scientist gets bored and challenges him to a debate and then lizardmen guy gets trounced and further discredited, and everything is fine. Until someone with an authoritarian streak gets tired of winning debates with lizardmen guy and instead tries to shut him up, or starts suppressing data that doesn't actually support the crazy theory but is kind of inconvenient or complicated to explain.
Then you're screwed because you're letting the conspiracy guy point to an actual conspiracy to suppress his views, which provides evidentiary support for the claim that their crazy theory isn't mainstream because it's being suppressed. Meanwhile you get free speech defenders concerned about a bad precedent coming out to oppose you, and then political lines get drawn over something that never should have been partisan, but now everyone is expected to pick a side. And a lot of people end up on the side of lizardmen guy.
But once it's partisan, people are hopeless at being neutral. If you're on lizardmen guy's side then you're giving him the benefit of the doubt and on the lookout for any fault in his critics, which is how you get way too many people actually believing in lizardmen.
The problem is fundamentally that censoring something discredits you rather than them.
"That's not actually how the measles thing happens.
What really happens is that the one nutter stands in the town square ranting about lizardmen and 99.99% of people ignore him, or an actual scientist gets bored and challenges him to a debate and then lizardmen guy gets trounced and further discredited, and everything is fine."
My observation (in Germany) is rather that many antivaxxer (and sceptics of forced measles vaccination) read the scientific literature quite deeply, but come to very different conclusions. Additionally, they often have marked "live and let live" personality traits, which authorities do not like.
Because of their deep intellectual investment in this topic, they often have a much deeper knowledge about the whole topic than working doctors. The only people who are real counterparties for them are actual respected scientific experts on the topic. While these are clearly even more knowledgeable, these actual experts fear the well-read antivaxxers because the latter
- love to show gaps in the whole theoretical frameworks,
Those "well-read antivaxxers" are the same as e.g. people with a fear of flying: they spend too much time looking at extremely rare catastrophic outcomes (dying or being seriously injured because of a plane crash or a vaccine side effect) and then think that it will surely happen to them or their children. The only difference is just that when someone who's afraid of flying doesn't take a plane, it only affects very few people (if that), whereas lowering herd immunity affects us all.
The difference between yesteryear, when everyone ignored the nutter ranting about lizardmen in the town square, and today is that the nutters can now find company and reinforcement for their beliefs thanks to the Internet. And ultimately it leads to people like Elon Musk getting high on their own supply of toxic disinformation and causing the death of thousands of people by shutting down USAID because they believe some far-right nutter on X more than what "the establishment" has been saying for decades...
One is the "do vaccines cause autism" sort of thing, which, basically, they don't, but there are a lot of wrong people who think they do for bad reasons. That's the thing where if you try to censor things you're screwing yourself by creating the breeding ground for bad conspiracy theories. And how you get enough people refusing vaccines for bad reasons to cause problems etc.
Then there's the policy debate on whether vaccines should be mandatory, where people can make some pretty non-crazy arguments that they shouldn't be. Or the question of whether a specific person in a specific circumstance should get a specific vaccine, to which a reasonable answer could occasionally be no. But the people making those arguments aren't even necessarily wrong and having them push back on something when they have a reason to push back on it is perfectly legitimate and the people wanting to stop them are the baddies.
Is it? Because plenty of other hoax-based bullshit, like Flat Earth Conspiracy Theorists and those who believe that the Earth is only 6,000 years old continue on in their bubbles regardless of how much evidence is provided to the contrary.
What's strange is that many people who believe in a Mature Creation (as I've heard it; "Last Thursdayism" is new to me) will readily accept it as the explanation for ancient starlight but then deny evolution and claim that the fossil record is actually evidence of the biblical flood. Which is an unnecessarily weak position to take when you have already accepted a perfectly unfalsifiable cop-out! The truth is that most of them don't want to think too hard about it.
Of course. It's not about being reasonable, it's chasing some emotional need that's unrelated to the truthfulness of the belief. But keep alert for the faith-based beliefs you yourself might find yourself defending with flimsy logic too. It's easy to get sucked into the belief that since all the authorities you respect tell you something is true, then it must be, and you don't have to bother much with how valid your justification is because you already believe the conclusion.
A good self-test is asking yourself how you know the Earth isn't flat. Don't do any research, just try to work it out from what you've already observed and think what makes you believe that conclusion.
There's nothing wrong with Last Thursdayism. It's unfalsifiable. You're welcome to hold it.
Most people find that it's more complicated to work with, since it requires a vastly more complicated set of initial conditions. But if you find that it works for you it isn't actually wrong.
I've always assumed that committed conspiracy theorists are just trolls rolling with it (because nobody could be so stupid as to actually believe in the conspiracy's premise). So no amount of evidence is going to "convince" them, because they already know the truth, and don't care.
But then perhaps over time, they somehow attracted people who genuinely are that stupid, and uncritically believe? That demographic is obviously going to be too stupid to critically assess any new evidence either.
Do you think the same way about religious believers? This is a rhetorical question to help you understand why people hold false beliefs. Of course Mohammed wasn't really the messenger of God, but it's a popular false belief for some reason that isn't stupidity or trolling.
Plenty (most?) of the people you interact with every day primarily form their worldview based on what feels good emotionally. It's not a matter of stupidity, plenty of smart people delude themselves into thinking easily falsifiable things.
Considering how many surveillance laws were passed in the USA after the towers well (independent whether it was a terrorist attack or some controlled demolition) and wars were started on Afghanistan and Iran (the latter having nothing to do with Al-Quaida or the attacks on 9/11), it should be obvious that at least from the political side there is/was a hidden agenda:
- Conspiracy theory view: Some buildings were demolished. Politics seizes the opportunity to pass surveillance laws and start two wars.
- Non-conspiracy view: Some terrorist attack event happened (but every actuary can give you estimates on how often such an event is to be expected, so nothing surprising here), so politics seized the opportunity to pass surveillance laws and start two wars.
The only difference between these perspectives is what happened the three towers and some part of the Pentagon building to collapse.
Funny story there: I was stuck with a conspiracy-minded high school teacher who insisted that some sort of flash lower down in one of the towers was proof of a demolition. I got fed up with listening to it each day, so I calculated how long it would take a shock wave to propagate through steel, from the crash site to the flash below. It pretty much worked out.
Given that a large portion of the population has a HD or higher quality camera in their pocket most of the time these days, most cryptid style conspiracies seem pretty well debunked at this point.
I wonder if it gets a mention? It does get a mention in the recent Bruce Campbell movie https://www.ernieandemma.com/ - which looks to be even more poignant with his recent cancer diagnosis :-(
Somewhat relatedly, there is a pretty plausible theory that some “find the Yeti” expeditions were in fact cover for operations by my country’s intelligence services to sabotage China. See e.g., https://topsecretumbra.substack.com/p/the-secret-history-of-...
(Btw the general idea that there are animals that we don’t know about is not remotely far-fetched. A new possum genus was discovered like a month ago.)
> (Btw the general idea that there are animals that we don’t know about is not remotely far-fetched. A new possum genus was discovered like a month ago.)
I might be totally mistaken but I think most of the times when a new "species" is found is either a) some different genus which a non trained eye would not be able to distinguish from an existing one, or b) some species that lives only in a very difficult to reach place with some very specific conditions (i.e. underwater near volcanoes).
Something so different with so many "sightings" as a Bigfoot? Almost impossible.
Finding a variant type of possum is not at all the same as Nessie surfacing in front of humans for the first time in a century, or a bipedal ape on a decades-long walking tour, unseen.
In a similar vein I highly recommend Behind the Curve, which is a documentary about the flat Earth movement. It was a pretty fair film and tried to get to know the people involved in the movement and what it was that motivated them.
It was interesting to see that one of the main figures featured in the documentary started out pretty generically wanting to get into conspiracy theories and started reading up on one after another until he found a particular one that clicked.
What does bigfoot have to do with conspiracy? Doesn't bigfoot qualify as folklore/urban legend/pseudoscience/hoax/mythology? Is there widespread belief the government is actively covering up its existence for some reason?
Nothing in the linked story explained it. Did someone make a whole documentary and couldn't get the most basic info right? Or did the reporter mangle the article write-up?
There are more conspiracies. Here are some well-verified ones:
- Epstein and way too many important people.
- The big one from the 1970s onward to increase the return on capital by lowering living standards, the "Powell memorandum".[1] That's the founding document of the modern conservative movement.
- Facebook/Meta being behind schemes for age verification.[2]
I wouldn't say that Epstein is a vindication of conspiracy theories, at least not the "Bigfoot" type. Epstein was already in trouble with the law for trafficking over 20 years ago. The pedophilia in the Catholic church was known decades before that. It's shameful that these stories didn't get more attention sooner, but the general veracity of them wasn't in question.
The prototypical pedophilia conspiracy theory we didn't believe at all is the Comet Ping Pong one, which was appropriate.
> The pedophilia in the Catholic church was known decades before that.
Except the proportion of paedophile priests is about the same as the proportion of paedophiles in the general population. There are more paedophiles in schools and social services than in religious organisations - and there have even been more convictions of teachers and social workers, at least tin the UK. The reason you think of the Catholic Church this way is BECAUSE it got more media attention earlier than elsewhere. A surprising number of people the UK do not know about the biggest big paedophile scandal in the country, the Islington one, that was huge, and at least one politician who was responsible for the failure to investigate went on to have a successful career in politics (the only time it set back her career at all was when Blair wanted to make he minister for children there was a backlash)
I think if 20 years ago you claimed that there was a global sex trafficking ring that procured young girls for elites, politicians, celebrities, and royalty, you'd be laughed off as a David Icke level conspiracist. These days it just seems obvious that that was going on.
Its not just a sex trafficking ring, its a corruption ring, and the corruption part of it is much bigger. It is what the arrests in the UK have been for. Given how senior some of the people in the UK are (Mandelson is a former cabinet minister, and a former European Commissioner, and was very influential even before he held those posts).
If they had not trafficked minors as well I wonder whether it would ever have been exposed. It makes me wonder what else is going on.
"Bigfoot" isn't inherently a conspiracy theory. If you say that bigfoot exists, you're wrong, but not necessarily a conspiracy theorist. To be a conspiracy theorist, you also have to posit a grand conspiracy to conceal the existence of bigfoot.
If you posit a conspiracy that only involves a few people who could plausibly coordinate to conceal the truth, that's also not a grand conspiracy, and we don't call people conspiracy theorist for believing in regular, everyday criminal conspiracies.
> If you posit a conspiracy that only involves a few people who could plausibly coordinate to conceal the truth, that's also not a grand conspiracy, and we don't call people conspiracy theorist for believing in regular, everyday criminal conspiracies.
No, but we did call people conspiracy theorists for believing the thing Snowden subsequently showed to be real.
Just because someone is paranoid, does not mean that conspiracy's to do them harm go away.
Capitalism is rapidly moving towards an open establishment of techno/fuedalism, or at least trying very very hard, but as usual it's the end game that tends to fail in these ill concieved plans.
And running populations in circles to speculate about yeti, bigfoot, aliens, atlantis, and variations on the rapture, has served for millenia, but the end of scarcity
is adding a new twist,hence the dusting off of old tabloid's in an act of desperation.
I used to look down on conspiracy theories, now I think many are actually true, or are mixed with truth. Its really unlikely that a theory circulates widely but has no basis in reality
“Reality” applies pretty much zero selection pressure on ideas that are by definition non-actionable.
That’s the real bread and butter of conspiracy theorizing: claims that don’t matter to anyone’s real lives whether they’re actually true or not.
Therefore they propagate primarily for entertainment value and face none of the friction that you’re imagining being generated by “doesn’t actually make useful predictions about the world.”
This is almost certainly because a member of the public phoned the police/FBI and alleged that GM was /u/maxwellhill, not that it was part of the FBI’s case. Look at the other stuff on the list.
I don’t know if the claim is “absurd” but it appears to be essentially baseless.
Wasn't Epstein a conspiracy theory once? Epstein cover up has made me believe that cover ups DO happen, and if this one was covered up, what else has been cover up?
I don't understand the Epstein thing. In particular, I don't know why everyone doesn't agree "Epstein had help offing himself". That's the most natural inference from the evidence I'm aware of, and also satisfies the conspiracist urge for drama. Everyone should be happy with this, but I've hardly ever heard anyone else put it forward. What am I missing?
Popular conspiracy theories are psyops to either discredit people, movements or ideas
The government spent a lot of time and energy pumping up UFO conspiracy theories to hide sightings of classified aircraft, and they're getting pumped up again in the age of developing cheap weaponized drones.
I would not be surprised that the whole human sex trafficking and Qanon related conspiracy theories are also psyops to hide what's actually going on in plain sight. Obviously, Hillary Clinton wasn't trafficking kids in the basement of a pizza parlor, but there is literally a cabal of elite sex trafficking pedophiles that own and run everything, and one of them is the president.
Wild to think Q anon could have been truth mixed with wild fiction to throw people off. Thats really only something I thought happened in movies, or novels. I'm willing to believe alot more than i ever thought I would
Well there you have it. That has nothing to do with truth, only an emotional inclination. For instance, you are strongly inclined to believe the claims in the comment you responded to, despite it being almost entirely BS.
> Its really unlikely that a theory circulates widely but has no basis in reality
No, this is not at all true. For example, the only "truth" of BigFoot is the hoax video that many people are emotionally inclined to think isn't a hoax. The only "truth" in Qanon is the messages that Q wrote. Pizzagate was believed by people emotionally inclined to believe that Hillary drinks children's blood. And on and on. Did the government fake the moon landing? Many people believe so, despite no "truth" to it. Is the Earth flat but NASA is conspiring to tell people it's a globe? Is evolution a hoax? There are reasons that these circulate widely despite having no truth to them.
Supposedly exposes the Patterson-Gimlin film as a hoax, which is a big deal in the Bigfoot community.
IMO, that was done years ago.
If you look up that film stabilized [1], it becomes really apparent that it's just a guy in a ape costume. The shaky camera is the only thing that makes it harder to determine what's going on.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPlRr_OfxZI
Read the comments on that video to see how many conclude the opposite!
Is the number of people high enough to make them right?
For example if one doctor says I have cancer but 100 electricians say I don't I'm cancer free
9 out of 10 experts agree. It's that last one. That one person is just enough for people to latch on. Then, of the 9, 6 of them get tired of yelling at clouds and quit. The 6 get replaced with those that believe the one so that there's not 7. That goes on for long enough, you get people in charge that do away with vaccinations and measles has a come back.
That's not actually how the measles thing happens.
What really happens is that the one nutter stands in the town square ranting about lizardmen and 99.99% of people ignore him, or an actual scientist gets bored and challenges him to a debate and then lizardmen guy gets trounced and further discredited, and everything is fine. Until someone with an authoritarian streak gets tired of winning debates with lizardmen guy and instead tries to shut him up, or starts suppressing data that doesn't actually support the crazy theory but is kind of inconvenient or complicated to explain.
Then you're screwed because you're letting the conspiracy guy point to an actual conspiracy to suppress his views, which provides evidentiary support for the claim that their crazy theory isn't mainstream because it's being suppressed. Meanwhile you get free speech defenders concerned about a bad precedent coming out to oppose you, and then political lines get drawn over something that never should have been partisan, but now everyone is expected to pick a side. And a lot of people end up on the side of lizardmen guy.
But once it's partisan, people are hopeless at being neutral. If you're on lizardmen guy's side then you're giving him the benefit of the doubt and on the lookout for any fault in his critics, which is how you get way too many people actually believing in lizardmen.
The problem is fundamentally that censoring something discredits you rather than them.
"That's not actually how the measles thing happens.
What really happens is that the one nutter stands in the town square ranting about lizardmen and 99.99% of people ignore him, or an actual scientist gets bored and challenges him to a debate and then lizardmen guy gets trounced and further discredited, and everything is fine."
My observation (in Germany) is rather that many antivaxxer (and sceptics of forced measles vaccination) read the scientific literature quite deeply, but come to very different conclusions. Additionally, they often have marked "live and let live" personality traits, which authorities do not like.
Because of their deep intellectual investment in this topic, they often have a much deeper knowledge about the whole topic than working doctors. The only people who are real counterparties for them are actual respected scientific experts on the topic. While these are clearly even more knowledgeable, these actual experts fear the well-read antivaxxers because the latter
- love to show gaps in the whole theoretical frameworks,
- ask really annoying and interesting questions
- etc.
Those "well-read antivaxxers" are the same as e.g. people with a fear of flying: they spend too much time looking at extremely rare catastrophic outcomes (dying or being seriously injured because of a plane crash or a vaccine side effect) and then think that it will surely happen to them or their children. The only difference is just that when someone who's afraid of flying doesn't take a plane, it only affects very few people (if that), whereas lowering herd immunity affects us all.
The difference between yesteryear, when everyone ignored the nutter ranting about lizardmen in the town square, and today is that the nutters can now find company and reinforcement for their beliefs thanks to the Internet. And ultimately it leads to people like Elon Musk getting high on their own supply of toxic disinformation and causing the death of thousands of people by shutting down USAID because they believe some far-right nutter on X more than what "the establishment" has been saying for decades...
So there are two separate issues here.
One is the "do vaccines cause autism" sort of thing, which, basically, they don't, but there are a lot of wrong people who think they do for bad reasons. That's the thing where if you try to censor things you're screwing yourself by creating the breeding ground for bad conspiracy theories. And how you get enough people refusing vaccines for bad reasons to cause problems etc.
Then there's the policy debate on whether vaccines should be mandatory, where people can make some pretty non-crazy arguments that they shouldn't be. Or the question of whether a specific person in a specific circumstance should get a specific vaccine, to which a reasonable answer could occasionally be no. But the people making those arguments aren't even necessarily wrong and having them push back on something when they have a reason to push back on it is perfectly legitimate and the people wanting to stop them are the baddies.
It makes me a little bit sad, I knew it was very unlikely, but I still had hopes just because it would be so cool to find that big foot is real.
Is it? Because plenty of other hoax-based bullshit, like Flat Earth Conspiracy Theorists and those who believe that the Earth is only 6,000 years old continue on in their bubbles regardless of how much evidence is provided to the contrary.
There’s no possible evidence against so called “last Thursdayism”, so you are certainly misrepresenting the state of affairs.
What's strange is that many people who believe in a Mature Creation (as I've heard it; "Last Thursdayism" is new to me) will readily accept it as the explanation for ancient starlight but then deny evolution and claim that the fossil record is actually evidence of the biblical flood. Which is an unnecessarily weak position to take when you have already accepted a perfectly unfalsifiable cop-out! The truth is that most of them don't want to think too hard about it.
Of course. It's not about being reasonable, it's chasing some emotional need that's unrelated to the truthfulness of the belief. But keep alert for the faith-based beliefs you yourself might find yourself defending with flimsy logic too. It's easy to get sucked into the belief that since all the authorities you respect tell you something is true, then it must be, and you don't have to bother much with how valid your justification is because you already believe the conclusion.
A good self-test is asking yourself how you know the Earth isn't flat. Don't do any research, just try to work it out from what you've already observed and think what makes you believe that conclusion.
There's nothing wrong with Last Thursdayism. It's unfalsifiable. You're welcome to hold it.
Most people find that it's more complicated to work with, since it requires a vastly more complicated set of initial conditions. But if you find that it works for you it isn't actually wrong.
I've always assumed that committed conspiracy theorists are just trolls rolling with it (because nobody could be so stupid as to actually believe in the conspiracy's premise). So no amount of evidence is going to "convince" them, because they already know the truth, and don't care.
But then perhaps over time, they somehow attracted people who genuinely are that stupid, and uncritically believe? That demographic is obviously going to be too stupid to critically assess any new evidence either.
and this is your theory for…all theories?
or just the “obviously stupid” ones?
Do you think the same way about religious believers? This is a rhetorical question to help you understand why people hold false beliefs. Of course Mohammed wasn't really the messenger of God, but it's a popular false belief for some reason that isn't stupidity or trolling.
Plenty (most?) of the people you interact with every day primarily form their worldview based on what feels good emotionally. It's not a matter of stupidity, plenty of smart people delude themselves into thinking easily falsifiable things.
We are barely sentient shit slinging apes.
Physics is needed to fully understand the demolition of 3 towers..
Considering how many surveillance laws were passed in the USA after the towers well (independent whether it was a terrorist attack or some controlled demolition) and wars were started on Afghanistan and Iran (the latter having nothing to do with Al-Quaida or the attacks on 9/11), it should be obvious that at least from the political side there is/was a hidden agenda:
- Conspiracy theory view: Some buildings were demolished. Politics seizes the opportunity to pass surveillance laws and start two wars.
- Non-conspiracy view: Some terrorist attack event happened (but every actuary can give you estimates on how often such an event is to be expected, so nothing surprising here), so politics seized the opportunity to pass surveillance laws and start two wars.
The only difference between these perspectives is what happened the three towers and some part of the Pentagon building to collapse.
Funny story there: I was stuck with a conspiracy-minded high school teacher who insisted that some sort of flash lower down in one of the towers was proof of a demolition. I got fed up with listening to it each day, so I calculated how long it would take a shock wave to propagate through steel, from the crash site to the flash below. It pretty much worked out.
What was the teacher's reaction?
Congrats. You solved the puzzle.
Given that a large portion of the population has a HD or higher quality camera in their pocket most of the time these days, most cryptid style conspiracies seem pretty well debunked at this point.
Mandatory XKCD.[1]
[1] https://xkcd.com/1235/
There's a Bigfoot trap in Oregon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bigfoot_trap
I wonder if it gets a mention? It does get a mention in the recent Bruce Campbell movie https://www.ernieandemma.com/ - which looks to be even more poignant with his recent cancer diagnosis :-(
Obviously Bigfoot is too smart to fall for those traps
> The trap's door has been bolted open since 1980 for visitor safety.
"visitor safety" indeed!
Human or bear?
"There is a serious overlap in the intelligence of our smartest bears, and the dumbest tourists." - a National Park Ranger
Somewhat relatedly, there is a pretty plausible theory that some “find the Yeti” expeditions were in fact cover for operations by my country’s intelligence services to sabotage China. See e.g., https://topsecretumbra.substack.com/p/the-secret-history-of-...
(Btw the general idea that there are animals that we don’t know about is not remotely far-fetched. A new possum genus was discovered like a month ago.)
> (Btw the general idea that there are animals that we don’t know about is not remotely far-fetched. A new possum genus was discovered like a month ago.)
I might be totally mistaken but I think most of the times when a new "species" is found is either a) some different genus which a non trained eye would not be able to distinguish from an existing one, or b) some species that lives only in a very difficult to reach place with some very specific conditions (i.e. underwater near volcanoes).
Something so different with so many "sightings" as a Bigfoot? Almost impossible.
Bigfoot proposes the idea that there are animals we do know about, but just haven't found proof of, which is a little more farfetched.
Finding a variant type of possum is not at all the same as Nessie surfacing in front of humans for the first time in a century, or a bipedal ape on a decades-long walking tour, unseen.
In a similar vein I highly recommend Behind the Curve, which is a documentary about the flat Earth movement. It was a pretty fair film and tried to get to know the people involved in the movement and what it was that motivated them.
It was interesting to see that one of the main figures featured in the documentary started out pretty generically wanting to get into conspiracy theories and started reading up on one after another until he found a particular one that clicked.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behind_the_Curve
The documentary does not, in fact, help explain the conspiracy zeitgeist. Human nature has been reason enough through modern history.
This MSN "article" seems oddly out of place on HN.
What does bigfoot have to do with conspiracy? Doesn't bigfoot qualify as folklore/urban legend/pseudoscience/hoax/mythology? Is there widespread belief the government is actively covering up its existence for some reason?
Nothing in the linked story explained it. Did someone make a whole documentary and couldn't get the most basic info right? Or did the reporter mangle the article write-up?
I'm pretty sure almost everyone who believes in UFOs also believes that bigfoot is some kind of alien. So that's a lot of people.
Cryptozoology is pretty big in the conspiracy mediascape.
Why are explanations so popular? You gotta wonder.
There are more conspiracies. Here are some well-verified ones:
- Epstein and way too many important people.
- The big one from the 1970s onward to increase the return on capital by lowering living standards, the "Powell memorandum".[1] That's the founding document of the modern conservative movement.
- Facebook/Meta being behind schemes for age verification.[2]
[1] https://scholarlycommons.law.wlu.edu/powellmemo/
[2] https://techoversight.org/2025/07/29/bloomberg-meta-google-l...
I wouldn't say that Epstein is a vindication of conspiracy theories, at least not the "Bigfoot" type. Epstein was already in trouble with the law for trafficking over 20 years ago. The pedophilia in the Catholic church was known decades before that. It's shameful that these stories didn't get more attention sooner, but the general veracity of them wasn't in question.
The prototypical pedophilia conspiracy theory we didn't believe at all is the Comet Ping Pong one, which was appropriate.
> The pedophilia in the Catholic church was known decades before that.
Except the proportion of paedophile priests is about the same as the proportion of paedophiles in the general population. There are more paedophiles in schools and social services than in religious organisations - and there have even been more convictions of teachers and social workers, at least tin the UK. The reason you think of the Catholic Church this way is BECAUSE it got more media attention earlier than elsewhere. A surprising number of people the UK do not know about the biggest big paedophile scandal in the country, the Islington one, that was huge, and at least one politician who was responsible for the failure to investigate went on to have a successful career in politics (the only time it set back her career at all was when Blair wanted to make he minister for children there was a backlash)
I think if 20 years ago you claimed that there was a global sex trafficking ring that procured young girls for elites, politicians, celebrities, and royalty, you'd be laughed off as a David Icke level conspiracist. These days it just seems obvious that that was going on.
Its not just a sex trafficking ring, its a corruption ring, and the corruption part of it is much bigger. It is what the arrests in the UK have been for. Given how senior some of the people in the UK are (Mandelson is a former cabinet minister, and a former European Commissioner, and was very influential even before he held those posts).
If they had not trafficked minors as well I wonder whether it would ever have been exposed. It makes me wonder what else is going on.
"Bigfoot" isn't inherently a conspiracy theory. If you say that bigfoot exists, you're wrong, but not necessarily a conspiracy theorist. To be a conspiracy theorist, you also have to posit a grand conspiracy to conceal the existence of bigfoot.
If you posit a conspiracy that only involves a few people who could plausibly coordinate to conceal the truth, that's also not a grand conspiracy, and we don't call people conspiracy theorist for believing in regular, everyday criminal conspiracies.
> If you posit a conspiracy that only involves a few people who could plausibly coordinate to conceal the truth, that's also not a grand conspiracy, and we don't call people conspiracy theorist for believing in regular, everyday criminal conspiracies.
No, but we did call people conspiracy theorists for believing the thing Snowden subsequently showed to be real.
> If you say that bigfoot exists, you're wrong, but not necessarily a conspiracy theorist.
I’m not sure if “I’m just a cryptozoologist” is much of a vindication.
Conspiracy theories arise from the natural tendency of human brain to look for patterns even where there are none.
That being said, nowadays it seems that a difference between conspiracy theory and confirmed fact is 12-24 months
Just because someone is paranoid, does not mean that conspiracy's to do them harm go away. Capitalism is rapidly moving towards an open establishment of techno/fuedalism, or at least trying very very hard, but as usual it's the end game that tends to fail in these ill concieved plans. And running populations in circles to speculate about yeti, bigfoot, aliens, atlantis, and variations on the rapture, has served for millenia, but the end of scarcity is adding a new twist,hence the dusting off of old tabloid's in an act of desperation.
I used to look down on conspiracy theories, now I think many are actually true, or are mixed with truth. Its really unlikely that a theory circulates widely but has no basis in reality
“Reality” applies pretty much zero selection pressure on ideas that are by definition non-actionable.
That’s the real bread and butter of conspiracy theorizing: claims that don’t matter to anyone’s real lives whether they’re actually true or not.
Therefore they propagate primarily for entertainment value and face none of the friction that you’re imagining being generated by “doesn’t actually make useful predictions about the world.”
They're all on a spectrum between flat earth and Epstein didn't off himself, with some clustering at either end
A few years ago, the "tinfoil hat crowd" had this absurd claim that Ghislaine Maxwell was a reddit powermod:
https://www.vice.com/en/article/incoherent-conspiracy-sugges...
The article above is from 2020, and later the FBI itself used the user maxwellhill as evidence in Ghislaine's investigation:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Epstein/comments/1qsf6y6/reddit_pos...
This is almost certainly because a member of the public phoned the police/FBI and alleged that GM was /u/maxwellhill, not that it was part of the FBI’s case. Look at the other stuff on the list.
I don’t know if the claim is “absurd” but it appears to be essentially baseless.
The Overton Window shifts,
no matter what the “we always believed and knew” crowd tries to say.
Wasn't Epstein a conspiracy theory once? Epstein cover up has made me believe that cover ups DO happen, and if this one was covered up, what else has been cover up?
It still is, and it is plainly a true conspiracy. Hence its placement at the top end of the spectrum.
What else has been covered up? Oh boy...
I don't understand the Epstein thing. In particular, I don't know why everyone doesn't agree "Epstein had help offing himself". That's the most natural inference from the evidence I'm aware of, and also satisfies the conspiracist urge for drama. Everyone should be happy with this, but I've hardly ever heard anyone else put it forward. What am I missing?
Popular conspiracy theories are psyops to either discredit people, movements or ideas
The government spent a lot of time and energy pumping up UFO conspiracy theories to hide sightings of classified aircraft, and they're getting pumped up again in the age of developing cheap weaponized drones.
I would not be surprised that the whole human sex trafficking and Qanon related conspiracy theories are also psyops to hide what's actually going on in plain sight. Obviously, Hillary Clinton wasn't trafficking kids in the basement of a pizza parlor, but there is literally a cabal of elite sex trafficking pedophiles that own and run everything, and one of them is the president.
Wild to think Q anon could have been truth mixed with wild fiction to throw people off. Thats really only something I thought happened in movies, or novels. I'm willing to believe alot more than i ever thought I would
> I'm willing to believe
Well there you have it. That has nothing to do with truth, only an emotional inclination. For instance, you are strongly inclined to believe the claims in the comment you responded to, despite it being almost entirely BS.
Watch Mirage Men
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UFO_reports_and_disinformation
Does anybody believe the lone gunman theory with JFK? Nobody buys the official narrative.
> Its really unlikely that a theory circulates widely but has no basis in reality
No, this is not at all true. For example, the only "truth" of BigFoot is the hoax video that many people are emotionally inclined to think isn't a hoax. The only "truth" in Qanon is the messages that Q wrote. Pizzagate was believed by people emotionally inclined to believe that Hillary drinks children's blood. And on and on. Did the government fake the moon landing? Many people believe so, despite no "truth" to it. Is the Earth flat but NASA is conspiring to tell people it's a globe? Is evolution a hoax? There are reasons that these circulate widely despite having no truth to them.