Do you know any of these bored nutters?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2lyzw7xwxo

Why is it that any form of natural disaster, pandemic, regional event or whatever is always pounced upon by conspiracy theorist oddjobs these days? I know one guy from school who is straight round the U-bend with stuff like this.

Are they just terminally bored? IS there something missing in their lives where they need to make something up to feel superior and smart, under the guise of “question everything, prove that this is XXX”?

Basically, trying to start conspiracy theories and make them stick has become something of a sport for people. The more outlandish the better. Points for believers.

See, Birds aren’t Real.

But there are climate engineering machines…

Surely those big fans I see around the country could be capable of creating a hurricane if they were all switched on at the same time?

This type of batshit stuff is embraced by MAGA nutters.

He was responding to Republican congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who in recent days suggested on her social media accounts that the US government “can control the weather”.

Because Web 2.0 has created a vast network of facebook groups, Discord channel and forums where like minded people can go round in circles telling each other how clever and right they are and that everyone else are outsiders who just don’t understand.

50 years ago if you wanted to engineer that kind of dynamic you had to start a cult, now it just happens organically.

 IS there something missing in their lives where they need to make something up to feel superior and smart,

In a nutshell, that’s exactly it.

Well hold on a minute, Trump lives in Florida and that imbecile’s hot air must affect the weather.

We have nutters outside our shop on Sundays.
One of them was holding a bit of cardboard moaning about geo engineering . Most of them are still moaning about COVID.
I’m sure hurricanes will give them something new to focus on.
****.

Serious answer, I think in many cases this stuff gives some people a sense of belonging and purpose that they do not otherwise have in their lives.

well, i guess technically, humans have assisted in engineering this, just uncontrollably, although i guess that’s kinda counter engineering…

For some of them its a business i.e. content creators.

Find a niche (in this case conspiracy theories), create content, attract subscribers, monetize content. Rinse and repeat.

Alex Jones (Infowars) being one major example, the business model of which has been magnified a thousand times by easy access to cheap content creation technology and dissemination platforms like YouTube, FB etc.

I genuinely believe that most of the top conspiracy content creators don’t believe in any of the crap they put out. The aforementioned Jones is on record saying he doesn’t personally believe any of it. It just helps him sell his radioactive water purification tablets and apocalypse survival vitamins.

I’ve heard some groups of nutters suggesting that riding bicycles off road is a good idea when we all know there are perfectly good roads available.

I’ve heard some groups of nutters suggesting that riding bicycles off road is a good idea  – Not on here you haven’t!

50 years ago if you wanted to engineer that kind of dynamic you had to start a cult

Or enlist the Pentagon.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Popeye

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Stormfury

I’ve yet to see the evidence, but most conspiracy theorists would attribute these weather extremes to HAARP.

President Kennedy did say that “we now possess the means to control the weather”.

Maybe he was thinking of MegaCity4?

maybe the only way to put such theories to the test, is for some University to build its own HAARP.

 The aforementioned Jones is on record saying he doesn’t personally believe any of it.

Are you sure? My own view – based on podcasts like Knowledge Fight and listening and watching dispositions during his Sandy Hook trials is that he wholeheartedly believes the claims he makes. That’s partially why the Sandy Hook trails went the way they did (as well as his refusal to comply with the process) is that he couldn’t claim it’s just ‘entertainment’. I know he uses it to sell products, and he chooses the message according to the audience – but that him self-censoring, rather than acknowledging it’s made up. For instance, in an ep of Infowars only this year, he still made the claim that Sandy Hook was staged/fake

I think @Duggan has it though, for some folks, the simple direct answer to some these complex and intractable issues gives them comfort, a sense of comradeship, and the ability to tune out news about things like climate-change. If you ‘know’ its all fake, you can ignore it all completely and go about your life. Must be a bunch easier on your conscience to fill your F-150 that way.

My daughter… she’s 9… in school they’re “debating” whether the moon landings are real. Her pals are watching YouTube videos and concluding that it wasn’t real “because the flag is blowing in the wind, and there is no air in space”.

Yay to YouTube.

There have always been nutters on the one side and the easily persuaded on the other.  Unfortunately, in the age of the interweb the nutters have the means to find a wider audience and the easily persuaded can more readily find a source to verify their misconception.

The moon landings are entirely fake, NASA didn’t have the tech. Unfortunately they enlisted Kubrick to film the publicity materials and he insisted on doing it all on location.

System 1 thinkers – fast, instinctive and emotional. See this article.

Also feeds into things like doping conspiracy in sport, i.e. “Pogacar wins everything so he must be doping, it’s obvious”.

A friend of mine, a well educated university lecturer, otherwise completely normal woman thinks the moon landings were faked. We’ve more or less silently agreed that we just won’t talk about it.

Because there are now different channels of information dissemination. How did you actually know the earth is flat? Its because everyone else said it was.

If the BBC told you that Norway was moving troops along its boarder with Sweden, you’d probably believe it and mention it to your friends as a fact.

For those who take their info from social media and their associated networks its the same principle.

I used to work with a guy like that.

Started off with an unhealthy obsession with military hardware to the extent that he knew muzzle velocities of tanks, firing rate of machine guns, payload of nuclear bombers and so on.

Then it developed into how “they” (the military primarily) were controlled by Government to “do stuff” and evolved into more Government control, vaccines (Covid was an absolute godsend for him), weather, the whole works.

Yes, currenly have one in my team, its a struggle to keep professional with him at times

This morning, the team were talking about the regeneration of our town…levelling up £20m plus another 20m, its now actually starting work, thanks tories LOL,  etc etc

His contribution..a knowing smirk followed by “15 minute cities!”

In the shop e have a tea towel of 60s icons.
On it you have shitty old cars, trains and push bikes.
Then you have Concorde and man on the moon. Stuff that’s not old fashioned because they haven’t been bettered .
Therefore I do struggle with the moon landings purely because it was such a mind boggling thing to happen “all that time ago”.
Soon we won’t believe Concorde was supersonic either.

he wholeheartedly believes the claims he makes

He admitted under oath during his trial that he didn’t actually believe Sandy Hook was a hoax

there are perfectly good roads available

Either you’ve been at the koolaid, or there ARE Perfectly good roads available that only the elite get to use, makes you think!

He admitted under oath during his trial that he didn’t actually believe Sandy Hook was a hoax

Sure, but he also thinks that the US courts are rigged, and has said that he feels no obligation to participate. Part of the reason one of the trials collapsed and the judgement was made against Jones was that he pretty much refused to co-operate with the court. He has said subsequently on his show that he still thinks that Sandy Hook was faked. As I said, Jones will self-censor if he thinks it’s in his interest, or dependent on what audience he’s talking to, but otherwise he really does think that he’s been chosen by God – who has downloaded all the world’s knowledge to his brain while he was eating fried chicken in a restaurant; to spread ‘truth’

Edit: Jones was broadcasting during one of his trails that he still thought Sandy Hook was faked. It’s why there’s an court-appointed auction in a couple of weeks time to sell off everything he owns to pay the massive fines he has

His contribution..a knowing smirk followed by “15 minute cities!”

My Mum lives in a Low Traffic Neighbourhood – first put in in a trial form during COVID but now permanent.

The local area FB group is basically a bunch of frothing gammons claiming that the whole thing is a woke conspiracy, all the council data is flawed or manipulated or just plain fake and that, as they have Free Movement under Magna Carta, this amounts to a violation of their human rights.

Anyone even suggesting that actually the LTN is good cos it’s quieter, their kids can cycle to school etc is immediately denounced as a council plant or a stooge for the local pro-cycling weirdy beardy group.

There’s an interesting documentary called Behind The Curve all about Flat Earthers.

The arch-flerfer is Mark Sargant.  You may have seen him on TV and not known who he was, he’s the go-to “expert” for this stuff.  It’s funny of course but it’s also pretty tragic.  The guy has devoted his life to flerfing, it is literally who he is and who all his friends are.  He also has the screaming thigh-sweats for some lass halfway across the globe who appears fairly disinterested in any sort of romantic notions.

So the answer to “IS there something missing in their lives where they need to make something up to feel superior and smart?” is yes.  Because if they lose that, they have nothing else.

That said, I rather suspect that there’s a percentage of them (certainly on the Internet) who don’t believe a word of it and just enjoy trolling people who think they’re intellectually superior.  You think they’re stupid but they’re laughing their heads off as they reel in another one.  (See Poe’s Law)

 the flag is blowing in the wind, and there is no air in space

There’s a website devoted to debunking all the moon landing myths.  The flag is an easy one to field though, there’s a horizontal spar across the top.  It would have been a bit of a dropped bollock for NASA to build a moon rocket, get into space with a flag, then go “whoops, there’s no air, now what?!”

I saw a documentary about a US weather control device. It stopped the earths core from spinning and some scientists had to go an fix it with nuclear blasts.

It was all hushed up so not surprised you guys don’t know about it.

Wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if some of the online activities promoting geoengineering/Chemtrail nonsense ultimately have links to fossil fuel interests or the right wing think tanks and arms length influencers that operate in public realm on behalf of fossil fuels. It’s about moving on the conversation away from ‘how do we stop this getting worse’ and who should compensate the people who have been affected by it’ and filling public discourse, radio phone ins and talk shows with guff about weather modification instead.

It all helps with reducing the political consensus needed to rapidly switch away from intensive fossil fuel use

Now thats a conspiracy i can get on board with.

Therefore I do struggle with the moon landings purely because it was such a mind boggling thing to happen “all that time ago”.

The answer to that is quite simple and pretty much proof that they did indeed land on the moon.

We know this because otherwise every Russian stand up comedian since the 1970’s would start their set with ‘ Hey, do you remember when the Americans landed on the moon ? ‘

If you’re interested in this stuff, there’s a good podcast; Some Dare call it Conspiracy  which is hosted by two former conspiracists who’re now devoted to busting the myths and nonsense. It covers a huge amount of this thread’s subject and because its told from a conspiracists POV is really quite revealing about the motivations

The answer to that is quite simple and pretty much proof that they did indeed land on the moon.

We know this because otherwise every Russian stand up comedian since the 1970’s would start their set with ‘ Hey, do you remember when the Americans landed on the moon ? ‘

This.

The tagline at the time was “The World Is Watching.”  At the height of the Cold War.  Gemini/Apollo only existed at all in order to give the Red Threat a bloody nose.  If there was even the remotest of whiffs that they might have faked it, the USSR would have been on it like a tramp on hot chips.

Anything else about stars or flags or shadows or whatever is just noise, it’s nonsense.  The fact that in the subsequent 55 years – and doubly today so given the anti-West headbanger currently in charge – Russia hasn’t whistle-blown in all that time is all we need to know.  “The moon landings were faked because I don’t know how sticks work” is about right for that class of 9-year olds.

Therefore I do struggle with the moon landings purely because it was such a mind boggling thing to happen “all that time ago”.

There’s an excellent video on YouTube of a NASA rocket scientist giving a guided tour of a Saturn 5 rocket. It’s fabulous and almost in itself proves the landings were real. Definitely shows they were possible. Don’t have a link as it’s late and I CBA to search for it but there was a link in a thread in here somewhere…

The moon landings are entirely fake, NASA didn’t have the tech. Unfortunately they enlisted Kubrick to film the publicity materials and he insisted on doing it all on location.

I have no doubts that they landed on the moon but if someone suggested that a few of the pictures were  done on the set of 2001 because annoyingly the film that came back wasn’t useable, I wouldn’t be surprised :-).

They spent a ‘lot’ of money and the only thing they would have to show to public would be the pics so they would have to be good.

The trouble is that leap from faking some good footage for the posters ends up getting translated to its all fake, but tbh I just think a lot of peoples minds still seem to be unable able to move on with the future, back in the day they still believed the world was flat and you’d die if a train went too fast.

The actual source code to the computer landing  is available online – it’s interesting stuff.