• Dragon
    link
    fedilink
    3
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    I believe that conspirators push outlandish conspiracies to distract from real ones. Alex Jones seems like a CIA operative (or something of the sort).

  • EvanM
    link
    fedilink
    12 years ago

    Please remember to follow lemmy’s and this community’s rules while discussing, thank you.

  • Free Palestine
    link
    fedilink
    1
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    If we ignore a lot of strictly far-right oriented conspiracy theorism, there’s a surprising amount of theories that are at least very likely true but either governments or government organizations deny.

    And, of course, some of the strictly far-right theories are based on likely true stuff, but they lean much too far into fantasy, or delude themselves by blaming the wrong elements of society - or just flat out linking likely true stuff to obviously fake stuff. (pizzagate comes to mind, for instance)

    But, while talking about Pizzagate, there is an element of that does seem to be true. That being that there’s an illegal child sex-trafficking ring that this nation’s elites take part in, and the government murdered Epstein to keep covered up.

    Then there’s a healthy amount of stuff that gets called ‘conspiracy’ by the establishment, but clearly doesn’t count as such because all of the evidence is out in the open, you just have to look anywhere but where mainstream media wants you to be looking. Stuff like the war on terror being a front to secure oil from the middle east and destabilize the governments of that region. The US using death squads and funding opposition groups around the world to destabilize governments that disagree with them diplomatically. There are others, but I don’t see much point in writing out a whole-ass list.

    We could also talk about pseudo-conspiracies that are likely true, but which lack official evidence. Things like Facebook controlling narratives on the site. Twitter shadowbanning political opponents to the West. ETC. These theories are interesting and if you’re even slightly online you may have already either heard of or experienced them. But, of course, because these aren’t rigid theories with ample evidence you’re bound to see people on the far-right use these to ‘prove’ their far-right bullshit. So grain of salt them.

    There are what I like to call “hybrid theories”, which is a conspiracy theory that ties into other conspiracies, while also using well-researched sources. Depending on if sources are to be trusted (I’m not going to say whether or not they should be) 9/11 would count as one of these. Though we’ll ignore the far-rights “jet fuel can’t melt steel beams” line. In this case, 9/11 is a hybrid because it can be tied directly into the US’s support, funding, etc. of the Mujahadeen in the '70s and '80s against the USSR, previous disruption efforts carried out by the US prior to the event, and the US using the war on terror to do what I’ve previously discussed in this comment.

    We could talk about “pop-theories” too (alt. “urban legends”). Things that are popular subjects that people will just talk about without having any evidence, but which spread before the internet age (or after it for that matter, but most are from before) via word of mouth. Walt Disney being frozen is one, Polybus is another. Both of those are false, but a couple of these were possibly true. A recent likely true one being that during the storming of the capital, the police guarding the white house just let people get by them, because the police in the US have become a mostly fascist-oriented career and so they tend to support fascist-oriented causes.

    But, the big thing about conspiracy theories is that if you’re not in a top-level intelligence agency position, it’s very hard to know for absolutely sure if things are true or not until someone in that position either spills the beans, or documents leak. Which, due to the inherently negative effects of the internet and its cult-like communities, just feeds the cycle. There are a couple of theories that I’d argue are provably real (the child sex-trafficking ring, for instance) but won’t gather popular support, simply because certain elements of the internet take the evidence way too far, and makes so-called “rational” people sceptical of all theories, even when the evidence is laid out in front of them.

    I know you asked about theories that I think are real, but I spend way too much time researching and learning about conspiracies (it and studying the far-right are fascinations of mine) and apparently I had a bit more of a ranty answer in me than I thought at the start.

  • @AnOrdinaryDog@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    1
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    Here’s a few:

    • Sections of the CIA under the direction of CIA director Alan Dulles conspired to assassinate JFK and cover up the plot. Lee Harvey Oswald was a patsy.
    • Julian Assange has been persecuted for several years and spent years in solitary confinement with the use of fabricated and trumped up charges in order to punish him for wikileaks and terrorise others who would think of doing something similar, and to create a chilling effect on journalists. The CIA also plotted to assassinate him, but the plot was not carried out.
    • Major oil companies including Exxon have well known since at least the 1970’s how devastating climate change is and will be, and have used their advanced knowledge to devise a long-running propaganda campaign to deny and obfuscate the risks, while shaping politics to avoid any action on climate that would threaten their business model.
  • @Lunacy@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    1
    edit-2
    2 years ago

    There is a very interesting article written by Snowden dealing with this topic.

    https://edwardsnowden.substack.com/p/conspiracy-pt1

    The greatest conspiracies are open and notorious — not theories, but practices expressed through law and policy, technology, and finance. Counterintuitively, these conspiracies are more often than not announced in public and with a modicum of pride. They’re dutifully reported in our newspapers; they’re bannered onto the covers of our magazines; updates on their progress are scrolled across our screens — all with such regularity as to render us unable to relate the banality of their methods to the rapacity of their ambitions.

    The party in power wants to redraw district lines. The prime interest rate has changed. A free service has been created to host our personal files. These conspiracies order, and disorder, our lives; and yet they can’t compete for attention with digital graffiti about pedophile Satanists in the basement of a DC pizzeria.

  • @erioque@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    02 years ago
    • DuckDuckGo is a honey pot produced by G**gle for privacy kiddies.
    • USA authority can decrypt T*r network by military technology going more than 50 years ahead of civil.
    • L*mmy devs made le**y to brainwash Americans into killing capitalism.
    • G*d is dead.
    • I’ll get miracle p*wer after 666 downvotes.
  • @pimento@lemmygrad.ml
    link
    fedilink
    02 years ago

    I will start with the big one which is 9/11. Obviously there is a lot of speculation about who did it and why, but I will just mention one basic fact.

    To start with, the first plane crashed into the world trade center at 8:46 am. The fourth plane crashed near the capital city at 10:03 am, over an hour later. One such attack should be enough to put all air defenses at maximum alert, and scramble interceptors. These systems are designed to intercept stealth aircraft and ballistic missiles, so they wont have any problem to track and destroy civilian airliners. Instead it seems that the military was completely asleep. There is simply no explanation for that, except so-called “conspiracy theories”.

    • @Jeffrey@lemmy.ml
      link
      fedilink
      0
      edit-2
      2 years ago

      I heard a story from a professor who used to be a contractor for the US Department of Defense, he was at the pentagon talking and walking with his boss when he followed his boss into a room where he didn’t have the clearance to be. It was an accident, and nothing came of it, but he said he saw a drone operator eating a poptart while surveying somewhere.

      That image has always kinda stuck with me. We like to think of our institutions, governments, and militaries as exact infallible machines, but at the end of the day everything is run by regular people eating poptarts.

      So, anytime I think “there’s no way a system could be that incompetent” I remember that everything is run by regular mistake-making people who are eating poptarts.

  • @TheAnonymouseJoker@lemmy.ml
    link
    fedilink
    -22 years ago

    In a chatroom yesterday, I typed this comment:

    Microsoft and Google have an iron grip on kids since junior classes these days. Facebook ecosystem covers the social aspect. Amazon gets the purchases. Twitter gets the political ideology tracked and minds shaped towards either of the dichotomy.

    Add Snapchat and Reddit alongside Facebook ecosystem, and add to that the Western black information news media, and you have an almost complete summary of their propaganda machine.

        • @AnOrdinaryDog@lemmy.ml
          link
          fedilink
          12 years ago

          What?

          What about the conspiracy to commit a military coup in Chile in the 1970’s and install a right-wing dictatorship to suppress the left?

          What about the conspiracy to fabricate a cassus belli against Iraq in 2001- 2003 to invade the country under the pretext of a menace of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction?

          What about mass surveillance via the internet?

          What about the holocaust?

          There are obviously true conspiracy theories, many are widely believed by the left and many are even public record at this point.

          • @ChinaNumberOne@lemmy.ml
            link
            fedilink
            -22 years ago

            What about the conspiracy to commit a military coup in Chile in the 1970’s and install a right-wing dictatorship to suppress the left?

            not a conspiracy theory, it’s simply true

            What about the conspiracy to fabricate a cassus belli against Iraq in 2001- 2003 to invade the country under the pretext of a menace of proliferation of weapons of mass destruction?

            not a conspiracy theory, it’s simply true

            What about mass surveillance via the internet?

            not a conspiracy theory, it’s simply true

            What about the holocaust?

            not a conspiracy theory, it’s simply true

            reported and blocked

            • EvanM
              link
              fedilink
              0
              edit-2
              2 years ago

              Thank you for the report, unless I am misunderstanding he is saying these “theories” are the truth, given the context. Could have been worded better, but in this part

              There are obviously true conspiracy theories, many are widely believed by the left and many are even public record at this point.

              I think he is saying these are true even if some people call them theories. I interpret the thread as

              Only right wingers believe in conspiracy theories?

              yes

              I disagree, I believe all these to be true

              If I am missing something do let me know

              • @AnOrdinaryDog@lemmy.ml
                link
                fedilink
                12 years ago

                Yes absolutely all these conspiracy theories are true. I’m not a peddler of holocaust denial, I simply just don’t buy that “being false” is a pre-requisite for a narrative to be a conspiracy theory.

                All of these facts started off as contested and disbelieved by large parts of various publics.

                The US’s involvement in the coup in Chile was certainly deduced by many Chileans and others outside Chile the day coup happened, thanks to a good understanding of the nature of the structure of US imperialism in latin america. However, there was little hard evidence at the time and US involvement was kept secret and denied by the US establishment and media. The fact that US military and intelligence agencies were intimately involved in the plotting and material support for the coup d’état was denied, covered up and obfuscated.

                It was a conspiracy, and Chileans and others who said the US was involved were communicating a theory about a secret plot by the powerful, a conspiracy theory that was objectively true, but not accepted by the mainstream. Now it is widely accepted as historical fact.

                The existence of weapons of mass-destruction in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was a hotly contested issue. The right campaigned to have it accepted as a fact, and their campaign was supported by much of the mainstream media in the United States, Britain, Australia and other allied countries. This involved the strategic leaking and revealing of reports from intelligence agencies that were designed to support the narrative that Iraq held a secret stash of weapons.

                The anti-war left fought back with claims that this campaign was based on lies, that it had the goal of manufacturing consent for an illegal invasion. We claimed that Bush, his administration, Blair, his administration, and the military and intelligence agencies were conspiring to start an illegal war under false pretexts. This was a conspiracy theory. UN weapons inspectors denied the weapons existed, but the Bush administration cast doubt on their credibility and pointed to their own fabricated evidence that weapons existed.

                In the end, the truth of the conspiracy was revealed bit by bit as the occupying armies in Iraq failed to turn up any evidence of the secret weapons.

                The narrative of mass-surveillance on the internet emerged from the world of conspiracy theories in a similar way. First as concerns, then suspicions, then allegations, before finally becoming mainstream with the Snowden revelations. Even now there are many, perhaps a majority, who will look at you wide-eyed with disbelief if you try to explain the extent to which our activities online are monitored, recorded and monetized. “Conspiracy theorist!”