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Ahnaf Ibn Qais's avatar

If you spoke to any Human Being on the planet merely 300-400 years ago, you would find that they all had notions regarding Beings from the Unseen Realms:

Some societies formulated that said Beings "came from the Skies" (i.e. 'Aliens' in modern parlance). Others formulated that they reside 'somewhere' from which they perceive us, but we cannot do so to them (i.e. the 'inter-dimensional' thesis in modern parlance).

Regardless, the common point was that almost no Human Being on the planet rejected the existence of these beings due to 'lack of sense perception &/or 'scientific evidence.'

The reason is simple: Our standards for Assent (or lack thereof) have shifted in some societies (such as the West) more than others. Thus, all talk of the 'Supernatural' is disreputable.

Today, we rarely take things like historiography, testimonial evidence, etc., seriously like we used to. Some societies (particularly North America & Europe) consider only Empirical Verification &/or Falsification as the 'gold standards.'

So, to answer the question, I am someone who (just as Humans have done for several millennia in times past) takes Testimonials, Narrative & documentary sources as more credible.

They have more significant weight to myself (& to billions of others) than 'lab work,' where things get verified, falsified, etc.

If that makes me a 'Conspiracy theorist'... so be it! I am in the company of most of Mankind (past & present, old & young, wise & foolish). My opponents, meanwhile, are 'merely guessing,' given their novel, peculiar methods & pursuits.

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Fabius Minarchus's avatar

The space program was incredibly expensive back at its peak. And even if there were gold bricks lying on the surface of the moon, bringing them home economically would not have paid at the time. You would need reusable rockets and an atomic powered ferry between Earth and moon. The safety issues for the latter aren't trivial, and I'm not sure the portable computers of the day were up to the former. (It is truly amazing what they did manage to do with primitive computers. Even as late as the early 1990s they had an entire mainframe dedicated to tracking the GPS constellation, and they had to split the problem into three partitions and use a square root representation of the covariance matrices.)

Then you have the layers of anti corruption and civil rights laws that strangled the government labs and the contractors in red tape. The wastage these days is truly enormous. I have seen some of it up close back in the day.

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Fabius Minarchus's avatar

Global warming due to burning billions of pounds of coal and oil is a hoax started back in the 1800s.

The government is controlling the weather via HAARP and chemtrails.

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John Carter's avatar

Conspiracy Theorist: The evidence points to the existence of UFOs.

Coincidence Cultist: They definitely don't exist.

CT: How do you know?

CC: If they did, there would be whistleblowers. Impossible to keep a secret that large!

CT: There are whistleblowers.

CC: *Credible* whistleblowers.

CT: What makes them not credible?

CC: They're talking about UFOs.

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Tree of Woe's avatar

I've had this conversation so many times, lmao.

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John Carter's avatar

Same lol

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Ahnaf Ibn Qais's avatar

No lies detected!

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Hans G. Schantz's avatar

The corollary of that is the people who argue there couldn't possibly be an all encompassing conspiracy to impose a New World Order because too many people would have to be in on it and someone would talk. Then you have to patiently explain to them, not only have they talked, you can read all their books in which they lay out their plans and thinking!

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John Carter's avatar

That aspect is always hilarious.

"They could never do something like that in secret!"

"They aren't keeping it secret at all."

*Fluoride stare*

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Hans G. Schantz's avatar

"I have this book by H.G. Wells. You should take a look at. It's called The Open Conspiracy. And see this wolf in sheep's clothing? That's the symbol adopted by the Fabians."

"But... but... but... that's completely crazy."

"Exactly. But that doesn't mean it's not also true."

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John Carter's avatar

The argument from incredulity is the only real tool they have left.

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John Carter's avatar

The Mitteldorf article was very interesting. An excellent summary of the state of play and overview of the questions.

The type of logic being employed by the CC and the dietrologist are fundamentally different. The former tends towards a very binary thinking - something is true or it is not, and all of possibility space is assigned one or the other value ... much more of it 0 than 1, which certainly simplifies things.

The dietrologist adopts a more Bayesian approach: different possibilities are assigned a probabilistic value between 0 and 1, and those values are continuously reassessed in light of new evidence. Thus for example the Moon landing: I assign a very low probability to an outright hoax, a much higher probability to the suspicion that we have not been told the full story, and within that latter scenario, varying probabilities to different sub-scenarios (looking for Atlantean ruins? Diplomatic mission to aliens? Something else?)

Obviously the second is far more sophisticated, but to the more primitive epistemology applied by CCs, it indeed looks schizophrenic. How can you believe two incompatible things!? Easy enough, when you don't fully believe either, and are quite comfortable inhabiting uncertainty.

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Tree of Woe's avatar

Exactly. Well put.

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Eric Brown's avatar

What about just straight-up political opposition? Civil rights protestors complained for most of the 60s that money for the space program should have been spent on civil rights programs. And in the 70's, that's exactly where it went.

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Dave's avatar

The moon is a bonanza of mineral wealth, and the first nation to stake a physical claim would have an enormous advantage over terrestrial competitors, and yet, after the early 70's, we never went back, just closed up shop and called it a day.

No, something else was/is going on up there, or else our rapacious elites would have never turned their backs on such a goldmine.

And all of that ignores what I consider irrefutable photographic evidence of extensive ruins on the moon, as well as dozens of whistleblowers who credibly claim to have seen much more detailed photographic evidence of large scale industrial activity, as well as structures of gigantic proportions on the moon, all of which is being suppressed by various governments.

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Eric Brown's avatar

Going to the moon is HARD. Staying there is HARDER. You'll never get space cities without cheap launch, and Apollo was anything but cheap launch.

Walter McDougall's _The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age_ should be required reading for any space enthusiast.

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Lizzy Beta's avatar

I've figured out the shadowy group that runs the world. They're called the IIC. That stands for Idiots In Charge.

While I believe all human institutions are oligarchical, I don't think the oligarchs have super intelligences, super weapons, nor intricate byzantine nested plans that are followed to the smallest flow chart arrow.

We certainly aren't getting the truth from any mainstream institution. Mostly, what we have are a bunch of very powerful people who blunder about, trying to make things go their way. They mostly get what they want.

This class of people, the managerialists you can call them, really believe that if they say something often enough it becomes true. "safe and effective." "The Russians stole the 2016 election for Trump!" "I can't breathe!" "Insurrection!!!!!!!!!!!!" and on and on and on and on. They never shut up. Yet in their world, the world of their half brains, all those things are reality because they speak them into reality.

The managerialists are detached from reality, living in their own deluded worlds. They aren't capable of using both halves of their brains. Here is Iain McGilchrist describing our left hemisphere dominated world. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4IeuIg9nGY

While I believe our ruling class has abundant power, lies and manipulates things to increase their power, and for their benefit, I do not believe they are all powerful, have total control over the population or ever will, have directed energy weapons or haarp that cause every natural disaster, and that every single bad thing that happens is a 'false flag.'

'They' are mostly powerful, but blundering idiots.

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SkarnkaiLW's avatar

Generally the Q narrative, with the twist that I don't believe in white hats/patriots are in control. But, basically rule by pedophiles, demon worshippers, and so forth. I believe this has been the case for the majority of human history to varying degrees.

I could cheat and talk about central banking as a conspiracy against the public, but that is too easy.

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Eric Brown's avatar

I guess I'm just stupid, because it's plainly obvious that (1) we went to the moon, and (2) we stopped going to the moon because we decided to spend the money elsewhere.

There's also (3) we didn't go back because NASA got terribly bureaucratized in the late Apollo timeframe.

There's one killer argument for why we went to the moon: Because the Soviets would have called us out on it if we hadn't.

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Tree of Woe's avatar

I don't think that's stupid. Personally I had always believed we've been to the moon and that the reason we didn't go back was a developing competency crisis in our country. That said, the recent UFO evidence suggests to me that there might have been more going on than that.

As I said in the article, the hardest part of being a conspiracy theorist is knowing which conspiracies to believe....

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Hans G. Schantz's avatar

The counter for that is they've been blackmailing, demanding favorable grain deals and the like to keep quiet. But no, I don't believe we didn't go to the moon either.

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Dave's avatar

We went to the moon, but our government hasn't been honest about what they found, and the Soviets saw the same evidence and didn't want to open that can of worms either.

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Teleros's avatar

Dearie me, imagine still believing the moon is real...

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Karen's avatar

Speaking of dietrology, how about this scenario: the authorities both took us to the moon AND created fake landing visuals (a la Kubrick) because they wanted people to think we couldn't get there. Why would they do that? Perhaps because they didn't want us to know what they actually found there...

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Tree of Woe's avatar

That's fantastic.

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Mycroft1325's avatar

Coincidence Cultist or 'Skeptic'- A person who invariably believes whatever narrative the Establishment is pushing at the time.

I long for the days when true Skeptics existed.

I'm going to add what will make me sound like a broken record here, but it should be repeated-

'Aliens' do not exist and never have. Creatures which are essentially immortal, vastly more powerful, more perceptive and MUCH more intelligent than we are, do. For thousands of years they have been manipulating humanity for their own ends.

The Elite of the Elite of humanity, who serve them directly (mostly people we will never know or see), do so hoping they will not be kicked to the curb when the time comes. Most of the human-level conflict we see is like a game of 'musical chairs' to them. They serve these creatures hoping they will not be obliterated when the time comes to pull the plug on the current world order.

There's a lot of talk today about 'defeating the new world order'. But here's the catch- that's exactly what the Elite of the Elite and their non-human masters WANT. The Bible doesn't call it, 'The Great Deception' for nothing. It is deep, wide and old.

Here's how it could go- Information comes incontrovertibly into the public that The Jab is lethal and intentionally so. In rage, the world rises up and starts an 'apocalyptic' struggle, against the Governments & Authorities. At some point, a man of extraordinary ability emerges & with his help, that new order is torn down. People all over the world then, tired of the war, call for a new era of peace, begging this new man to lead it.

He accepts, but then, a small group who saw the threat this guy actually represents, kill him in public view of thousands. Only here's the kicker- He comes back from the dead, apparently more powerful and more godlike than ever. He then *claims* to be god, and says that we now have to unite as never before, because Monsters we can't imagine are coming from the Outer Dark to destroy humanity. Anyone who doesn't want to join this new world, must be killed for the greater good, as their 'negativity' will keep everyone else from ascending.

It'll be something like that.

The Current secret Cabal that runs the world is what the Bible calls, 'Mystery Babylon', the woman in purple and scarlet, who has gotten the world drunk on the wine of her iniquities. That is the CURRENT 'New World Order.' But even though the Bible also tells us this, what happens next seems to have been neglected. The Beast that she rides, that Beast is the one that throws her off!

The Apparent victory against The Powers That Be will only be putting a greater and more dangerous power into play. I suspect that at least some of the Super-Elite know this. Which is why they work like the dickens to make sure they are on The Beast's good side. (assuming he has one.)

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Jonathon's avatar

This is a problem of cognition. It’s possible to construct castles in the air with significant internal logical cohesion that bear no relation to reality. High-IQ individuals, like schizophrenics, are prone to reaching a conclusion based on an analysis of the logic and not checking all the links to observable reality. This tendency was exploited to facilitate the recent mass injections. It also underlies mass adoption of erroneous theories such as the corpuscular theory of light by people who should know better. We have supposedly smart people saying that photons can be infinitesimally small or as big as the universe, without ever actually seeing a photon. How did this happen? They’re all wordcels. Not a shape rotator among them. Epistemology itself is an expression of cognition and bears no other relation to reality. With such weak powers of observation, humanity is doomed to endless controversies about aliens, which in any case are a more appropriate topic for discussion than the necessity of consumption tax. Endless speculative discussions can be created to distract every calibre of intellect for ever.

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Lizzy Beta's avatar

They are using only their left hemisphere. The left has narrow focus, is not capable of seeing the bigger picture, and constructs theories, ideologies, bureaucracies, models, and so on, without checking to see if they comport with reality. The left hemisphere demands a simple story to explain everything.

Check out the work of Iain McGilchrist.

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Jonathon's avatar

Makes sense, thanks!

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p3ck3rw00d's avatar

Its not Conspiracy theorist versus Coincidence Cultist--that's mixing up two separate dichotomies which are at play:

Skeptic vs. Dogmatist

Conformist vs nonconformist

The first dichotomy is a division based upon *truth claims*, whereas the second is based upon one's acceptance of *authority*. I think its easy for these to bleed into one another because the current ruling order bases their authority upon reason/expertise/"S"cience/etc.

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Abhcán's avatar

In short: while there are absolutely conspiracies, I am highly suspicious of conspiratorial thinking.

Perhaps I'm one of the coincidence cultists. I'll try to explain my approach.

Conspiracy theories offer a tempting option to cut through the complexities of the world. Too tempting in my view. Furthermore, I think you're going with an assumption that there are only two possible approaches to navigating a complex world when one has imperfect and incomplete information. First of all, does one have all the relevant context? An unintuitive statement may make perfect sense in context, and a seemingly obvious statement the reverse. There's also the trap of wanting to defend a chosen theory to the exclusion of evidence to the contrary (also applies outside of the "conspiracy" adjective). Also, there is money, fame, and political gain to be had from showcasing an "unorthodox theory" that appeals to conspiracy theorists.

Articles on the UFO sightings:

The UFO craze was created by government nepotism and incompetent journalism - https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/the-ufo-craze-was-created-by-government

Explaining All The Weird UFO ‘Aliens’ - https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/explaining-all-the-weird-ufo-aliens

A few views on conspiracy theories in general:

"Heads I Win, Tails You Lose" - https://sharpenyouraxe.substack.com/p/heads-i-win-tails-you-lose

The Conspiratorial Mindset - https://sharpenyouraxe.substack.com/p/the-conspiratorial-mindset

Forget Conspiracy Theories The Really Bad Stuff Happens in Plain View - https://billmckibben.substack.com/p/forget-conspiracy-theories

Conspiracy Theories are propaganda for deep beliefs - https://tomstafford.substack.com/p/conspiracy-theories-are-propaganda

Edit to correct a misspelling.

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