Come on Lockbox, nobody really has "open discussions" with you, because you do not speak in a manner that allows that to happen with all your conspiracy addict linguistic methods. I happen to know this so I play the cards in front of me instead of trying to get you to behave in a way that is not possible after decades of your lifestyle choice.


Why? Photos are among the easiest things in the world to fake. If your default is to not trust the narrative, whatever that means, why would you trust photos that support the narrative?



This is the core problem with conspiracy addicts. They try to separate themselves from the sheeple by believing they are using a higher level of thinking by not trusting the "narrative" like the "uncritical masses." Thing is, the masses are not "uncritical." They just do not accept that weird beliefs are the norm unless shown they are accurate, so just because a small group of passionate people may believe 2+2= potato that does not mean that is the correct default assumption. As well, any time any type of system has a flaw there will be people who discover it and exploit it, which is by definition a way humans are "critical" of situations. People expose mistakes and bad policies all the time by exploiting them for their own gain. Selfish? Sure, but also that is what helps systems improve. Conspiracy addicts place no value on this process.

I would suggest that conspiracy addicts are quite ironically one of the least critical segments of the population, because they by default accept weird, unproven narratives as the starting point from a few passionate people, and why should those few passionate people be trusted when they have a clear motive and agenda behind their beliefs. Seems that would be the definition of the worst people to believe at face or near face value.

That whole when there is smoke there is fire nonsense was spouted by riggies in this industry for years and years to rationalize and justify their beliefs. They trusted each other (even if their theories contradicted each other) rather than believe in silly things like database software that could prove or disprove any of their theories. It was the exact same thinking process as you demonstrate on a regular basis, which is why I rarely have any discussions with you in a serious manner. Why bother, no point, but I know that riggies can be entertaining at times, hence when you do that I have a bit of fun, nothing more or less. Many times the riggies appreciate that attention even if they do not like what I say, because otherwise they tend to be generally ignored or dismissed by the uncritical sheeple masses, and even their fellow riggies tend to at best parallel play with them rather than openly support them (like how you never really directly support washoe or the wannabe communist Putin lover). Just the way the riggie culture works.

All the best.

This.

Of course you are, LOL. Although I'd call it something more like "where I can come up with a reason for there to have been a fire that fits with my predetermined beliefs about the establishment, there was a fire" principle.

I definitely don’t think that just because there’s a large difference in the number of opinion holders on an issue that the minority opinion can be dismissed out of hand but I likewise don’t see any signal in that smaller group being very dedicated compared to the disinterested majority. The passion or lack there of of either side seem more likely to be motivated by other unrelated factors than their distance to the truth. It seems like it could be a very misleading heuristic. The truth of something is independent of who believes it.

I would suggest the odds of the truth of something is lower when the narrative is created by a smaller group of people to manufacture a resulting thought process that validates the "truth" they wish to believe in. Much easier to groupthink something into existence with a handful of "passionate" people working for that cause than for millions of indifferent sheeple to do that same task.

Good post.

Nice to find the odd high content post in the hi-lo content post thread!

his main example is something that was proven true time and time again. there was and is rampant cheating in online poker.

This is a misrepresentation of what is actually going on. There are more people who believe very firmly that the Sandy Hook school shooting actually happened and that the twin towers fell because planes were hijacked and flown into the towers than there are people who believe the opposite, regardless of whether they are willing to display their "passion" by arguing with conspiracy theorists on the internet.

And for the truly absurd (e.g., lizard people), you can't really expect people to be doing a lot of research, passionately or otherwise, to disprove the "theory." Life is too short to waste time on such endeavors.

100% agree with this, and I think it is a combination of ego and a desire for entertainment (probably more the latter for LB) that causes CTs to accept the highly improbable as a starting point.

On some level, I get it. The world I live in indisputably is less entertaining than the world LB lives in.

why should the starting point be newspapers and politicians and media companies?

how many times do their lies need to be uncovered before you gain a little skepticism?

It isn't just the media. It's also logic. There are a great many things where there either is no plausible incentive to lie or no real possibility of lying successfully.

One of the many reasons that so many people believe planes were flown into the twin towers is because so many people saw planes fly into the towers. I know some of those people. One of those people told me after the first plane hit, and before the second plane hit, that he saw the first plane hit one of the towers. I am as certain as I can possibly be that this person is not a government operative.

Also, there have been actual conspiracies, some involving agencies of the government. But they don't involve the hyper-competent and highly organized government that some people imagine exists. More often, they involve a bumbling, barely competent group of people in government who are lying after the fact to cover their own wrongdoing or incompetence.

we must be talking about different events.

Having established a couple of days ago that you don't know what a lawyer is, I feel compelled to ask: do you know what a newspaper is? Hint: the clue is in the name for both.

Yeah, I get that as well, and indeed Looky uses his beliefs for some entertainment value, but the core is still paranoid distrust of mysterious forces in the world, which is why I have said when he stays with the silly topics like UFOs those debates can actually be entertaining. The UFO thread had a hard core UFO person and a hard core debunker who were both really into it so that combination with Lacky's usual routines definitely created an enjoyable topic for a little while when UFOs popped into the news cycle a while ago. The issue is when the more disgusting conspiracies appear, because it is obvious where that guy falls on them.

I similarly find some, though not all, of washoe's weird stuff entertaining, but the problem there is that is a dude who is going deeper and deeper into really bizarre rabbit holes, so not sure if he will eventually turn into a variation of Licky or more likely get somewhere much darker once he goes too deep. The wannabe communist Putin guy in contrast is just a miserable being, which is why nobody really interacts with him, even the other conspiracy people. I have not read too many of the posts of the other posters who apparently spew conspiracies here, like the Deuce dude.

I know someone that ran away and was covered by ash, who also took some of the most amazing photos I have seen when it happened. Lots of people know those who were there and saw what happened. I did not know that the conspiracy was that no planes even existed now. Was that always the case? 9/11 was the conspiracy of that generation, just like JFK was one of an earlier one, and my guess was Covid was going to be the one of this generation (remains to be seen), and it is why I asked Lukky to make some predictions on it before it really took off. He refused that freeroll as he is more a predict and be entertained after things happen type within that culture.

Dude, you missed the granddaddy of them all, the OG nutcase, the capo di tutti conspira-capi, Playbig 2000. If memory serves, he was the guy who predicted the pope and Biden would be sharing a jail cell and posted pictures of some tents on the White House lawn or something as proof, amongst his many other entertaining theories.

Exactly. The conspiracy derpers are fun at first, but they always converge on really dark, upsetting ****.

Yeah, that was the Q guy, and to his credit he made a lot of specific predictions based on whatever crazy he consumed, and of course none of them came true, because duh. You will never see the other conspiracy people here make that mistake as they know specific predictions are the bane to the conspiracy goalpost changing lifestyle.

Yeah, that is why I had fun with the online poker riggies for a long time, as nearly all of them had a cap of their crazy, generally based on not being as good a player as they thought and having tilt issues. A few would stand out though as clear mega derps and then after a while of complaining of bad beats and whatever standard online poker tropes the antisemitism due to who owned Pokerstars would come out along with some other stuff. Not that common, but happened and usually Bobo or Mike Haven would nuke those accounts. Most riggies were just there to vent and have a little fun, but some clearly had other beliefs. No difference here.

As you say, 9/11 was the conspiracy event of a generation, so there are a lot of theories. Many involve planes flying into the towers, but some do not.

The OG 9/11 stuff is that planes alone couldn’t bring down the buildings and that the US was somehow involved in orchestrating the whole thing as a justification for war.

I have recently interacted with people on Reddit who question whether the planes actually existed. There’s now quite a few adults who were either not alive then or too young to have coherent memories of the event. Laughably dumb is one of the criticisms that there isn’t that much video evidence from a city that big, forgetting of course that everyone having a camera in their pocket wasn’t a thing then. I would imagine the further we get from the event the more you’ll hear conspiracy theorists claim the planes were a total fabrication.

The no planes theory has believers because when you slow the footage down frame-by-frame, there is no apparent resistance to the planes entering the building, with them saying that the planes were holograms. I'm agnostic on it but it seems like a red-herring as there are certainly a lot of other more indisputable topics with 9/11.

Good reason why believing a few people with a passion for a specific very fringy topic and a clear agenda for it may not be the best starting point! I mean, if you cannot trust the passionate hologram people, who can you trust!

Wasn't there some "documentary" called Loose Change made by some high school kid, where he was like "jet fuel burns at x degrees, steel melts at y degrees, so, controlled demolition obvs. QED"? I don't remember the details.

I remember a guy posted a parody he called Unfastened Coins which I thought was great though. It was a video of him playing with a toy boat in his sink which had some ice cubes floating in it, to prove once and for all that Titanic couldn't have been sunk by an iceberg. The narration went something like "boats are made of steel, steel is stronger than ice, here is my incontrovertible proof" followed by him repeatedly ramming a toy boat into a floating ice cube to show the boat remained undamaged, accompanied by "vroom"-like sound-effects.

In 100 years, some people probably will be questioning whether the towers ever existed.

Sure if you want to believe whatever bullshit narrative the media tells you about the Titaic allegedly sinking.

Given what some people deny happened in recent history, that is sadly probably not the weirdest prediction to make. Perhaps some already believe that. Holograms and such.

And I'll be long gone, so they won't have to bother with me telling them that I had been on various floors of the hologram at different times.