I don’t think this qualifies as a “conspiracy theory.”
“Quite simple to pull off, really. All I had to do was have explosives planted in the base of the towers. Then on 9/11 we pretended like four planes were being hijacked, when really we just rerouted them to Pennsylvania, then flew two military jets into the World Trade Center filled with more explosives, then shot down all the witnesses of Flight 93 with an F-15 after blowing up the Pentagon with a Cruise missile. It was only the world’s most intricate and flawlessly-executed plan ever, ever.”
- George Bush on South Park
Reading AHunters excellent post (#20), I was reminded of an even more wacky conspiracy that is still clung too: That a young, recently married Hawaiian woman would fly alone to have her baby in a third-world country and then fly back to Hawaii with that baby (by herself, mind you), and then (with family help, one presumes) manage to get a completely valid birth certificate issued in Hawaii…all so the baby could be elected President of the United States 48 years later…as conspiracies go, that is a doozy when you look at it.
I’ve always liked the one about how all world leaders are really shape-shifting reptilian humanoids, pushed most famously by David Icke. ‘Evidence’ for this typically comes in the form of youtube videos that have been compressed so far as to leave artifacts all over the place, which however are actually just the protagonists’ human masks slipping.
I really cannot imagine the state of mind that allows anybody to believe this. I’m not trying to be funny here—I actually can’t, and truth be told, that’s the scariest part of the whole thing.
I used to think the shift-shaping, alien lizards, David Ickes believes are running the world (Queen Elizabeth II is one of them!) would be laughed out of Hollywood as a B movie plot. Considering recent movies, I’m not so sure, but I think it’s still incredible stupid as a conspiracy theory.
Any conspiracy involving “The Government” always assumes that “The Government” is some sort of monolithic, lock-step, hive-mentality, super-secretive, all-powerful entity capable of pulling off all sorts of nefarious plots.
I was a federal employee for 37 years (including time on active duty) and in a couple of my jobs, I held pretty high-level security clearances. I worked in the Pentagon for 30 months. At various times, I worked with people from a number of intelligence agencies. Never once in those 37 years did I experience any organization in lock-step with anything. What conspiracy whack-jobs fail to consider is that “The Government” is full of people who pretty much mirror the public at large, since they come from the public at large.
It’s not an organization that people join because of shared interests or goals. For many, if not most, it’s a job like any other job. They show up, do what they have to do, collect their pay, and eventually quit, retire, or die at their desks. :eek: Some are dedicated, some are barely competent, some are total wastes of oxygen. Considering that, how could anyone believe that enough of them will conspire together to execute these occurrences without anyone else finding out??
In conclusion, the idea that “The Government” is capable of conspiracies is the biggest conspiracy theory of all!
Whoo boy, did Penn & Teller have a field day with that on their show Bullshit!.
Watching Icke speak with such credulity is half chilling, half hilarious.
Yeah, this is a good one. And what exactly would be the point? She knew her mixed race baby would grow up to be a candidate for the Presidency 50 years later and wanted to leave documentation that would fool those people 50 years later?
The people who believe this have to believe it was done deliberately. She sneaked over to Kenya to have that baby, precisely BECAUSE it would make him ineligible to become president, as part of some sort of Satanic Ritual to curse the United States when this baby would eventually get fraudulently elected. With a fake President that would break the covenant God had with the United States, and the land would become cursed, Fisher King style.
While not a Government employee, I concur with everything you say here. IMHO, one reason people are able to stretch their mind into believing the Government is capable of such plots, is the development of the A-bomb - that was done mainly in secrecy, was well orchestrated, and people involved, for the most part, kept quiet. <sarcasm>If they were able to do that without anyone noticing, who knows what else they are capable of?</sarcasm> :rolleyes:
This. I worked for the Department of Defense in the '90s and it’s laughable that “The Gub’mint” could put together, much less keep secret, captured UFOs and alien autopsies, 9/11, HAARP controlling the weather, and so on.
I think hardcore conspiracy theorists are looking for ways to control their lives (or at least have the illusion of control) and – rather counter-intuitively – try to keep themselves “safe”; certain beliefs can create a sense of community and belonging.
Maybe, maybe not, the false conspiracy was that there were witches, not the hunt.
I saw a page somewhere on the net that tried to draw links between multiple conspiracies. The only part I remember was that Aristotle Onasis was in on the Kennedy assassination, and married Jackie afterwards to keep an eye on her.
Much easier to just believe that he was killed by a tiger.
I worked closely with a lot of government agencies while in real estate. IMHO, the government couldn’t orchestrate a plot to convince the public not to take poison.
Other theories:
The Beatles were a communist plot to take over America. And Yoko was a government agent hired by the government to break up the Beatles so that would not happen.
Most successful rock musicians have sold their souls to the devil in exchange for fame. Talent and luck had nothing to do with it.
Rock music causes premature deaths, because most rock musicians have died young.
Part is this. Another part is the desire to be better than you, as felt by someone who has, or feels they have, no valid way to become better than anyone else.
If I’m stuck in the same reality as you normies, I’m never going to excel. So I know the world is round. So what? Everyone knows that. It doesn’t make me special. However, if I know that the world is flat, and that everyone around me thinks it’s round due to some vast conspiracy only I and a few others have seen through, then I’m special. I’m better than you dumbasses, at any rate, and I didn’t have to do a damn thing to earn it beyond watching some YouTube videos and shitposting in some forum.
So I can become as smug as humanly possible because I believe in something people two thousand years ago knew was fake, and if you think I’m wrong, you’re just a sheep. Baa. Baa. Now I shall laugh in your face until you punch mine.
Llama in the headlights?[/rlh]
That was actually meant to be a “deer” in the headlights, not a loved one. Autocorrect is conspiring to screw up posts on the Dope!!!
I’ve heard it said that the federal government is like your local DMV office, only on a larger scale when it comes to miscommunication and incompetentcy.
That there is some child sex slave ring on the Moon. Or Mars.
That Satan Worship and underground Pedophilia Rings are prevalent and pervasive, and that Bill Clinton and various celebrities regularly pay to rape and kill children.
They seem preoccupied with this subject matter.
I known someone that believed right wing radio talk shows like Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck embedded sub-harmonic pulses into their shows in order to make the listeners more susceptible to extraterrestrial abduction.
He also believed homosexuality was genetically engineered into humans by the extraterrestrials in order to corrupt the evolutionary progress of the human species.
I’ve always know Limbaugh was up to no good!