If you don’t watch yourself He’ll give you a good tongue lashing.
He once heeled me, but this isn’t really the forum for witnessing, is it?
This forum is too straight-laced for this type of humor.
Sounds like it’s kind of related to Munchausen’s Syndrome.
My personal, unsubstantiated pet theory? The Professor was keeping them on the island. I’m guessing he was on the run after selling nuclear secrets to the USSR/plotting to overthrow the government/getting the Dean’s daughter pregnant.
Stranger
SECRET cabal! Secret! Ixnay on the ategray oeshay!
Me, despite my skepticism about…well, everything…I still pretty much believe in Jungian Synchronicity. The recent discoveries about quantum entanglement have only served to top off my pseudoscientific gobbledygook tanks.
How so? taking notes
The Great Shoe is supposed to be secret!
Hold your tongue!
Don’t worry, we can cobble together some sort of cover for them. Not that I’m one to toe the line when it comes to all this secrecy and mysticism.
the people who write computer viruses and software companies that sell antivirus software are working in concert with each other, in fact, the virus writers are most likely employed by the antivirus software companies…
they’re, of course, paid “under the table” so the antivirus companies can retain an air of plausable deniability…
think about it…
I don’t need to go to the doctor for a checkup, because if there was something wrong with me, I’d just know.
So far, so good.
Ignatius Donnelly, Populist politician & general crank, wrote a book RAGNAROK based on that very concept.
I believe that back when humans were first being humans, the hunter-gatherer types, grandmothers had a very integral part in the raising of children. Here are my observations:
[ul]
[li]1) Girls get fertile way too early. I could have had a baby when I was twelve, my aunt when she was nine. Now—discounting the fact the girls are maturing earlier due to better nutrition and whatnot, even if the mean age of childbirth was around 18, most 18 year olds are not equipped to handle a new baby.[/li][li]2) Most new mothers need all sorts of training on how to breastfeed, what to do when the baby is freaking out, how to burp it, etc.[/li][li]3) My parents, and the parents of almost everyone else out there, rrrrreeeeeaaaallllyyyy want me to have grandkids for them now now now! They are way more excited about it than I am.[/li][/ul]
Ok—My theory about the original family unit:
When a young girl has a baby, most of the care of that baby is put on her mother. As the girl gets older and has more children, she learns more about raising children and takes over more and more responsibility in that task. As her daughters grow they learn about taking care of kids by helping with their younger siblings and cousins. When the daughter’s daughters are old enough to have babies, she then takes over as the primary care giver and all her daughters help out with the little ones, thereby learning how to raise their own.
This network of care giving leaves the teenage and young women more time to help with the gathering of food and cavorting with young men. This explains for me why young women who can not or will not take responsibility for a baby are at the most fertile state in their life.
Second crackpot theory: Someday in the far off distant future, when all current civilizations have perished, future civilizations (be they human, future evolution of intelligence, or aliens) will be hella confused about our time due to our current mining of fossils and the extreme amount of exotic species finding new habitats on far off continents. For example, how will they explain all the rabbits and camels in Australia?
That’s it, is it?
[/Chris]
One of my favorites is that Nicola Tesla invented waaaay more things than the government is telling us.
Actually, all my crackpot theories involve the government keeping secrets from the general public. UFO’s, assassinations, Black Ops, you name it. I’m there.
Munchausen’s Syndrome is a recognized psychiatric disorder in which the patient pretends to have an illness or feigns symptoms in order to receive treatment, even invasive surgery. It’s rather the extreme end of hypochondria. They’ll often make up new illnesses or fabricate a spectrum of atypical and frequently contradictory ailments and engage a variety of specialists (all of whom are, of course, looking for symptoms that fit a diagnosis in their area of specialty) and will willingly undergo painful and needless procedures due to their insistance and presentation of a valid pathology.
Analogously, your technological crackpots tend to promuligate some inane theory and submit it to one expert or another (generally descending down the ladder from legitimate and educated experts to other crackpots and pseudoscientists) and will convolute, faliciously conflate, or outright fabricate evidence to support their theories. Those who manage to bring attention to their cause frequently claim some kind of cover up or personal repression, even going so far as to claim threats and assaults by the powers of repression; to wit: Art Bell and his claims of threats/abduction/et cetera by “The Government”.
I’m not suggesting that they are two manifestations exactly the same disorder, only that there are significant similarities between them, the notable difference being that in the former the focus in on the self, while in the latter it is on an external element, though as previously noted conspiracy theorists will often turn the alledged persecution back onto themselves. Both are more frequently seen in men that women (how many women have you seen initiating genuinely crackpot theories?) and both involve patent deception.
Aside from that, general scientific and technical ignorance, combined with a healthy dose of cultural superstition in one form or another, makes it pretty easy to promolugate crackpotism onto the general populace, as the wide acceptance of astrology, chiropractic (aside from mechanical adjustment), the lottery, alien abductions, theistic apparitions, aroma therapy, homeopathy, Social Security, and so forth. I was recently sitting in one of my usual haunts up at the bar and two waitresses were trying to convince me of the validity of astrology. “Like, how could everything not, like be interconnected. Like, you know physics, yeah? Like, didn’t Einstein say everything is, like, a part of everything else, and we’re, like, all part of the same stuff as the sun and the moon?” Oh…okay, that makes sense then. Like. Even after trying to relate general personality traits to me based upon my birthdate they were only batting about .300 (and given that the traits were generally dichotomous, it means they were doing worse than general guessing) they were still convinced in astrology, “'Cause it’s like, so close. Like, look at all those things it got right about you.”
Methinks basic applied statistics should be a mandatory course in high school and a requirement in order to exercise the voting franchise.
Stranger
Hmm, I’ve seen examples of Munchausen’s by proxy. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Crackpot by proxy. No “My son invented a car that runs on water and is being repressed by MIBs!” No “My daughter created magnetic rings that grant physical immortality!”
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I believe that almost all cases of SIDS are parents suffocating their babies.
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I believe that if everyone had seen Star Wars: The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones completely independently of each other, without any pre-movie discussion, the attitude towards them would have been significantly higher.
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I believe that if we weren’t allowed to introduce people to the concept of God until they were 20, no one would believe in him.
(we’ve done this before, but I like it)
My favorite: lee harvey oswald (assassin of John F. kennedy) was a double agent for the CIA.
It’s a fun theory, and it can never be proven(or disproven),the CIA would never release any information (implicating itself in the murder). My reasons for liking this one:
-Oswald’s strange travel hsitory
-his trip to Mexico City (and contact with the KGB)
-the disappearence of most of his personal effects after his death
The CIA has been involved in a lot of very questionable actions, like:
-the murder of opposition politicians in nicaragua (1950’s)
-the assassination of communist s in the Philippines
-the Iran-Contra dealing
-the smuggling of Cocaine with booby Seal(Mean, Arkansaa)
Stop on, Chris.
I believe that the “water car” really exists. Maybe it doesn’t run on water, but it runs on some common substance or principle and the only reason we’re not using it is because there is a vested interest in keeping the Middle East in turmoil. I think that this is because the fundamentalists who really control this country (and the world by proxy) want to spark a new Crusades so they can bring about the End Times as written in Revelations. I also believe that the lack of good public transportation in this country is related to this. It is in the fundamentalist-imperialists’ favor that we consume as much gasoline as possible, because if we all used public transpo there would be less bitching about high gas prices and fewer people looking for a Crusade.
I think some of the more popular conspiracy theories (the JFK murder, the Roswell crash) were cooked up or distorted by the government to mask even more devious goings-on.
I believe that the nuclear family is one of the reasons for the rise in the murder rate and other criminal activity directed towards individuals. If you murder someone now, you’ll only greatly affect their immediate family: their parents, mate, and children. Cousins, aunts, etc might be sad, but it won’t be as devastating. So the chances of your act coming back to you in a retributive way are less than if you kill a member of a tightly-knit clan or tribe. A murder of one of those people will send the whole tribe (which may mean 50+ people) gunning for you. I know there is tribal warfare and such in places like Africa, but there seems to be less person-on-person crime than there is in places where nuclear families are more common.
I believe that tribes and clans are often a direct factor in cases of horrible genocide and other ethnic based atrocities.