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What are some things a conspiracy theorist has told you?

Coworker. I told him to fuck off with his conspiracy bullshit. But back when I patronized him, one thing he said was that he didn't consider belief a binary as in that you either believe something or don't. He viewed all beliefs as a continuum. You can believe one thing 10% and another thing 90%, but he wouldn't let me pin him down as to whether he "believed" any particular thing or not.

All while trying to convince me "tall white aliens" run the U.S. government and Sandy Hook was faked by a bunch of actors and the U.S. military had invisibility technology and planes that aren't dumping weather-controlling chemicals don't leave trails in the sky. Pretty standard QAnon-level bullshit. But if I asked him if he believed any of those things, he wouldn't answer. Honestly, it makes sense as a dishonest rhetorical tactic.

Dude also literally drinks borax in his juice cleanse drink.

78 comments

  • Jesus christ, where do I even begin? I have parents who are conspiracy nuts, so this'll be quite a list. There's a difference between my mom, step dad, and oldest little brother, though, as two of them believe in more occult crap.

    Well, here we go...

    • Chemtrails. Also HAARP. For some reason "they" are constantly trying to control the weather. Somehow it involves better controlling the population. There was also the idea that Chemtrails seeded clouds to then rain chemicals onto people that'll keep them complacent and controlled.
    • During the Syrian mass immigration crisis; "they" are trying to replace us with a more complacent population to control us better.
    • Vaccines are a scam to create a more complacent population, or is a means of population control, or is transhumanism and transhumanism is bad.
    • By extention, COVID-19 exists only as a scare tactic. A frightened, scared population is a complacent population more easily controlled.
    • Global warming is a scare tactic, and same as COVID-19, exists only keep the population scared and complacent.
    • Most wars, especially the "war on terrorism" by George W. Bush, is a scare tactic.... Yadda yadda complacent, controlled, etc...
    • NATO is an expansionist, imperialist organisation to consolidate all power in one place for better control. It forces members to join it either through coercion or passive aggressive pressure. Russia only defending itself.
    • The military (which military?) has far more advanced technology than what's available to the public. Such as anti-gravity drones and thought suppression antennas.
    • Every action, event, political decision, election, or organisation is always caused by a shadowy group of people who are the ones really in control of everything. A shadow government. They control truly everything, and their actions are done in order... To... Control........ Everything... Yeah, not a really thought out one, this one is. But the basis for all the other conspiracies, and the "they" or "them" always refers to this.
    • The Rothschild family is part of "them", the most powerful family in all of history! (probably forgot about the Hapsburgs).
    • They will never give true medicine to the world, as a means of keeping the population controlled. All medicine exists to keep you reliant on them.
    • Homeopathy is the medicine "they" don't want you to use.
    • "They" are hoarding ancient, advanced technology.
    • "They" are suppressing archeology, in case any "true" history comes to light, such as those involving highly advanced precursor races.
    • The Smithsonian museum is hiding skeletons and archaeological findings that don't fit with "established, mainstream archeology", such as skeletons of a giant, highly advanced precursor race. Yes, they like David Icke. How could you tell?
    • There are ways of generating free energy that "they" don't want you to know, but ancient civilisations did. Such as the Egyptians who built pyramids as huge power plants. They're either plasma fusion plants, pizo-electric generators producing energy from Earth's vibrations, or some kind of funny triangular rock that in its exact configuration can generate power from the Earth's lay-lines.

    There's probably a lot more, but I'm tired of typing all this out.

  • I work in health care, one of our delayed young patients needs urgent surgery for their condition. I called them because the surgeon's secretary tried to contact them several times re getting them in next week without success, and the parent told me they didn't want the surgery because they were certain that the surgeon would do "extra" procedures, which in their mind meant the patient would be given the COVID and flu vaccines while under anesthesia against their will. The doctor called them and explained that the patient needs it very badly and that nothing else would happen, so they reluctantly agreed, but they still called me yesterday fussing about this idea. I explained that there were several people in the OR for the procedure, not just the surgeon but nurses and residents and the anesthesiologist, and that none of them particularly wanted to lose their professional license doing something they didn't consent to even if for some reason the surgeon thought that stealth vaccinating the child was a good idea.

    Um, surgeons don't consider it their job to secretly vaccinate people. In my decades of health care work I've only seen one technically unconsented patient because otherwise they would lose their limb and die of sepsis, and were so unable to respond to discussion about it and they had no next of kin or SDM, that the decision had to be made as life or death, because a pit bull mauled them so badly and ripped off a limb. (Sadly they lost the limb anyway). Surgeons really don't want to do that, and they sure as hell don't want to also stealth vaccinate crazy people.

  • one thing he said was that he didn't consider belief a binary as in that you either believe something or don't. He viewed all beliefs as a continuum. You can believe one thing 10% and another thing 90%, but he wouldn't let me pin him down as to whether he "believed" any particular thing or not.

    That seems pretty reasonable. The only thing I believe 100% is that my consciousness exists in some way. I'm about 99.9% certain that reality is roughly as I experience it (I have a physical body, the things I witness correlate to an external world, I'm not a brain in a box or in some kind of simulation, etc.). Every other belief carries some higher degree of uncertainty.

    I think of how much evidence I'd need to believe something. If someone told me their dad was childhood friends with Bill Clinton, I probably wouldn't believe them, but all it would take to convince me would be a yearbook and a couple old photos. If someone told me they had a tea party with Sasquatch, they could show me a video and I'd still assume it was faked.

    This seems like a healthy perspective, to me. The problem pops up when you start assigning high confidence levels to unlikely claims, or spend too long obsessing over low confidence claims. I suppose aliens could run the government, but even 10% confidence is way too high.

  • My father told me that Bill Gates designed and distributed COVID. Iirc to reduce world population or sell vaccines or whatever.

    From that time onwards, I felt I could not guess whatsoever anymore what he'd believe to be true. All the belief in energy and human influence through thought alone and even across distance solidified that feeling.

78 comments