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.

  • Kissaki@feddit.org
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    55 minutes ago

    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.

  • agent_nycto@lemmy.world
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    4 hours ago

    One guy told me Sunkist was made by demons because the u in the logo isn’t actually a cursive u, it’s an i, so it’s Sinkist as in kissed by sin.

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    5 hours ago

    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.

  • heavydust@sh.itjust.works
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    5 hours ago

    Brother in law has everything: hollow earth, flat earth, vaccines, chem trails.

    The best: he thinks the government will steal his money if he gets a job, and that’s why he’s unemployed.

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        21 minutes ago

        He never explained both at once but he was more serious about the flat earth. I guess there would be some kind of caves underneath or something where the Shrek-people were hiding. I try to avoid him actually so it’s difficult to have explanations.

        One more: He had a web site for his crappy music, like some ambient and peaceful Burzum with the philosophical lyrics of a teenager (he’s 40). But the GDPR happened and he believed it was a plot from Europe to destroy all the European internet. But he was too smart for them, and he deleted his web site without asking me for explanations. He had no backups for some reason.

      • heavydust@sh.itjust.works
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        1 hour ago

        In taxes yes. But he deeply believes that all his profits will be gone and he would be working for free. The truth is that he’s a failed artist and thinks his lack or revenue was a conspiracy too so…

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    9 hours ago

    All while trying to convince me “tall white aliens” run the U.S. government

    This is where you ask him: How sure are you that they’re white? What if they’re grey? Or blue? What if they’re short? Or really tiny? Or not aliens at all but rather underground people? Or actually future humans? All of these are at least as likely as white tall aliens, so the chances of it being white tall aliens can’t be that high, even if it were 1% we would already covered 27% just with those cases, and adding 3 more colors we get to 54%. So definitely the chances of them being tall white aliens is much less than 1%, because I can keep adding colors, sizes or origins and they all have the same validity the chances of them being tall white aliens is infinitesimally small, which in statistics we call 0. So why bother?

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    14 hours ago

    Brother-in-law told me that the government is using weather-control machines to target Republican states.

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    13 hours ago

    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.

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    15 hours ago

    Like everyone here in have stories but instead of adding to the pile may I offer a simple solution. I tell people who fall this stuff to make a list and post it on their fridge. If just one of them turns out to be true they can call me up and rub it in my face. There are two reasons I suggest this. First, the people in the media who push this stuff keep a steady flow of BS incoming. They put out a new one to distract from the last one. Second, back in 2011 I realized it’s like a cult and I did a little looking into what it takes to get people to snap out of it. The expert I found said there is nothing you can do, folks have to reach their own conclusions. Should any of your friends come around just let it go, don’t make a big deal about it.

    • TootSweet@lemmy.worldOP
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      12 hours ago

      If just one of them turns out to be true they can call me up and rub it in my face.

      I tried something somewhat like this once.

      He’d constantly be like “something big is coming very soon, just wait.” And I kept pressing him for “due dates”. Like by what date are you 99% sure “it” (like, official announcements that ETs have been living among us disguised as humans since the 60s or whatever) will have happened? Because if he gives a date, I can finally nail him down and say “hey, so, you were wrong, see? The incorrectness of your prediction is some amount of disconfirming evidence right?”

      So when he finally did tell me a “due date” for one of his conspiracy theories, I kept that in the forefront of my brain. He said that Trump would arrest “thousands” of high-profile Democrat pedophiles engaged in child sex trafficking within a year after his first term in office started.

      Well, it happened! Not really. All the right-wing news outlets vastly misrepresented an FBI sex trafficking bust that had nothing to do with Trump or “high-profile Democrats” as the one and the same massive bust of sex-trafficking high-profile Democrats that Q and Fox News and my conspiracist former friend had predicted. And it fell within the timeframe he predicted.

      Of course, it was horse shit. This was no confirmation of his wacky theories. But to him, I was just being willfully blind to the obvious vindication of his prediction.

      The lesson I took from that was that the fantasy they live in is far to resilient against actual reality to be phased even a little bit by any actual real-world events. And promising someone bragging rights “if such-and-such of your predictions come to pass” isn’t going to pan out for you as well as you might hope. It would require them to have a connection to reality for that to work, and they don’t.

      • HellsBelle@sh.itjust.works
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        8 hours ago

        What we believe shapes who we are. Belief can bring us salvation or destruction. But when you believe a lie for too long, the truth doesn’t set you free. It tears you apart.

        Altered Carbon, s01e08, writer Brian Nelson

  • ERROR: Earth.exe has crashed@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    18 hours ago

    This one is gomna break you brains:

    Y’all heard of the “Great Replacement” unhinged conspiracy theory?

    Imagine that, but Han Chinese Edition.

    Context: My family was born in PRC

    My older brother told me the CCP is conspiring to… wait for it

    Replace Han Chinese with ethnic minorities and “African Migrants”… 🤨

    Yea his brain is totally cooked.

    Might be lead poisoning or some other weird shit in China.

    He hates racism, yet simultaneously believes in a racial hierarchy. 🤨

    (of course, he believes Han Chinese are on top 🤨)

    Oh did I forget to say, we live in the US.

    Why is he so worried about China, a country he no longer has citizenship in… 🤨

    He believes in Han Supremacy but became a US Citizen? 🤨

    (Sorry for the 🤨 emoji, its just so… bewildering)

    Also, doesn’t like vaccines, but still caved in and got a tetnaus vaccine when he stepped on a nail. Yes he know its a vaccine, but apparantly, if your risk of dying is high enough, survival instincts overrules conspiracy theories? 🤔

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      12 hours ago

      A Chinese person I know believes that Jews control the entire world. Even China was controlled by the Jews until Xi Jinping came along and tried to throw off the yoke. Apparently, the hooked nose is a dead giveaway for spotting Jews.

      Fortunately, she is mostly isolated (by her own choice, she has a vehicle and plenty of time and money to socialize if she wants) aside from communicating online.

      She also told me that the Mexican government had been taken over by Freemasons in the 1800s and become extremely hostile to the Catholic Church. Priests were killed or driven out of the country, monasteries and convents were closed, and Church property was forfeited to the state.

      Actually, to my greatest astonishment, that last paragraph is completely true. Look up anti-clericalism in Mexico. The remnants of these anti-clerical laws were only removed from the Mexican constitution in 1992.

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        17 minutes ago

        until Xi Jinping came along

        It’s funny that conspiracy theories are always moving from one guy (or subject) to another as time passes by while trying to explain the same thing, like the explanations for the failed predictions of Nostradamus. Before it could have been Mao, then that other guy, then Xi Jinping…

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    21 hours ago

    Two weeks ago.

    California’s reservoirs are empty and couldn’t fight the fires because of democrats.

    You can log into a website to see the realtime water levels. They are nearly full and have been. They are also above average levels.

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    My neighbor told me I was gonna die in 1year after getting the first round of COVID vaccines. Pff. I wish! Still here unfortunately.

    • BonesOfTheMoon@lemmy.world
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      5 hours ago

      I’ve had nine vaccines so far and have totally died nine times over, and also I glow in the dark and Bill Gates knows where I am at all times because I run on 5G.

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    1 day ago

    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.

    • JackFrostNCola@lemmy.world
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      5 hours ago

      They probably are right with the military thing, i do believe that militaries around the world do have some cutting edge tech that isnt publicly available whilst it still gives them an edge over an enemy, but fairly ‘mundane’ shit like slightly better night vision goggles and sonar. (Mundane as in the general public wouldnt care, not that it wouldnt be super interesting from a technical POV).

      Also i think there is a big factor that is keeping a large chunk of populations worldwide more complacent. It isnt a collective organised operation but simply… shitty low-nutrient and calorie dense fast food & junk snacks and being a bit more lazy & complacent is just a side effect of people running their bodies and minds on sub-standard food.

      • JustEnoughDucks@feddit.nl
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        4 hours ago

        I’m pretty sure nowadays it is 90% high performance cryptography tech. Protecting state secrets, Intel, and surveillance intelligence is like #1 priority for a few different governments since all of the big powers have been hacking each other (or trying to) since the dawn of the internet lol

        • heavydust@sh.itjust.works
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          11 minutes ago

          high performance cryptography tech

          We have proof that the NSA and others have made discoveries way before anyone else (like the NSA with the DES algorithm, or weird stuff during WW2), but it’s because they have the best mathematicians. I have noticed that the truth is always too boring for them and they always seek something deeper or more magical like Harry Potter.

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      1 day ago

      Some of these have been around for a while or remind me of some, my crunchy new-age grandparents were hardcore into the NWO order stuff. Some others I recall

      • NWO stuff: North America would become the North American Union and forcefully adopt the Amero as currency. This was the pretext for the eventual merging of the EU and NAU to start total domination, pretty sure the UN was involved in this one.
      • Stargates are real and the the US has bases on the moon as well as Mars
      • Some water alignment thing, that you can put a logogram or something under a glass of water and that changes its properties to be better (‽??)
      • The Philadelphia Experiment
      • Roswell is responsible for technological leaps, and the powers that be have been slowly releasing things to evade suspicion
      • Mayan calendar stuff
      • Hardcore distrust of medical doctors and hospitals
      • Fluoride - mind control, it’s a neuro toxin!

      There’s others but those stick out.

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        21 hours ago

        Oh yeah, my parents certainly believe Stargate is created by artists trying casually reveal “the truth”, not in a literal sense, but one that is very open to interpretation. Somehow (and especially to my mom) if some artist, like a singer or a writer, creates something that is adjacent to her beliefs she’ll feel validated about them.

        The tech being drip-fed into the public is also one, connected directly to the one where “the military” has super advanced technology.

        And same with water. My parents already believe in homeopathy, and everything that comes with it. So water has a special “memory” that can somehow be imprinted and change its properties. Same goes with influencing water with sound or light.

        And of course, they have INSANE distrust for doctors. Or literally anyone in a professional position. I think, with their beliefs, if you’re in a professional position you’re part of the system that hides and lies to the population, a mandate of “them” in control, to keep everyone stupid and complacent. So anyone in a professional position is an enemy, a malicious entity out to get you.

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    2 days ago

    A440 was developed by the Nazis because it is harmonically dissonant and causes disorder and chaos as it is incongruous with people’s natural frequency. A432 is the ‘natural’ tuning system.

    As someone who went to college for music theory, it was hilarious hearing this

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      Yeah, I remember when my step dad has a period he believed this. He would find ways to tune music back to how it’s “supposed” to sound. Everything sounded horribly out of tune, but he’d just say it’s because we’ve all become so used to listening to music the “bad” way.

        • Classy@sh.itjust.works
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          Well you’re wrong. A440 is the Nazi Reich frequency, and in response, the globohomo Jewish elites developed A432 to vibrationally enslave the goyim. It’s obvious that we must revert to Renaissance tuning and just temperament A415 to undo the cancer caused by modernity