Obviously, bigfoot hasn't been seen again because he went back to his UFO...
A new Bigfoot documentary helps explain our conspiracy-minded era
101–110 of 119 posts
Re: A new Bigfoot documentary helps explain our conspiracy-minded era
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you posit a conspiracy that only involves a few people who could plausibly coordinate to conceal the truth, that's also not a grand conspiracy, and we don't call people conspiracy theorist for believing in regular, everyday criminal conspiracies. No, but we did call people conspiracy theorists for believing the thing Snowden subsequently showed to be real.
Not me, I didn't. That conspiracy was certainly pretty big, but there was also a ton of smaller leaks as you'd expect on a real conspiracy of that size, so you certainly wouldn't be called nuts for assuming NSA were spying on a lot they weren't supposed to. Security state loyalists were not nearly as influential in online discourse back then, as they are now. Probably astroturfing, AI and algorithmic amplification pl…
> so you certainly wouldn't be called nuts for assuming NSA were spying on a lot they weren't supposed to.
You say that like it isn't what happened.
If anything there were more security state loyalists in the first years after 9/11 than there are now.
Re: A new Bigfoot documentary helps explain our conspiracy-minded era
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
Funny story there: I was stuck with a conspiracy-minded high school teacher who insisted that some sort of flash lower down in one of the towers was proof of a demolition. I got fed up with listening to it each day, so I calculated how long it would take a shock wave to propagate through steel, from the crash site to the flash below. It pretty much worked out.
What was the teacher's reaction?
From my recollections, not much. I was on a practicum in his classroom, so it was different from the usual teacher/student dynamics. It was a great teachable moment though!
Re: A new Bigfoot documentary helps explain our conspiracy-minded era
#104Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does anybody believe the lone gunman theory with JFK? Nobody buys the official narrative.
Plenty of people do, alongside the preponderance of evidence.
Indeed. Two years after the assassination I wrote a paper on it for a summer school history class. I researched in the local public library, where I read a bunch of magazine articles and Mark Lane books, blissfully unaware of ideological agendas and bad faith, and believed there was a conspiracy--though I didn't know which theory was correct because there were so many and they only increased in the ensuing years. At one point I had a shelf of JFK conspiracy books and then I met the author of one, an ex-boyfriend of friend ... he was very sincere about his incredibly looneytunes claims (https://www.amazon.com/Best-Evidence-Disguise-Deception-Assa...)
It wasn't until usenet came along and I encountered debates between physicists and conspiracy cranks that I started to question it--the physicists would calmly present solid-seeming arguments and the cranks would accuse them of working for the CIA and post malarkey. But I still wasn't sure--a bad argument for something isn't a good argument against it. My biggest breakthrough was when I was dating a law professor whom I greatly respected, very liberal (as am I)--she was the cofounder of the Women's Studies program at UCLA--and she was bemused by my entertaining the conspiracy theories as at all likely (no one in her academic, legal, and feminist circles did), and she casually mentioned that one of the first things she learned in law school was that people are highly unreliable in judging the direction that a sound comes from, so people talking about shots coming from the grassy knoll didn't really mean anything. Her attitude drove me to dig deeper, and when the web came along I found https://www.jfk-assassination.net/ (it was located elsewhere back then). I started seeing all the counterarguments to the misrepresentations in those books and articles I had read, and this was before Bugliosi's 1600 page https://www.amazon.com/Reclaiming-History-Assassination-Pres...
I now know about as well as one can know any historical event that LHO, a man who had defected to the USSR, possibly planning on giving them information about the U-2 (for which he was denounced by U-2 pilot Gary Powers) and had been on TV representing the "Fair Play For Cuba Committee" (of which he was the only member), was the lone gunman. That doesn't mean that his story was simple--it wasn't, and that's part of the fuel for appallingly ignorant and intellectually dishonest conspiracy theories.
It's sad to see on HN claims that no one believes what is believed to be actually true by rational informed people, along with questions like
> What do you believe? The news?
(I haven't had a TV for at least 20 years; what does he believe, YouTube? I know how to gather and weigh information; he doesn't) grossly dishonest assertions that
> pizza gate was corroborated by the epstein emails
and nonsensical ignorant claims about UFOs that are supported by terrible reporting by ignorant sensationalist journalists. It is almost certain that there is intelligent life elsewhere in this vast universe, but there is no evidence that any of them are the cause of our UAPs and many reasons from logic and physics why they aren't and could not be.
Re: A new Bigfoot documentary helps explain our conspiracy-minded era
#105I used to look down on conspiracy theories, now I think many are actually true, or are mixed with truth. Its really unlikely that a theory circulates widely but has no basis in reality
> Its really unlikely that a theory circulates widely but has no basis in reality No, this is not at all true. For example, the only "truth" of BigFoot is the hoax video that many people are emotionally inclined to think isn't a hoax. The only "truth" in Qanon is the messages that Q wrote. Pizzagate was believed by people emotionally inclined to believe that Hillary drinks children's blood. And on and on. Did the gov…
> pizza gate was corroborated by the epstein emails.
LOL. That doesn't even warrant a response.
Re: A new Bigfoot documentary helps explain our conspiracy-minded era
#106Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wouldn't say that Epstein is a vindication of conspiracy theories, at least not the "Bigfoot" type. Epstein was already in trouble with the law for trafficking over 20 years ago. The pedophilia in the Catholic church was known decades before that. It's shameful that these stories didn't get more attention sooner, but the general veracity of them wasn't in question. The prototypical pedophilia conspiracy theory we d…
> The pedophilia in the Catholic church was known decades before that. Except the proportion of paedophile priests is about the same as the proportion of paedophiles in the general population. There are more paedophiles in schools and social services than in religious organisations - and there have even been more convictions of teachers and social workers, at least tin the UK. The reason you think of the Catholic Chu…
> The reason you think of the Catholic Church this way is BECAUSE it got more media attention earlier than elsewhere.
I think what earned the Catholic Church their reputation was that the church was actively involved in protecting known pedophiles and repeatedly shuffling them around effectively giving them an endless supply of fresh victims while suppressing the voices of many of the children brave enough to come forward. The problem with the church isn't that pedos exist there, but that they've been very often supported and defended and their actions covered up in ways that don't (and often couldn't) happen in schools.
Re: A new Bigfoot documentary helps explain our conspiracy-minded era
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
Plenty of people do, alongside the preponderance of evidence.
Indeed. Two years after the assassination I wrote a paper on it for a summer school history class. I researched in the local public library, where I read a bunch of magazine articles and Mark Lane books, blissfully unaware of ideological agendas and bad faith, and believed there was a conspiracy--though I didn't know which theory was correct because there were so many and they only increased in the ensuing years. At…
> It is almost certain that there is intelligent life elsewhere in this vast universe, but there is no evidence that any of them are the cause of our UAPs and many reasons from logic and physics why they aren't and could not be.
No one is saying that, there is just a history of the government using UFO/"alien" conspiracy theories as disinformation to discredit sightings of classified aircraft, which themselves are mundane and nothing special: https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/ufo-us-disinf... - https://archive.ph/3bTMz
NASA already addressed UAPs[1], they're just misidentification of things like passenger aircraft
[1] NASA's channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQcqOW39ksk
Re: A new Bigfoot documentary helps explain our conspiracy-minded era
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those "well-read antivaxxers" are the same as e.g. people with a fear of flying: they spend too much time looking at extremely rare catastrophic outcomes (dying or being seriously injured because of a plane crash or a vaccine side effect) and then think that it will surely happen to them or their children. The only difference is just that when someone who's afraid of flying doesn't take a plane, it only affects very…
This is not a good analogy. Aircraft manufacturers and airlines have a lot at stake if they let any risks slip through. If anyone dies it will be big news and visible to everyone, with real consequences for the companies responsible. (I'm in the US so this may only be relevant there) Childhood vaccines could cause a serious chronic disease in 1% of kids and we would have no way to know because: 1) Many vaccine clinic…
I'd be much more inclined to believe they were holding genuine, consistent opinions of that if they applied the same concern to the other end: unstudied long-term problems from measles infections. But they don't. It's the same for COVID/vaccines. Endless concern over spike protein or long-term risk in the vaccine, but happy to get the spike protein or long-term risk from the viral infection.
Re: A new Bigfoot documentary helps explain our conspiracy-minded era
#109Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is not a good analogy. Aircraft manufacturers and airlines have a lot at stake if they let any risks slip through. If anyone dies it will be big news and visible to everyone, with real consequences for the companies responsible. (I'm in the US so this may only be relevant there) Childhood vaccines could cause a serious chronic disease in 1% of kids and we would have no way to know because: 1) Many vaccine clinic…
I'd be much more inclined to believe they were holding genuine, consistent opinions of that if they applied the same concern to the other end: unstudied long-term problems from measles infections. But they don't. It's the same for COVID/vaccines. Endless concern over spike protein or long-term risk in the vaccine, but happy to get the spike protein or long-term risk from the viral infection.
But that’s “natural.” This is the underlying idea, that nature absent human influence is inherently more pure and good.
I used to associate antivax with the loony left and with primitivism, which is the idea that if we abandon technology and civilization we will get to LARP as the Na’vi in Avatar. Then this stuff jumped across the horseshoe gap to the far right.
Or… maybe the new age and certain types of greens always were far right. If you dig into the origins of the new age you run into figures like William Dudley Pelley and Savitri Devi.
Disease, disability, pain, and death are also natural.
Re: A new Bigfoot documentary helps explain our conspiracy-minded era
#110What happens when the majority of people assume anything that looks like bigfoot is some person in a hairy suit and then a scientist creates a human primate or monkey chimera hybrid for the purpose of harvesting human organs and it escapes? Do game departments and law enforcement ignore all the calls? Are we allowed to capture and tame it? Would it be treated as a human or a monkey? Does it get human rights or animal…
The organ harvesting purpose implies that the monkey chimera would have higher-order intelligence, right? Or are we to assume the organ harvesting is of the "rip and tear" variety as opposed to the "precision" variety?
How very sad. The monkey chimera was fluent in English, but got subdued in India.