2y ago

What's a low stakes conspiracy theory you believe?

We've got a bunch of new people now so let's bring back a classic post. What low stakes conspiracy theory do you believe that you cannot prove but feels right to you?

I'll start: I believe that dating apps have made a concerted effort to smear in person meeting people and tie it to being "creepy" through social media so you are forced to meet people online(which was the creepy option just 15 years ago)

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Public programs are purposely underfunded to make it easy for people to point to why they don’t work (the average person doesn’t think about/care whether they get funding), making it easier to continue the process of privatizing everything.
Many conspiracy theories aren’t actually conspiracy theories but a consequence of profit-driven motives that give the illusion of a conspiracy theory.
- As someone who works with houseless folks this is absolutely without a doubt a thing. There are for profit companies springing up that do similar social services that I do, too, so the privatization part even applies. It's fucked
- That's just observable facts.
- The first one is just political strategy, it's known as starve the beast
- And then you can make great use of absolute numbers over more contextualized relative numbers/ Here's a made up example:
  why did it cost 700 million to vaccinate every American??
  $700 million / 300 million Americans = $2.33 per vaccination, insanely cheap. Less than you spent on gas tax getting to and from work today.
  I'm always immediately suspicious when someone starts throwing around absolute numbers like that.
There is a small but self-sustaining breeding population of cougars living in the Adirondacks and possibly most of upstate New York, but this will never be officially confirmed by the various government environmental agencies because then they would have to take real action to protect them. Cougars have everything they need there and there's really no reason to believe they're just walking 1800 miles and not breeding.
This is the case for a lot of other heavily forested places east of the Rockies as well.
- oh hey, it's the Gippsland Panther but in America
  Also the Tasmanian Tiger still exists, and proclaiming it extinct was actually the best way to protect it
- is this a conspiracy??? Im from up there and everyone seems to just accept it there
  
  Just had this discussion around a campfire in the Adirondacks. Nearly everyone agreed Wolves and Mountain Lions are in upstate NY except for the one person who said, "Well the DEC hasn't said so, therefore they're actually Coyotes and Bobcats".
If I were a ghoul at Nestle, I would have spent the past couple decades propping up the shittiest local water utilities, lobbying to make sure their shittiest policies are kept and their most generous programs abolished. Having a local entity with a monopoly on providing water to the area is often the worst of both worlds in the US. You get the inflexibility of a government bureaucracy because they have no reason to improve and you get the shady billing practices of a corporation because of the insistence that we not just give people water for free. When it comes time to privatize your local water supply, many people will be chomping at the bit to bring in “competition” because they hate their local utility so much.
Major sports leagues are not rigged in the sense that winners are pre-determined, but the refs are told to keep games, serieses, and playoff races close, because blowouts and dominance are boring.
An NBA ref got busted for betting on games and IIRC talked about how the league would make the above obvious to refs (at least in the postseason). There's too much money changing hands and too little accountability for shady shit to not happen at all, and this is the type of thing all owners could have a handshake agreement on because they'll all profit from it and it doesn't really prejudice any team specifically.
I go back and forth. But this week I 100% believe Justin from Canada is Fidel's kid.
- Also, Hua Guofeng was Mao Zedong's son. I mean think about it, they were both Chinese and they both had the same haircut.
- I like this one.
  
  I don't care if it's true I want to believe
The feds are running Pokémon Go (and possibly other copycat AR games) to harvest data on human movement and shopping patterns, and the feds are the ones who forced Niantic to dismantle the remote raiding economy and focus almost entirely on in person raids.
A development studio deliberately stopping whales from dumping money into them (ie the previously unlimited remote raid passes) is kind of a jaw dropping moment.
- The feds have had to tell soldiers etc multiple times to stop using jogging apps and uploading their routes to social media. They're posting detailed maps of where everything is at military bases and government facilitites.
Toby Keith had "Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue" pre-written years before 9/11 and wrote it generically enough so that it could apply to whatever war Amerikkka entered next.
- Is Toby Keith considered the typical pro-USA pro-war country star post 9/11? Or is there another famous guy who is even more emblematic of that?
  
  There was that where were you on 9/11 song
Dating apps deliberately match you with incompatible people so you keep returning and paying for premium.
- there’s no way this isn’t true. i have personally experienced this on those apps.
  
  Probably it is like slot machine programming. Average is bad, but will give out a minor win timed so that you still believe that it is possible.
Gaylor Swift. I heard someone talking about it once and I went down the rabbithole and it's crazy.
- Go on
  
  Cishet white women like to image Taylor is a lesbian or bi because it makes them feel like they're supporting a "diverse" artist instead of a rich, white, cishet one
Frosted Flakes are not great, they're just paying Tony the Tiger to say that.
- THEY'RE GRRRRRRFINE!
- John Harvey Kellogg was a surgeon who performed circumcisions. He believed they were an effective treatment for "addiction to masterbation".
  There are conspiracy theories (misconceptions?) that he popularized circumcisions in America. Or that Corn Flakes were created to curb masterbation urges - because they are so bland that obviously no one would want to jerk it after eating that.
  Idk where I'm going with this, but John Harvey Kellogg was a weird fucking dude.
  
  Is this a misconception? I've never looked into that but heard it before. I'm skeptical of googling this haha
  
  He did actually make cornflakes to stop people from masturbating though. It was something to do with spicy food making you horny
The lottery is a trap designed to catch time travelers.
- There've never been any time travellers because the time traveller detection agency always spots them winning the stock market and neutralizes them, .
Jeff bezos didnt kill himself (duh)
I think the story about the passengers fighting back on United flight 93 is fake and it was shot down by the military.
- 100% believe it
- Both can be true. The story is entirely plausible, though. People had cell-phones and the towers had already been hit.
  I think there's a cultural memory hole thing going on - Hijackings used to be really, really common and were usually resolved without too much violence. Being hijacked would definitely ruin your day, but the general wisdom was to just sit tight and wait to be rescued or ransomed or whatever. A lot of the time passengers would be released after the hijacker's demands were met.
  Pretty much the only reason 9/11 worked as well as it did is because up until then no one had tried it. Once the people on 93 knew what the stakes were it was, what, 150? 200 people against four or five armed with small knives? Most people aren't fighters but those are still really, really bad odds.
  
  Were cell phones usable on planes in 2001?
- United flight 93
  Idea for a bit: Hexbear passengers on United Flight 93 having a struggle session on whether it's okay to critically support our hijackers if they really do intend to fly the plane into the Capitol building.
  
  I could see Mel Brooks or Monty Python pulling that. I don't know who the equivalent screwball black comedy people are these days. Eric Andre?
Crosswalk buttons and hold open/close door buttons in elevators are just there to give an illusion of control
- Those are both regional.
  Almost no open/close buttons do anything in the US, but they're completely honest in Japan.
  Crosswalk buttons may: actually hurry up the cycle and stop traffic sooner, wait until the next red light and show a crossing indicator that it'd otherwise skip, or do nothing at all. This can change from city to city, from intersection to intersection, and even over a schedule throughout the day.
  
  In my experience a reasonable amount of elevator close buttons have an effect, at least where I've been in the US
- Agreed, but it also works both ways. If you think your card has 50 dollars but it only has three, you go and buy 55 dollar item and have to give 'em a ton of money without first realising.
i dont necessarily believe it but i think the conspiracy theory that justin trudeau is castro's kid is funny
- I consider it more likely true than false, as far as I know nothing has refuted this version of events at all

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