I've been saying this for a while. The real malicious actors are right there in the open, telling you what they're doing. I think people gravitate toward the clearly fake conspiracies because it helps soothe their conscience - clearly their guy is Different, you don't even have to think about it, right?
It's wild how long the Republicans have been plainly stating what their goals are, and people keep looking for alternative, easier to accept explanations.
It’s still crazy to me how much of the bad shit the government has done has been declassified and publicly available and people still just kind of ignore it. Who needs censorship when people are just willing to overlook reality? Or even worse, just make up nonsense.
There's also a feeling of "knowing" more than other people. You don't know about how Albert Einstein and Nikola Tesla invented a time traveling aircraft carrier? Have I got some research that you need to do on your own. But if you did know about it, then it's junk meant to distract you from what's really going on.
None of that "knowledge" derives from any level of credible sources, but it does bring a certain level of superiority over people on Facebook. If it's actually well documented and widely known, then that isn't something where I get to feel better than other people.
I was at the UFO museum in Roswell, NM and the guy that was giving a talk was a self-described Ufologist and this was after the government released the UFO footage. He talked the whole time about government coverup of past UFO crashes, etc.
In the Q&A, someone asked if the recent footage gave him hope that we'll begin to learn more about UFOs now that the government seems more forthright with the information... And he got pissed at them for even asking. It was as if his whole retirement activity of uncovering conspiracies was challenged and his brain couldn't handle it except by getting angry at an honest question.
His conspiracy seemed to be more boring than he thought (and spent decades "researching") so he wouldn't allow the truth to shatter it. It was fascinating to see in real-time.
Conspiracy theorists are not about the actual theories. They are about being special.
They are smart and figured out monkeys have been influencing the course of human politics since the roman empire.
*They * are the only ones who "get it" that bic biro pens have finger print scanners the CIA uses to locate disobedient citizens.
As soon as it becomes confirmed, they are no longer special, because everyone "gets it".
When they say "wake up sheeple", they wouldn't know what to do if you "woke up".
That's why the idea of wokeism is so repugnant to right-wing conspiracy theorists. The idea that they are the ones asleep but also there are many others who woke up before them is so counter to their own self-image that they will alter their perception of the world before they will allow such a thing to be true.
It's like that Simpsons episode where Homer joins the group to find out what happened to I think a turtle that went missing. When they found out the truth, they got upset because they couldn't theorize crazy shit anymore.
I'm new to Lemmy so I don't know if there's a good workaround for this, but OP posted this to /c/4chan as well as /c/greentext and both came to my feed one after the other.
Am I supposed to block OP for cross posting, block one of the two communities? Both ideas seem kinda stupid.
It's because OP made two separate posts and therefore uploaded the image twice so lemmy doesn't recognize it as cross-post (check the image URLs, they are different). If OP properly cross-posted it, the URL would be the same and you wouldn't see it twice in your feed.
If this is a one-time event, I would ignore & move on. If I ever see more than three posts in a row by a user, I block that user. It doesn't have to be permanent.
If you think something is wrong if you see the same thing more than once, you're gonna have a bad time. Not only do things get crossposted between communities with different names, they also get crossposted between communities with the same name on different instances. Big political news often shows up a half-dozen times, or more.
I would just ignore it once or twice, I don't find it to be a big problem when browsing All. But if it becomes a repeat nuisance for you, since they seem to be two communities for basically the same thing, I would see if one is significantly more active than the other and block the less active one.
There's no way Elon is as rich as Bezos lol. Does he claim to be the richest person in the world?
Edit: that's crazy, like literally I've never used anything Elon's companies have produced, and pretty much the whole web uses Amazon web services. Are emerald mines really that profitable? 🤣
Can we try to keep the conversation separate? Despite the fact that fucking jackass owns SpaceX, they've been good for space tech. Tesla on the other hand haven't done shit that other companies haven't done better by now.
Elon funded PayPal, and they forced him out when it became successful and he wanted to change its name to X. I'm not making that up. So you likely used PayPal at some point.
They're all too happy to be "drinking liberal tears." They never truly gave a shit about it, they just wanted "to win" and those perceived slights hinderd their chances at winning. Now that it's in their favor they couldn't possibly care less and if anything are happy it's happening in part because of their lust for revenge and in part because they get "to win."
The tabloids and Congress have the same class interests as Trump and Epstein, and the cranks need the special secret knowledge to feel like special smart boys.
...speaking of special smart boys, I genuinely struggle with how people can't put these things together, and I'm definitely not one of the great minds of our time.
It's an old play, spend years accusing someone of something you do, then whey they accuse you for doing what you do, you can call them childish for doing the "no you are!" argument, even though it's true.