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Comment by unsignedqword | Hacker News Reader

Those theorists are quite irrational, but what I find most ridiculous about a lot of them is not the theories themselves, but the idea that they have the ability to actually fight back.

Sensationalists like Alex Jones assert crazy ideas such as the government tainting our tap water to perform mass mind control and yet at the same time spread this message that they can resist against the upcoming "New World Order." With chemtrails specifically, on YouTube, you'll find videos of people spraying vinegar bottles outside when they see airplane contrails outside, believing it to be some sort of deterrent against their effects. If I believed that the government was capable of shit like super-effective mind control and all that other shit, I'd pretty much believe there's no hope for the world and recline to live the rest of my life in a bunker somewhere.

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This. If the government is really that omnipresent and controlling in our lives, are they really going to let some blogger who knows the Truth run amok and post it everywhere?

Yes siree, this government is capable of faking the Moon landing, concealing the existence of aliens / lizard people, and executing 9/11 to invade Iraq, but they are powerless against some random dickhead with a laptop who spotted the holes in the Official Story that this omnipotent cabal just couldn't cover up. Riiight.

The counter argument, of course, is that by 'removing' / silencing said conspiracist it would be proof they were right all along.

I have to clarify: them knowing and proliferating the 'truth' is one thing, whereas the idea that they can actually do something about it is what I'm really getting at. They paint a pessimistic picture of the world that's at odds with the idea that somehow they can band together somehow and fix it.

Not this. "The government" is just groups of people. Some groups, such as the NSA, certainly do have the ability to be close to omniscient (or as much as it matters here). Their motto is "Total Information Awareness" for crying out loud!

Didn't you ever read Brave New World? You don't publicly kill the Truth-knowing bloggers. You drown them out with by a million distractions. See also: Mao's Hundred Flowers campaign.

I'm not going to argue every stupid conspiracy theory that anyone can name...but I don't need to. There are plenty of actual conspiracy facts that should be sufficient to convince anybody that this kind of shit actually happens. COINTELPRO, Operation Mockingbird and MK Ultra to name a few.

The modern "skeptic" gets it all wrong - they don't question anything and come to conclusions way too quickly. That's because they're not actually skeptics, they're just afraid of getting out of their mental comfort zone.

Yeah, the interesting thing about conspiracy is that they're almost always self inconsistent: they believe in government/ elite having "super power", and yet also incompetent enough to cause fuck up that would require the existence of said conspiracy to cover things up.

This is probably a different way of expressing the same thing, but I think what is salient to people is that there isn't anything to be done about these kinds of conspiracies. It unleashes a satisfying chemical cocktail in the brain of outrage, fear, and the sense that something "serious" is going on.

And unless you're being asked to do something trivial like spray the air with vinegar or line your wallet with aluminum foil, generally the conspiracy is not accompanied by any obvious call to action that might bring on feelings of tedium and responsibility. All the entertainment value, none of the responsibility.

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