They do. It’s called filing for bankruptcy.
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Good.
Out of curiosity, I tracked down a PDF of the book. Holy fucking hell. The first part is just ranting about conspiracies. Bush and Obama and the government are all killers, etc etc. Empire, they, government, blah blah. And then they just starting posting pics and claiming BS about it. Its like showing a pic of a dog and saying clearly it is a cat in a dog costume.
The section I skipped to was Lanza’s house evidence. They took pictures of evidence photos where a room is “clean” then “messy” to show they were staging photos - not, you know, different times during the evidence gathering.
They took the fact that they had pics of a rifle on a floor, and in a box, to say that the rifle arrived new in a box, then placed on the floor. The reality is, they pack evidence like that into boxes (I used to have a client that sold CSI equipment.) They even say, “if it was evidence, they would use a bag”. NO, they use fucking boxes with the item zip tied to it. Same with knives, bats, etc.
Then he goes into other details where his knowledge clearly stems from movies, vs reality.
It’s got to be some sort of D-K effect, where they know so goddamn little, that they just look at photos and bits of things and then concoct a story around it, even though it doesn’t fit with reality. And there’s over 400 pages of this shit. Jesus Christ.
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You could have 5k video of the whole thing and the theories would focus on how the video was faked. There’s nothing that would convince one of these nuts that they’re wrong.
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I’ve watched Corridor Digital’s Deep Fake Videos. I’m not sure that anything is real any more.
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In universities, new religious movements aren’t studuied because they are dangerous-- they are studied because they are fascinating from a sociological perspective.
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Hounding a man whose son was murdered by telling him he faked his own son’s death and hounding him day and night harassing him for experiencing a tragedy…
I hope all these bastards genuinely rot in hell. They are the bile of this society I wish I could flush down the toilet.
I wish I could give Mr. Ponzer a really big hug and tell him how sorry the rest of the country feels for him and his son.
Take all these Sandy Hook deniers along with Alex Jones and throw them into the sea without a view of land. Bastards, incredible bastards all of them.
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See what I mean!
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Our legal system doesn’t permit a swift kick to the nuts. And I don’t mean that figuratively, pain and potential sterilization would still be too good for this manipulative, anti-social behavior that spread like an idiotic virus through a segment of our society.
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Sandy Hook dad to get $450,000 from conspiracy theorist
That should be “Sandy Hook dad to be owed $450,000 by conspiracy theorist”. Not at all the same thing.
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Basically after FM radio ‘stole’ all the music AM radio picked up the slack with talk radio which broke down into three categories: sports, religious, and ‘news’ (so legit but right leaning stuff mixed with Rush Limbaugh and Coast To Coast AM).
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What I find strange is how parsimony seems to go entirely out the window. I can see why some of it would, the cover story that ‘they’ want you to believe is presumably going to be put together by vaguely competent people with an eye to plausibility; so the conspiracist needs to be willing to embrace a somewhat more convoluted account; but that doesn’t explain why there seems to be no bound.
In the Sandy Hook case, most obviously, the ongoing harassment of victims and insistence that they are totally faking it in assorted intricate ways seems to ignore the still-conspiracy; but vastly simpler possibility that the sinister ‘they’ just did the sensible-evil thing and staged a shooting by actually having a bunch of people shot, thus conveniently providing a 100% authentic scenario in all respects except the shooter, rather than an entire PTA worth of ‘crisis actors’ and a cast of victims who didn’t actually exist, or had their deaths faked, or whatever the variant is this time around.
I just don’t understand the combination of wholehearted belief that the darkest and most evil forces are at work beneath the surface with the unwillingness to consider simple, obvious, evil conspirator options that would achieve the same goals with vastly fewer people who need to be kept from talking forever, evidence that needs to be faked, and so on.
It’s not as though I’d approve of them if they made these changes; but they would be much less incomprehensible. It’s not as though history is without cases of skullduggery; but the real ones tend to be less involved because they either feature a competent evil protagonist who just goes in and does whatever requires the least tidying afterwards.
Would the Sandy Hook parents just be too painful if they were real so a just world demands that they be fake? Do conspiracy wonks have some sort of breakage in their complexity metrics?
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My favorite variant to the canonical 9-11 theory regards WTC 7:
So… 19 fake-terrorists hijack 4 planes, hit WTC 1 & 2, which collapse an hour later (well, through controlled detonation, of course)… Then, the actual target (WTC 7) collapses (well, I mean, is detonated) 7 hours later.
Those guys pulling the strings of these conspiracies-- they’re so sneaky!
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I rather suspect he was always contaminated, but knew enough to only teach safe, “blue-pill” versions of how conspiracy theories form and are disseminated. (He studiously left out the part that "Oh, and by the way, all these conspiracies we studied? They’re real!") He bided his time until he got his tenure, and only then began dispensing red pills generously.
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Hey, don’t forget the Military shooting a Cruise Missile in to the Pentagon on the same day.
I know (online) people who lived in Washington DC on 9/11. They saw the plane about two minutes before it hit the Pentagon, and just wondered why it was coming down so fast. Needless to say, they have zero patience with the bullshit “It was a missile!!1!” conspiracy theories.
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Like so much rhetoric of late, this is basically true but the question is, “How much?”.
Therein lies the devil in the details. The “How Much” is the part that literally everyone is contesting about the other side, and also obfuscating about their side.
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Conspiracy theories in the US well precede the growth of talk radio, though they (and later the internet) made it easier to promulgate them.
Kurt Andersen’s recent book Fantasyland has some interesting ideas about why this seems to be so much worse in the US than anywhere else, though of course traditions elsewhere (especially Europe) go back much further.
Someone said that conspiracy theories are attractive because they are ultimately comforting. They say that the world is not really chaotic and unpredictable, because someone (the Elders of Zion, the Illuminati, Bohemian Grove, George Soros, etc.) is in control of everything and there is a purpose behind the apparent chaos and conflict of the world.
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We’re still no worse than hundreds of other countries. Get over it.
Well, for one thing, despite the FTC’s efforts, we do still for a while have communications that are more open than what is available in Europe. With the First Amendment and other laws, our news organs are able to publish stuff that would be killed before it reached the press in Europe because of concerns over liability or security restrictions.
We have a population that includes a lot of people whose ancestors came here because they wanted to get away from the @%!# they had to go through in the old country. They passed on their anti-whateveritwas feelings to their progeny and it rolled on. I swear sometimes I think there’s a genetic basis to being a conspiracy bunny.
And there is a very strong streak of belief here in “rugged independence”. That’s why a lot of people headed west in the 19th century. A lot of the deniers and conspiracy bunnies actually think that their nuttiness is actually an expression of insisting on doing their own thinking, refusing to believe what the government says as a form of personal freedom. Their belief in conspiracies everywhere they look is actually just as much a knee-jerk reflex as a cat jumping when it sees a snake, but you’ll never get them to admit that truth.
Last but most certainly not least, the mental health care system in this country isn’t just broken, it’s practically nonexistent. We have a boatload of people running around who really should be in therapy but there’s no legal way to get them there.
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