There are actual constipations, of course, but normally they aren’t so glamorous like Q or other ones, especially because when some perpetrator is arrested, the conspiration stops.
For instance the Itavia flight 870 disaster, there was clearly a conspiration, and some people involved on destroying evidence were put on trial, and they were saved by the statute of limitations, but even in this messy case, a lot of investigations were done, and terrorist acts on planes going in Sicily are ended.
On the other hand the conspiracies don’t have judges accusing people even if no jail time ensues.
If you ever have the chance, try the canned Brown Bread. Ideally with a good smear of butter. I mean, its not gourmet or anything, but its pretty good!
In the skeptic/rationalist community, we generally make the distinction between “conspiracy” and “grand conspiracy”. The former do really happen, of course, but it’s the latter ones that are never true. The distinction is essentially “how many people would have to keep this secret for it to succeed” and if the answer is more than, say, five for more than a few weeks, then safe to say it’s not true. Things like Q, flat earth, and moon hoaxing would require tens of thousands of people to keep this giant secret for decades. That’s impossible, of course. We know from actual attempts at grand conspiracies in tobacco companies, pharma companies, Watergate, etc, that someone always talks. Often some clerk expected to get coffee or copy files for the people trying to ruin the world. Big secrets are basically impossible to keep for long.
Absolutely true, and “how many secret-keeper-days?” is a metric I like to use. But I don’t mention that to my conspiracy nut family and friends. Because Q is talking, after all (eyeroll, sigh, head-meets-desk).
Also, that metric for MKULTRA chills me to the bone. Heck of an outlier, I hope.
The deliberate dismantling of critical thinking has moved beyond a simple refusal to teach scientfic thinking straight into presenting pseudoscientific “discovery” and argumentation as the TRUE critical thinking. The most popular framing of being that it is defiance of conformity, be it scientific-consensus, secular authority, “elite” rules and anti-public education…
Teaching young evangelicals to memorize “Logical” talking points to “argue” against evolution springs to mind, but secular examples abound too. The Knights Templar article on bbs and the the Dan Brownian / History Channel model of epistemology (the most ancient, most mysterious text is obviously the most truthful, and if you have to decipher clues, that’s research!) is a delibrate abuse of the trappings of expertise.
Add to all that the legitimate history of problems with authority. My mom, a left-leaning NPR liberal cum new-age weirdo apent my childhood railing against the authority of experts. Partly due to a legitimate early-mid 20th century marriage of science, colonialism, authoritarianism and corporatism that was framed in an arrogant refusal to show their work.
But the reaction and the take-aways were muddied and oversimplified, and cynical authoritarians warped this movement into “their experts are always bad and wrong” blunt object rather than a renewed commitment to painstaking, healthy, robust and transparent epistemology.
I do think a lot of good learning has happened on the science side, and even government and law have found ways to be more accountable and transparent, but the cuts suffered have already been infected and exploited by cynical assholes. Hopefull the bofy can resist in the end. we’re smelling pretty fucking gangrenous right now.
