Very much agree with your assessment. The outlandish is deliberately seeded in to sow discord, and to characterize all of us in the eyes of the outside normie population as immediately dismiss-able.
A partial list. To start with the big one: that the Apollo moon landing(s) were faked. This has the more extreme version that outer space itself is fake, i.e. unreal. This goes along with biblical cosmology that we live under a dome firmament, which is fellow-traveler to Flat Earth/Antarctic Ice Wall. There is also the hollow Earth/moon-is-hollow theory, which of course does not mix well space being fake. In another area I'd point to the Judy Wood's claim that DEWs took down the twin towers on 9/11. JFK Jr. is Alive was pushed pretty heavily into Q discussion groups; not impossible, but unlikely. Let's not forget that during the Covid era medical freedom groups were flooded by the "there is no such thing as viruses" army.
To the extent I pay attention to the above it is to study how they think and argue. There are a few distinctive traits. They operate as anomaly hunters, constantly search for the hidden guy wires. They construct miniature imaginary models of how reality "should" work, such as how moon dust "should" kick up, point out how it does not do so in the NASA videos, and say see, this proves it was all faked. They direct your attention on dubious and very narrow points while asking you to forget the wealth of counter-evidence.
Excessively narrowed focus is one trick. In the other direction is obstinate over-generalization. The deductive syllogism goes like this. NASA/the government/the media lies about everything. NASA/the government/the media is telling us X. Therefore X must be false. See TewaPatriot for illustration. Toss in a dose of condescension for good measure.
I've watched a few Bart Sibrel interviews. Not to examine his folly per se. Rather, to look for psychological insight. My takeaway is that he suffers from Crusader's Syndrome. He appears convinced that the government is pushing one lie on us after another - an understandable point of view - and is infuriated by that. In an attempt take them down he is taking on the biggest lie of them all (in his mind): the Apollo moon landings. That is his crusade.
For the more ordinary citizens that get taken in I believe a different dynamic is at play. It is, ironically, the fear of being fooled. People who are midway in their journey of waking up are especially prone to this tendency. When you are strong enough to realize and admit that you have been fooled in the past there is, in the reverse direction, strong psychological pressure to not be fooled again. The easiest way to not be fooled is to not believe anything anymore.
Then there are the professional iconoclasts. Those who have made their name and career bucking the mainstream narratives. It is impossible, for example, on thoroughly ideological grounds, for James Corbett to entertain the possibility of so-called White Hats in high positions of power in the U.S. government. Oh you silly Q-tards, he chuckles.
I'll end with a different thought, a conspiracy theory on manufactured conspiracy theories, if you will. It is the idea that the intelligence agencies who push Flat Earth and etcetera are not intending or expecting to gain huge traction on that particular narrative. They have a related goal. What they are doing is seeing who bites, on what platforms, measuring how quickly the memes travel and to where. They are constructing and mapping an information network. For what purpose? For later in time using it to deploy their ultimate information payload, e.g. that Trump is bad.
It's a fascinating theory. Similar to the Saul Alinky principle that "the issue is never the issue" - the Marxist Revolution is - here the (extreme) conspiracy theory is not the conspiracy theory. The influence network is the weapon.
Gosh. Thank you. I've not much talent for meme making. I've not much talent for shit posting. (Though I occasionally snap a zinger.) Instead I pad around the Great Awakening forest looking for a Thoughtful Spot or two to set down for a spell.
As an addendum to my mini-essay I'll add three more examples of thinking gone awry. To offer that we operate on a level playing field here, in the third example it is I who plays the fool.
Number 1. What about passing through the van Allen belt?
Brief answer: swiftly.
It's like dashing from your car to your front door under moderate rainfall. You'll get somewhat wet but not soaked.
It is true that prior to moon-bound missions NASA was worried about the health effects of passing through. In particular head flight surgeon Charles Berry was a worry wart extraordinaire. But once tested they realized that the belt is thin enough, and the relative velocity of the craft high enough, that the accumulated radiation exposure was not going to be a show stopper. Radiation dosimetry is a well studied subfield of medical physics.
The mistake here is that of becoming stuck on the idea that the van Allen radiation belt is somehow a hard wall, so intense that even brief exposure is as sure a death as a strip of bacon left in a microwave oven on setting 10 for an hour.
Instead: the scientific approach is to take measurements, cross-check to theory, observe the results - no dead astronauts - and conclude: not so bad after all. Phew.
Put differently, inductive thinking over-rules deductive thinking.
Number 2. The Bill Cooper objection.
I have a lot of respect for Bill Cooper and have learned much from him. From him I first became aware of the Illuminati and their larger, subordinate group, the Freemasons. The Hour of Our Time. Behold a Pale Horse. In conspiracy theory history he is an Original Gangster.
On one of his radio broadcasts he denied the Apollo program. He did so on narrow technical grounds. Consider a space walker, he said, and draw your attention to the backpack, the life support system. How is it supposed to release the astronaut's body heat trapped in the space suit when space is a vacuum? There is no air circulated around his suit to remove heat. Without heat dissipation the temperature builds up to a degree that the man will die from heat exhaustion. But on television they do not die. Logically, therefore, the scenes must be faked.
The fallacy is easy to spot. With a few moments of recollection I can think of six modes of heat transfer. Direct transport, convection, conduction, evaporation, adiabatic expansion, and radiative heating/cooling. Bill Cooper considers only convection. In the suit design, water tubes woven into the underwear carry heat from the astronaut's body to the backpack by direct transport. From the backpack to space the process is radiative cooling.
The flaw is that he was working with a deficient model of intuitive physics. When faced with observations that force a contradiction there is a choice. He could either expand his knowledge, or stick with his model (and be wrong). He chose to stick.
A better investigative approach is to acquire blueprints of the suit designs from ILC Dover, the manufacturer. Plus, ask one of the thermal engineers to walk through the design of how the contraption works. NASA built large vacuum chambers for testing the behavior of materials and artifacts in a simulated vacuum of space.
Number 3. Bringing down the twin towers on 9/11.
Now it's my turn to be the fool. Watching the coverage on live TV I bought the explanation that burning jet fuel softened the metal girders and support columns sufficiently such that it led to sudden collapse. "Huh," I thought. "I didn't know it could do that. I guess you learn something new every day." How embarrassingly dumb of me.
This was a case of incorporating new information uncritically. The perpetrators knew that the trauma and shock of the event shuts down critical thinking and opens the mind up to suggestion. They know that the confused mind is desperate for an explanation and, for most people, would rather accept a falsehood that tidies it away than to continue under confusion. Once accepted it is locked in. From that point forward the falsehood is difficult to dislodge.
They apply a clever psychological technique too. First there is lingering TV exposure of the burning stories, the fire fighters, the jumpers. Then the shock of the collapse. Followed by the injection of the ready-made explanation. Then a quick transition back to the emotional experience. For the trick to work it is important that the burning jet fuel explanation not be discussed long enough for you to come to your senses and go "Hold on. That makes no sense." The explanation is then reinforced through repetition from every media angle.
Starting from "hold on that makes no sense," critical thinking continues with: Shit. They're lying to us. All at once. If they're lying to us on something this big it has to have all been planned. If this is planned what kind of world have we been living in?
A tiny few could see through the mind trick from the beginning, notably David Ray Griffin. He wrote 14 books on the subject of 9/11. I know. He passed away three books short.
Referencing the post sandwiched between your two, "Muh space" and "I don't believe".
I don't know who he or anyone else is, personally, since we all appear here anonymously behind usernames. A few of us frogs may hop together on the same Lilly pads in the Pond of Real Life.
Very much agree with your assessment. The outlandish is deliberately seeded in to sow discord, and to characterize all of us in the eyes of the outside normie population as immediately dismiss-able.
A partial list. To start with the big one: that the Apollo moon landing(s) were faked. This has the more extreme version that outer space itself is fake, i.e. unreal. This goes along with biblical cosmology that we live under a dome firmament, which is fellow-traveler to Flat Earth/Antarctic Ice Wall. There is also the hollow Earth/moon-is-hollow theory, which of course does not mix well space being fake. In another area I'd point to the Judy Wood's claim that DEWs took down the twin towers on 9/11. JFK Jr. is Alive was pushed pretty heavily into Q discussion groups; not impossible, but unlikely. Let's not forget that during the Covid era medical freedom groups were flooded by the "there is no such thing as viruses" army.
To the extent I pay attention to the above it is to study how they think and argue. There are a few distinctive traits. They operate as anomaly hunters, constantly search for the hidden guy wires. They construct miniature imaginary models of how reality "should" work, such as how moon dust "should" kick up, point out how it does not do so in the NASA videos, and say see, this proves it was all faked. They direct your attention on dubious and very narrow points while asking you to forget the wealth of counter-evidence.
Excessively narrowed focus is one trick. In the other direction is obstinate over-generalization. The deductive syllogism goes like this. NASA/the government/the media lies about everything. NASA/the government/the media is telling us X. Therefore X must be false. See TewaPatriot for illustration. Toss in a dose of condescension for good measure.
I've watched a few Bart Sibrel interviews. Not to examine his folly per se. Rather, to look for psychological insight. My takeaway is that he suffers from Crusader's Syndrome. He appears convinced that the government is pushing one lie on us after another - an understandable point of view - and is infuriated by that. In an attempt take them down he is taking on the biggest lie of them all (in his mind): the Apollo moon landings. That is his crusade.
For the more ordinary citizens that get taken in I believe a different dynamic is at play. It is, ironically, the fear of being fooled. People who are midway in their journey of waking up are especially prone to this tendency. When you are strong enough to realize and admit that you have been fooled in the past there is, in the reverse direction, strong psychological pressure to not be fooled again. The easiest way to not be fooled is to not believe anything anymore.
Then there are the professional iconoclasts. Those who have made their name and career bucking the mainstream narratives. It is impossible, for example, on thoroughly ideological grounds, for James Corbett to entertain the possibility of so-called White Hats in high positions of power in the U.S. government. Oh you silly Q-tards, he chuckles.
I'll end with a different thought, a conspiracy theory on manufactured conspiracy theories, if you will. It is the idea that the intelligence agencies who push Flat Earth and etcetera are not intending or expecting to gain huge traction on that particular narrative. They have a related goal. What they are doing is seeing who bites, on what platforms, measuring how quickly the memes travel and to where. They are constructing and mapping an information network. For what purpose? For later in time using it to deploy their ultimate information payload, e.g. that Trump is bad.
It's a fascinating theory. Similar to the Saul Alinky principle that "the issue is never the issue" - the Marxist Revolution is - here the (extreme) conspiracy theory is not the conspiracy theory. The influence network is the weapon.
BRILLIANT post. Do you mind if I steal it and share it?
Sure, be my guest.
Typos include: constantly search -> constantly searching
Lol you are something else. I admire you.
Gosh. Thank you. I've not much talent for meme making. I've not much talent for shit posting. (Though I occasionally snap a zinger.) Instead I pad around the Great Awakening forest looking for a Thoughtful Spot or two to set down for a spell.
As an addendum to my mini-essay I'll add three more examples of thinking gone awry. To offer that we operate on a level playing field here, in the third example it is I who plays the fool.
Number 1. What about passing through the van Allen belt?
Brief answer: swiftly.
It's like dashing from your car to your front door under moderate rainfall. You'll get somewhat wet but not soaked.
It is true that prior to moon-bound missions NASA was worried about the health effects of passing through. In particular head flight surgeon Charles Berry was a worry wart extraordinaire. But once tested they realized that the belt is thin enough, and the relative velocity of the craft high enough, that the accumulated radiation exposure was not going to be a show stopper. Radiation dosimetry is a well studied subfield of medical physics.
The mistake here is that of becoming stuck on the idea that the van Allen radiation belt is somehow a hard wall, so intense that even brief exposure is as sure a death as a strip of bacon left in a microwave oven on setting 10 for an hour.
Instead: the scientific approach is to take measurements, cross-check to theory, observe the results - no dead astronauts - and conclude: not so bad after all. Phew.
Put differently, inductive thinking over-rules deductive thinking.
Number 2. The Bill Cooper objection.
I have a lot of respect for Bill Cooper and have learned much from him. From him I first became aware of the Illuminati and their larger, subordinate group, the Freemasons. The Hour of Our Time. Behold a Pale Horse. In conspiracy theory history he is an Original Gangster.
On one of his radio broadcasts he denied the Apollo program. He did so on narrow technical grounds. Consider a space walker, he said, and draw your attention to the backpack, the life support system. How is it supposed to release the astronaut's body heat trapped in the space suit when space is a vacuum? There is no air circulated around his suit to remove heat. Without heat dissipation the temperature builds up to a degree that the man will die from heat exhaustion. But on television they do not die. Logically, therefore, the scenes must be faked.
The fallacy is easy to spot. With a few moments of recollection I can think of six modes of heat transfer. Direct transport, convection, conduction, evaporation, adiabatic expansion, and radiative heating/cooling. Bill Cooper considers only convection. In the suit design, water tubes woven into the underwear carry heat from the astronaut's body to the backpack by direct transport. From the backpack to space the process is radiative cooling.
The flaw is that he was working with a deficient model of intuitive physics. When faced with observations that force a contradiction there is a choice. He could either expand his knowledge, or stick with his model (and be wrong). He chose to stick.
A better investigative approach is to acquire blueprints of the suit designs from ILC Dover, the manufacturer. Plus, ask one of the thermal engineers to walk through the design of how the contraption works. NASA built large vacuum chambers for testing the behavior of materials and artifacts in a simulated vacuum of space.
Number 3. Bringing down the twin towers on 9/11.
Now it's my turn to be the fool. Watching the coverage on live TV I bought the explanation that burning jet fuel softened the metal girders and support columns sufficiently such that it led to sudden collapse. "Huh," I thought. "I didn't know it could do that. I guess you learn something new every day." How embarrassingly dumb of me.
This was a case of incorporating new information uncritically. The perpetrators knew that the trauma and shock of the event shuts down critical thinking and opens the mind up to suggestion. They know that the confused mind is desperate for an explanation and, for most people, would rather accept a falsehood that tidies it away than to continue under confusion. Once accepted it is locked in. From that point forward the falsehood is difficult to dislodge.
They apply a clever psychological technique too. First there is lingering TV exposure of the burning stories, the fire fighters, the jumpers. Then the shock of the collapse. Followed by the injection of the ready-made explanation. Then a quick transition back to the emotional experience. For the trick to work it is important that the burning jet fuel explanation not be discussed long enough for you to come to your senses and go "Hold on. That makes no sense." The explanation is then reinforced through repetition from every media angle.
Starting from "hold on that makes no sense," critical thinking continues with: Shit. They're lying to us. All at once. If they're lying to us on something this big it has to have all been planned. If this is planned what kind of world have we been living in?
A tiny few could see through the mind trick from the beginning, notably David Ray Griffin. He wrote 14 books on the subject of 9/11. I know. He passed away three books short.
Who is TewaPatriot btw?
Referencing the post sandwiched between your two, "Muh space" and "I don't believe".
I don't know who he or anyone else is, personally, since we all appear here anonymously behind usernames. A few of us frogs may hop together on the same Lilly pads in the Pond of Real Life.