Travis
Misanthrope of the Mountains
- Joined
- Mar 31, 2007
- Messages
- 24,133
Even the most steeled of conspiracy believers needs a pointer here and there in order to do battle with the unbelievers. So here a few to put you in the ranks of the truly gifted.
You must declare your genius to everyone
It isn't enough that you are smart. And you are pretty darned sure you are very bright. You were, after all, the only one on your shift at Taco Bell that knew that The Iliad wasn't a sexually transmitted disease. Granted you haven't read the work yourself but you totally intend to once you are done with the latest Anita Blake book.
So declare your great intelligence right up front. You don't need to actually demonstrate it. Just tell everyone about it. They might not be immediately impressed so take your last IQ test results (remember that one you got to through that pop up ad that also promised to tell what Community character you were?) and just add 80 points to it.
If they say that IQ tests are irrelevant tell them "that's just what a person that doesn't score high would say!" That will get them to shut up.
Once you have wowed them with ridiculously high IQ scores they will learn to sit back and lap up your sweet thought drippings.
Your "Expertise" from intuition is real so tell them so
One of the problems with those debunkers is that they often bring up papers and works by actual experts. Well you are not an actual "expert" with a degree but you feel you know a thing or two in the field of "it looks sturdy to me so it must be." Sure that one guy tripped you up that one time by showing you a picture of a bridge that you admitted looked pretty sturdy then it turned out to be that one bridge that collapsed because someone played the harmonica. But the WTC is different! It just looked so danged sturdy it must have been. How could your gut feeling be wrong?
Now they'll try and bombard you with numbers and photographs of the thing to show it wasn't indestructible so you'll have to ignore it. Sort of like how you continue to think that, while everyone else is conceived through sex, you really were just delivered by a stork. It sure beats facing up to the unpleasant reality that your parents once saw each other naked. Well this is an unpleasant reality too. So ignore the @&#! out of it.
Speaking of which....
Ignore reality
Reality is so boring if you let it get in the way. What's cooler? An Area 51 where they test pilot reverse engineered alien starships or a dry lake bed where slightly stealthier new jets are tried out? Alien starships all the way! So, when faced with two divergent choices always go with the one that would make for the better movie. This might mean that you end up with fantastic ideas about miniature nuclear weapons in New York or gigantic space rays on invisible space stations but who is going to really prove that those things aren't there?
Remember when your older brother told you a scary clown face pops into any mirror when your back is to it? Well you couldn't ever really prove that didn't happen now could you? Neither could that string of therapists.
Now the worst that happened there is that you now live in a house with no ability to comb your hair straight and sometimes you freak out in front of shop windows when the sun is just right but otherwise you cope. So go do the same to those debunkers.
Of course this might mean that your cool stories might be so divergent as to preclude each other but don't worry...
Believe in contradictory things
Who says you have to believe in just one set of things from reality? That's so narrow minded. Who says JFK wasn't assassinated by Nazi robots from inside the Moon and by the Mossad? Not you.
And could the WTC be destroyed by a space station's ray gun and by nano-thermite delivered by holographic planes that were also physical planes? Why not?
I mean it blows your mind that when it's noon at your house it's eight at night in London. This is surely the same thing. Besides all these things have "experts" that have endorsed them.
All experts are equal
A derived line of thought from you thinking of yourself as a genius is that expertise is really malleable. I mean surely the only thing those debunkers have got behind all those people that they call "experts" is that those people have a bunch of Doctorates. So what. Your cousin Luke has like five of those from Trinity Southern University. And he actually lost your pet rock when you had him watch it that weekend.
So it really escapes you why those debunkers love them letters after a name so much. But they do so you search around for people with them that also say things that you agree with. Maybe they have degrees in theology or other unrelated fields but that isn't really that important. Read what they have to say...underline a few bits then say it breaks the whole thing open.
Heck you could even have your cousin Luke write a paper using words suggested by the thesaurus to create a document that you will then source in your later arguments. If other conspiracy theorists talk about Luke's paper then you can cite them as more proof that there is a groundswell of support for the idea you planted in Luke's mind in the first place (it shouldn't be that hard you did once talk the guy into snorting mustard up his nose).
Motive is all that you need.
All you really ever need to figure out the truth is to look for motive. You learned that from those paperback crime novels you were reading instead of your history text book. And in those books the person with the most to gain is always the one that did it. It's honestly so easy you really wonder why they even have the FBI.
So just search around, find someone that benefited from the bad thing and pin it on them. Granted this sometimes means you are pinning it on someone that wasn't even alive at the time but that goes back to "ignoring reality."
Things unknown to you are unknown to everyone
You remember September 11th quite well. That was the day you skipped school go smoke weed with Francis and then someone said something about the planes and the World Trade Center (you're also pretty sure he said something about Sparkle the Yellow Hippo but no one else will back you up on that). So you watched it with all the attentiveness a pothead with ADHD can possibly muster about something and you don't remember anything about that tower seven coming down.
So surely it was covered up. I mean if you didn't hear about it then nobody heard about it. And that makes all the other things around it mysterious. Like a newscast that thinks it is coming down early. I mean those debunkers think that was just a mistake but you know the truth about mistakes...
Bad things never "just happen"
Terrible things don't "just happen." I mean hurricanes that level cities or earthquakes that send Haiti from the 13th to the 15th ring of hell don't just come out of nowhere with no cause. That would require a world with an awful lot of chaos and random bad stuff. And that's scary as hell. So surely there are huge human machinations behind them. They don't just come out of the blue they are orchestrated from inside a volcano somewhere.
Men don't just massacre kids at a summer camp because they are insane. Someone made that man insane intending him to carry out such a horrible crime because....
The real world operates by Bond villain rules.
These plots have reasons behind them. Nebulous reasons to be sure but reasons all the same. And, sure, the plots are often so overly complicated that the planners must think "parsimonious" is a dirty word (It is. Trust me.)
But super villains operate unconstrained by what makes sense to you and me. I mean we can't understand how they get those legions of minions that die off in droves whenever an oversexed super secret agent shows up (like those swarms of bugs by the sewer plant that kamikaze your car's windshield). But they get them somewhere.
So surely someone that's somehow managed to convince a bunch of college dropouts to sacrifice themselves protecting what they only know as the "Machine that kills everything" must know what they are doing when they decide that the real reason behind their latest plot is a war someplace else being fought by someone else over something that has nothing to do with anything going on. And what's worse is that everything that happens is part of the plan no matter what!
Oh and that doomsday machine...
Technology you don't understand is evil
Do you know what a "high frequency active auroral research program" is? Of course you don't. You still think the hoverboards from Back To The Future 2 are a real thing that the government is repressing.
But you know who uses technology that you don't get? Evil people. Or people so super intelligent that they become evil. And don't think you are limited to the technology most people know about. Pretty much everything does actually exist (see the hoverboards) and you can bet that it was invented by Tesla. He was capable of anything. You learned that from that documentary about him where the Goblin King confesses as such to Wolverine to get back at Batman.
So don't believe them when they say the technology doesn't exist. It surely does because, as far as you know, the stuff was magic and Tesla was like a magician or something. [citation needed]
So let them know that you know the impossible stuff is real and is really behind anything else that you don't get. Use it as a huge MacGuffin to tie all your disparate ideas into one huge impossibly labyrinthine plot that only that guy back in the volcano can actually see through to completion.
After that the only thing left to do is...
Declare those that oppose you as "in on it"
This is really the last step. If you haven't yet swayed those debunkers with your unbridled brilliance then they are surely either jerks or actively working with the enemy. Being jerks is too boring to be true in your idea of how reality works so just go with them being part of the very plot you yourself invented that one morning in between masturbation sessions to photo shoots of Olivia Wilde and Olivia Munn (or O2 as you call them).
You must declare your genius to everyone
It isn't enough that you are smart. And you are pretty darned sure you are very bright. You were, after all, the only one on your shift at Taco Bell that knew that The Iliad wasn't a sexually transmitted disease. Granted you haven't read the work yourself but you totally intend to once you are done with the latest Anita Blake book.
So declare your great intelligence right up front. You don't need to actually demonstrate it. Just tell everyone about it. They might not be immediately impressed so take your last IQ test results (remember that one you got to through that pop up ad that also promised to tell what Community character you were?) and just add 80 points to it.
If they say that IQ tests are irrelevant tell them "that's just what a person that doesn't score high would say!" That will get them to shut up.
Once you have wowed them with ridiculously high IQ scores they will learn to sit back and lap up your sweet thought drippings.
Your "Expertise" from intuition is real so tell them so
One of the problems with those debunkers is that they often bring up papers and works by actual experts. Well you are not an actual "expert" with a degree but you feel you know a thing or two in the field of "it looks sturdy to me so it must be." Sure that one guy tripped you up that one time by showing you a picture of a bridge that you admitted looked pretty sturdy then it turned out to be that one bridge that collapsed because someone played the harmonica. But the WTC is different! It just looked so danged sturdy it must have been. How could your gut feeling be wrong?
Now they'll try and bombard you with numbers and photographs of the thing to show it wasn't indestructible so you'll have to ignore it. Sort of like how you continue to think that, while everyone else is conceived through sex, you really were just delivered by a stork. It sure beats facing up to the unpleasant reality that your parents once saw each other naked. Well this is an unpleasant reality too. So ignore the @&#! out of it.
Speaking of which....
Ignore reality
Reality is so boring if you let it get in the way. What's cooler? An Area 51 where they test pilot reverse engineered alien starships or a dry lake bed where slightly stealthier new jets are tried out? Alien starships all the way! So, when faced with two divergent choices always go with the one that would make for the better movie. This might mean that you end up with fantastic ideas about miniature nuclear weapons in New York or gigantic space rays on invisible space stations but who is going to really prove that those things aren't there?
Remember when your older brother told you a scary clown face pops into any mirror when your back is to it? Well you couldn't ever really prove that didn't happen now could you? Neither could that string of therapists.
Now the worst that happened there is that you now live in a house with no ability to comb your hair straight and sometimes you freak out in front of shop windows when the sun is just right but otherwise you cope. So go do the same to those debunkers.
Of course this might mean that your cool stories might be so divergent as to preclude each other but don't worry...
Believe in contradictory things
Who says you have to believe in just one set of things from reality? That's so narrow minded. Who says JFK wasn't assassinated by Nazi robots from inside the Moon and by the Mossad? Not you.
And could the WTC be destroyed by a space station's ray gun and by nano-thermite delivered by holographic planes that were also physical planes? Why not?
I mean it blows your mind that when it's noon at your house it's eight at night in London. This is surely the same thing. Besides all these things have "experts" that have endorsed them.
All experts are equal
A derived line of thought from you thinking of yourself as a genius is that expertise is really malleable. I mean surely the only thing those debunkers have got behind all those people that they call "experts" is that those people have a bunch of Doctorates. So what. Your cousin Luke has like five of those from Trinity Southern University. And he actually lost your pet rock when you had him watch it that weekend.
So it really escapes you why those debunkers love them letters after a name so much. But they do so you search around for people with them that also say things that you agree with. Maybe they have degrees in theology or other unrelated fields but that isn't really that important. Read what they have to say...underline a few bits then say it breaks the whole thing open.
Heck you could even have your cousin Luke write a paper using words suggested by the thesaurus to create a document that you will then source in your later arguments. If other conspiracy theorists talk about Luke's paper then you can cite them as more proof that there is a groundswell of support for the idea you planted in Luke's mind in the first place (it shouldn't be that hard you did once talk the guy into snorting mustard up his nose).
Motive is all that you need.
All you really ever need to figure out the truth is to look for motive. You learned that from those paperback crime novels you were reading instead of your history text book. And in those books the person with the most to gain is always the one that did it. It's honestly so easy you really wonder why they even have the FBI.
So just search around, find someone that benefited from the bad thing and pin it on them. Granted this sometimes means you are pinning it on someone that wasn't even alive at the time but that goes back to "ignoring reality."
Things unknown to you are unknown to everyone
You remember September 11th quite well. That was the day you skipped school go smoke weed with Francis and then someone said something about the planes and the World Trade Center (you're also pretty sure he said something about Sparkle the Yellow Hippo but no one else will back you up on that). So you watched it with all the attentiveness a pothead with ADHD can possibly muster about something and you don't remember anything about that tower seven coming down.
So surely it was covered up. I mean if you didn't hear about it then nobody heard about it. And that makes all the other things around it mysterious. Like a newscast that thinks it is coming down early. I mean those debunkers think that was just a mistake but you know the truth about mistakes...
Bad things never "just happen"
Terrible things don't "just happen." I mean hurricanes that level cities or earthquakes that send Haiti from the 13th to the 15th ring of hell don't just come out of nowhere with no cause. That would require a world with an awful lot of chaos and random bad stuff. And that's scary as hell. So surely there are huge human machinations behind them. They don't just come out of the blue they are orchestrated from inside a volcano somewhere.
Men don't just massacre kids at a summer camp because they are insane. Someone made that man insane intending him to carry out such a horrible crime because....
The real world operates by Bond villain rules.
These plots have reasons behind them. Nebulous reasons to be sure but reasons all the same. And, sure, the plots are often so overly complicated that the planners must think "parsimonious" is a dirty word (It is. Trust me.)
But super villains operate unconstrained by what makes sense to you and me. I mean we can't understand how they get those legions of minions that die off in droves whenever an oversexed super secret agent shows up (like those swarms of bugs by the sewer plant that kamikaze your car's windshield). But they get them somewhere.
So surely someone that's somehow managed to convince a bunch of college dropouts to sacrifice themselves protecting what they only know as the "Machine that kills everything" must know what they are doing when they decide that the real reason behind their latest plot is a war someplace else being fought by someone else over something that has nothing to do with anything going on. And what's worse is that everything that happens is part of the plan no matter what!
Oh and that doomsday machine...
Technology you don't understand is evil
Do you know what a "high frequency active auroral research program" is? Of course you don't. You still think the hoverboards from Back To The Future 2 are a real thing that the government is repressing.
But you know who uses technology that you don't get? Evil people. Or people so super intelligent that they become evil. And don't think you are limited to the technology most people know about. Pretty much everything does actually exist (see the hoverboards) and you can bet that it was invented by Tesla. He was capable of anything. You learned that from that documentary about him where the Goblin King confesses as such to Wolverine to get back at Batman.
So don't believe them when they say the technology doesn't exist. It surely does because, as far as you know, the stuff was magic and Tesla was like a magician or something. [citation needed]
So let them know that you know the impossible stuff is real and is really behind anything else that you don't get. Use it as a huge MacGuffin to tie all your disparate ideas into one huge impossibly labyrinthine plot that only that guy back in the volcano can actually see through to completion.
After that the only thing left to do is...
Declare those that oppose you as "in on it"
This is really the last step. If you haven't yet swayed those debunkers with your unbridled brilliance then they are surely either jerks or actively working with the enemy. Being jerks is too boring to be true in your idea of how reality works so just go with them being part of the very plot you yourself invented that one morning in between masturbation sessions to photo shoots of Olivia Wilde and Olivia Munn (or O2 as you call them).
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