• Michael@slrpnk.net
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    2 days ago

    I’m not making an argument for chemtrails. It’s pointless to speculate about, there is no evidence or smoking gun.

    I’m just suggesting that we be kind and empathetic towards individuals that do believe these sorts of things. Is it out of character for the US government? Nah, not really.

    Many of these people probably were living in or around 1969. In their lived reality, the US government was doing shit like this. Have things really gotten better?

    • MonkeMischief@lemmy.today
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      1 day ago

      EDIT: Sorry for the essay LOL.

      I really appreciate your take and efforts to be compassionate about the loads of people who simply were let down by a lack of, or sometimes learned cultural opposition to, education. We’re paying for it so hard right now.

      I mean, yeah, MK-Ultra was a very real program, for instance. The Cold War Era was loaded with shadowy nonsense conducted by spooks, all over the place! Real conspiracies totally happened!

      But people on the whole crave sensation and don’t have the logic or education to discern between whistleblowers and grifters.

      I think the part that is so painful is that there’s just so much noise.

      It feels like conspiracy theories generally used to be…More harmless? More often the stuff of kooky neighbors and not always dangerously deluded basement militants and chart-topping podcasts.

      Now it’s a carefully engineered, algorithmically driven pipeline from the former to the latter.

      Now, thanks to social media, they’re politically weaponized psy-ops: Get the masses all riled up about aliens, mind-control vaccines, and satanic child-farming underground pizza delivery chain networks…

      …And they won’t bother to focus their energy any real and “boring” conspiracies, like monopoly-forming, price fixing, shrinkflation, planned obsolescence, cop unions, the insurance industry, manufacturing consent, stock market manipulation, wage theft, billionaire bunkers, car-required civic planning, surveillance normalization, gerrymandering, Cambridge Analytica, McKinsey, class warfare, too-much-to-list about Boeing…

      Because those are very real problems perpetuated by very bad powerful people, and they take a ton of very risky work to fix.

      And those conspiracies are so very boring and predictable, because it’s a massive shell game with a million little nodes that all lead to countless instances of “Someone is doing these bad things to amass more money or influence.”

      Last note: It’s also really odd and telling how the ones who are SO adamant about government conspiracies don’t tend to care much about corporations.

      Government mind control chips in water (to make us more… subservient or something?) Totes!

      But ad companies listening to your devices to figure out when you’re at your weakest to push ads for foolish purchases?

      Naaaaah!