I’ll go first: r/kitty. One of the hundred grillion cat subs back on Reddit, the culture in this one was you posted a cat picture, and the only word allowed in the title or in any comments or replies was “Kitty.”

Someone is using that subreddit for covert communications, I just know it. Either on the level of “if u/PM_me_your_nostrils posts an orange cat, we attack at dawn!” or there’s some steganography going on with the pictures, but that subreddit was too stupid to be as active as it was.

  • throbbing_banjo@lemmy.world
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    13 minutes ago

    Tinfoil hats on? Alrighty then:

    All these Verizon outages are intentional and part of the plan to invalidate the 2024 election.

    We’ll see it happen again on and around election day, maybe xitter will go down too.

    Whole voting districts in Georgia won’t report in, citing system crashes, security breaches, whatever they feel like making up. Republican Secretaries of State will declare the election compromised before vote counting even starts.

    Obviously there’s also a hurricane and massive flooding, hence the tinfoil hat, but let’s not forget where and when we are in history, and that The Business Plot was a real thing.

  • Anderenortsfalsch@discuss.tchncs.de
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    8 hours ago

    Years ago I had fun with “what if the US never actually went to the moon”. I did not believe it, it was just a nice plot idea, we even made a pen & paper oneshot about it. Nowadays I have no whatsoever fun in thought experiments like this, because the real threat of someone believing it to be true. I want to enjoy “birds aren’t real” or “giraffes do not exist” or … the worst is flat earth. It started out as a joke and now idiots try to proof the earth is flat, proof by accident it isn’t and then question rather their methods than their belief system. We just can’t have nice things.

  • LustyArgonianMana@lemmy.world
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    5 hours ago

    Kary Mullis didn’t invent PCR, his then-gf Jenny did. Matilda effect

    Other theory: a staff member at Neopets is messing with in game economy to sell digital items irl on ebay

  • bi_tux@lemmy.world
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    8 hours ago

    the feds and big corpos are spying on you and the only reason you’re still alive is because

    a) you’re a small fish

    xor

    b) you help them in some way by being a usefull idiot

    xor

    c) you’re part of the conspiracy

  • noughtnaut@lemmy.world
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    16 hours ago

    So many people believe that Covid was a way to scare us all indoors, so they could change batteries in all the birds.

    That’s preposterous.

    Birds use rechargeables, that’s why they’re always sitting on the power lines. Like, duh, wake up sheeple.

    • bi_tux@lemmy.world
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      8 hours ago

      no, you don’t understand, the feds invented the perpetum mobile, birds only sit on power lines to confuse people like you!

  • PM_Your_Nudes_Please@lemmy.world
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    13 hours ago

    Alex Jones was a CIA plant, to make conspiracy theorists look crazy… And it worked really really well.

    The government was nervous because there were some conspiracy theories that were a little too close to reality. Shit like MK ULTRA and the Harvard mind control experiment sound fake, but we have the declassified docs. We know they happened. And there were lots of conspiracy theories that were likely hitting just a little too close for comfort. But outright disputing the conspiracy theories would just add credibility to them, in a “methinks the lady doth protest too much” sort of way.

    So instead, they set out to discredit the people making the claims. They wanted to poison the well. So they found a dude named Alex Jones who had potential. He’s easily manipulated, so they can basically feed him wild conspiracies and he’ll eat them up. And all they had to do was boost his message. Jones never even needed to knew he was a plant, (and in fact, it would work better if he remained clueless.)

    They gave conspiracy theorists a face. Before Alex Jones, conspiracy theories were something the average person jokingly threw around while drunk at the bar. But suddenly, conspiracy theorists were up front and center. And here’s the important part: the theories didn’t have a good spokesman. Suddenly, the average person’s view of conspiracy theories shifted. They weren’t funny anymore; They had your crazy uncle ranting about dead kids being fake.

    By giving conspiracy theories a face, then having that face spew the most insane bullshit alongside the true (or nearly true) theories, the government was able to discredit the true theories. They were able to poison the well, because the main person ranting about the conspiracy also thinks Sandy Hook was a hoax.

  • Lianodel@ttrpg.network
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    11 hours ago

    Oh, another one: anti-vaccination was pushed by health insurance companies to dampen public perception of government-run healthcare.

    Vaccine development and implementation fucking worked. If people were happy with the results, they might end up swayed towards publicly-funded healthcare. So… put a lid on that by whipping up a bunch of fear, uncertainty, and doubt. Some folks will no longer see the vaccination programs as successful efforts to protect public health, but as a conspiracy to… do something. And instead of pointing to it as an example of a public healthcare program, you’ve first got to spend time defending evidence-based medicine, which takes up so much fucking time and energy, and ultimately won’t convince people who bored too deeply into that alternate-reality tunnel.

    It turned a public health initiative into a fucking tar pit, and now the once-free vaccinations cost over a hundred bucks if you don’t have insurance.

  • kittenzrulz123@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    13 hours ago

    Heres my conspiracy theory:

    Political extremism isn’t real (specifically in regards to left wing “extremism”). Its a social construct created by the capitalist class to convince workers that left wing ideologies are scary and having your elections be between two liberals is “normal”. If you ignore that ideologies like Anarchism become common sense. Why do we need lords and masters, why do we need the tyranny of capitalists and the cruel rule of “democratically elected” leaders? Ultimately we do not, the economy would be better if it was owned by the workers and world better if every person was free to be the master of their own life. Capitalists and politicans fully understand this, thats why they pump everyone with propaganda so they can keep their positions of privilege and power.

  • mysticpickle@lemmy.ca
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    17 hours ago

    Tiktok is a Chinese psyop to turn the next generation of Americans into drooling idiots.

    • EnderMB@lemmy.world
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      2 hours ago

      The previous generation probably said the same about MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, etc.

      Let people enjoy what they enjoy. There will always be idiots everywhere, and TikTok emerging won’t suddenly make Americans dumber.

  • Adderbox76@lemmy.ca
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    21 hours ago

    JD Vance was forced in as the Trump VP pick by the Heritage Foundation so that when Trump either dies or stops cooperating with them on Project 2025, they already have a man in place to take over. And that’s likely the reason for the assassination attempts.

    If Trump dies, they get Vance (a true believer…unlike Trump who just wants the power to stay out of prison) at the top of the ticket.

    • mojofrododojo@lemmy.world
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      17 hours ago

      If Trump dies, they get Vance (a true believer…unlike Trump who just wants the power to stay out of prison) at the top of the ticket.

      And we get some kind of Peter Theil libertarian theocracy.

      Vance’s flexibility to bend in any direction at any time is just… he makes lindsey graham look principled.

    • Delphia@lemmy.world
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      14 hours ago

      I genuinely believe at this point that Trump wants out but they wont let him, I think the first assassination attempt rattled the shit out of him. He went along as a willing figurehead, he was never a true believer. He was told they would be behind him and protect him as long as he did what he was told, they would . Now he has realised too late that a figurehead is also a lightning rod but that his only way out is through and they will knock him off or throw him to the wolves if he rocks the boat.

    • sudo@programming.dev
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      3 hours ago

      I believe the official narrative is JD Vance was Donald Trump Jr’s shitbrained idea. Trump Jr and Vance personally both roll with the same “intellectual dark web” theories, neo-eugenics and such.

  • Match!!@pawb.social
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    20 hours ago

    content warnng: Magic The Gathering

    facts: a couple of weeks ago the commander rules committee, the independent group that governs the popular Commander format, started receiving death threats after they banned some boring ass broken cards (jeweled lotus? dockside extortionist? nobody is ride or die for those)

    as a result, the rules committee turned over control of the format to Wizards of the Coast / Hasbro, the makers of magic the gathering

    fact: last year after some magic the gathering content was leaked, Hasbro send literal pinkertons to harasss the youtuber leaking it and recover the leaked goods

    conspiracy theory: hasbro hired the pinkertons to make those death threats against the rules committee so that hasbro could seize control ove the most popular independent format of magic

    • SkyezOpen@lemmy.world
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      17 hours ago

      I wanna say “nub uh” but the fact that they’re getting death threats is really crazy. Like they changed the mulligan rule from partial Paris to the new one (Vancouver?) and basically everyone said “that’s neat” and did partial Paris anyway. And over busted things like dockside? Goddamn there was barely an outcry over prophet of kruphix.

      Sol ring ban I could see death threats. That’s about it.

  • PhlubbaDubba@lemm.ee
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    22 hours ago

    Conspiracy Theorist culture has been coopted by the evangelical right in the wake of shit like Watergate and Iran-Contra making a non-interfered-with conspiracy theorist culture seem too dangerous to the right to be allowed to persist.

    Evidence being that if you go far enough down the rabbit holes of the looney theories we all like to make fun of, you’ll inevitably find some evangelical nut preaching about how it has to be that way either because they believe it says so in the bible or because they believe it’s a sign of the rapture which is surely happening within their lifetime, or often both.

    It’s like the most dangerous kind of conservative appropriation of counterculture narrative.

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    24 hours ago

    The addition of microphones and cameras to things like phones, computers, watches and other technology is to normalize being surveiled as well as minimize other privacy violations. We now have fridges that have WiFi capabilities now and often in the presence of some sort of device with a camera due to phones.

    • Dizzy Devil Ducky@lemm.ee
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      21 hours ago

      Pretty sure they said conspiracy theory, not fact. At this point it’s so believable if a theory it might as well be fact, in my opinion.

      • Elextra@literature.cafe
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        20 hours ago

        Well I guess for me is wondering if this trend started because people thought it would be either functional or cool vs businesses being malicious and their aim was more surveillance tolerance?

        People dont think its weird to have a camera on a laptop or phone anymore. Instead, people sometimes are now buying phones for the picture quality… And fridges with WiFi because the tech is cool or something.

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      17 hours ago

      What’s really crazy is how fucking Good all those microphones are.

      I’ve been using alfredcam to utilize old phones and tablets, and holy shit they can hear so well.

      Like the k88, an ancient tablet that was useless when it came out, foisted upon at&t users. The mic on it will pick up conversations clear as a bell OUTSIDE my house

      Shit’s fucked, yo

    • michaelmrose@lemmy.world
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      21 hours ago

      Fridges with computers in them but we someone missed the boat on pervasive RFID in food containers and maintaining in stock of my shit. It should be able to tell my milk is 1/4 full and 2 days from expiration and add it to an order that shows up when my calendar says I’ll be home but no what do we get? Something with 1/2 the lifespan which can play youtube videos and show you how much beer you have from the couch from its webcam.

      Why even bother.

  • BonesOfTheMoon@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Elon Musk is paying anti-immigration and anti-trans groups like the Tanron network to spread their rhetoric on social media.

    Oh wait that one is true. Filthy piece of shit.

  • JPAKx4@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    23 hours ago

    Ken Paxton has dirt on every Republican in Texas, and the fraud we know about is probably a multitude less than what he actually does.