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This drives me nuts.
When I was in grad school, we had our weekly seminar. A student in our group had to go give a review-presentation on a topic of their choosing each week for our brown bag lunch meetings. People would usually present on topics related or adjacent to their actual work, because doing the reading and research for their presentation was part of their larger knowledge gain and broadening related to their own field.
But this one guy presented about how the world was going to end in 2012. He was serious – some how he had made it into grad school, fooling everyone. We all thought it was some sort of Andy Kaufmann-esque prank he was playing on it, holding a straight face while presenting – complete with references to conspiracy websites.
He lost his funding shortly thereafter.
The weird thing is, losing his funding probably reinforced his belief in the conspiracy. Persecution complexes can be very powerful things.
That’s the insidious thing about conspiracy theories once they latch onto the brain. Any consequences or conflicting information just become “them” trying to subdue or mislead you.
He lost his funding shortly thereafter
He can’t be too upset. The world didn’t end in 2012 so his hypothesis was wrong.
I wonder what all those 2012 people say today?
Same thing all numerologists will say: ah, something was wrong with the calculation. The world will actually end (insert some new date in the near future, so the grift can continue).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dates_predicted_for_apocalyptic_events
After his 1260 prediction failed, the followers of Joachim of Fiore rescheduled the end of the world to 1290 and then again to 1335.
History is full of this stuff :)
Was one of them, many of us coped by saying something subtle “changed” that will become noticeable later.
I’m convinced that these conspiracies are spawned from racism towards non white civilizations. It’s easier for them to believe an imagined space God came there and built something rather than the indigenous people. There is also probably some need to believe that we are always at the peak of human progress in all things but in reality the story is more complicated.
It’s older than this bullshit: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29081831/
It’s true. I saw it on this documentary called Stargate.
Fun fact: War and Peas is on Mastodon and through ActivityPub magic their posts now also show up in !tails@lemmon.website
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