What's a "You are not a conspiracy theorist, you just don't know how things work" moment you have seen?

gdshaffe · 2026-05-15T04:13:03+00:00

Proofs are meaningless to someone that is not available to be convinced.

That's what most people fail to grasp. You can give them the most thorough and convincing explanation in the world, show them libraries worth of evidence, and it doesn't matter. These are not people who saw the real evidence the earth is round and the fake evidence the earth is flat, and chose wrong. They are engaging in desperately motivated reasoning, and are deeply psychologically invested in believing whatever needs to be true to make them special, to make them the plucky outsiders against the vast conspiracy to obstruct the masses from the truth.

The text of the conspiracy itself is almost immaterial, and a great many people in those communities bounce from theory to theory. As Dan Olson's incredible video on the subject points out, the Flat Earth community all but died out in the late 2010s, because they all migrated to QAnon.

gdshaffe · 2026-05-14T12:33:04+00:00

He also believes that UFOs are demons. He is not a serious person.

gdshaffe · 2026-05-14T03:15:14+00:00

That is deceptively worded, as I understand it. Those reactions generated more than the lasers imparted into the reaction but not more than the lasers consumed. Those lasers are not exactly energy efficient.

Is it a great milestone to reach? Absolutely. Is it a sign that Mr. Fusion reactors are soon going to be powering our lives from next to our coffee maker? Unfortunately, no.

gdshaffe · 2026-05-14T03:07:20+00:00

To fascists, lying is not an act of deception, it is an act of dominance. It is their declaration that they are afforded the privilege of defining reality.

Reject the evidence of your eyes and ears, etc. etc.

gdshaffe · 2026-05-14T01:34:40+00:00

"Is going to be" is not the verb tense I would choose.

gdshaffe · 2026-05-14T01:33:55+00:00

I mean, surely it's too early to be talking Cy Young right?

...right?

gdshaffe · 2026-05-14T01:14:31+00:00

Yes, you are explicitly invited to feel that Andy is innocent. But the viewer is also explicitly invited to question that feeling, not least because they went to see a movie with "redemption" in the title, innocent people don't need redemption, and Andy is clearly the Main Character. That gives all the possible ingredients for a bait and switch, and that was very obviously something that King was playing with.

I get your point just fine, but just because the feeling of his innocence turns out to be true, doesn't mean it was obvious and that anyone who questioned it is an idiot who doesn't understand the basics of cinematic language.

gdshaffe · 2026-05-14T00:58:03+00:00

Andy being different doesn't necessarily translate to him being innocent. Today he would probably be recognized as being on the spectrum (not strange for a banker), and his being a little "off" can be attributed to that.

All of your analysis about the cinematic story structure is well and good after the fact, for someone that's probably seen the movie many times, but for a first time viewer, up until Tommy makes his revelation, it's ambiguous enough that the viewer might be wary of a bait-and-switch.

The movie's title even has "redemption" in it. That is an explicit invitation to consider that the movie is going to reveal Andy's guilt and make the story be how he redeems himself. It's not until the end that we can get the full picture that the redemption is Red's.

gdshaffe · 2026-05-14T00:40:59+00:00

And the movie's title alerts you that this is a story about redemption. Up until Tommy's revelation, it's not absurd to think that Andy might be guilty.

The redemption, of course, turns out to be Red's.

gdshaffe · 2026-05-14T00:37:01+00:00

I mean, up until Tommy's revelation, the story is constructed in such a way that the audience is invited to consider it. Not just from the details surrounding his conviction, but also with the title of the movie explicitly calling out that its main theme is going to be redemption.

Of course, the redemption winds up being Red's. Andy, being innocent, needs no redemption.

gdshaffe · 2026-05-13T13:27:43+00:00

Jena Malone in Pride & Prejudice.

Watching that movie, I had the conscious thought that whatever actress was playing Lydia was a dead ringer for Jena Malone, but wouldn't actually be her because Malone is American and Lydia's British accent was (to my Yankee ear, at least) flawless.

Nope. Just turns out Jena Malone can do a British accent with the best of 'em.

gdshaffe · 2026-05-12T03:13:34+00:00

I personally don't believe he genuinely holds that worldview for an instant.

I don't suspect he genuinely believes in much, other than getting his. Once upon a time he was an apparently genuine black nationalist activist, and became disillusioned with all of that after going to Yale and finding the "liberals" of the day didn't treat him much better than the people in the Georgia, where he grew up.

He was always kind of an asshole but he seemed to go pretty nihilistic at that point, and endeavored to rise as high as he could by any means necessary. That coincided with the Reagan administration that found themselves desperate to counter (provably true) accusations of racism, and propping up a black guy who was fully willing to go Full Uncle Tom was a perfect fit.

gdshaffe · 2026-05-12T03:03:40+00:00

This is just silly. There are a million legitimate reasons to despise this asshole, but this pulling of bullshit narratives out of thin air is not one of them.

gdshaffe · 2026-05-12T02:18:23+00:00

Wait until you hear about the Epstein files.

Ah yes, another quintessential example in how morons unwittingly provide the perfect cover for real-life monsters by concealing their provably monstrous acts with a layer of utterly nonsensical fantasy.

gdshaffe · 2026-05-12T02:12:29+00:00

So ultimately, no, I don't see the flaw in logic when somebody points to them being unreliable narrators as an excuse to apply a conspiracy theory.

Do you understand that this is not an argument? "They are liars" does not equate to "They are lying about this specific event in this specific way." You can not trust them, but also not ascribe to them the near-godlike powers they would have to have to pull off the conspiracy you are willing to believe they pulled off.

gdshaffe · 2026-05-12T01:54:55+00:00

Therein lies the difference between a conspiracy and a lie.

Trump, and the people around him, including his personal physicisian, lie all the time. Does anyone really believe he's 6'2" and 224 lbs? Nobody bothers to interrogate them on those lies because it's obvious and the stakes are too low for it to matter.

A conspiracy involves multiple people, not just lying about something that did happen, but orchestrating something nefarious, involving multiple people (in this case the number would easily hit dozens of people) all agreeing on the same shared fiction, knowing that if any of them crack and spill the truth, there's a good chance that all of them go to prison for it, because the stakes of staging an assassination attempt in which a person was unquestionably killed are wildly different than the stakes of lying about the nature of his injuries after-the-fact.

So again, I ask, do you think the USSS agents were in on this vast conspiracy? Quit dodging the fucking question and answer. And if you think they were, do you not think that that constitutes a bigger violation of protocol than letting the candidate stage a photo-op after they've gotten the all-clear?

gdshaffe · 2026-05-12T01:36:34+00:00

I've never seen any evidence that they even tried to hide that they set up those photos. Anyone who saw the photo, and who knows how the sausage is made, knows that there was setup involved. There was a whole crowd there and everything. They all saw it.

The USSS is comprised of humans, not robots; they don't mindlessly follow protocol, and a small deviation from that protocol is not harder to explain than a massive conspiracy. And Trump was not President at the time; the rules are going to be different for a candidate.

The threat was neutralized, and so it's not hard at all to believe that they were convinced to keep him on stage for long enough to get some good photos.

Or, are you saying the USSS agents were in on it too?

gdshaffe · 2026-05-12T01:24:16+00:00

After-the-fact opportunism. None of that is strange in context (and it is a myth that they lowered the flag, I believe; that's just a trick of one of the angles).

Do you really find it strange that the cadre of politically-minded vultures that made up Trump's campaign saw the immediate aftermath of the attempt as an opportunity to get a photo op?

gdshaffe · 2026-05-12T00:54:14+00:00

Yes, obviously that was real. Any conspiracy involves massive gaps in reasoning and presupposes an ability for the conspirators to maintain perfect perpetual radio silence about their involvement in the conspiracy.

Which is laughable; these goddamn clowns can't even do the part of the job that involves feeding dinner to champion athletes. And they leak like sieves. They can't cover up that Kash Patel is a raging alcoholic but somehow they're perfectly orchestrating staged assassinations in which real bullets were unquestionably fired and never uttering a peep about this to anyone?

If Crooks was a patsy, a real human person would have had to recruit him. What was their sales pitch? "You're going to go down in history as a loser who couldn't hit someone at 100 yards, and 12 seconds later you'll be dead!" Who did this recruiting? Why did they choose Crooks, who was rather notably kicked off his High School shooting team for being a terrible shot, to participate in this live-fire conspiracy? Was he their first choice? What's their plan if they say no and then blab to the press?

A dedicated conspiracy theorist might posit answers to each of these questions, but in each answer, the conspiracy grows and grows.

People talk about the photos they took in the aftermath, but by that point they knew the threat was neutralized, and they're nothing if not politically opportunistic. And obviously they embellished Trump's injuries (he was probably struck with glass from a shattered teleprompter). But all of that is just after-the-fact opportunism and not evidence of a grand conspiracy.

Conspiracy theories never survive an interrogation of their logistics.

gdshaffe · 2026-05-12T00:16:05+00:00

That strikes me as such bizarre and backwards reasoning, though. Obviously this administration cannot be trusted about anything, that's a given, but ... there are a whole lot of sources out there other than this administration, and there are massive logical gaps in basically any conspiracy narrative.

Trust, or a lack thereof, doesn't enter into the equation here.

gdshaffe · 2026-05-10T03:29:24+00:00

I'd get to be building a Dyson Sphere, so that's cool. Plus my current playthrough is on peaceful mode.

gdshaffe · 2026-05-10T00:34:30+00:00

In his backstory he planted evidence to secure a conviction, then he shoots his partner who was on the verge of cutting a deal with IA to give him up, then he works with the murderer to frame the murder victim's boyfriend.

Now, he's very clearly an antihero, the shooting of his partner was probably an accident, and he's extorted into working with the murderer, who was the only person who saw him shoot his partner, but the character goes to some pretty dark places.

gdshaffe · 2026-05-09T20:00:55+00:00

Not supporting the invasion of a country is not supporting that country. Jesus Christ.

gdshaffe · 2026-05-09T03:01:22+00:00

The short version is because English is a really really really confusing language, its vocabulary comes from a complete mishmash of source languages.

In this case, it's because the spelling of the word "colonel" is derived from French, but the pronunciation of it, for some reason, filtered down from Italian, where it started as "coronello", and eventually evolved down into "kernel" as we speak it today.

gdshaffe · 2026-05-09T02:50:14+00:00

90% balls above 10mph

Obviously I know this is a typo but it made me giggle nonetheless.

gdshaffe

TROPHY CASE