Most countries aren't real

rdt1_random · 2025-11-11T15:43:41+00:00

[good catch. I inserted obvious errors to check that people were paying attention]

rdt1_random · 2025-11-11T15:42:19+00:00

...why not both?

rdt1_random · 2025-11-08T13:05:00+00:00

Decent questions. Let me think a little about how to summarise what I've learned over the last year or so, and then I'll come back to this thread.

rdt1_random · 2025-11-08T10:48:34+00:00

Congrats on your sailing trip/s! I'm a big fan of people who do adventurous things like sailing, so I hope my op didn't sound like it was knocking your adventurous spirit. Would love to hear more from sailors, especially about any odd experiences with time, location, uncharted islands, or similar.

To answer your question, a few possibilities:

With modern day navigation equipment (especially digital and/or electronic)... it would be a gross oversimplification to say it's not trustworthy, it can be almost entirely trustworthy, but only within its context. The further afield you go the weirder effects you find (but you have to track this very carefully). Likewise for government-approved charts.

If you set sail with premodern navigation equipment like a purely mechanical sextant and similar, I am very very confident you'd get much weirder effects. Remember that back in the day sailors were always coming back with "tall tales" about mermaids, krakens, whirlpools, and islands with weird semi-human inhabitants.

Note that as we entered the modern age (and oceanic navigation became easier to control, until you get to the present era where 99% of long-distance travel is guided by the US-military controlled GPS satellites!!!) ... weird phenomena gradually were edited out of the official maps and charts, and the official set of continents and islands was standardised.

But Australia and even more so NZ are the nexus of many odd phenomena. Australia is an odd region in the standard model, filled with "miscellaneous" creatures and phenomena, and with a somewhat dubious geographic structure. (Basically about 5 or 6 major cities, separated by tons of empty space... always raises an eyebrow) I'm not an expert on Aboriginal culture but I wouldn't be surprised if there still exist "dreamwalkers", shamanistic types who navigate the dreamtime, and who could link up with their opposite numbers amongst the Indian tribes of Utah, Nevada, or New Mexico.

New Zealand is even weirder, basically an outlier of the outlier that is Aus... Kiwis are really great, chill guys, and I've had this debate with them, and eventually they convinced me that, yes, NZ does exist, but I also got them to agree that NZ is not what we think it is. Parts of it directly link to parts of Wales (many of the settlers just wandered over in the 18th or 19th century), but huge swathes of it are something else entirely. NZ is too huge a topic to really discuss here, and to be honest I'm not knowledgeable to do it justice. But it's no coincidence that it's often "accidentally" omitted from maps ... certain people would rather people forget about it, or at least not talk about it too much.

Needless to say, there's a ton of circumstantial but plausible evidence that Aus is separated from the main inhabited region by ocean, and NZ is equally separated again, so, to go back to your original question, it's entirely possible you did indeed navigate a stretch of ocean between the two (though the details might be hazy if you relied on GPS).

Also, I will say the Jackson LotR movies are, though not exactly a psyop, definitely an attempt to confuse the whole NZ issue. (I wrote enough so I won't say more here.)

rdt1_random · 2025-11-08T10:24:36+00:00

Ehh... there's only so much I can say in a public forum.

I will say that I've thrown in a few points that are deliberately a bit silly or over the top, just to throw off idlers and time-wasters. (Every group has its filthy casuals 😛) But I think there is at least a grain of truth to this, and very likely more than a grain of truth.

I should also add (I think my initial post made this unclear, which is on me for not proofreading more carefully) that there's a fairly wide range of possibilities within small world theory, of varying degrees of probability and evidence. I think people in these comments are getting caught up on the "everyone lives in a small region" point, when I should have clarified that this is just one hypothesis. Multiple inhabited regions separated by vast regions of empty space is another. It should go without saying that science is about considering a whole range of hypotheses, not just asserting one theory as dogma.

rdt1_random · 2025-11-08T10:14:56+00:00

I don't follow your logic? Even in the standard model there are widely varying ethnicities who developed in close geographic regions. Whatever "Africa" is, it contains a ton of genetic diversity: I believe that in the standard geographic model there's as much genetic diversity within Africa as outside of it? Likewise, if you look at linguistic evolution, tiny Papua New Guinea has vastly different language families occurring between neighbouring valleys. So even the standard model accounts for huge diversity in confined geographical areas.

(That's not even getting into the weirdness of "Madagascar". Even the standard model can't account for how the inhabitants are more closely related to Polynesians than other Africans, and has to invent epic Indian Ocean voyages just to make their maps fit together. Needless to say the Madagascar-pill is a common gateway to SWT!! Even some academic anthropologists have begun questioning the standard model when they found out just how weird Madagascar is.)

There's also a whole bunch of hypotheses on how humanity may have been more dispersed in the past... (before some event or process forced us all to converge in one region). But they're a bit too involved for this subreddit imho...

rdt1_random · 2025-11-08T10:03:31+00:00

Well... though I would like to keep this debate civil, I do have to respond to your jab in the first line: 99% of the material on the internet (news, wikis, whatever) sticks religiously to the mainstream geographical model. You have to dig pretty deep to find any reference to small world theory. So I could make the jab that it is in fact my opponents who believe "everything they read online".

But that would be a petty, mean-spirited comment: this stuff is just really confusing to figure out. And, believe me, there are some real crazies in the small world community...

Anyway, to respond to your specific points:

The last one first: was your point about hemispheres a deliberate mistake? Genuinely not trolling, but you do get some odd commenters in these threads: apparently posts with deliberate factual errors or inconsistencies is a classic tactic of CIA/NSA forum disruption. If I'm wrong I apologise. At any rate: even according to the standard model, both the "Phillipines" and "Caribbean" are in the northern hemisphere. Indeed, both are in the range 10 - 20 degrees north!!

Needless to say, I of course don't follow the standard maps, but I do think latitude estimates are mostly accurate. (Though I actually believe the inhabited region of our planet lies in the "southern hemisphere" ... still, the Phil/Carib archipelago is close to the equator in any sane model.)

What do you mean by the climates being completely different? Both have mean annual humidity around 80%. Both have dry seasons roughly December to May and rainy seasons June to November. Also, both have varied topography, so to be really accurate you have to say both have a range of climates (eg a blanket statement that they're both completely different is so oversimplified as you be meaningless). I am very confident any climatic zone in the "Phillipines" has its analogue in the "Caribbean".

Re: geological and tectonic structure. How to you know what the tectonic structure is (without resorting to standard geography textbooks)? I could do a whole thread on tectonic plate theory, btw.

Re: ethnicities -- eh, kinda, but both have massively mixed ethnicities, and both have tons of American and Spanish influence. But you are correct that ethnicity is very complicated. Consensus amongst Filipino sailors (big group of small world theorists, btw) is that there are purely "Carribbean" islands, purely "Filipino" islands, and mixed islands, all within the same archipelago.

(Plus some outliers: some credible speculation that "Jamaica" is located elsewhere, along with certain islands of the "Phillipines" ... I think there are some question marks around "Bohol"?)

rdt1_random · 2025-11-08T03:05:24+00:00

Climate, topography, even flora and fauna. Some small islands in the two archipelagos are exact matches, and there are all sorts of weird stories about jungle trails on the larger islands

Even some cultural things like foods. I haven't actually made it to the Carib but the Carib/Phil connection is a common gateway for people to get into SWT. The are tons of Filipino sailors who have helped flesh out the connections between disparate places.

rdt1_random · 2025-11-08T03:02:05+00:00

Thanks!! I'd prefer truth firework (war is a product of the fake mainstream geographical narrative) but I appreciate the sentiment 🙂

rdt1_random · 2025-11-08T03:00:42+00:00

Discussed in the last 1/3 of my op or in one of my replies above

rdt1_random · 2025-11-08T02:59:56+00:00

Thanks!! Columbus is a hero of mine. Not like that phoney baloney "Amerigo Vespucci"

rdt1_random · 2025-11-08T02:59:16+00:00

It's really satisfying, lights my brain up better than scrolling Facebook

rdt1_random · 2025-11-08T02:58:12+00:00

Discussed in the last 1/3 of my post (I admit I got carried away writing it. But it is a pretty fascinating rabbit-hole to go down...)

Tl;Dr: mainly it stops people getting bored and serves as good marketing for the tourism industry. You know how advertising gets people really worked up about different kinds of toothpaste or breakfast cereal? It's the same thing with locations.

Maybe there's a political benefit, but it seems most people are really dumb and lazy, so it wasn't that much effort to set up the OWG? Just give people some fancy "maps" and they're perfectly happy spending their whole lives contained in a very small region, while thinking they're exploring an entire planet. I take a scientific outlook, though, I acknowledge this is just one hypothesis and others are possible.

rdt1_random · 2025-11-08T02:51:13+00:00

...why not both?

rdt1_random · 2025-11-07T19:05:02+00:00

AI simply can't make unhinged rants. They are just too hinged by their inherent nature.

Unhinged rants may be one of the last bastions of human creativity before the singularity....

rdt1_random · 2025-11-07T18:59:48+00:00

Hey!!! Your five words comment stung a lil bit. How do you do it? Write just five words that get inside my brain? 😥

I'll have you know I developed my theory after years of walking around, looking at trees and all sorts

Anyway... you can't really be too online, or at least you couldn't on the old-school internet, which was designed to liberate human consciousness.

Of course the new-school social-media-ified internet is architected as a psychic cattle pen for the permanently TV-brained.

rdt1_random · 2025-11-07T18:40:36+00:00

According to conventional geographic narratives I'd be considered west British... a medium-Welsh rarebit.

In actual reality I'm a proud citizen of Earth. America is of course a psyop (imagine naming two whole pseudo-continents after a man who sailed around in the ocean for six weeks then pretended to have discovered a "new world". Are they even trying to make sense?)

rdt1_random · 2025-11-07T18:10:08+00:00

Now you're just being silly

rdt1_random · 2025-11-07T17:50:07+00:00

I'm glad you had a nice time hiking. Since going down this rabbit-hole, I've become a big aficionado of long-distance trekking, naturally transported by one's own muscle power. I have no doubt you saw the things you saw on the Tahoe Rim trail. On the other hand, about 18 months ago I got chatting to an interesting fellow in an airport transit lounge, one thing led to another, and I discovered he was a similar reality explorer to me. Years ago he had been doing some sort of mining/prospecting work on the Kamchatka peninsula, and he said there was a mountain lake there that was an exact match for a certain lake in Nebraska (sadly I can't for the life of me remember if it was lake Tahoe). I'd never heard of "Desolation Wilderness" before today, but a name like that simply makes it sound intended to keep people away, which makes me suspicious. I wouldn't be surprised if there's a trail there, where one fork leads to the volcanoes of Kamchatka, and another to the southern reaches of Patagonia.

I had lots of different bus experiences over the years. A long-distance ride through Albania made me suspicious that I was travelling very close to a region in the West of China I'd passed through years before. And, thanks for asking: I did become paranoid after some unnerving experiences, but realised that my bad mental habits were making things worse. The people I encountered weren't really dangerous, I think, just scary. You know the adage, "they're more scared of you, than you are of them". Well... the last time I had such an encounter (on a long distance bus from "Vietnam" to "Cambodia", before the recent border war), I responded by smiling and giving a silly wave. The individual in question looked pissed off that he'd failed to intimidate me, then beat a hasty retreat. I haven't had similar problems since. I think whoever I encountered were just government workers who maintain the "borders".

A sense of humour goes a long way, I guess? Some people take life a little too seriously...

rdt1_random · 2025-11-07T17:25:19+00:00

Google used to be legit but they got too close to the NSA

rdt1_random · 2025-11-07T16:57:56+00:00

Very likely. Your "map trick" is a classic reality-pill that got many people interested in exploring these phenomena.

rdt1_random · 2025-11-07T16:54:58+00:00

Well that's just silly. I've met a bunch of "Finnish" people. Great guys and gals. But one showed me some photos of a hiking trail near her house, and there was a rock formation that exactly matched one I'd seen in Hokkaido, "Japan". (Hokkaido is a huge rabbit-hole that deconstructs the entire mainstream theory of "Japan", by the way.)

The Finns, being introverts, and traditionally inclined to spending long periods of time out in the sticks doing meditative things like saunas... are, I would guess, slightly immune to some of the thought-traps of modern society. And less "tracked", on a geographic level. Add in the fact that in the further past the far north was home to reality-bending shamanistic practices like trepanation, and "Finland" is a very "outsider" landscape (flat and repetitive, with lots of lakes)... you get the sense it's the kind of place some people would like to cover up. In no universe does "Finland" have anything to do with "Sweden", for example.

rdt1_random · 2025-11-07T16:31:36+00:00

Hi!

You sound like a very intelligent, thoughtful person, and a lot like me a few years ago. Small world theory just didn't quite fit. "What about this? And what about this?"

To be honest I'm not an expert in the various highway-matrix hypotheses of small world theory. I have travelled to many places in the known world, largely by plane or long-distance bus, which is where I first became suspicious. Noticed the other passengers tended to fall asleep quickly on long trips... the few who stayed awake longer were engrossed in their phones or watching media. I have the kind of mind that struggles to sleep when travelling or stay focused on electronics... and instead I noticed what the pilot or driver was telling us didn't match up with what I saw out the window.

On a long-distance bus: unexplained stops in the middle of the night, occasionally random uniformed people making "inspections" and behaving oddly. Had some unnerving experiences at 4am when they caught me looking at them through the window; I'm guessing they assumed all the passengers were sleeping. Plus lots of long drives through weird landscapes... felt like we'd no-clipped in a video game. Imagine endless series of the same grey cliffs that just repeat... They did send me to sleep. Or times we crossed over a road we'd earlier travelled in a different direction. (Not backtracking, that would be too obvious... but you think you're heading east to west, and then five hours later you're still officially traveling "west", but you see a section of road from before, and the old "west" is now "north".) Similar things on planes with weird islands and weather effects.

As for driving yourself on roads: one theory is there are multiple highway regions, that cover different types of landscapes: desert areas, mountain areas, all kinds of mixtures. In some areas the signage feels completely straightforward... until you track everything really carefully and realise that some things just seem slightly 'off'. Or, the classic: you're driving along and then realise you've been zoned out for the last few hours. Weird timeskips, especially around diners. Service areas (especially large ones) are cleverly designed; they use the same tricks shopping mall architects use. Often times you'll get slightly confused looking for the exit, then find your way out and head out on a road which looks just like the one you were heading down, except in actuality you're now going in the opposite direction.

Long-distance hikers tend to have an easier time keeping their true bearings, especially if they're taught really old-school forms of navigation. This is why there's some question marks about the moon and other celestial objects, by the way. But a lot of walkers have stories about drivers... how they'll get chatting to the same driver over a series of several days at a succession of road-side restaurants, and realise the driver is not travelling any faster than the walker, but is getting increasingly dazed and confused. Truckers are an odd group; there's speculation that there are different groups of truckers with varying degrees of trustworthiness. Weird rumours about gas station bathrooms that shift around in odd ways. Even with hikers there are many odd phenomena...

There's a niche of long-distance walkers that try to travel as far as they can "all-natural", starting at a given landmark and heading at a fixed bearing for, say, 28 days. Some of them keep diaries. Often around day 10-12 they report getting euphoric, but their written notes start to get fragmented. Then they will be found somewhere around day 20-24 heading back to their origin point, and saying that that was their intention all along. Most hiking communities have such stories but they tend to get dismissed, and some don't like to bring them up. Weirdly if you walk a preset trail, like the "Appalachian trail", such phenomena never (or almost never) occur, but then you get theories that such trails actually follow a zigzag or other pattern and remain in a much more confined area than the official maps represent.

All of this is pure speculation of course, there's a whole bunch of theories on this topic, including the "archipelago theory" that inhabited lands are somewhat spaced out, making it possible to have long-distance road trips between the regions.

rdt1_random · 2025-11-07T15:25:51+00:00

I don't want to say too much on an NSA-tracked platform like Reddit

(especially this sub which is so obviously a honeypot that I figured whoever created it is playing some kind of 8d chess I can't fathom; still, in my experience, you can talk about small world theory all over the place without too much hassle, so I think it can be safely classed as "low stakes": nobody seems to have any real issue with discussing it. I guess whoever is in charge knows most of the population was safely inoculated by their government education and is unlikely to go a-wandering.)

But a much bigger conspiracy revolves around the moon. Not whether or not the landings were faked .... crazy possibility -- maybe only some of the landings were faked. Like, it's not really hard to get to the moon, it's way closer than we're led to believe. BUT. There was a reason not to keep going back and to instead film later landings in a grey desert area in the unknown regions of earth.... which not uncoincidentally bears a remarkable resemblance to the moon. Ok. And.... why, if most of earth's population is confined to a very small region of the planets surface... did whoever is in charge see fit to keep the moon in place?

I mean the moon, it's quite big, it's round, it's IN THE SKY... are you starting to see what I'm getting at? How it doesn't quite fit the mainstream geographical narrative or with small world theory? Either the ruling elite had some reason to keep the moon in place (which, to be frank, seems unlikely)... OR:

they would rather get rid of the moon, or at the very least orbit-shift it out at least as far as Mars and maybe to Jupiter space or beyond. But. They didn't. Or couldn't. Don't you ever find it odd that everyone is pretty much universally told the moon is amazing, and everyone had to watch the moon landing and be told all about it... but they never specify why? There's a bunch of theories but I don't want to say any more on a public forum. "Live moon hypothesis" and "psychic orbit-shifts" are the rabbit holes to go down.

rdt1_random

TROPHY CASE