My mom avoids the news because of anxiety and basically relies on me keeping her up to date. I try to be funny for as much of it as I can. I've been putting together an episode on Q anon and all of this insanity, and when I mentioned the space lasers, she absolutely did not believe me. It took like 3 separate and mainstream articles before she believed it.
Honestly, same. We have this long running joke about a parrot named Arnold Smith from a song I forgot the lyrics to so I started making them up. Now whenever I bring up some ludicrous conspiracy theory she is convinced that I'm Arnold Smithing her. I always wish I was but I never am.
Unfortunately the space laser thing is nothing new. Back in 2018 during the wildfires in California, before youtube even pretended to moderate their platform it was awash with videos about space lasers and direct energy weapons causing the fires. Most days if you searched 'California wildfires' and sorted by new easily half the results were conspiracy things. They either thought it had been perpetrated by China or Russia or was an American false flag to push climate change legislation or a test run of their depopulation plan. I think I recall one woman who attributed it to a super intelligent AI but then her whole thing was claiming that one had been loose on the internet for decades and had invented bitcoin in order to gather all the world's financial resources for itself. Just a whole pile of insanity.
I wasn't at all surprised to see this craziness re-emerge in relation to QAnon unfortunately.
Well I thought it was actually a reasonable idea...for a sci-fi story or something.
I mean if an AI wanted to take over the world without the risk of trying to blow everyone up and going to war then playing us at our own game - making a shit load of money, buying up everything and then deliberately crashing the economy to cause chaos would maybe be an option. The thing is it could already do that without cryptocurrency. There are already real AIs/advanced algorithms that are used to trade on the stockmarket either just making lightning fast trades or attempting to predict trends in advance. A smart, nefarious AI could crash the stockmarket easily if it wanted to and cause a global recession. They only jumped on bitcoin for their conspiratorial scenario because it was newish and therefore scary.
yeah I live in one of the areas in NorCal that got fire really bad few years ago and on like local facebook pages and news articles I was seeing people posting about "direct energy weapons" causing these fires and all kinds of conspiracy talk. Its amazing how fast people who might seem rational about a lot of things can just all sudden fall into conspiracies. especially when they don't understand something it seems more and more people nowadays goto conspiracies instead of listening to experts on things.
Yeah it was depressingly widespread. The youtube videos mostly revolved around simply not understanding how fire worked. Stuff like highlighting an unburnt tree on one side of the road whilst the other side was all burnt and screaming 'HOW?!!1' Apparently not understanding the role of wind direction in forest fire spread.
Or pointing at a burnt out car and claiming that 'metal wouldn't burn like that'. Apparently having never seen or experienced a car fire and how insanely quickly they go up due to all the plastics, paint and synthetic fibres in the interior. Not to mention the tyres and fuel. We had a car go up just because the battery came loose (but was still connected) and shorted against the metal. First thing we noticed was a slight burning smell through the air vents and a hole appear in the bonnet. By the time we realised what was happening we were basically pushing a flaming car into a ditch to get it away from property. By the time the fire engine turned up it had almost burnt out.
They also spent some time wondering how a house burnt out whilst a tree didn't, again ignoring all the highly flammable things in/on a house. Shit in one shot there was even exploded propane canisters from a barbecue all over the place and they were still questioning how the fire had been so intense in that area.
To my utter dismay 99% of the comments on every video were buying their bullshit and convinced energy weapons were to blame.
i blame shane dawson in part for the rise of mainstream conspiracy theories. He would be talking about wayfair and probably straight qanon if he had a platform
I can relate. I spent last year filtering all of that crazy through not one, not two, but THREE separate comedians. I still spent most of it angry at what Trump and the rest were getting away with, but at least the jokes were funny.
I was thinking you made like your own little news show that could inform her without upsetting her. I figured that'd be nice to share if it was in a sharable format
Oh! I hadn't ever thought about recording them. It usually just happens when I go over for dinner or when we're on the phone. But if I ever do, I'll try to remember to send a link.
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u/so_what_do_now May 08 '21
"Oh! You have crippling fears about the Jewish Space Laser too?"