Your mind turns off at the words “conspiracy theory” but this is based in fact. There has been actual historical fact of weather warfare, weather modification is happening right now. It’s not just speculation…
[citation needed]
eh, watch the video, will you.
I watched the first minute of it. It was enough to satisfy me that I wouldn’t get anything useful from it.
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No, my mind turns at the word “chemtrails”, and at the invocation of argument ad populum (and, really, if you’re going to shoot for argument ad populum, you should really look for something that’s more popular than videos of people lighting their farts on fire).
The presenter’s a crackpot. He presents no actual evidence, just video of condensation trails that he claims are not condensation trails. He has photographs of “a whole lot of planes with a whole lot of tanks with a whole lot of something”. That something? Water. Those tanks are ballast tanks, used to simulate flying conditions with a full complement of passengers and crew.
One of the images he has zooms in on a US patent number, as if that’s significant and scary, but here’s the funny thing about patent numbers: you can look them up.
Aerial delivery system
A method and apparatus for aerial fire suppression utilizing a potable fire retardant chemical dispensing system, readily adaptable, without extensive aircraft modification, to various makes of aircraft, for dispensing current types of forest and range fire fighting chemicals. The aerial delivery system is self contained and reusable. It enables cargo/utility aircraft to carry and dump a load, under control. The aerial delivery system is capable of attachment at the wing box, pressurized delivery from the nozzles, and nozzles directed straight downward.
Frankly, between the claiming that contrails aren’t contrail because-I-say-so, suggesting that that easily searchable patents are somehow nefarious, and that tanks of water are actually dangerous chemicals, that’s three strikes, and I’m barely 3 minutes into the video.
I don’t know what you think “solid evidence” is, but, as an active research scientist I feel compelled to inform you that this? This isn’t it.
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The problem is that you’re barely three minutes into the video. The whole thing is more than an hour. So who knows if he gives more solid evidence. The part you watched was the introduction, where he is going to develop on his points further. You know… It’s called structuring a presentation.
So the rules of those that were in the Lounge apply, one of which was “No political discussions”.
The definition of conspiracy, is an act by a group to commit something illegal. Politics consists of groups, so this topic applies to that rule and will probably be locked or even deleted.
@lolsparta4, just one basic thing to keep in mind. This conspiracy theory admits that the conspirators are also spraying themselves. Such a basic thing should be comprehended just like the ‘Staged moon landing’ conspiracy, which practically states that USA fooled USSR or USSR were willing to keep it a secret and lose the space race.
I would hope that this thread is locked for a completely different reason. There are many, many different ways to define “politics”, and if you want to get down to the nitty gritty, every action between two individuals is political in some nature.
The lack of interaction between two individuals is also political in some nature.
The the sake of letting us all exist outside some quantum superposition of states, the definition of “politics” employed here needs to be a little more narrowly defined than “things that consist of groups” (we’re a group of fans of the development of INS’s games, after all).
The discussion of conspiracy theories usually ends up on the do-not-discuss list because conspiracy theory advocates do not bring up the topic in good faith. They’re not looking for a discussion, they’re looking to advertise.
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You can’t really say that the old rules apply if they’re not posted anywhere. How can new members follow rules that they’ve never seen?
As to the video, it makes me sad what rubbish people will believe 
You could look at contrails in one frame of mind and be fascinated at how water vapour behaves in our atmosphere and feel like you want to find out more about it, or you could see them as something you don’t understand that must be a threat.
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In many cases, conspiracy theroies are born of an individual’s delusion (that’s actually what delusional paranoïa is). The problem, then, is that however intelligent those persons are, they can simply not fathom that it may be false. For them, it is truth.
That’s why, when you directly confront them about how nonsensical it is, they will become angry and simply class you as against them. That’s the paranoïa bit there : you tend to divide the world between the “with us” and “against us” (and “too stupid to understand”). Which is not always a bad system, but you see the problem with simply telling them that what they know is he truth is, well, not.
This is how someone otherwise as smart as anyone can believe that (and that’s an actual example) the Government transplanted foetuses under her skin when she slept at a hotel during a professional trip.
This is also how brilliant, charismatic individuals can both believe strange, ridiculous things and be good enough to convince millions of it.
Of course, not everyone believing those is a delusional paranoid. After all, not only it is reassuring to know that there are Problems caused by The Bad Guys, it is also because we naturally prefer simpler answers, and conspiracy theories give (seemingly) simple ones.
And none of us should believe that we are immune. I could cite textbook cases of the above-mentioned charismatic delusional paranoid, but the first two I have in mind may not only turn the thing (even more) political, but actually have major followings in our demographics (with few believing both, amusingly)
The right reaction isn’t “most people I know are stupid” but the far less rewarding “then I am probably unknowingly believing some of those myself”, as you probably guessed. Sigh
So it is easy to mock them, sometimes with hilarous results. But we shouldn’t make the mistake that it’s stupidity from the authors, nor that we are above falling for those. Believe me, I learned it the hard way.
Obviously, this is not the only source. Some are created by dishonest persons for fun and/or profit, while others may be from people making genuire mistakes, and a surprising number of out-of-control hoaxes.
This point of culture was brought to you by the Armchair Psyciatrist, Psychologist and Sociologist Association.
And sometimes, there are indeed conspiracies, though they tend to be smaller, pettier and less competent (read : disappointing) than their fictional counterparts.
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It goes beyond that, but yes. One important aspect of typical conspiracy theories is that those delusions aren’t necessarily paranoid, but they’re delusions of grandeur. The delusions craft themselves in such a way that make the conspiracy believer feel special. That’s why so many conspiracy theories are built around “special knowledge”. By believing in the conspiracy, the theorist, usually with the help of an echo chamber, is brought to believe that they are either smarter than the average bear (which is why they managed to figure out the conspiracy/why they can see the “evidence” of the conspiracy so plainly, while it remains invisible to those people around them), or “chosen” (by the gods, by the aliens, by government operatives, by the CIA, by the Pentagon, by… Them!).
Conspiracy theories are also self-reinforcing, which helps to drive the delusional worldview, and which often makes those in the throws of a conspiracy theory frustratingly immune to evidence or reason. EVERYTHING related to the conspiracy reinforces the conspiracy. People are trying to show you that you’re wrong? It must be because you’ve gotten too close to something really big! People laugh at you? It’s because they’re trying to coerce you into silence! People ignore you? It’s because they don’t want to hear the truth!
Notice in the video in the OP, the presenter mentions that Al Gore is “distancing himself” from these government programs (that no one has admitted to existing). Gore is doing this now because the TRUTH IS ABOUT TO COME OUT! Conspiracy promoters shout this line until they’re blue in the face. They’re desperate to keep people listening, and they really have nothing further of substance to keep their audiences hanging around for. On some levels, we are, psychologically, a very simple species. One of the easiest ways to keep us hanging around is to catch our attention and get us to invest a tiny bit of it in something, and then promise that there is a payoff coming soon. Not NOW, but soon. If it’s NOW, they’ll get their reward, walk away, and forget all about it, or, worse, believe that the reward isn’t worth anything in the first place, as it didn’t cost them anything (this is, for instance, why moderately priced wine generally sells better than cheap wine; if it has no cost, it has no value). If it’s way down the line, no one will stick around that long (the cost is too high). But if it’s just over that hill, we’ll hang around and wait for it, or maybe we’ll climb up to the top of the hill.
What do you do when you don’t actually have that reward yet? “Oops, I’m sorry, I meant it was over the NEXT hill!” By this time, your audience is already one hill invested into this thing. They may as well climb the next one. Get them over enough hills, and suddenly they’re too deeply invested in this thing to back out.
The sure sign that you’re dealing with a charlatan, fraud, or someone who has gotten in over their heads and has promised something that they can’t actually deliver is that they’re constantly looking for, and trying to sell people on, signs that that reward they’ve been promising is soon to arrive.
This is the same basic psychological trick used in games like World of Warcraft, where quest chains promise you a reward of significance, but not until the 6th or 7th time they have you run off and beat up on some squirrels. It’s always a “oh, just one more thing, then you can have your shield of +1 vs sunburn”. The biggest difference, however, is that WoW and the like are able to eventually give you the reward, creating a Pavlovian response, while the conspiracy theorist can’t deliver. Eventually people lose interest, and either laugh it off, or move on to the next big fad in conspiracy theorizing.
You don’t have to look any further than the recent spat of biblical doomsday claims over the past few years, and how the number of people believing in them has fallen exponentially. There’s also Planet X (big in conspiracy circles 10 years ago), JFK, Princess Diana…
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Thing is, my time has a certain amount of value. This is why any decent paper starts out with an abstract, which outlines the key points of the argument (the tl;dr is at the beginning, yo). Same applies for presentations. If you can’t present at least one solid argument for your point and outline the rest in the first 1-3 minutes of your presentation then it’s unlikely to be worth the rest of the hour to finish watching. Particularly in the case of Youtube, you can give the video a fairly lengthy description where you can sell your case and include any citations with actual links! That kinda stuff makes it a hell of a lot easier to take a video seriously if it provides good and plentiful citations for any assertions it makes.
I didn’t get that in the first 3 minutes, and I got nothing from the description. It wasn’t worth my time. If you believe otherwise, give me links to specific points of interest in the video and links to sources that back up any assertions made in those segments not cited in the video itself.
That’s not much to ask if you actually want to persuade me that’s the real deal.
Personally, I think that’d be a dangerous proposition. I as mentioned, I found 3 instances of misleading or flat out factually wrong statements in those first 3 minutes. That’s enough for me to write off the presenter as unreliable. If you let people cherry pick bits and pieces of the video, you only get cultivated snapshots. Think of it like buying from an unrated seller on eBay: Yes, they’ve provided photographs, but they tell you nothing about whether the item you’re buying works, and you know nothing about the reputation of the seller.
Advertise?
A conspiracy theory?
this isn’t really a conspiracy theory. Weather modification exists around the world, Everyone has tactics to make it rain or drop temperatures. Just google weather modification. The problem is governments not being open enough about these and their consequences. I also feel there are factually wrong statements about chemtrails in the video. I mean, why don’t you fly up there in a plane and sample all the contrails? I also don’t even see contrails very often at all. I haven’t seen one in weeks now. And the whole thing about contrails and all that is pretty much bad speculation. It seems a waste of time and resources to me for a government to do anything of the sort. Also, concerning layout, yes, this video does not grab on to the viewer. The subject is interesting enough for most people, but keep in mind that this is not in standard documentary format. It is a filming of a presentation. In a presentation, people can’t really just leave as easily as in an online video. Now I just wish someone would make good documentaries of everything… maybe Vice.
But what’s your point?
Yes, governments can and have done weather modification, but it’s a very crude tool and the best known recent example of the Beijing Olympics only involved cloud seeding, causing rain to fall in a place other than the Birds Nest stadium.
However, if you really think there’s some conspiracy going on, by all means charter a private jet with scientific equipment and go contrail hunting. Let us know what you find.
I find the whole concept of trying to control the weather frankly as useful as trying to dig a tunnel under the Atlantic using nothing but your grandmother’s false teeth.
Sure, maybe there are ways to tempt local weather in certain directions. Science can do clever stuff. But nature has repeatedly reminded us throughout history that She Is Boss. It’s pointless. The weather will do what the weather wants to do and the best thing is for us to make sure we’ve made suitable contingencies for those events.
I’m not even going to go into whether I actually believe this stuff.
Getting flashbacks to when i was called a crackpot by a room of people for speaking about the NSA… after the snowden leaks were well into the 5th or 6th round of NSA denials then having to retract as more leaks were made public… Not because the idea chemtrail poisining is true, but because of the broad over generalizations of “conspiracy theorist” and etc im seeing in this thread.
Some people dont believe the very well documented truth behind the US-iraq war, for example. And of course people who were speaking out at the time were dismissed as conspiracy theorists, no better than the people who think our senators are actually lizards. Obviously there’s a lot of powerful people doing shit in secret to their own benifit, this shouldnt be surprising. You cant exactly peer review these things.
Watch those generalizations. Controlling the weather to some extent is an actual thing we do. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloud_seeding. Chemtails are something else entirely, though.
To … silly … in a BAD …way … can’t … watch … any … more…
Well, yes, I was asking why nobody would fly up in a helicopter and sample the contrails after the plane flew by to confirm their conspiracy.
Controlling the weather is useful. Sure nature is boss, but we can already do things like cloud seed and affect the atmosphere with our toxic pollution, lol.
eh what a stupid title.