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What is the most unhinged conspiracy theory? (lemm.ee)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Flat Earth.

It’s not the most immediately shocking, not the most colorful and dramatic, but there are two factors where no other conspiracy theory can compete:

It is so easily falsifiable that basically more people would have to be in on the conspiracy than not.
Nobody would stand to gain anything from the lie.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Yeah, at least with something like the fake moon landing conspiracy, there is a clear motive for it. Like the USA and USSR both had very strong propaganda machines and really strong incentives for hitting the next space race milestone.

The tech was barely advanced enough to perform the functions necessary to complete the mission, everything was pushed to its absolute limits to successfully perform.

But the flat earth thing has none of that. The tech necessary to demonstrate the curvature of the earth existed thousands of years ago and in fact was believed pretty widely by even ancient peoples.

There exists no motive, no incentives, and requires believing that basically all of known physics is completely wrong despite thousands of obvious counter-examples.

Just stupid.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago

If the US had fixed the moon landing, the USSR would have been all over it. There's no way they would have let that slide. One option, however, is that the US and USSR were working together in secret, and the whole space race was faked. The USSR got all the major early contributions and exchange for letting the US claim the honor of the moon landing. (This also requires disregarding every other space program, but at least there's internal consistency)