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Our Nut-Job Litmus Tests

My husband's great grandad ran a masonic lodge somewhere in London, then Kent. in late Victorian/Edwardian times. A few years ago, his grand-daughter (a step relative as my husband descends from a first marriage, this lady from a second) gave my husband this big tin box - as she has no kids to leave it to. The box is full of masonic paraphernalia and paperwork.

I keep meaning to scan and photo it all and put it out there. Strange as it may sound, I've never got round to actually sitting down with it and going through it all but had a quick look a few years back and the most striking thing, to me, was a solid gold pentacle. I had no idea pentacles were a thing in the masons.
 
Self-appointed experts who "analyse" video and photographs of events in order to prove they are hoaxes and only succeed in showing how little they know about photography and how cameras work.
 
That's more incompetence than nutjobbery.
 
Oooh, we NEED to see that pentacle!
escargot, I will take a crap phone photo of it when I get round to looking through the box. But I keep thinking I should fix my printer so I can scan all the documents - IIRC it's mainly paperwork. This lovely lady found out my husband is into genealogy, and so thought he was the best person to have the box but then we've done nothing with it.
 
escargot, I will take a crap phone photo of it when I get round to looking through the box. But I keep thinking I should fix my printer so I can scan all the documents - IIRC it's mainly paperwork. This lovely lady found out my husband is into genealogy, and so thought he was the best person to have the box but then we've done nothing with it.
GITM, have you got an Android phone? The Google Drive app will convert photos taken by your phone camera directly into scans - you can probably guess where it saves them. I use it all the time for receipts and such.
 
When all else fails, send down the thereoeumetical question, "What's the difference between a dream and a joke?". Sorts the cream from the pre-cum.
 
GITM, have you got an Android phone? The Google Drive app will convert photos taken by your phone camera directly into scans - you can probably guess where it saves them. I use it all the time for receipts and such.
Yes, I have an android. I didn't realise that and use Google Drive a lot! Thanks for that info, very helpful.
 
I'm going to have to add another item to my crank criteria:
Constantly referring to those who disagree with their ideas as either "disinfomation agents" or "naive".

The disinformation agent accusation may be the more obvious sign, but the naive thing only clicked today. I was trying to research why there is the idea that the illuminati/other secret society must signal their nefarious deeds to the public, and the word naive must have come up several dozen times. I got sick of seeing it,TBH. Usually it was in the context of the writer leaping through some incredible mental gymnastics, then insisting that those who didn't accept these ideas were naive (or, of course, disinformation agents).

There seemed to be no room for simply disagreeing with their argument.

Interestingly, I used to hear the accusation of "naive" thrown around a lot by certain types of Fundamentalist Christians in the town where I used to live, specifically the end-timers who would go around town preaching about their visions and so on. They didn't use the term disinformation agent though - the equivalent was to say that such a person was under the control of Satan.

At any rate, this is going on my red flag list from now on.
 
Use of the term "sheeple".

All of the world's ills are down to a Zionist/Jewish conspiracy (this is a helpful way of identifying nutjobs on the far left and right).

9/11 truthers who claim that no planes were even involved (it was an illusion projected by top secret military hardware).

People who, whenever even mild scepticism is expressed about their favourite conspiracy, take this as further proof of how far the conspiracy goes and who is in on it.
 
When all else fails, send down the thereoeumetical question, "What's the difference between a dream and a joke?". Sorts the cream from the pre-cum.

My answer: in a joke, something other than me is the punchline!
 
Using the word sheeple is more the sign of an asshole.
 
Using the word sheeple is more the sign of an asshole.
It does appear to be part of a specialised vocabulary that denotes membership of a small élite group who alone know the REAL truth.... which in itself is a litmus test for detecting the presence of people to keep a healthy distance from. Members of fringe religious denominations use this word too, but they pronounce it as "unsaved".
 
I find the "Chemtrails" people are an interesting sub-group to study. It looks as if they've woven whole cloth from a few stray threads - a whole conspiracy theory based on not very much at all, or a fallacious interpretation of perceived phenomena. Firstly, I can't help thinking there are easier, cheaper, less elaborate and more effective methods of mind-control and behavioural modification available to any malevolent people who would obtain benefit from reprogramming our minds. Look at News International/SKY/FOX-TV, for instance. Two; most of us know next to bugger all about what goes on in the sky. This includes a lot of meteorologists. If pushed, I could put names to maybe three different types of cloud before I have to go and look it up. Three: of course there's a lot more activity going on up there than there was fifty or sixty years ago. In 1945 there were only a handful of jet aircraft and the effective ceiling for any sort of plane was around thirty thousand feet with only a specialised handful able to get any higher. So contrails - as opposed to "chemtrails" - are a fairly recent phenomena dating from the first high-altitude bombers in the 1940's. Very hot engines at twenty-five thousand feet putting out an exhaust WILL create vapour trails in the sky. As the number of planes up there exponentially increased, then of course there are going to be a hell of a lot more contrails up there. And for all I know that amount of jet engine exhaust residue - which only really has one direction to go in - might have long-lasting effects on people down here. But to say it's being done deliberately, as opposed to it being just incidental background pollution, is stretching things.

That's not to say it's never been attempted - look at attempts to seed clouds and force rain to happen where it's needed - and I wouldn't put it past certain government agencies to conduct feasiblilty studies. (and then to decide it's inefficient and fuctionally useless). After all, if any war came to this, air-delivery from above would be used to spread chemical weapons (Agent Orange in Vietnam). I just think to allege it happens on the claimed vast scale beggars belief. It'd be horrendously expensive, you'd need a whole secret infrastructure depending on absolute secrecy (whistle-blowers? Credible ones?) to make the stuff and fit the planes, and it sounds incredibly inefficient as a delivery system - how much of it would be wasted on seas, deserts and uninhabited areas? And why haven't aviation engineers working on maintaining civil planes broken silence, and reported on the strange equipment secretly fitted to civilian airliners - which must be useless dead weight adding to their running costs? (What surcharge would Ryanair put on the chemtrail delivery systems fittted to its fleet?)

The more you try to anayse it, the more the chimera of "chemtrails" vanishes. Yet enough otherwise rational people still believe and cannot be shaken from their belief. This in itself is an interesting Fortean study - what makes them predisposed to believe?
 
Actually, the 'chemtrail conspiracists' think the way they do because back in the 60s, the UK military actually did test spraying of some kind of chemical or biological agent over Norfolk. There is also reason to believe that similar tests were carried out in the US.
So, given that foundation, a certain amount of paranoia is justified. But yes, now it has gone too far - it has reached the point of 'crazy'.
 
In 1945 there were only a handful of jet aircraft and the effective ceiling for any sort of plane was around thirty thousand feet with only a specialised handful able to get any higher. So contrails - as opposed to "chemtrails" - are a fairly recent phenomena dating from the first high-altitude bombers in the 1940's. Very hot engines at twenty-five thousand feet putting out an exhaust WILL create vapour trails in the sky. As the number of planes up there exponentially increased, then of course there are going to be a hell of a lot more contrails up there.

Actually, contrails were often seen during the Battle of Britain, early in WWII. Sometimes the sky was thick with them. An interweb search will turn up dozens of photos, some of which are also used here:

http://contrailscience.com/fightercontrails-over-kent-1941/
 
That's interesting. I wonder if people on the ground in Kent and London wondered if this was some sort of Nazi plot to spread poison from the sky, or perhaps they had more immediate things to worry about!
 
Paul Nash - excellent stuff.
 
Contemporary art. Battle of Britain. Paul Nash.

Worth a look. Unfortunately this site is image link hostile.
So...I'm not sure what that has to do with nutjobs.
 
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