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Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 23, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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What is the most enjoyable conspiracy / new age belief to hold? I don’t mean convincing or beneficial, but just pure fun. Like, if beliefs were games or desserts, which belief would you buy to enjoy for an overindulgent weekend?

(Inspired by the weird egyptian pyramid theory going around online)

I like the one where the Space Force are actually a secret cadre of Trump ultra-loyalists who's primary mission is to help carry out the big Day or Reckoning against the Bad People. This is actually a very specific and narrow version of the larger “any day now Hilary et al will be executed at gitmo” complex of conspiracy theories ala Real Raw News (https://realrawnews.com/) but hyper fixated on the Space Force being secret Trump commandos. Its died down a bit since Trump won; many of its principle concerns involved the Space Force finding proof that the 2020 election was stolen, and that somehow this proof was located on one of more satellites and that Space Force loyalists had secretly physically accessed these satellites in orbit and were about to blow the whole thing open, any day now.

There is also a predictable amount of overlap between the Space Force people and the UFO scene, which has itself been very active/excited for the last 8 years or so for a number of reasons.

edit - I also enjoy the "Everyone Famous is Actually Trans" one too mentioned down thread. There don't appear to be all that many people directly involved in this one, but they are very prolific and focused on it, and produce a lot of very entertaining infographics and other "evidence" that's easy to share and repost on twitter and social media, making it look bigger than it is.

Transvestigation or transpiracy is enjoyable because it's wildly out there while being basically harmless. The claim is that many celebrities are secretly transgender.

A prominent example is Candance Owen's 8 part video series arguing that Bridgette Macron, the french first lady, was born a man. It's amusing but desperately in need of a shorter summary.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=FDOnxpViQxY&list=PLPW2eH9z9CUvJ0Iiv9AQqq2RVAWFFfNZR&index=8

The Electric Universe is fun because it starts with plausible sounding arguments about space not being electrically neutral and then builds so much stuff out of that it starts sounding like 40k lore.

https://www.thunderbolts.info/wp/2015/02/18/discourses-on-an-alien-sky-series-2/

Phantom Time is pretty nifty. AKA "a few hundred years in the middle-ages, including Charlemagne, never existed". You could probably mess with people at dinner parties with it.

Angel Numbers. Essentially a superstitious belief that the appearance of certain numbers provides meaning.

We're surrounded by numbers, from car mileage to receipts to credit cards. My wife and I have long had a joking superstition that single-digit order numbers on Wawa receipts are important and mean something will happen (for those of you less fortunate, Wawa order numbers go from 000-999, and Wawas are open 24-7 so they reset at random). She did get her first real job the same day we got the 001 receipt for the first time.

Looking for random patterns is fun.

Like 4Chan dubs? Nice.

My gf and I are fans of 11:11 meaning yay look at that it’s a happy time

She believes it I guess

It’s really just fun and cute

I'm a big fan of 12:34pm. Less so of 12:34am, but that's because nothing good happens after midnight.

There’s one theory that I think is ridiculous but fun called Tartaria, where people claim that the buildings from the 1892 World’s Fair in Chicago were actually from a super advanced ancient civilization in the Americas

Something about Flat Earth makes me smile.

I love the flat earth, too, but, alas, the earth can't be both flat and hollow at the same time.

Sigh...! Who lives inside the hollow earth?

Ultima Thuleans, of course. The breakaway Nazi UFOs come from there, too.

The only thing about Hollow Earth that makes me pause is the seismic shadow zone see observed at certain angles. Almost as if it's hollow! There was also a video somewhere of a spinning blob of water in zero g, with bubbles of gas trapped inside. It formed a hollow in the center. I couldn't find that in my cursory search.

My most treasured Earth is not Earth as we know it theory is that the moon is a plasma phenomenon, and that our known world is a crater.

Unfortunately, smarter and more diligent men than me have done much more work than I ever will, and the common explanation is as correct as we know how to make it. Boring and sad, I know.

Disappointing. But one can dream.

I asked Claude.

Earth's Delicious Hollow Center

If Earth were hollow and we could fill it with something delicious for sustenance, I'd suggest:

Nutrient-rich bone broth. It would:

Provide complete proteins, minerals, and collagen

Be liquid at Earth's internal temperatures

Remain stable for long periods

Be accessible through "wells" that could tap into the broth reservoir

Supply both hydration and nutrition