What conspiracy theories do you believe in? - Put your tinfoil hats on

[Lords Greatsword]

Anyone ever have to spend a couple days taking a series of bizarre standardized tests in junior high or so, which were largely a bunch of opinion questions and had nothing to do with anything academic? My entire class as a high school freshman took one of these. It was never explained what it was for and took a couple hours out of two days.

It wasn't any kind of SAT or aptitude test, and everyone was weirded out by it. I was pissed and on the first day, just started answering every question randomly and then leaving early. On talking about it with a couple friends who were also weirded out about it, we decided the next day we'd just start answering all the questions the way we thought Hitler or Stalin would.

Did anyone else ever have a seriously weird standardized test in school that was never explained and never showed up in any record?

While I don't recall my classes ever having that, a couple years ago when I still lurked /x/ for anything remotely interesting, I'd occasionally find posters discussing something similar that they had back in school. The speculation was that it might've been part of some government project that attempted to seek out potential talent.

 

[ita]

Did anyone else ever have a seriously weird standardized test in school that was never explained and never showed up in any record?

I took a test like this in a public high school but it was more explicitly about finding potential career types that would match our personalities. They gave us our individual results on these sometime later too. I remember my results being in line with what I expected. The testing made sense to me as a student as a way to get us to actively think about what we wanted to pursue after basic education, but now I do wonder what benefit that kind of data had for the government.

I also remember poking fun at a friend who got his results back, which said he would be likely interested in every single career type they were testing for. I don’t think he was trying to be funny with his answers or anything though. He was just really autistic.

 

[Candlelight Desolation]

Did anyone else ever have a seriously weird standardized test in school that was never explained and never showed up in any record?

No, though I recall when I was in second grade me and a bunch of other boys were taken out of class one day and taken to a room where we were to take turns reading three letter "nonsense words", and I found out years later that schools do this to screen for dyslexia.

The testing made sense to me as a student as a way to get us to actively think about what we wanted to pursue after basic education, but now I do wonder what benefit that kind of data had for the government.

I never had a career test like this in high school.

 

[Boy_Blunder]

I don't believe in nuclear bombs. I think that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were hit with fire, like the rest of Japan was, and then doused with chemicals to get the kayfabe started. I think the supposed test footage is of big conventional bombs and special effects, and I think that personnel in the range of the tests were hit with chemicals to make it believable. How have terrorists never set one off? How has one never been used in anger?
I think they were made up mostly to enforce the American hegemony on the world (obey us or we'll send you back to the stone age) and to make hedonism and nihilism and bad decisions less shameful (why set up for the future if the whole world could explode any second?)

 

[FatalTater]

I took a test like this in a public high school but it was more explicitly about finding potential career types that would match our personalities. They gave us our individual results on these sometime later too. I remember my results being in line with what I expected. The testing made sense to me as a student as a way to get us to actively think about what we wanted to pursue after basic education, but now I do wonder what benefit that kind of data had for the government.

I also remember poking fun at a friend who got his results back, which said he would be likely interested in every single career type they were testing for. I don’t think he was trying to be funny with his answers or anything though. He was just really autistic.

We did those tests that were supposed to make you think about what you're good at or what activities you enjoy as a way to get us thinking about future career training. The teachers and staff were very up front about it.
As a kid it irritated me, partly because even though we might be interested in a certain career path we still had to take courses that had little to do with it, so what's the point and partly because my lil' chaos demon self had equal scores in most of the categories so it wasn't very helpful.

I also remember taking tests (more like quizzes) to figure out if we were right-brained or left-brained. Again, I was in the middle.

I used to be in the college bound classes and the gifted and talented programs.
Now I post on KiwiFarms.

Not sure what happened.

 

[Dang dirty Pidgeons!]

I think they were made up mostly to enforce the American hegemony on the world (obey us or we'll send you back to the stone age) and to make hedonism and nihilism and bad decisions less shameful (why set up for the future if the whole world could explode any second?)

same problem with moon landing deniers: you wanna tell me the sovs were in on it? that's getting too far fetched and absurd. But I can't say that your very train of thought never entered my mind either... I'm almost positive that john von neumann went on record saying that nuclear deterrence will only work and uphold worldpeace U.S. hegemony if we regularly use them. So every new generation is reminded of it's devastation. If people stop even believing in it, that warrants a little demonstration.
Take that one to sleep with ya.

 

[ita]

I think they were made up mostly to enforce the American hegemony on the world (obey us or we'll send you back to the stone age) and to make hedonism and nihilism and bad decisions less shameful (why set up for the future if the whole world could explode any second?)

I would love for this to be true honestly. I’ve had terrible nightmares of nuclear annihilation since I was a kid. Emergency alert system sounds freak me the fuck out for this reason. In fact, it still terrifies me when I remember that Hawaii had an accidental (maybe “accidental”?) emergency alert about an incoming missile a few years ago. How fucking traumatizing that must have been.

 

[Dieter Laser]

Did anyone else ever have a seriously weird standardized test in school that was never explained and never showed up in any record?

Several times.

I’m convinced that the last one was 100% some sort of DEA disinformation campaign. It was a long drug related survey but every question was worded such that you couldn’t say you weren’t using drugs.

They’d word it like “on a scale of 1 to 10 how much does your cocaine usage bother you.” There’s no way to answer that without implying you’re doing cocaine.

I assume it was to pump up statistics? Idk, it just never sat right with me.

It makes as much sense as the Yo-Yo assemblies.

Thread tax - the Mandella Effect is a psyop.

 

[Otterly]

Anyone ever have to spend a couple days taking a series of bizarre standardized tests in junior high or so, which were largely a bunch of opinion questions and had nothing to do with anything academic?

Yes in the Uk equivalent. I agree with @NoReturn that it might have been a cheap research project - the bar for getting consent for such things was pretty much zero on those days. We also had to do a load of weird exercises and games, but only the first one was everything, they picked a class worth of us out for the rest.
Probably some stupid progressive education pet project

 

[Burnt Effigy]

Anyone ever have to spend a couple days taking a series of bizarre standardized tests in junior high or so, which were largely a bunch of opinion questions and had nothing to do with anything academic?

It's for the explicit purpose of fishing out people for government positions.

I know someone that was picked to do COBOL (old-ass programming language nobody but dinosaur orgs use) in a govt organization specifically because of these tests, he basically got removed from education entirely at 16, and instead trained for COBOL.

 

[Osmosis Jones]

I don't believe in nuclear bombs. I think that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were hit with fire, like the rest of Japan was, and then doused with chemicals to get the kayfabe started. I think the supposed test footage is of big conventional bombs and special effects, and I think that personnel in the range of the tests were hit with chemicals to make it believable. How have terrorists never set one off? How has one never been used in anger?
I think they were made up mostly to enforce the American hegemony on the world (obey us or we'll send you back to the stone age) and to make hedonism and nihilism and bad decisions less shameful (why set up for the future if the whole world could explode any second?)

It’s a bit of circular logic to say that they don’t exist because they haven’t been used and then to ask why they haven’t been used while denying the only time they have been used against a target. Nukes are devastating. The historical context of their use against Japan is one of complete assertion of authority.

Terrorists haven’t used one because you can’t just get a nuclear warhead. It’s the same reason terrorists aren’t just firing ICBMs at DC and doing Pearl Harbor 2.0. It’s not available. The resources and coordination required to obtain, maintain, and use even a small warhead is substantial. What you would need in order to either create or obtain a nuclear warhead and then use it is an order of magnitude more complex and invested.

World powers don’t use them because it’s not wise to glass the planet. If even a handful of important targets were struck with nominally sized nuclear warheads, the fallout for an airburst like Nagasaki and Hiroshima is enough to cause severe health problems for years to come, and a ground impact would irradiate the soil and create a massive hazard for decades to come. If you ever want that land for yourself you’d best not use nuclear.

 

[blur2990]

Anyone ever have to spend a couple days taking a series of bizarre standardized tests in junior high or so, which were largely a bunch of opinion questions and had nothing to do with anything academic? My entire class as a high school freshman took one of these. It was never explained what it was for and took a couple hours out of two days.

It wasn't any kind of SAT or aptitude test, and everyone was weirded out by it. I was pissed and on the first day, just started answering every question randomly and then leaving early. On talking about it with a couple friends who were also weirded out about it, we decided the next day we'd just start answering all the questions the way we thought Hitler or Stalin would.

Did anyone else ever have a seriously weird standardized test in school that was never explained and never showed up in any record?

 

[Rick The Stick]

I don't believe in nuclear bombs. I think that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were hit with fire, like the rest of Japan was, and then doused with chemicals to get the kayfabe started. I think the supposed test footage is of big conventional bombs and special effects, and I think that personnel in the range of the tests were hit with chemicals to make it believable. How have terrorists never set one off? How has one never been used in anger?
I think they were made up mostly to enforce the American hegemony on the world (obey us or we'll send you back to the stone age) and to make hedonism and nihilism and bad decisions less shameful (why set up for the future if the whole world could explode any second?)

>nukes don't exist
>if they do how come they haven't been used?
>no, the two times they've been used weren't nukes because nukes don't exist.
>so why haven't they used them if they're real, huh?

This is why conspiracy people are seen as retarded.

 

[AnOminous]

I know someone that was picked to do COBOL (old-ass programming language nobody but dinosaur orgs use) in a govt organization specifically because of these tests, he basically got removed from education entirely at 16, and instead trained for COBOL.

I know someone who still maintains COBOL codebases for the very dinosaur orgs you're talking about. Yes, he's a (literal traditional meaning of the word) boomer.

Terrorists haven’t used one because you can’t just get a nuclear warhead. It’s the same reason terrorists aren’t just firing ICBMs at DC and doing Pearl Harbor 2.0. It’s not available. The resources and coordination required to obtain, maintain, and use even a small warhead is substantial.

The Japanese doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo (the one that launched a sarin nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway) tried to obtain a nuclear weapon from the Russian Mafia. Luckily, not even the Russian Mafia was insane enough to sell them one, although there are suspicions they actually have some of the nukes that mysteriously went missing during the dissolution of the U.S.S.R., so they just got ripped off instead.

 

[Bonesjones]

I don't believe in nuclear bombs. I think that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were hit with fire, like the rest of Japan was, and then doused with chemicals to get the kayfabe started. I think the supposed test footage is of big conventional bombs and special effects, and I think that personnel in the range of the tests were hit with chemicals to make it believable.

Trinity is observably a dirty bomb and not a nuclear one.

same problem with moon landing deniers: you wanna tell me the sovs were in on it?

A useful lie is better than the truth, every politician knows.

It’s a bit of circular logic to say that they don’t exist because they haven’t been used and then to ask why they haven’t been used while denying the only time they have been used against a target. Nukes are devastating. The historical context of their use against Japan is one of complete assertion of authority.

The firebombing of Tokyo was way worse than the atomic bomb. The real trick is to explain the observable difference between a dirty bomb (a large explosion doped with nuclear material to spread fallout/radiation) and an atomic/nuclear bomb.

 

[Meriasek]

Trinity is observably a dirty bomb and not a nuclear one.

How so? The flash seems pretty hard to reproduce with a conventional bomb of that magnitude, and the measured 20 kt are also pretty steep to fake with conventional explosives.
There's pre-Trinity footage where they tested 100t of Composition B and while it creates a similarly shaped fireball, the flash is much less pronounced. That one was a dirty bomb, actually, with a bit of radioactive material stuffed into the pile of Comp B to disperse it for testing purposes.

 

[Bonesjones]

How so? The flash seems pretty hard to reproduce with a conventional bomb of that magnitude, and the measured 20 kt are also pretty steep to fake with conventional explosives.

There's pictures of the test that shows huge piles of explosives in boxes. Also a lot of footage is models (the houses being blown up). Measured by who exactly?

 

[Meriasek]

There's pictures of the test that shows huge piles of explosives in boxes. Also a lot of footage is models (the houses being blown up). Measured by who exactly?

The huge pile of explosives is from the earlier rehearsal test I mentioned with 100t of Composition B. There's video footage of that as well and there's a clear difference.
Don't know about model footage, some footage looks like models due to the cameras having a narrow depth of field and odd combinations of field of view and so on, which is because they use weird optics since the cameras were in protected bunkers and so on.
The yield was measured/estimated via proxy, using radiological samples to estimate the efficiency of the fission and thus the yield. That's the most common method of measuring weapon yield, although other methods exist like measuring the strength of the shock wave, the brightness of the fireball (used by satellites), or seismological data. The Trinity test was obviously measured by the Los Alamos people. They recently brought out some Trinitite from storage and tested the samples again, now estimating 24 kt yield for Trinity.

 

[Dang dirty Pidgeons!]

Trinity is observably a dirty bomb and not a nuclear one.

A useful lie is better than the truth, every politician knows.

The firebombing of Tokyo was way worse than the atomic bomb. The real trick is to explain the observable difference between a dirty bomb (a large explosion doped with nuclear material to spread fallout/radiation) and an atomic/nuclear bomb.

In October 1947, a local health care provider raised an alarm about infant deaths downwind of the Trinity test, bringing it to the attention of radiation safety experts working for the US nuclear weapons program. Their response misrepresented New Mexico’s then-unpublished data on health effects. Federal and New Mexico data indicate that between 1940 and 1960, infant death rates in the area downwind of the test site steadily declined—except for 1945, when the rate sharply increased, especially in the three months following the Trinity blast. The 21 kiloton explosion occurred on a tower 100 feet from the ground and has been likened to a “dirty bomb” that cast large amounts of heavily contaminated soil and debris—containing 80 percent of the bomb’s plutonium—over thousands of square-miles. (See Figure 1.)

I think you've read the same article but never heard about the concepts of ground-and airburst.
So, I, for one, now have a conspiracy theory about your reading comprehension.

The firebombing of Tokyo was way worse than the atomic bomb.

Agreed. Nothing rivals it's scale.

The real trick is to explain the observable difference between a dirty bomb (a large explosion doped with nuclear material to spread fallout/radiation) and an atomic/nuclear bomb.

Bright blinding flash, emp, Gamma burst... The works. As mentioned above.
The actual equipment, like those old satellites, to measure and detect nukes might be something of interest to you.

 

[Osmosis Jones]

The firebombing of Tokyo was way worse than the atomic bomb. The real trick is to explain the observable difference between a dirty bomb (a large explosion doped with nuclear material to spread fallout/radiation) and an atomic/nuclear bomb.

The difference is show of force (we only need a few atom bombs or one dirty bomb to do the work of dozens or hundreds of firebombs) vs the use of a dirty bomb which would’ve had devastating consequences for Japan and likely would have escalated the war.

We’re really reaching on this whole nuclear bombs aren’t real thing. I’m open to any ideas but the conjecture doesn’t illustrate a world where they simply don’t exist. There’s a big difference between nukes being played up and not being real at all. If it’s all special effects and conventional weaponry being misrepresented, that’s all the more reason for countries at war to use them as a show of force given that they wouldn’t actually have the same devastating consequences as what is claimed. If the implication is that the real threat is dirty bombs, then we’re kinda back at square one where nukes do exist but now we’re calling them something else with no other facts of the matter changed. We’re both talking about a weapon capable of total destruction on an unimaginable scale. The general idea of nuclear war doesn’t really change whether it’s high yield, low fallout atomic bombs or dirty bombs. We are both speaking of the threat of - essentially - extinction. Just on different timelines.