He's right for all the wrong reasons. He still believes in widespread False Flags, but he doesn't think the Superbowl will be one of them.

Sadly, there are enough real tragedies out there. ready to be exploited, that people looking to erode civil liberties don't NEED to manufacture them. All they need to do is wait and watch for the right moments. Also, I don't buy the idea that the people dragging us into this mess are all linked together with a secret agenda, operating out of pure greed, malice, or weapons-grade Satanism, depending on what socio-political subgroup of conspiracy theorist you happen to ask. Modern paternalists aren't really that secretive about where their sympathies lie, and I think they genuinely believe that strengthening the state and rolling back on civil liberties is "for the best". Thanks to a number of factors, the first three estates of Western society simply don't have a taste for liberalism anymore, nothing more, nothing less. It's part of a natural cycle of historical social development; we had our Republic, now we're headed towards our Empire, unless wiser heads can prevail.

I just think a massive coordinated Super Bowl attack would be nigh impossible to pull off without a large number of people being in on the loop, and, the more people who are in the loop, the harder it would be to keep quiet, which is why I can't believe any modern false flag conspiracy.

People like this muddy the waters; he's just troll-shielding with mugs who don't have the presence of mind to hide their shame. Not saying that he secretly believes in their particular brand of glossalolia, but that just makes his inability to recognize his own bullshit even more disgusting.

These idiots can't believe that tragedies happen without sinister backing. Part of that is, I think, the "no true Scotsman" fallacy, as lots of conspiracy wonks are gun owners and can't stand the thought that a walking arsenal could be a threat, since guns are supposed to make everyone safer. Ergo, in their broken brains, no REAL gun owner would go crazy and shoot up a theater or school, it MUST be a government plot. From there, it's only a question of degree as to how deep their rabbit hole goes.

What's worse is it's become a kind of learned schizophrenia. Thanks to the preponderance of twist endings in so much of our fiction, they've trained themselves to work contradictory facts into their narrative without skipping a beat. If you could somehow convince them that something they perceived as a false flag was really what it seemed, they'd then claim the perception of it being a false flag was perpetuated by the conspiracy to make them look bad and throw them off the scent.

Well, I'm a pretty pacifist fellow, guns are regulated pretty sanely in Canada but I've never owned one. I was a raging CTist for at least a couple of years..maybe a touch longer; it's hard to remember clearly because I was fairly bug-fuck crazy at the time.

It was a combination of semi-dysfunctional, bug-fuck family life, years of dysthymia compounded with drug and alcohol use and abuse and abhorrent lack of critical thinking skills (but a certain rhetorical skill) that led me down that road, and it's exactly as shallow and pathetic as it seems from the outside. Of course, when you've no ability to effectively assess information it's really, really easy to be just soldier on beyond the point of good sense for a good long while. There's also that thrilling emotional component that allows for a double-kick of righteousness and utter fear.

I hesitate to lay the blame of the feet of any one group or institution, though; obviously if I'd known better I wouldn't be telling this tale, but I'd be lying if I said that I'd never, in all my years of falling prey to other people's fancies, had the nagging suspicion that I was somehow complicit by not stopping to wonder how I kept getting dragged along so. And all of this after I'd be warned by tales of Santa, the Easter Bunny, Zeus and Yahweh, the supremacy of democracy and capitalism, etc., etc., etc.

Ah well, hindsight's 20/20 and I'm still an idiot, but I'd like to think a less repugnant idiot for all of that.

My old man, however, is still reporting from the Moon.

Makes for some interesting conversations. He's got this sort of semi-solipsistic monomania thing going; pretty easy to get a laugh out of him. Ever seen somebody get petulant because you won't reply to their fallacious reasoning and accusations? It's pretty special.