By David Futrelle
I‘m going a little off-topic tonight because I’ve found, well, one of the most creative conspiracy theories I’ve run across in a long time.
In the midst of a discussion of transgenderism on 4chan’s famously antisemitic /pol/ board several months ago, one apparently drunken anon let slip a little theory he’s been kicking around involving Jews, math, and the flat earth:
I did Nazi this one coming, as they say.
Drunkish Anon’s comment inspired a bit of a discussion in the thread, as several math-loving Anons, momentarily setting aside their antisemitism for the greater good, attempted to convince their confused colleague that, yes, negative numbers are a real thing, and the earth really is a sphere — while all around them the other Anons spewed assorted terrible thoughts about trans people.
Such is the state of debate in 2018.
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@David Futrelle: “Apparently”? I think the guy’s teetering on the verge of alcohol poisoning.
No, no, no….he hasn’t touched a drop since the invention of the funnel.
@Diego Duarte:
As one of the insane few who genuinely enjoys algebra, I approve of this renaming.
https://gph.is/1p3bO4Z
*gif edit*
Alvy: You know, I was having lunch with some guys from NBC and I said, “Did you eat yet?” and Tom Christie said, “No, Jew?” Not, “Did you,” but “Jew eat? Jew?” Not “Did you,” but “Jew eat?”
Rob: Max, you see conspiracies in everything.
~ Annie Hall
Thug Cat knocks glass off table:
@Scildfreja Unnyðnes
them”.
Except that, last I checked, weren’t American comics invented by them–to the point that a list of Gentile Golden and Silver Age comics creators would be far briefer?
Actually, something like that happened in real life, during World War I’s East African campaign!
An incompetent British general named Wapshare was sent to Kenya in East Africa to lead some British and African forces in the campaign against the Germans in Tanganyika (today Tanzania).
When Wapshare arrived in Mombasa, he boarded a rickshaw to head for headquarters, and the African driver said to him in Swahili, “Wapi? Juu?” That meant: “Do you want to go up the hill, sir?”
Wapshare, however, immediately leaped out of the rickshaw and began thrashing the driver with his swagger stick.
When his aides pulled him off and asked Wapshare why he’d done that, the general answered, “I thought he said: ‘Wappy’s a Jew.'”
@Moggie
Whenever I read horrible stuff like that, I think of the words….
ROBERT MUELLER
….and I feel a lot better.
(that B.S. will stop one Mueller’s done with the Chump’s Fakeministration, that’s for sure, and the House Impeaching the Orange menace will be a part of it too. Also all of the players in that Chump regieme are guilty….including Pence).
@SpukiKitty:
Whenever I read horrible stuff like that, I think of the words….
ROBERT MUELLER
….and I feel a lot better.
I’m just going to leave this here:
Wish it would, but it won’t.
If it all goes as we want and 45’s Administration is put in jail, there’s still all the fascists, neo-nazis, trolls, and authoritarians who put Trump there. All out there with a huge chip on their shoulder, being told that their country has been stolen from them, who’ve been fed decades of propaganda telling them that the proper answer to the rule of law is violence.
There’s still a movement of fascists moving internationally to strangle any growth and drag us all back into the dark ages, as if it weren’t bad enough right now as it is.
There’s still legions of people, a huge majority, who glibly side with corporate overlords that gleefully reap the health and wealth of the world to pad their overstuffed vaults and cellars.
Always remember – children were imprisoned under the Obama Administration. Trump’s Cavalcade of Horrors took what Obama started and reveled in it, but Obama started it. And those sorts of policies echo on throughout history. We’re not fighting anything new here, we’re fighting one of the oldest, nastiest, most cantankerous beasts in human history.
We should fight to remove Trump and his corrupt Administration, because he does reflect a turning point. But cast aside any idea that it’s going to get better when that happens – it’s gonna get worse. Our opponents are going to get nastier, more violent, more underhanded, and more cruel.
This is going to be a long, long fight, my duck. Grit your teeth and toughen your hide, because we’re going to be much older by the time we’re through.
Alan Robertshaw,
Having now read Serving the Reich I can endorse the point you make about the German physicists having “cocked up” – mostly through not realising that developing an atomic bomb was possible within a few years given adequate resources (and contrary to what I said before, Ball thinks that Germany could have mustered such resources, though I’m still rather sceptical of this), but again, this was nothing to do with “German physics”. That was used, and its few scientifically significant proponents scapegoated, in the postwar self-justifications of those German physicists who had happily served the Nazi regime (usually telling themselves that they were acting in the interests of Germany or of German science), without having had anything to do with “German physics”.
*Oblate spheroid
Interesting. They did not cover this in any of my classes.
/s
Is this real life?