I've been attempting to "maintain the sanity of this sub" for the past several months, and it's getting pretty fucking exhausting and frustrating. A community like this just becomes extremely toxic as soon as most people start seeing those who disagree with them as "paid shills" by default. And that's what this place has become.

I think pizzagate, and the Trump supporters in general, have fucked over this community and made it more vitriolic and paranoid than ever before. Those of us here who are still highly skeptical of all the weak "evidence" surrounding the pizzagate theory are just accused of being pedophile defenders/sympathizers or shills, and there are multiple threads every single day that reach the front page accusing us of being "outsiders trying to brigade this subreddit." As if the pizzagate believers just can't accept the fact for a moment that maybe a reasonable, intelligent, skeptical person could POSSIBLY not see the same shit that they see when looking at the same evidence.

I wouldn't mind debating the theory with polite and intelligent people who just saw things differently from me. But instead, the overwhelming majority of people I've debated on this sub about pizzagate just can't help but feel disgusted by those who disagree with them. And perhaps that's because they're used to only participating within communities where everyone agrees with each other all the time, and the minority opinions just get buried and/or banned for having a different perspective.

I'm not here to argue Pizzagate with you, but I think it would be good for you to take a look at the facts again with an open mind.

And there it is... "you don't agree with me so your mind must be closed!"

It's one step away from "you don't agree with me so you must be a shill"

Take a look at the facts. At the end, facts hold the truth.

I've looked at the facts with an open mind and came to the conclusion that there were no facts - just a whole lot of speculation and forced interpretation.

But I'm probably a shill... right?

Because there's no proof.

I don't argue that there are many elite pedophiles - probably a higher % of elites are pedophiles than the general population because power and money lets them get away with it.

Everything else is an attack on anyone associated with HRC with a whole lot of dishonest cherry picking and warping of facts to spin a narrative.

You don't think that the correlation between fake news and Pizzagate isn't relevant?

It's relevant in that pizzagate is fake news.

I think it's a neutral term used by lots of people for various ends. Some use it to discredit lies, some use it to discredit truths. Words aren't biased in themselves. It's all in who is saying it in what context.

I think it's obvious this guy doesn't want to have an "open discussion" and would prefer to instead refer to himself as a victim of "shill name calling" and echo talking points. The fact that his comment made it to the top of this thread proves your point. Thanks for representing this sub well in this conversation.

Unfortunately those are bots, so it might not be useful to stop them by human hands.

I've been seeing a ton of highly upvoted threads where the top comment is dismissive and contradictory to the message of the post. I think we've all seen this, and it's not new.

Of course it's not new, it's how discussion works. Though posts come in many shapes & sizes, a common form is:

POST: makes a point.

COMMENT #1: Best counter point.

If the top comment was always in agreement with the post, couldn't one suspect foul play there as well? "The top comments are always in agreement with OP, must be b-b-b-b-bots!"

I'd think that would be even more suspect that what you're alleging. So you think "shills" get posts voted up, but don't have the shillpower to get their desired comment to the top spot? Or is it the other way--shill don't have the votes to downvote something, but they do have the votes to get the top comment in place? Or maybe you think it's a 360 psyop where shills get popular topics voted up just so they can debunk that topic with a counter point in the top comment? I very much doubt anyone cares enough to plan let alone implement something like that.

Preach a logic and reason based open minded thought process.

Great idea.

Don't allow shills and egotistic douchebags ruin the sub by driving wedges in the community.Preach a logic and reason based open minded thought process. Blanket assumptions and cheeky remarks are not cohesive to productive thinking.

Say something when you see a user leave facts unacknowledged. Say something when you see a comment or a post meant to distract and divide.

Would calling people out make me an egotistical douchebag? would countering someone's opinion make me a shill?

Discourse is messy.

Agreed. And you are one of my favorite members here, I should mention.

However, I think being a bit confrontational is essential to "calling people out." Your post seemed to simultaneously call for a kumbaya moment as well as a culling of the uninformed or willfully ignorant. That seems contradictory.

Just my two cents.

Very well said. One edition:

We are all trapped in this third dimension dominated by duality.

Some would say the hologram is made because of the duality. So,

You are not your body. You are not your mind.

is next to impossible to fully realize without destroying your senses through intense asceticism or psychedelic drug use.

There are many names for it, but my favorite is the white flame meditation. It's from a comic series I love, but it's about the true meditation of the self. The characters use it to break mind control techniques.

it's just a dumb blog but she typed it out well and I didn't have time to do it that well.

You'd be better off reading the comic series mentioned in there.

I think it's unrealistic for us to expect r/conspiracy to stay the same over time. There's a reason that people bug out. Eventually we just to accept this sub has been overrun, take all the good evidence with us, and bug out to a new sub

Possibly. It happens every couple of years. Awhile ago a whole bunch of guys left for some active angelfire thread. Few years back a lot of 4chan's conspiracy sub had a falling out, came over here. Year or two later, bunch of guys went over to some reddit wanabe that fell apart. Most recent one was a lot of the PizzaGaters going over to Voat

It's not the last place. Reddit is openly censoring. Reddit used to be great for free speech, but it's been sold out from under us. It's not the same reddit of a few years ago. It's OK to leave. Everything is temporary. There are better places for us to discuss conspiracies, and I think voat is at least one of the decent places. I don't know many others though, so if anyone else does would you mind sharing with us where else is good?

Agreed - to an extent. Preachers rarely get the full message across to an audience, and sometimes speeches can be boring to listen to.

If you give yourself entirely to logic and reason, you'll betray against your soul. If you give yourself entirely to emotion and cheeky remarks, you'll betray against your mind. Moderation is the key to victory!

How about normal people giving dissenting opinions and immediately being called shills? You will look at my comment history, see I haven't posted much, "how strange you decide to post now, your facts mean nothing because I disagree with you and you don't have a mile long post history in /r/conspiracy." It feels like self implosion. For a community that is supposedly open to dissenting opinions, a lot of folks in here will attack anyone that they don't agree with. Anyways, back to work.

That's nice. I see the word "shill" thrown around here like rice at a wedding.

I noticed on my last post the manipulation of the up-votes. It would get to a certain # then got down voted by 3-5 votes. It continued that way for a few days. It just finally hit a 100 in up votes today. I wrote the post on Sunday. It was on Aaron Hernandez's weird suicide. Had lots of complements on it. It wavered at 97 up votes for 3 days. Each time upvoted then down voted by 5. It was very methodical.

Hey Dan, hope you don't mind me bringing this up again because I think I found an outline of what is in the insurance files here:

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-02-17/dhs-insider-warns-its-spy-versus-spy

It lines up with the hint that I saw in an archived blockchain thread that "the main issue documented in the files is how foreign governments are controlling the actions of NATO governments."

If you don't feel like clicking that link here is the most notable quote:

"Q. So an ex-CIA senior agent named Robert Steele is on record saying Epstein’s island was a honey trap to lure our most powerful politicians into a extortion scheme?

A. Yes. There are videos of some of the most powerful players in the most humiliating positions."