We all know that many conspiracy theories are little more than the products of runaway systems of pattern recognition leftover from the days of our ancestors trying to identify threats lurking in the grass or shadows, combined with a rancid bucket of confirmation bias flung at the wall to see what sticks.
And that’s precisely what happened when this random ding-dong posted his own wall-flinging episode to Instagram:
This would normally be the part where we say something to the effect of “let’s unpack this whole suitcase of crazy”, but fortunately, a brave soul on Twitter, William Mullally (@whmullally) beat us to it. And normally we hate articles that are basically just reposts of someone else’s thread on another platform, but this one deserves better than to be lost down the memory hole of hot takes and cat pictures.
Zoom. Enhance.
He then digs up the date the scene was filmed. The fact that it was nearly a decade ago is central to the idea of a conspiracy being at play here, of course.
At this point it’s pretty easy to do an image search for pictures of one of the largest tourist hotspots in the world, at least at a time before large groups of people could create viral transmission hotspots. Here’s what he found:
Zoomer. Enhance-er.
Wait, is “Buone Feste” some sort of deep state illuminati activation signal?
It’s a fucking ad for SPAGHETTI
And now there’s vomit on our sweaters.
The moral of the story?
Apophenia
From the Skeptic’s Dictionary, Apophenia is the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness of unrelated phenomena. Here’s a choice bit from their entry on the subject:
According to Brugger, “The propensity to see connections between seemingly unrelated objects or ideas most closely links psychosis to creativity … apophenia and creativity may even be seen as two sides of the same coin.” Some of the most creative people in the world, then, must be psychoanalysts and therapists who use projective tests like the Rorschach test or who see patterns of child abuse behind every emotional problem. Brugger notes that one analyst thought he had support for the penis envy theory because more females than males failed to return their pencils after a test. Another spent nine pages in a prestigious journal describing how sidewalk cracks are vaginas and feet are penises, and the old saw about not stepping on cracks is actually a warning to stay away from the female sex organ.
http://skepdic.com/apophenia.html
Fortunately, Instagram conspiracy theorist “lexfuture” has 3,049 followers and has since taken his account private in the wake of being dunked like a bag of pasta into the boiling water of facts and common sense.
