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GOP Oversight Member Suggests Smithsonian Hiding Bones of Giants (meidasnews.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/nottheonion@lemmy.world
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In June, Rep. Eric Burlison, a Missouri Republican serving on the House Oversight Committee, appeared on BlazeTV’s Prime Time with Alex Stein, where he discussed his belief that giants once existed. Burlison told Stein he was scheduled to be at “NephCon 2025,” a conference focused on fringe topics including the biblical Nephilim —figures in Genesis that some interpret as the giant offspring of angels and human women.

He credited Timothy Alberino’s podcast with sending him “far down the rabbit hole,” eventually reaching claims that the Smithsonian Institution is hiding evidence, the bones of past giants that lived on the Earth. Burlison suggested that, as a member of the Oversight Committee, he could investigate the Smithsonian.

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[–] 61 points 1 year ago* (18 children)

pinch bridge of nose... deep breath

How the fuck is the left losing to literal insane people and morons. How the fuck are there DOZENS, if not hundreds, of people sitting in the highest positions of our government who believe 1000% in actually certifiable conspiracy theories about giants, space lasers, weather machines, chem trails, microchips vaccines, 5G mind control/Covid generation, and virgins blood drinking rituals... and yet we are still debating the democrats based on high brow merit.

I fucking hate these people, but I really hate all of the mother fucking morons and degenerates that helped put them into these positions more. And that includes all of you dumbasses that just didnt vote for Kamala whether willfully or apathetically. I have no love for the woman either, but come the fuck on. Look what the fuck you have done. I'm so tired of pretending that any of this shit is abnormal and temporary and will be reigned in. There is no end in sight, and seems only likely to get way worse. Fuck all of you shortsighted, idiotic and hateful assholes. You did this and now we all suffer because of it.

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  • [–] 22 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    How the fuck is the left losing to literal insane people and morons.

    The left usually doesn't get to run. The center keeps losing to literal insane people and morons.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago*

    In America the left lost due to two things:

    An industrial and computer revolution that redistributed most of the population over two generations. This broke the grassroots movement mechanism the civil rights and later efforts depended on. Internet chat rooms were not a replacement.

    Allowing the people in power to count votes and decide who won elections over 30 years

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  • [–] 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    It's because you won't run for political office.

    It's that lack of action.

    Oh, we all agree with your words. It's not about consensus.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I live in Indiana in a hard red district. If I thought there was even a chance, I'd seriously be considering it. I couldn't even manage to get to city council here though. Half of the local elections dont even have a Dem or independent running because there is no chance for it. Your name has an R next to it or you fuck off with your maybe 15 percent.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago

    How the fuck is the left losing to literal insane people and morons.

    The size and scale of media available to the Silicon Valley tech sector has afforded them enormous leverage over modern Americans and their view of the world. "The Giant of Kandahar" is one example of a mythology that helps explain why Americans lost in Afghanistan, without ceding that our whole 23 year occupation was a mix of waste and incompetence. It's one part engagement-bait, one part conspiracy theory, and one part evangelical propaganda (the Giant is further embellished as a Nephilim, thus proving we were fighting a Holy War overseas and not just engaged in an opium-laced land grab).

    I fucking hate these people, but I really hate all of the mother fucking morons and degenerates that helped put them into these positions more. And that includes all of you dumbasses that just didnt vote for Kamala

    The claim that Kamala Harris lost because she was stabbed in the back by far-left, transgender, pro-Putin antisemites is its own brand of BlueMAGA mythology and serves much the same purpose as the dogmatic superstition on the right.

    You did this and now we all suffer because of it.

    The folks leading the charge are the billionaires profiting off the exploitation. They aren't suffering. They're getting sucked off at orgies full of sex trafficking victims imported from countries - like Israel and El Salvador and Japan and German - where we've built up a large military presence for the purpose of exploitation.

    Everyone else is told that they either need to throw their support behind this rapist pig wanna-be Mussolini or the AIPAC-aligned insurance company ghoul, because failing to support My Team means you deserve whatever misery is inflicted by Their Team.

    Somehow, the pain we all end up experiencing from outside the corporate walled garden is always either Fake News (when My Team is Winning) or Your Own Stupid Fault (when Their Team is Winning).

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    Many people have extremely low literacy levels and have difficulties with media criticism. In the US, this is largely driven by the Right’s attack on education in response to Brown v Board of Ed - if black children get to go to school, they don’t want them to receive a good education. The higher echelons of the Right can afford to send their children to private schools anyway. Many schools in the US also spent the past decade not teaching phonics (using a “whole reading” model that was tested and proven to be ineffective in the 1970’s) and school English curriculums have deprioritized reading entire novels in favor of the passages that show up on standardized tests. Subjects like history and science have also gotten the shrift in favor of more time on math and reading in the decontextualized format they use on these tests.

    We live in an era of violent anti intellectualism. It is trivially easy to make shit up, and the internet provides a constant stream of slop. This was bad before AI, AI has accelerated it. And with a distrust in institutions and the idea of an “expert” in general - people will not believe anyone that goes against their pet ideas. It makes them feel smarter, that they know something that the experts don’t. Those latte drinking elitists think they know things, but I know better! There’s the double edged sword of they “know” that you can’t believe everything online, but what that ends up doing is allowing them to pick and choose what they believe. You can provide a Wikipedia article demonstrating that what they are claiming is a 1000 year old Incan carving is a modern art project, but they’ll just claim Wikipedia isn’t a valid source - while uncritically believing “Amazing Facts Channel.”

    It’s an attack on the idea of knowledge itself, the world of “alternative facts.” You can pick and choose what to believe - to live in a world of make believe where you are The Chosen One because you know all of these things that the “experts” are too dumb to see.

    It kind of reminds me of my ex husband, when I tried to explain how to solve quadratic equations to him. “But what if you could just take the square root of the whole thing and pretend x is that? Isn’t all of math made up anyway?” He had deep insecurities because he had been raised to believe he was a genius, and couldn’t stand being wrong about anything. He’d be furious when I looked up basic facts he was incorrect about because he would constantly belittle my intelligence.

    I don’t know if the problem is fixable. Maybe if the internet dies, maybe if we lose Facebook and AI and everything else in some sort of Carrington event and have to go back to books. I don’t know.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    It's warfare, like being hit with bullets. Except it's new and it's online social warfare. Literally millions of slaves (bots are slaves) posting online for at least 9 years now.

    And the others, like Candace Owens who is well spoken and reasonably intelligent but doesn't believe in dinosaurs apparently - are also slaves, but being blackmailed into saying this shit.

    We free people are sitting amongst a slave takeover like a zombie virus broke out. Our lawmakers KNEW and should have enacted a national online government forum so we would have a secure way of communicating politically that would protect free speech - but they all MAJORLY SUCK at progressive policy, especially for anything MODERN, so they didn't do it. And it fucked us.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago (7 children)

    I agree. It's almost as batshit as believing a two party system is your only option despite there being nothing making it so besides convention.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (6 children)

    The two party system is the natural inevitable result of First Past the Post voting. The spoiler effect of having a popular third party splitting the vote with their closest allies, granting the pluralityand the win to their opposition means that voters must be strategic and only vote for the party most likely to win between the two allies. This inevitably, always, leads to two polar parties dominating the political landscape. To kill the two party system, you need a better voting system. Ranked Choice is an improvement, but still tends to push toward the most polarizing parties. Personally, I like Approval Voting.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (1 child)

    It's not "splitting the vote" it's just an election with more than two viable options.

    Americans are hopeless. Ralph Nader and Ross Perot both ran on solid platforms and attracted substantial followings, but all anyone does is fixate and cry because you "shoulda won".

    The two party system: by fucking losers, for fucking losers.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago

    It's not "splitting the vote" it's just an election with more than two viable options.

    Say you have three major parties, the left wing democratic socialists, the moderate left liberals, and the right wing conservatives. The liberals do not generally support the more radical reforms of the democratic socialists, and the democratic socialists think that the liberal policies are too ineffectual and do not address the source of the problems as they see it. But they ultimately agree on the general direction the country should be moving and both of them know that the conservatives stand against nearly everything that they they stand for, and in fact have been recently marching towards far more dangerous policies that need to be stopped now. This should all sound very familiar.

    Now, polls show that the general public's first pick for party representation have 25 percent support for democratic socialists, 33 percent for liberals, and 38 percent for conservatives, with 4 percent undecided. If everyone votes for their first choice, the left wing WILL lose and the conservative party will take control. Despite the majority of people generally on the same side, the left, they still lose. This is the spoiler effect.

    So say, instead, that people that fall in the middle, politically more between the liberals and democratic socialists see the writing on the wall and decide to switch from support from the democratic socialists to the liberals to ensure they don't lose to the conservatives. Now the vote goes 16 percent democratic socialist, 43 percent liberal and 41 percent conservative and the liberals win by a narrow margin. This happens a few more time, maybe sometimes with the conservatives winning because people get comfortable voting again for the third party and spoiling the vote again just enough to lose the election for both left wing parties. Eventually, most people realize that the democratic socialists have no chance of gaining a plurality and so apart from a small percentage of hold outs, they get very few votes. Now you have a two party system. This is almost ALWAYS how this eventually happens.

    BTW, if you switch to Approval voting, those people get to vote as they see fit for as many parties/candidates as they see fit. Their could be dozens of parties/candidates running, and they could actively be running joint campaigns or endorsing one another and there is no spoiler effect unless a majority decide only to vote for one and only one candidate (which would be functionally identical to First Past the Post). In the example numbers, many of the liberals would have also supported the democratic socialists and vice versa. One of the two would have won (usually the more moderate party, but not always), and the conservatives would have had to compete with their joint efforts instead of letting them fight each other to the conservatives advantage.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    Every other country with first past the post parting has third and fourth parties that actually win seats.

    I'd agree with the overall point of your comment though. First past the post is problematic and does tend towards favouring two parties, though to my knowledge out all of the countries that employ FPTP the us is the only one where people believe there are only two possible options.

    Coalitions are formed all the time in Canada between our two most popular parties and smaller parties.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (1 child)

    The coalition agreements between parties keep the third parties more active and viable for sure. And third and fourth parties (and independents) are much more viable in smaller scale votes like individual districts that leans hard away from one of the major parties (much easier to get a democratic socialist voted for in a district where the Republicans dont stand a chance and so you have no reason to worry about the spoiler effect). But even in Canada, the PM vote ultimately came down between Carney and Poilievre, liberal and conservative, didnt it?

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    This last election was one of the most polarized we've had. And they happen. But the nod came close to winning a majority in my lifetime (they've really lost the plot lately).

    The influence of parties outside the "big two" waxes and wanes but they remain an important factor in a democratic process that, while flawed because of FPTP and many other reasons, remains a healthy-ish democracy. I stress the ish.

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