We’ve got a bunch of new people now so let’s bring back a classic post. What low stakes conspiracy theory do you believe that you cannot prove but feels right to you?
I’ll start: I believe that dating apps have made a concerted effort to smear in person meeting people and tie it to being “creepy” through social media so you are forced to meet people online(which was the creepy option just 15 years ago)
Nah, there have been protagonists like Brace through history and across cultures. Like Yasuke, a famous retainer of Oda Nobunaga who originally hailed from Africa. Or Lord Byron, who was the original type of guy on which all other types of guys were based. Mary Shelley was so fed up with his bullshit she invented science fiction just to have an excuse to get away from him. Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, known as Carlos the Jackal, A sort of semi-independent commando who worked with the KGB, Stasi, PFLP, and others during the cold war, fought France, doing much better than you would expect one guy to do. Dude’s serving several life sentences right now. Julie d’Aubigny killed a number of men in duels, wounded a few who ended up becoming her friends and lovers, and once notoriously burned down a convent to rescue her girlfriend, leaving an actual dead body in her girlfriend’s cell so people would think she’d died in the fire. Zhuge Liang was the most person in 3rd century China. At one point he had to defend a key city, but his army was still several days away while the enemy army was within site of the gate. His solution was to sit outside the gate, drink tea, and play sitar. When the general of the enemy army was told that Zhuge Liang had the gates of the city open, no soldiers on the wall, and he was just sitting outside jamming without a care in teh world the enemy general was like “nope. Not putting up with his bullshit today.” and took his entire army somewhere else to fight reasonable people.
The world is full of protagonists. They come, they go, and they lead very interesting lives.
Zhuge Liang is one of my favorite people in history. During the Battle of Red Cliff the army he is serving is running critically low on arrows. Zhuge Liang announces that he’ll handle it. The next day the enemy sees that barges full of hostile soldiers are rowing towards them through the mist from across the river. They sound the alarm and start firing volley after volley of arrows at the enemy troops on the barges. When Zhuge Liang decides he’s collected enough arrows, he orders his crews to abandon their “attack” and row back to camp. Then he has soldiers collect all the arrows embedded in the hundreds of scare-crows he’d ordered to be erected on the barges, replenishing his supply of arrows while diminishing the enemy’s stock by the same number.
At one point the army is trying to arrange a fire-ship attack to neutralize the enemy’s superior fleet of barges, but the wind is against them - if they launched the attack the fireships would blow back towards their own fleet. Zhuge Liang excuses himself, steps outside for a few minutes, then comes back in and explains that he has convinced the wind of the merits of their cause. And sure enough, the wind changes, they’re able to launch the attack, and the fire ships are very effective.
There’s allegedly a stone maze somewhere in south east China, and for ove a thousand years people have accidentally stumbled in to it, only to emerge hours or days later if they emerge at all. Allegedly Zhuge Liang set it up 1700 years ago because he needed to slow down a pursuing army. Sure enough the other army stumbled in to the maze and it took them days to finally untangle themselves from the accursed thing.
Many of his extremely true and verifiable exploits are detailed in The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, which is a book about how cool Zhuge Liang is and also features some other, less important characters. The man is the exemplar of Sun Tzu’s maxim that the acme of skill is to win your battles without fighting.
