The idea that those two concepts would be even functionally related is a massive struggle for me.
Like what? “Nonsense conspiracy theory makes sense because ‘NPR has an agenda’”. Like genuinely, huh? If you don’t believe NPR, you don’t have to pick the stupidest possible alternative.
Both groups trust that their chosen authority is the ultimate provider of truth, and generally prefer not to question that authority even when it leads to cognitive dissonance.
All airplanes are boats because they both carry people.
It’s fine to question authority. But you don’t have to pick genuine idiocy because you lack faith in some journalistic institutions. Maybe you could just, idk be a little more skeptical instead of thinking pizza places house pedophiles? It’s idiocy. Why be gentle about it?
If your argument for buying into some of this stuff is “they’re all liars! That’s why I believed the stupidest possible thing” You seriously need to look in the mirror and do some self evaluation.
In the same sense, you have never met anyone who believes Q is the “ultimate provider of truth” and not just some secret spy cell or whatever. I used hyperbole to illustrate a point.
I'm now thoroughly lost. You've equated NPR, a non-profit news organization that's pretty widely regarded as boring, with a wild conspiracy theory of sex trafficking pizza shops. You're welcome to try again but without the hyperbole this time?
Here’s one huge difference between the two: NPR does not generally make up stories from whole cloth, without at least a real person on the record vouching for them. Their flaws are pretty much all in what stories and details they choose to report, and who they choose to interview.
There are people in my town running for office who absolutely do believe that Q is the only trustworthy source of information, have declared so in public, and receive a nontrivial amount of support from folks who agree.
You may have tried to use hyperbole to illustrate a point, but you wound up looking like you're trying to either discredit a news organization you don't like or legitimize a bullshit artist by placing the two on equal terms.
It came across as disingenuous at best and you don't seem to be willing to recognize that divergence from your stated intentions. Why is that?
NPR is basically a state propaganda outfit that pretends to be a “neutral” and objective source, although its organization and methods are very different from those of the Q entity. Both sources have many die-hard followers who utterly fail to question their output, or understand their conflicts of interest.
It is a simple and consistent argument, even if you don’t want to believe it, and even if you are right to dislike the spice.
> Yeah seriously. What a weird false equivalence to try to suggest.
Honestly, it's probably part of a real justification narrative for trusting things like QAnon and talk radio over the mainstream media. If you do that, you at least have to put them on the same level, and if it's too difficult to build up things like the first two, then you can always try tear down the latter (since it's easier to cherry-pick enough stuff to make that passably believable: just set a very high bar then catalog the inevitable times one of the thousands of journalists didn't live up to it over the last century).
I think it's hard to define what "believing QAnon" means at this point because the so-called Q drops read like vague fortune cookies that could mean any and everything.
Alternative A) You are an ordinary person with an ordinary job and ordinary pasttimes. You fulfill your role in society like everyone else.
Alternative B) You have an important mission that will change the course of history, to spread the influence of <insert dogmatic belief system here>.
If you are bored, tired of living a repetitive life and have no purpose in life, Alternative B) sounds fantastic. Now you feel needed, you feel special, etc. You have a mission to save the world from the <masks|vaccines|science|microchips|illuminati|devil|5G|...>
Conspiracy theories, religious fanatism, extreme nationalism, flat earth societies, sanitary anticompliance (anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers), climate change denial... they all have a thing in common: they are not rational and the people behind them are afraid of rationality and science.
> Conspiracy theories, religious fanatism, extreme nationalism, flat earth societies, sanitary anticompliance (anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers), climate change denial... they all have a thing in common: they are not rational and the people behind them are afraid of rationality and science.
Actually, I'd disagree. If you dig in to a lot of these theories, there is a kernel of rationality behind them. Many adherents can actually rebut arguments with evidence that makes a surprising amount of sense: there are usually multiple possible explanations for individual phenomena, and if you look at them in isolation, it can be very hard to conclusively demonstrate that the "scientific" answer is actually the best possible explanation. This to me explains why even intellectuals can fall prey to these theories: if you already have a nonconformist streak, the alternative explanations can be interesting to dig into.
Where they fall flat is in overall coherence; these theories often end up with massive gaping seams if you try to expand them from explaining one phenomena. And these seams are so obvious, and yet adherents have no coherent explanation for these seams, that it overshadows whatever kernel of rationality the theory originally had.
All cults and religions are based on flawed logic, justifying and reinforcing its viral load.
Not saying movements don't have some learning and constructive purposes too, but the core of the ideology itself is always full of flawed logic most effective in confusing people.
Most large religions have something in common: as literacy and population density increases (i.e.: more people independently recording their own perspective on an event), miracles become less spectacular and divine revelation stops. Today we have no more columns of fire, no more prophets... nothing.
Legends are passed from generation to generation, and the ones that were more spectacular and entertaining were more likely to be passed to the next generation. So at some moment in history you had a proliferation of spectacular stories and prophets and miracles and divine revelation. But once writing systems are developed and adopted by the general population this no longer happens. Why? Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but the most likely reason is because people were making stuff up all along. That's why.
Secondly, the afterlife...
The reason people believe in an afterlife is mostly because the brain is designed to look for a path to survival at all times. e.g.: You think about going to work because you need income to go to the grocery store so you can buy food which you will eventually cook and then eat = survival. work -> income -> money -> food -> survival.
But eventually, the brain learns that all paths ultimately lead to death anyways. The brain, however, has defense mechanisms that prevent it from falling into psychological states that are bad for survival, and those defense mechanisms often involve illogical lines of thought. When this happens, your brain will try to get out of that psychological state by making some shit up, such as "look bro, you will die, but right after that, you will continue living". i.e.: the afterlife, souls, etc.
The afterlife, however, is just the beginning. Once you have an afterlife, now you can make rules that dictate what happens there. e.g.: "If you don't pay 10% of your income to me, your afterlife will suck". And once you standardize those rules now you have organized religion.
This is one belief. Another observation is how common consciousness is, and pondering why mind thinks something as common can only happen once per universe.
I would not call it a "kernel of rationality", I would call it a "kernel of creativity"... creativity that can be very clever and complex, but ultimately, creative (i.e.: made up).
Yeah, this feels like the outcome of echo chambers. The whole idea of "repeating a lie often enough makes it true" is happening constantly on a personalized micro scale.
In the past you had one nutter yelling on the street corner about the pedophiles in the pizza shops, and everyone kinda walked on by, thinking man, that guy's nutters. Now he's in your house, 6 hours a day. And eventually, you're like, man, those pizza shops, we've gotta do something about.
I just finished 'When Prophecy Fails' It's a study about what people do when they are presented with info that disproves their crazy ideas. It turns out, that when the end of the world doesn't come, if you're by yourself, and don't have any other true believers around to help you explain away the miss, then you usually become disillusioned and move away from whatever movement you're in.
On the other hand, when true believers are around, the feedback loop helps soften the blow and find an excuse. It blocks out the doubt and you continue in your beliefs.
The really shitty thing here is that with the internet, you never have to go through the disappointment of an obvious failed prophecy alone, you can reach out to 4 chan and explain away and justify and find support and reassurance that you weren't actually wrong, when the evidence right in front of your face is clearly saying you were wrong. This is contributing to a snowball effect where these movements are just connecting and growing and never suffer setbacks when the are obviously wrong. (i.e. pizza gate guy shooting into the closet.)
In the current incarnation, sure. But the real "problem" is the internet where people with niche ideas can find like-minded people and let their ideas and followers grow from there.
Sometimes the results are benign. Sometimes they aren't.
It is however exacerbated by algorithms designed to feed you content they know you'll react to. It's no longer that the fringe conspiracies are there for you to go find, they're out there, finding you. This is a novelty in human history. Certainly at this scale.
Unless you count the Missionaries, and I'd say that was altogether pretty successful.
People could always find like minded people and communicate, it might have been less efficient but conspiracy groups have always magazines in news stands, published books in stores and libraries, international newsletters, less formal letter based communication and conventions. You were probably less likely to come across them because it took a little more effort and you were in a "mainstream bubble" (I don't mean that negatively) but they were always there.
Saying it didn't exists before the internet is like saying dating didn't exists before it was online.
Speed, scale, accessibility, and the ability to target susceptible people without geographic proximity make it a novel problem.
A person handling out pamphlets (asserting something like "Liberal politicians run a pedophilia ring, look for the Pizza code!") can communicate with on the order of 10^1 people per day, and can persuade on the order of 10^1 people per year. The medium is sketchy, the messenger can't be abstracted from the message, one would have to be physically near the messenger, and the messenger would have to be actively trying to communicate with you when you came into proximity.
A person posting links to a (fake news) site (asserting something like "Liberal politicians run a pedophilia ring, look for the Pizza code!") via FB can reach on the order of 10^6 people in a day or two. And FB promotes that content to the people who are more susceptible.
Before social media, AM talk radio was the same cesspool, with the same content and a similarly sized audience. Facebook just makes it more visible to those that are rightfully disturbed by it.
Yeah. Up until recently, the ability to immediately communicate information to hundreds of thousands of people at once was guarded. Editors economically metered inches of print, networks (the original 4) were ruthlessly inoffensive to avoid pushing people away, radio stations religiously avoided dead air, etc. To build a fringe movement in the past, one could reach up to dozens of people directly or through pamphlets. Using the model of viral spread, the viral load from a pamphlet or from a conspiracy theorist's mouth was too low to infect most people, so the conspiracy would fizzle. If enough susceptible people were blasted with a high enough load of false information, those people could become infected and start spreading the false information themselves, triggering exponential spread, but in the past there weren't good ways to identify susceptible people. Modern platforms, optimizing for engagement/watch time, leveraged the immense amount of data they generate from user behavior to identify clusters of user behavior patterns, predict the cluster a user is most similar to, and feed that user content that activates other users in that cluster. In short, modern platforms make it far easier to both find people susceptible to a false narrative (or ensemble of false narratives), and to spread the false narrative.
Humanity has never faced this phenomena until recently, where anyone can infect hundreds of millions of people with false ideas like "the earth is flat", or "a deadly virus, and strategies to prevent it's spread, should be ignored", or "democracy is a lie and it is not a mechanism for peacefully removing people from power". If we don't demand a solution, we're going to continue to see massive death and destruction from uninformed or even perverse response to disease, climate change, and a myriad of other issues.
The Russian collusion conspiracy theory lasted for years, was broadcast on all the MSM news channels, and included many sitting congress members, without any evidence that it was true. Millions of wasted dollars later, and Mueller came up with nothing. The Russian collusion conspiracy theory was the most prevalent conspiracy theory of the last 4 years.
I strongly suggest you read the Mueller report. It's not what you've been led to believe.
"Mueller and his team of prosecutors have now indicted 34 individuals and three Russian businesses on charges ranging from computer hacking to conspiracy and financial crimes."
"Those indictments have led to seven guilty pleas and five people sentenced to prison."
If this doesn't line up with what you've heard, don't believe me, read the actual report. [2]
If any group of politicians had been investigated to the depth of the Mueller investigation, the same amount of criminal behavior would have been found. They're all criminals, you have to be to compete.
Was there really any need to single out one party? I could list a bunch of conspiracies that are accepted truths among most proponents of the other party, but I'll be flagged and banned.
Perhaps not the plan, per se, but when your entire ideology relies on falsehoods (like trickle-down economics, and the genetic superiority of white men over everyone else), when you take that to its logical conclusion you must employ authoritarian methods to suppress the reality that proves you're full of bullshit.
Not all of it is bullshit, but my hope is for people to call out the bad motivations and behaviour, in politics and workplace alike. Force them to discuss real issues rather than tribalism.
The identity politics has exactly the same problem, of losing the universal principles and broader perspectives.
I could list many conspiracies peddled by the other party but I would be flagged/banned for most. Some less controversial ones might be Trump being elected due to mysterious Russians, and Trump being a secret White Supremacist hiding dog whistles in every other tweet.
The FBI and Mueller special counsel report specifically called out an anti-Clinton campaign by the GRU. No one argues that Trump was elected by Russians, only that they did an awful lot to air Clinton's dirty laundry.
Seems a tad different than 'Hillary Clinton runs a child sex ring in a pizza parlor basement'.
I do. I argue he was not, but if you believe in the Russians, surely you beliefs the Chinese elected Biden. Just because you disagree doesn’t make it a conspiracy theory, only your insignificant disagreement.
I don’t remember Hillary Clinton calling Trump’s election fake in Nov 2016 (she conceded the morning after Election Day). There were no calls from Obama asking state legislators to overturn the results, or for VP Biden to just ignore state results and pick electors himself in Jan 2017 (which is what many Republicans are asking Pence to do next week).
Later there was an investigation into Russian election interference authorized by Trump’s own Attorney General. Five people went to prison. That’s not a conspiracy theory.
Speculation about Trump’s motives was fueled by his own extremely bizarre behavior towards Russia. In the infamous Helsinki meeting, he first destroyed interpreter’s notes to hide what was discussed, then took Putin’s side against the American intelligence community. My own feeling is that he did all this simply out of a weird admiration for Putin — but with this much smoke, it’s not surprising there were questions about a fire.
It's not hypothetical. General Flynn alleged that prosecutors threatened to prosecute his son if he didn't plead guilty. Those allegations are unproven, but that is how our justice system usually works.
> Former prosecutors say such hardball tactics are routine in criminal cases.
> “I can say with great confidence that kind of pressure is pretty common,” said Shanlon Wu, a former federal prosecutor who now is a defense attorney.[1]
And it is true that Flynn's son was a "subject" of the investigation[2], then General Flynn pled guilty, then nothing happened to his son. Even before Flynn made the allegations, NPR said: "[the plea deal] also apparently avoided prospective charges for Flynn's son."[3]
See, that’s another way of disconnecting reality from your wishes. In most countries, determining guilt is the prerogative of the justice system as it used to be in the US. But that has been corrupted. Belief, that there was a witch hunt exceeds the belief, that the justice system is just. Which gives short-term gains for whoever benefits from the former while the latter undermines the society long term. I have no idea, who did what, but I know a country or two, that is strategically interested in undermining the US democracy in the long run.
This is DARVO [0]. You're attempting to copy the fascism of the Republicans onto the Democrats. This might have worked better if it weren't for the Republicans' neglect over the past executive term; with hundreds of thousands of Americans dead or rioting because they're tired of starving and being shot, it is increasingly obvious that the Republicans are incapable of leading.
Neoliberalism is terrible, yeah, but your conflation of neoliberalism with neoconservatism is puerile and unhelpful. (And your posting history makes it clear that, because you're wealthy, you don't really give a shit about other people.)
This is a direct result of the degradation of journalism.
When you notice that mass media has a political agenda, you stop trusting them. You look for information somewhere else. If you are not very educated and don't have time to do serious research, you fall for conspiracy theories, since they are the complete opposite of mass media.
> This is a direct result of the degradation of journalism.
And, you know, a political ideology that believes the media lies about everything. The current President of the United States himself says it constantly.
Yes, Trump says things that are misleading or blatantly untrue. However I don't think mistrust in the MSM is "ideology" associated with one party. Fox News is the MSM for many people and they've given us many reasons to distrust them.
Just off the top of my head:
* WaPo and NYT lied about WMDs and Iraq.
* NYT lied about NSA spying programs in 2005. Snowden explicitly said he gave his leaks to a British organization because US news could not be trusted.
* Rolling Stone misrepresented or omitted testimonies in 'A Rape on Campus'.
* CNN said repeatedly that Clinton was polling higher than Trump and there was absolutely no way he was going to win. CNN also blacked out Yang and Sanders coverage and got flak for it. CNN also retracted at least one story on Trump, i cant remember what it was about but probably Russia.
* HuffPo has retracted a racist article after it was revealed the author had faked their identity, and editors made no attempt to verify whether or not their credentials were real.
* And of course everyone is familiar with the evils of 'new media' companies like Facebook and YouTube, from spreading harmful content to children, unfairly enforcing policies, spreading misinformation, and harmful ads.
I'm sure I could come up with more. Why should I trust them? What have these organizations done to prove to the public they are changing? Why does distrusting them make me some sort of alt-right crazy? It seems like the media has the burden of proof, not me. From where I stand, the "political ideology" is a reaction to a sleazy, corrupt, and dying media industry.
You're cherry-picking a few specific examples on the Democratic side, and comparing it to a party that literally ran - and had elected - a QAnon senator [1].
This whataboutism and false equivalency is extremely toxic.
Are dems perfect? Lord no. Does the MSM make mistakes? Absolutely. Is one side actively engaged in a war on truth? Yeah, kinda.
> However I don't think mistrust in the MSM is "ideology" associated with one party. Fox News is the MSM for many people and they've given us many reasons to distrust them.
I watch an awful lot of Fox, and let me assure you, they positioned themselves very much outside the mainstream media. They railed against the MSM non-stop for 4+ years by name. Unfortunately, they were hoisted by their own petard when they called Arizona for Biden. I was watching it live, and I nearly spat out my whiskey. They got hucked into the MSM bin by Trump supporters and left for dead on November 3, 2020, around 6PM PST.
> This whataboutism and false equivalency is extremely toxic.
It's not whataboutism, I never excused Trump nor the Republicans. They should be called out on their bullshit. If anything, responding to a comment solely about things the media has done with Senate election results is whataboutism.
False equivalency... Eh, maybe. The eye-for-an-eye tallying of sins never goes well and I'm not ready to try at the moment. But I will agree that Fox News has its reputation as a cesspool for a reason.
> Are dems perfect? Lord no. Does the MSM make mistakes? Absolutely. Is one side actively engaged in a war on truth? Yeah, kinda.
This helped me realize the problem. You come just short of saying MSM == Democrats, other news == Republicans. Not a single line of my previous post criticized any Dem politicians, only the MSM. The previous post has at least one example of the MSM working against progressive values. They are not the same thing. If you consider them the same thing, I think that's strange, because I don't think they should be. If there's some evidence that they are the same thing, do share, you'll probably be adding CNN's rap sheet of corruption.
It seems like the poll was just a few thousand people [1]. If we look at some specific poll questions:
> Moreover, fewer than half (47%) are able to correctly
> identify that this statement is false: “A group of
> Satan-worshipping elites who run a child sex ring are
> trying to control our politics and media.” Thirty-seven
> percent are unsure whether this theory backed by QAnon is
> true or false, and 17% believe it to be true.
47% identify the statement as false, 17% identify it as true and I assume the rest are unsure. This sounds about right for most unproven things.
I would suggest that given the long list of powerful contacts Epstein is confirmed to have had, his seemingly random rise to wealth, the idea that he wasn't a lone wolf isn't insane.
Also you have to consider that something like "Satan-worshipping" is loaded, as to a religious person anybody conducting such acts could be said to be following the path of Satan. Given the large number of Christians in the US, it's not unreasonable to believe this could have been misinterpreted.
> Nearly half (47%) believe the majority of protests this
> summer were violent, while just 38% correctly indicated
> that this is a false statement.
I am open to be corrected, but by all accounts there was at least some form of arrests at most large protests and many of those were violence related. I personally watched about 20 random live streams on Twitch and each time there was somebody who got into a fight. I imagine they are conflating violent protests with riots (where you have a significant number of agitators)?
I remember watching some news reporter state that the protests had been largely peaceful as a building burned down behind him. I don't think it could be argued that most large news outlets have become political in nature - historically the press and politicians would work hand in hand.
> More than one in three Americans believe in the existence
> of a so-called “deep state;”
My understanding is that the "deep state" is essentially the permanent state - groups such as the CIA, FBI, NSA, etc, that hold enormous amounts of power and act on scales longer than most presidencies and without democratic oversight.
I think that some of what this poll considers to be "fact" is simply from one of these "fact checker" services, which are based on existing evidence and general consensus rather than any kind of real investigation past a Google search by one random person.
Considering how many people believe "critical race theory", "intersectionality", and other crackpot conspiracy theories, this doesn't surprise me.
"Increasingly, people are willing to say and believe stuff that fits in with their view of how the world should be, even if it doesn't have any basis in reality or fact,"
By "critical race theory" do you mean that there's only one human race? This isn't a crackpot conspiracy; TBH, it makes the belief in multiple races look crackpot. Similarly, by "intersectionality" do you mean the advances in civil-rights law that let us recognize when women of color are being discriminated against? This isn't crackpot, but basic set theory being applied by lawyers.
Imagine being a country which doesn't feed everybody, house everybody, clothe everybody, give health care to everybody, but does have plenty of time to explain how skin color matters a whole lot and can fund police which will enforce skin-color policies. That's rightism in a nutshell.
>Imagine being a country which doesn't feed everybody, house everybody, clothe everybody, give health care to everybody, but does have plenty of time to explain how skin color matters a whole lot and can fund police which will enforce skin-color policies.
This is a fantastic description of leftism! It almost perfectly describes the Bay Area and Portland!
Just seeing the threads on the origin of Covid-19 on HN shows that it is very easy to get sucked in conjectures not supported by any facts and to irrationally start believing that something is likely.
When your leaders have spent the last 40 years in an active campaign to discredit science and debate in order to silence anyone who would question their questionable policies you shouldn't be surprised to get to this point.
93 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 136 ms ] threadThe existence of both groups is disappointing.
Like what? “Nonsense conspiracy theory makes sense because ‘NPR has an agenda’”. Like genuinely, huh? If you don’t believe NPR, you don’t have to pick the stupidest possible alternative.
It’s fine to question authority. But you don’t have to pick genuine idiocy because you lack faith in some journalistic institutions. Maybe you could just, idk be a little more skeptical instead of thinking pizza places house pedophiles? It’s idiocy. Why be gentle about it?
If your argument for buying into some of this stuff is “they’re all liars! That’s why I believed the stupidest possible thing” You seriously need to look in the mirror and do some self evaluation.
https://www.npr.org/2015/06/24/417192057/right-wing-extremis...
“Terrorist Or Hero? Politics Shape The Story Behind Antifa's Only Fatal Attack”
https://www.npr.org/2020/07/22/894343496/terrorist-or-hero-p...
“'Here It Is': Extremism Researchers Worry About The Rising Violence During Protests” (Story about an antifa member killing a proud boy)
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/04/909793727/here-it-is-extremis...
https://twitter.com/isis_win/status/1323046887910477837
https://twitter.com/backupishere/status/1044776935077941248
You may have tried to use hyperbole to illustrate a point, but you wound up looking like you're trying to either discredit a news organization you don't like or legitimize a bullshit artist by placing the two on equal terms.
It came across as disingenuous at best and you don't seem to be willing to recognize that divergence from your stated intentions. Why is that?
It is a simple and consistent argument, even if you don’t want to believe it, and even if you are right to dislike the spice.
Honestly, it's probably part of a real justification narrative for trusting things like QAnon and talk radio over the mainstream media. If you do that, you at least have to put them on the same level, and if it's too difficult to build up things like the first two, then you can always try tear down the latter (since it's easier to cherry-pick enough stuff to make that passably believable: just set a very high bar then catalog the inevitable times one of the thousands of journalists didn't live up to it over the last century).
What?! My problem is that people fail to question reputable but comically biased sources like NPR, not that those same people don’t believe Q!
This is such a ridiculous straw man! I hope you made this error in good faith.
Alternative A) You are an ordinary person with an ordinary job and ordinary pasttimes. You fulfill your role in society like everyone else.
Alternative B) You have an important mission that will change the course of history, to spread the influence of <insert dogmatic belief system here>.
If you are bored, tired of living a repetitive life and have no purpose in life, Alternative B) sounds fantastic. Now you feel needed, you feel special, etc. You have a mission to save the world from the <masks|vaccines|science|microchips|illuminati|devil|5G|...>
Conspiracy theories, religious fanatism, extreme nationalism, flat earth societies, sanitary anticompliance (anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers), climate change denial... they all have a thing in common: they are not rational and the people behind them are afraid of rationality and science.
It is largely impossible for us to operate any other way, no matter how true our knowledge is.
Actually, I'd disagree. If you dig in to a lot of these theories, there is a kernel of rationality behind them. Many adherents can actually rebut arguments with evidence that makes a surprising amount of sense: there are usually multiple possible explanations for individual phenomena, and if you look at them in isolation, it can be very hard to conclusively demonstrate that the "scientific" answer is actually the best possible explanation. This to me explains why even intellectuals can fall prey to these theories: if you already have a nonconformist streak, the alternative explanations can be interesting to dig into.
Where they fall flat is in overall coherence; these theories often end up with massive gaping seams if you try to expand them from explaining one phenomena. And these seams are so obvious, and yet adherents have no coherent explanation for these seams, that it overshadows whatever kernel of rationality the theory originally had.
Not saying movements don't have some learning and constructive purposes too, but the core of the ideology itself is always full of flawed logic most effective in confusing people.
Legends are passed from generation to generation, and the ones that were more spectacular and entertaining were more likely to be passed to the next generation. So at some moment in history you had a proliferation of spectacular stories and prophets and miracles and divine revelation. But once writing systems are developed and adopted by the general population this no longer happens. Why? Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but the most likely reason is because people were making stuff up all along. That's why.
Secondly, the afterlife...
The reason people believe in an afterlife is mostly because the brain is designed to look for a path to survival at all times. e.g.: You think about going to work because you need income to go to the grocery store so you can buy food which you will eventually cook and then eat = survival. work -> income -> money -> food -> survival.
But eventually, the brain learns that all paths ultimately lead to death anyways. The brain, however, has defense mechanisms that prevent it from falling into psychological states that are bad for survival, and those defense mechanisms often involve illogical lines of thought. When this happens, your brain will try to get out of that psychological state by making some shit up, such as "look bro, you will die, but right after that, you will continue living". i.e.: the afterlife, souls, etc.
The afterlife, however, is just the beginning. Once you have an afterlife, now you can make rules that dictate what happens there. e.g.: "If you don't pay 10% of your income to me, your afterlife will suck". And once you standardize those rules now you have organized religion.
In the past you had one nutter yelling on the street corner about the pedophiles in the pizza shops, and everyone kinda walked on by, thinking man, that guy's nutters. Now he's in your house, 6 hours a day. And eventually, you're like, man, those pizza shops, we've gotta do something about.
On the other hand, when true believers are around, the feedback loop helps soften the blow and find an excuse. It blocks out the doubt and you continue in your beliefs.
The really shitty thing here is that with the internet, you never have to go through the disappointment of an obvious failed prophecy alone, you can reach out to 4 chan and explain away and justify and find support and reassurance that you weren't actually wrong, when the evidence right in front of your face is clearly saying you were wrong. This is contributing to a snowball effect where these movements are just connecting and growing and never suffer setbacks when the are obviously wrong. (i.e. pizza gate guy shooting into the closet.)
Sometimes the results are benign. Sometimes they aren't.
Unless you count the Missionaries, and I'd say that was altogether pretty successful.
Saying it didn't exists before the internet is like saying dating didn't exists before it was online.
A person handling out pamphlets (asserting something like "Liberal politicians run a pedophilia ring, look for the Pizza code!") can communicate with on the order of 10^1 people per day, and can persuade on the order of 10^1 people per year. The medium is sketchy, the messenger can't be abstracted from the message, one would have to be physically near the messenger, and the messenger would have to be actively trying to communicate with you when you came into proximity.
A person posting links to a (fake news) site (asserting something like "Liberal politicians run a pedophilia ring, look for the Pizza code!") via FB can reach on the order of 10^6 people in a day or two. And FB promotes that content to the people who are more susceptible.
Ideas couldn't spread like this ever before.
Humanity has never faced this phenomena until recently, where anyone can infect hundreds of millions of people with false ideas like "the earth is flat", or "a deadly virus, and strategies to prevent it's spread, should be ignored", or "democracy is a lie and it is not a mechanism for peacefully removing people from power". If we don't demand a solution, we're going to continue to see massive death and destruction from uninformed or even perverse response to disease, climate change, and a myriad of other issues.
"Mueller and his team of prosecutors have now indicted 34 individuals and three Russian businesses on charges ranging from computer hacking to conspiracy and financial crimes."
"Those indictments have led to seven guilty pleas and five people sentenced to prison."
If this doesn't line up with what you've heard, don't believe me, read the actual report. [2]
[1] https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/breakdown-indictments-cases-...
[2] https://www.justice.gov/storage/report.pdf
The Republican Party ought to take a long, hard look at where their campaign against facts is leading them. It’s not even the party of Nixon anymore.
They know very well where they've wanted it to lead. Do you think otherwise?
The identity politics has exactly the same problem, of losing the universal principles and broader perspectives.
I could list many conspiracies peddled by the other party but I would be flagged/banned for most. Some less controversial ones might be Trump being elected due to mysterious Russians, and Trump being a secret White Supremacist hiding dog whistles in every other tweet.
The FBI and Mueller special counsel report specifically called out an anti-Clinton campaign by the GRU. No one argues that Trump was elected by Russians, only that they did an awful lot to air Clinton's dirty laundry.
Seems a tad different than 'Hillary Clinton runs a child sex ring in a pizza parlor basement'.
But maybe that's just my liberal bias speaking.
Later there was an investigation into Russian election interference authorized by Trump’s own Attorney General. Five people went to prison. That’s not a conspiracy theory.
Speculation about Trump’s motives was fueled by his own extremely bizarre behavior towards Russia. In the infamous Helsinki meeting, he first destroyed interpreter’s notes to hide what was discussed, then took Putin’s side against the American intelligence community. My own feeling is that he did all this simply out of a weird admiration for Putin — but with this much smoke, it’s not surprising there were questions about a fire.
- 34 indicted.
- 7 pled guilty.
- 5 went to prison. So far.
If this was a witch hunt, we found us a coven.
[1] https://time.com/5556331/mueller-investigation-indictments-g...
Coercive Plea Bargaining Has Poisoned the Criminal Justice System.
https://www.aclu.org/news/criminal-law-reform/coercive-plea-...
> Former prosecutors say such hardball tactics are routine in criminal cases.
> “I can say with great confidence that kind of pressure is pretty common,” said Shanlon Wu, a former federal prosecutor who now is a defense attorney.[1]
And it is true that Flynn's son was a "subject" of the investigation[2], then General Flynn pled guilty, then nothing happened to his son. Even before Flynn made the allegations, NPR said: "[the plea deal] also apparently avoided prospective charges for Flynn's son."[3]
1: https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2020-04-30/flynn-stil...
2: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/mike-flynn-s-son-subjec...
3: https://www.npr.org/2020/05/08/852582068/mike-flynn-pleaded-...
Neoliberalism is terrible, yeah, but your conflation of neoliberalism with neoconservatism is puerile and unhelpful. (And your posting history makes it clear that, because you're wealthy, you don't really give a shit about other people.)
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARVO
Typical leftist.
When you notice that mass media has a political agenda, you stop trusting them. You look for information somewhere else. If you are not very educated and don't have time to do serious research, you fall for conspiracy theories, since they are the complete opposite of mass media.
And, you know, a political ideology that believes the media lies about everything. The current President of the United States himself says it constantly.
Just off the top of my head:
* WaPo and NYT lied about WMDs and Iraq.
* NYT lied about NSA spying programs in 2005. Snowden explicitly said he gave his leaks to a British organization because US news could not be trusted.
* Rolling Stone misrepresented or omitted testimonies in 'A Rape on Campus'.
* CNN said repeatedly that Clinton was polling higher than Trump and there was absolutely no way he was going to win. CNN also blacked out Yang and Sanders coverage and got flak for it. CNN also retracted at least one story on Trump, i cant remember what it was about but probably Russia.
* HuffPo has retracted a racist article after it was revealed the author had faked their identity, and editors made no attempt to verify whether or not their credentials were real.
* And of course everyone is familiar with the evils of 'new media' companies like Facebook and YouTube, from spreading harmful content to children, unfairly enforcing policies, spreading misinformation, and harmful ads.
I'm sure I could come up with more. Why should I trust them? What have these organizations done to prove to the public they are changing? Why does distrusting them make me some sort of alt-right crazy? It seems like the media has the burden of proof, not me. From where I stand, the "political ideology" is a reaction to a sleazy, corrupt, and dying media industry.
This whataboutism and false equivalency is extremely toxic.
Are dems perfect? Lord no. Does the MSM make mistakes? Absolutely. Is one side actively engaged in a war on truth? Yeah, kinda.
> However I don't think mistrust in the MSM is "ideology" associated with one party. Fox News is the MSM for many people and they've given us many reasons to distrust them.
I watch an awful lot of Fox, and let me assure you, they positioned themselves very much outside the mainstream media. They railed against the MSM non-stop for 4+ years by name. Unfortunately, they were hoisted by their own petard when they called Arizona for Biden. I was watching it live, and I nearly spat out my whiskey. They got hucked into the MSM bin by Trump supporters and left for dead on November 3, 2020, around 6PM PST.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/03/us/politics/qanon-candida...
It's not whataboutism, I never excused Trump nor the Republicans. They should be called out on their bullshit. If anything, responding to a comment solely about things the media has done with Senate election results is whataboutism.
False equivalency... Eh, maybe. The eye-for-an-eye tallying of sins never goes well and I'm not ready to try at the moment. But I will agree that Fox News has its reputation as a cesspool for a reason.
> Are dems perfect? Lord no. Does the MSM make mistakes? Absolutely. Is one side actively engaged in a war on truth? Yeah, kinda.
This helped me realize the problem. You come just short of saying MSM == Democrats, other news == Republicans. Not a single line of my previous post criticized any Dem politicians, only the MSM. The previous post has at least one example of the MSM working against progressive values. They are not the same thing. If you consider them the same thing, I think that's strange, because I don't think they should be. If there's some evidence that they are the same thing, do share, you'll probably be adding CNN's rap sheet of corruption.
Not really, that’s using the rights definition of it, not my opinion.
From their perspective, there’s the “MSM” (everyone you’ve ever heard of except...) Fox, Breitbart and Sinclair.
Fox got hucked into the MSM pile, so there’s everyone you’ve ever heard of (“MSM”), Breitbart and Sinclair.
https://nypost.com/2020/12/29/covid-19-bill-started-a-180-da...
> Moreover, fewer than half (47%) are able to correctly
> identify that this statement is false: “A group of
> Satan-worshipping elites who run a child sex ring are
> trying to control our politics and media.” Thirty-seven
> percent are unsure whether this theory backed by QAnon is
> true or false, and 17% believe it to be true.
47% identify the statement as false, 17% identify it as true and I assume the rest are unsure. This sounds about right for most unproven things.
I would suggest that given the long list of powerful contacts Epstein is confirmed to have had, his seemingly random rise to wealth, the idea that he wasn't a lone wolf isn't insane.
Also you have to consider that something like "Satan-worshipping" is loaded, as to a religious person anybody conducting such acts could be said to be following the path of Satan. Given the large number of Christians in the US, it's not unreasonable to believe this could have been misinterpreted.
> Nearly half (47%) believe the majority of protests this
> summer were violent, while just 38% correctly indicated
> that this is a false statement.
I am open to be corrected, but by all accounts there was at least some form of arrests at most large protests and many of those were violence related. I personally watched about 20 random live streams on Twitch and each time there was somebody who got into a fight. I imagine they are conflating violent protests with riots (where you have a significant number of agitators)?
I remember watching some news reporter state that the protests had been largely peaceful as a building burned down behind him. I don't think it could be argued that most large news outlets have become political in nature - historically the press and politicians would work hand in hand.
> More than one in three Americans believe in the existence
> of a so-called “deep state;”
My understanding is that the "deep state" is essentially the permanent state - groups such as the CIA, FBI, NSA, etc, that hold enormous amounts of power and act on scales longer than most presidencies and without democratic oversight.
I think that some of what this poll considers to be "fact" is simply from one of these "fact checker" services, which are based on existing evidence and general consensus rather than any kind of real investigation past a Google search by one random person.
[1] https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/news-polls/npr-misinformation-12...
"Increasingly, people are willing to say and believe stuff that fits in with their view of how the world should be, even if it doesn't have any basis in reality or fact,"
That's leftism in a nutshell.
Yes, it is.
>Your argument is just veiled prejudice to disenfranchise your political opponents, without any basis of facts.
Perfect description of leftism. Love it!
/r/selfawarewolves
"As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Trump or Orangeman approaches 1."
Prime example of TDS. Rent free.
Imagine being a country which doesn't feed everybody, house everybody, clothe everybody, give health care to everybody, but does have plenty of time to explain how skin color matters a whole lot and can fund police which will enforce skin-color policies. That's rightism in a nutshell.
>Imagine being a country which doesn't feed everybody, house everybody, clothe everybody, give health care to everybody, but does have plenty of time to explain how skin color matters a whole lot and can fund police which will enforce skin-color policies.
This is a fantastic description of leftism! It almost perfectly describes the Bay Area and Portland!
The solutions are some though...
Education and Socialism