Hey folks, it’s Friday. If you want to hear me chatting with Julia Galef on her excellent “Rationally Speaking” podcast, our conversation is up now. I’m getting more interested in rationalism, and I thought it was a really great show.
I remember being rather peeved at Dara and Jane in the Epstein episode. Prison conditions ARE bad, and suicide is a problem, but systemic answers aren't always great at explaining specific cases. In the specific case of Epstein, considering his ties and the potential explosiveness of his testimony, I think it's insane levels of delusion to literally immediately after his death conclude "see, told y'all prisons were really bad - this has nothing to do with the specifics of this case though."
So far, my favorite part of today's essay is this:
"...consumers of less legitimate media (blogs and grocery store tabloids).”
Yup. Every morning, I shuffle down to bodega, pick up my cigs and a few powerball numbers if I'm feeling flush, and grab my copies of the "National Enquirer" and "Slow Boring."
So I guess this is why I subscribed. When you're not talking about the impacts of systemic racism, your contrarian views are helpful. And dryly funny. I agree on almost all counts, especially since I spent some time yesterday trying to figure out whether/how to respond to a cousin who claimed that 'food provided by the good Lord" would protect her against Covid, and that therefore she did not need to be vaccinated. After thinking about the conspiracies embedded in that, I responded by posting something on FB that compared the number of deaths from anaphylaxis from both Pfizer and Moderna (71) to the 450,000 deaths from Covid-19. I had to leave it at that, hoping my cousin would see it, but knowing it wouldn't convince her. I hope I reached some of our shared "friends' who haven't progressed as far down the anti-vaxxer rabbit hole.
But then again, as a mentor of mine once said: Even paranoids have real enemies. Humility is called for.
The far more wide-spread conspiracy that concerns me is that something like 75% of Republicans think the Democrats committed massive, organized election fraud in 2020. TBH I'd been associating it strongly with Q but I didn't realize only 7% of people copped to being Q-urious. Obviously conspiracy theories are far more disturbing when they're fed by the sitting president and a major "news" network. Interestingly it seems more convincing to argue the causality in the opposite direction--people convinced of the bigger conspiracy are more inclined to get sucked into cults like QAnon as a respite/way to "fight back."
The "conspiracy theory" form of Russiagate is that Trump was a Manchurian Candidate who spent 4 years doing whatever Putin wanted him to do, and I know at least a dozen people aged 50+ who would volunteer this belief at every opportunity.
I guess I hang out in lower-rent progressive circles that Matthew, but I saw lots of progressives pushing "Epstein didn't kill himself" memes. I don't know who they were insinuating was behind it, though. Did they just get caught up in spreading a right-wing meme targeting the Clintons?
FWIW, "Epstein didn't kill himself" was a very prominent view on my left-leaning Facebook timeline. Bernie supporters and leftists in general REALLY liked it for the connection between Trump (who they hate) and Clinton (who they hate almost as much), and gave some extra emotional credibility to their view that democrats and republicans are two sides of the same coin (not a view that I personally hold, but very widespread, at least within my social circles).
A lot of people are saying Greene disavowed her 9/11 truther conspiracy. Not so.
Saying that 9/11 DID happen is not as key as saying HOW it happened. Someone needs to ask her about that. The answers will probably be revealing unless she has been successfully coached on how to hide her nutball beliefs.
Her claim that she was "allowed to believe" absurd conspiracies is an unwitting confession that she is trapped in a information bubble and her selection of sources was suspect. Piercing that bubble is nearly impossible and in her case I doubt it has been burst yet.
I gotta tell you--I know it's an ancillary point, but I'm having a real eye-opener about sex trafficking over here. After reading that whole thread, here's my conspiracy theory: Cops are inflating the sex-traffic stats so that they have cover to do "Operation Asian Touch"-style stings where they get HJs on the job. Sickos! Also, I'm going to have to fight hard against the urge to make sex-traffic-skeptic my whole personality, but I also feel like this is news we've got to share.
If you don't think progressives and leftists buy into conspiracy theories, try to find a prominent progressive politician, activist or pundit that can provide you with a truthful and coherent account of the riots that occurred in Minneapolis.
Based on a handful of arrests of people with ties to white supremacist or far-right organizations out of thousands of rioters, it has become accepted fact that the primary driver behind the riots were far-right groups operating a false-flag campaign to discredit BLM.
Neverminded the dozens of other rioters who have been arrested who have been shown to have leftist or anarchist political leanings. We are supposed to believe they would have been 100% peaceful if it wasn't for the right wing instigators. And for some reason the media has almost no interest in investigating this conspiracy.
Jeffrey Epstein's death notwithstanding, his *life* is jet fuel for conspiracy theories. We now have dozens of medium-to-high-profile people who hung out with him and with his harem of victims, and all they can say now is some form of: "I thought it was normal for a rich man like that to surround himself with presumably-18-year-old women."
All this right after Harvey Weinstein finally got some justice, and everybody around him either says "I was directly victimized by Harvey Weinstein" or some form of "I had no idea about [the open secret about Harvey Weinstein]."
I’d highly recommend Dan Olson’s “In Search of a Flat Earth”, which starts out talking about the Flat Earth movement but then moves on to Q (as most Flat Earthers moved on to Q themselves over the last couple of years). It was made 4 months ago, but was very prescient about things like the movement pushing for something like the capitol riots.
Some folks are asking why it matters if Q is a cult or a conspiracy theory. I think the reason it matters is that this is one of the side effects of our increasingly-secular society. Religion was often able to take the reigns of people’s desire for there to be more order in the universe, but as more people fall away from religion you end up with things like QAnon ready to jump in.
Love this piece. The "Deep State" one is so funny though. It used to be something academics said to refer to the military and national security apparatus. It existed by definition (unless you thought the CIA was not real).
Most conspiracy theories collapse under the weight of the number of insiders needed to execute it and keep it under wraps. They usually require hundreds if not thousands of participants many of whom have no incentive to cooperate with it. And that is before you bring in problematic secret cabals which reveal the prejudices of the conspiracy spreaders.
There is only one conspiracy theory that I seriously consider plausible. It's that Sarah Palin is actually Trig's grandmother and not her biological mother. This is a rabbit hole Andrew Sullivan eventually got himself stuck in much to the detriment of his reputation as a serious thinker. I don't want to delve into the details as it gets very wonky and it is unkind to make a child with developmental issues the center of a controversy.
The advantage it has as a conspiracy theory is that it would be easy for people to conclusively disprove if they were so inclined and that the circle of people necessary to keep the truth from coming out is fairly small and they all have good incentives to do so.
I remember being rather peeved at Dara and Jane in the Epstein episode. Prison conditions ARE bad, and suicide is a problem, but systemic answers aren't always great at explaining specific cases. In the specific case of Epstein, considering his ties and the potential explosiveness of his testimony, I think it's insane levels of delusion to literally immediately after his death conclude "see, told y'all prisons were really bad - this has nothing to do with the specifics of this case though."
So far, my favorite part of today's essay is this:
"...consumers of less legitimate media (blogs and grocery store tabloids).”
Yup. Every morning, I shuffle down to bodega, pick up my cigs and a few powerball numbers if I'm feeling flush, and grab my copies of the "National Enquirer" and "Slow Boring."
So I guess this is why I subscribed. When you're not talking about the impacts of systemic racism, your contrarian views are helpful. And dryly funny. I agree on almost all counts, especially since I spent some time yesterday trying to figure out whether/how to respond to a cousin who claimed that 'food provided by the good Lord" would protect her against Covid, and that therefore she did not need to be vaccinated. After thinking about the conspiracies embedded in that, I responded by posting something on FB that compared the number of deaths from anaphylaxis from both Pfizer and Moderna (71) to the 450,000 deaths from Covid-19. I had to leave it at that, hoping my cousin would see it, but knowing it wouldn't convince her. I hope I reached some of our shared "friends' who haven't progressed as far down the anti-vaxxer rabbit hole.
But then again, as a mentor of mine once said: Even paranoids have real enemies. Humility is called for.
The far more wide-spread conspiracy that concerns me is that something like 75% of Republicans think the Democrats committed massive, organized election fraud in 2020. TBH I'd been associating it strongly with Q but I didn't realize only 7% of people copped to being Q-urious. Obviously conspiracy theories are far more disturbing when they're fed by the sitting president and a major "news" network. Interestingly it seems more convincing to argue the causality in the opposite direction--people convinced of the bigger conspiracy are more inclined to get sucked into cults like QAnon as a respite/way to "fight back."
The "conspiracy theory" form of Russiagate is that Trump was a Manchurian Candidate who spent 4 years doing whatever Putin wanted him to do, and I know at least a dozen people aged 50+ who would volunteer this belief at every opportunity.
I guess I hang out in lower-rent progressive circles that Matthew, but I saw lots of progressives pushing "Epstein didn't kill himself" memes. I don't know who they were insinuating was behind it, though. Did they just get caught up in spreading a right-wing meme targeting the Clintons?
FWIW, "Epstein didn't kill himself" was a very prominent view on my left-leaning Facebook timeline. Bernie supporters and leftists in general REALLY liked it for the connection between Trump (who they hate) and Clinton (who they hate almost as much), and gave some extra emotional credibility to their view that democrats and republicans are two sides of the same coin (not a view that I personally hold, but very widespread, at least within my social circles).
I just have say : the inclusion of RATM lyrics in the essay justified my decision to subscribe.
A lot of people are saying Greene disavowed her 9/11 truther conspiracy. Not so.
Saying that 9/11 DID happen is not as key as saying HOW it happened. Someone needs to ask her about that. The answers will probably be revealing unless she has been successfully coached on how to hide her nutball beliefs.
Her claim that she was "allowed to believe" absurd conspiracies is an unwitting confession that she is trapped in a information bubble and her selection of sources was suspect. Piercing that bubble is nearly impossible and in her case I doubt it has been burst yet.
I gotta tell you--I know it's an ancillary point, but I'm having a real eye-opener about sex trafficking over here. After reading that whole thread, here's my conspiracy theory: Cops are inflating the sex-traffic stats so that they have cover to do "Operation Asian Touch"-style stings where they get HJs on the job. Sickos! Also, I'm going to have to fight hard against the urge to make sex-traffic-skeptic my whole personality, but I also feel like this is news we've got to share.
SlateStarCodex’s post on “survey-belief” is a good one: https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/04/12/noisy-poll-results-and-reptilian-muslim-climatologists-from-mars/. I don’t think that a quarter of Democrats really believed 9/11 was an inside job, for instance; that was a way to signal “I don’t like Bush.”
If you don't think progressives and leftists buy into conspiracy theories, try to find a prominent progressive politician, activist or pundit that can provide you with a truthful and coherent account of the riots that occurred in Minneapolis.
Based on a handful of arrests of people with ties to white supremacist or far-right organizations out of thousands of rioters, it has become accepted fact that the primary driver behind the riots were far-right groups operating a false-flag campaign to discredit BLM.
Neverminded the dozens of other rioters who have been arrested who have been shown to have leftist or anarchist political leanings. We are supposed to believe they would have been 100% peaceful if it wasn't for the right wing instigators. And for some reason the media has almost no interest in investigating this conspiracy.
Jeffrey Epstein's death notwithstanding, his *life* is jet fuel for conspiracy theories. We now have dozens of medium-to-high-profile people who hung out with him and with his harem of victims, and all they can say now is some form of: "I thought it was normal for a rich man like that to surround himself with presumably-18-year-old women."
All this right after Harvey Weinstein finally got some justice, and everybody around him either says "I was directly victimized by Harvey Weinstein" or some form of "I had no idea about [the open secret about Harvey Weinstein]."
I’d highly recommend Dan Olson’s “In Search of a Flat Earth”, which starts out talking about the Flat Earth movement but then moves on to Q (as most Flat Earthers moved on to Q themselves over the last couple of years). It was made 4 months ago, but was very prescient about things like the movement pushing for something like the capitol riots.
https://youtu.be/JTfhYyTuT44
Some folks are asking why it matters if Q is a cult or a conspiracy theory. I think the reason it matters is that this is one of the side effects of our increasingly-secular society. Religion was often able to take the reigns of people’s desire for there to be more order in the universe, but as more people fall away from religion you end up with things like QAnon ready to jump in.
Love this piece. The "Deep State" one is so funny though. It used to be something academics said to refer to the military and national security apparatus. It existed by definition (unless you thought the CIA was not real).
Most conspiracy theories collapse under the weight of the number of insiders needed to execute it and keep it under wraps. They usually require hundreds if not thousands of participants many of whom have no incentive to cooperate with it. And that is before you bring in problematic secret cabals which reveal the prejudices of the conspiracy spreaders.
There is only one conspiracy theory that I seriously consider plausible. It's that Sarah Palin is actually Trig's grandmother and not her biological mother. This is a rabbit hole Andrew Sullivan eventually got himself stuck in much to the detriment of his reputation as a serious thinker. I don't want to delve into the details as it gets very wonky and it is unkind to make a child with developmental issues the center of a controversy.
The advantage it has as a conspiracy theory is that it would be easy for people to conclusively disprove if they were so inclined and that the circle of people necessary to keep the truth from coming out is fairly small and they all have good incentives to do so.