> “Yeah, they’re role-playing together. They’re role-playing the collective understanding of the conspiracy theory.”
This is how the flat-Earthers started, isn't it? But every parody eventually runs into Poe's law.
I love sarcasm. My daughter loves it too. We sometimes engage in conversation where we're both clearly being sarcastic, but we get increasingly dead pan about it till neither of us is quite sure if the other is still being sarcastic. She termed this a "sarcasm trap" a few years ago. We find it fun to see how far we can take it.
Birds Aren't Real seems way too on the nose for anyone to mistake it as serious, but there are some truly naive/gullible people in the world.
Foucault's Pendulum is a (fiction) book about some "Birds Aren't Real"-type protagonists who cross paths with people who went down the rabbit hole. They try to play their own game while staying separate from it. It does not end well.
A friend of mine works with a person who seems to honestly believe Birds Aren't Real (at least in part). I made a joke about this when we were fighting bird monsters in a video game and he groaned and told me the story.
I used to think conspiracy theorists were just nuts until the Snowden NSA leaks. I still think most conspiracies are total bunk (obviously), but I admit finding out the kind (and scope) of surveillance that the NSA was engaged in had made me a little more willing to believe some things.
Conspiracies and conspiracy theories are different. People actually conspire to do all sorts of things, all over the world.
Conspiracy theories are different, though because they start with a “what if” and move to belief instead of starting from evidence and moving to belief.
Rational thinking is when you use facts and draw a conclusion.
Rationalizing is when you have a conclusion, and you work backwards to justify it with rational-sounding arguments.
Conspiracy theories start with some ridiculous conclusion, and work backwards to make it sound intelligent. It's not intelligent, but it SOUNDS intelligent.
I think two important points which distinguish many implausible conspiracy theories from real conspiracies are 1) disregard for what humans are actually capable of doing and 2) not having any reasonable motive to attribute to the purported conspirators.
Any theory which alleges that some group of people secretly controls the world falls under #1. Trying to keep just 50 or 100 people organized and getting them to all do what you want is incredibly hard, let alone the entire world.
An example of #2: Here in Zambia, when the government started offering free COVID-19 vaccines, various conspiracy theories spread on social media: some said that anyone who accepted the vaccine would turn into a chimpanzee, others said that their bodies would become magnetic and attract iron objects, while others said that vaccinated persons would become sterile and be unable to produce children.
I don't think any advocate of these theories ever explained why the government would want to turn their citizens into chimpanzees, though.
The world is obviously full of conspiracies. People have been conspiring on various topics for a long time. What bothers me is people can't separate the wheat from the chaff and you get 'Biden is a robot' instead of actual conspiracies like Monsanto & Big Sugar, Big Pharma, Military Industrial Complex etc
The Snowden leaks are almost totally information-free and conspiracy theorists simply project their prior beliefs onto them. As an exercise, take any widely-repeated conclusion drawn from the leaks and then go back to Snowden's materials and try to build a supporting case for that conclusion.
I mean, there are a lot of things that fall under the "conspiracy theory" umbrella that just straight up happened. For example, the CIA experimenting on people with LSD trying for mind control (MKUltra), the FBI assassinating prominent figures on the left like Fred Hampton, Snowden, etc. And a host of pretty reasonable ones - like the fact that there were probably multiplier shooters in the JFK assassination (the Caro bio of LBJ does a pretty good job explaining how/why the warren report needed to be rushed and needed to be simple so that the US wouldn't go to war with cuba or the USSR), the FBI assassinating MLK.
I think people who self-identify as lefties still do, but they’ve had almost no political influence since LBJ left office, so since before its publication (I know that seems like a contradiction in order of events, but I just mean the constituents of the same political tendency over time). What is termed “the left” in popular news media definitely does not, but that has been the case practically since it’s publication. Since the Clinton turn at least.
I keep thinking about the old poster in Fox Mulder’s office from the show “The X-Files”, the one that said “I Want To Believe”. I suspect that the reason it featured so prominently in that film set is because showrunner Chris Carter was making a statement about the mentality of conspiracy theorists.
The phrasing of that poster is very specific. These people aren’t objectively and dispassionately weighing the evidence both in favor of and against a certain theory. No, that theory is their pet theory, and whether consciously or subconsciously, their thumb is on the scale in favor of proving it true. The reason being that an implication of most conspiracy theories is that there is a conspiracy of powerful people to keep the truth from being revealed.
I’ve come to believe THAT is the important component of any conspiracy. The specific “truth” which is being hidden, whether it’s aliens or lizard people or pedophiles running a pizza shop, is almost a McGuffin. The reason people believe conspiracy theories, and backwards-rationalize their perceived truthfulness, is that it helps them believe in some all-powerful, malevolent cabal whose agenda includes keeping down the “little guy”. It’s a way for them to justify the failures in their lives without having to take responsibility for those failures. It’s the oldest story in the book.
It doesn’t help that there are real-world examples of conspiracies that have been proven true, but I suspect it wouldn’t be a deal-breaker for these people even if that weren’t the case.
It's all fun and games until the NSA actually creates bird drones for spying on citizens for the sake of national security and any one who identifies them are labeled insane and have their rights stripped and shipped to a oil refinery in north dakota.
Or the NSA commits illegal massive surveillance at a global scale, and an NSA analyst reveals it then gets asylum in Russia and US citizens shrug and move on forgetting it ever happened.
> NSA commits illegal massive surveillance at a global scale
has illegality been proven?
From what I could find they performed surveillance under FISA warrants.
There are obviously greater conspiracy theories, but are they supported by evidence?
I remember hearing research about these in 2012. I went to school right next to the Air Force Research Laboratory which controls a $2B+ budget, and there were research projects around biomimicry, etc. As your link shows, miniature drones that look like birds and mimic actual bird movements definitely exist.
IIRC, there has been similar research devoted to small burrowing ground animals as well.
How prevalent these are in the wild, and where and what they are used for is a whole other topic, but their existence is crystal clear. I wonder how many people outside of engineering fields actually know about this vs think it is some sort of science fiction.
Oil refinery workers in remote areas get paid a fortune and live in low cost centres, they work for a few years and retire early.
That does kind of sound like a punishment of the future: you have to do 'manual labour' - which people are so unwilling to do, that it also happens to be the highest paid.
White collar workers make TikToks for lattes, Blue Collar workers are the high income earners.
Oil refinery workers are generally college educated petrochemical engineers.
Their "peers" in the corporate office often make much more than they do. I don't know of what refinery workers are "retiring early" but my grandfather's 30 year CITGO pin as well as cancer that runs through my family from proximity to those "low cost centers" leaves much to be desired of this rose tinted narrative you're describing.
I have read that most newly minted millionaires own their own construction/contractor business.
I can say, anecdotally, when I lived in Silicon Valley the blue-collar guy down the street had his own house painting business and did alright as near as I could tell. I know he got in a few hours of golf during most days.
Conspiracy theorists aren't real. My theory is that they are a fabrication meant to make us disprove anything that goes against the mainstream narrative.
In reality, the truth is always somewhere in the middle.
Jokes aside, I'd be 0% surprised if there were some famous conspiracy theorists who were on various intelligence agencies payrolls to draw attention and make the idea of a conspiracy look silly.
There's also some "voluntary cover" involved; people who know things are eager to tell what they know as well as avoid the consequences. So they're likely to add a dose of crazy too, to disassociate what might be recognizably their experiences into something they can deny at need.
Few people tell their stories with full fidelity anyway, we gloss over our mistakes and make everything better and less banal by instinct.
But subliminal messaging is considered a conspiracy theory. Maybe it's not as obvious as messages played backwards, but if it's not happening already, there are definitely people working on it. The UK Government has a "nudge unit". I suppose arguably it's not a conspiracy theory any more because we all just assume it goes on.
Are the vaccine conspiracies really that outlandish, in a world where the US government once intentionally infected black people with syphilis and let them die in the Tuskegee syphilis study? (I'm triple vaxxed, just pointing it out.)
At one point before Snowden, the whole NSA thing was considered a conspiracy theory by many.
World governments have done some really crazy things in the past and kept it secret for a long time. Why do we assume now is any different?
There are some real nut cases out there, like the whole "Q" thing. But I think that the true believers and the most fervently vocal ones are a fairly small minority and the rest look at it the same way as Santa and the Easter bunny.
> the rest look at it the same way as Santa and the Easter bunny.
Ha ha, as an atheist, I chuckled at where you stopped. After unraveling the Santa Conspiracy as a child I began to question all of our other "cultural lore".
Any time you see 'conspiracy theorist' in a media context you should stop and remember that virtually every FBI indictment ever handed down includes 'conspiracy to commit mail fraud'. In this context, conspiracy simply refers to two or more people working together to conduct a criminal activity. However, FBI agents are not generally referred to as 'conspiracy theorists' even though their job is to investigate actual conspiracies.
The sociocultural use of the phrase 'conspiracy theory' is of course quite different. It's much more like a critique of religious belief - i.e. the notion there's an all-powerful, all-seeing force behind all events. Could it be the UFO aliens? Black helicopter-flying government agencies? The ancient gods and goddesses of Greek and Egyptian and Hindu theology? The more recent avatars of the Abrahamic traditions?
Now, today's media probably consists mostly of people for whom (Frank Herbert quote here) "religion is a kind of puppet show to amuse the populace and keep it docile, and who believe essentially that all phenomena - even religious phenomena - can be reduced to mechanical explanations."
Even so, it's unlikely that the Guardian would describe the religious beliefs of millions of their readers as 'conspiracy theories' as the phrase is perjorative and intended to belittle or disparage.
Regardless, some large-scale 'conspiracy theories' seem to have quite a bit of truth to them. For example, consider the notion that there was a deliberate conspiracy to fabricate evidence of WMDs in Iraq c. 2002-2003 run by the American and British governments in collusion with corporate media outlets from the NYTimes to FOX News and the BBC. Is that a 'conspiracy theory' or a credible allegation that still deserves serious criminal investigation?
The track record on “conspiracy theories” is recently very poor. So the current use of the phrase has an immediate stink to me now.
For every vocal “5G causes cancer idiots” there are a thousand silent “well, with my own eyes I am watching a video of Hunter Biden smoking crack sitting on a bed talking to a naked prostitute explaining about how people stole his last laptop during an 18 day bender and are now black mailing him, so, no, I don’t think this whole laptop thing actually “Russian Disinformation””… but it seems the practice is just lump both of those things together now.
Something I learned early is that character means the things you do when no one is looking (pay attention here to the reaction). People that still want to hide the Hunter Biden stuff here and elsewhere don’t believe it’s a consultancy theory, they just want to censor it. Still call it the same thing because achieves the goal.
> This is the fourth interview McIndoe has given as himself, not his conspiracist character.
The fact that he occasionally does sincere interviews and then goes on to (back in character) deny that the interview took place seems a little unhealthy. I know it's all a big joke but it just feels like real people could fall into this satire conspiracy theory when he attacks the credibility of legitimate journalists.
I think it’s part of the joke (and by consequence of real life conspiracy theories) that you will never know for sure what is the true. Good, lasting CTs are by definition impossible to disprove completely. It is up to you to decide what is real without anyone telling you. It is a good exercise.
Readit News
This is how the flat-Earthers started, isn't it? But every parody eventually runs into Poe's law.
I love sarcasm. My daughter loves it too. We sometimes engage in conversation where we're both clearly being sarcastic, but we get increasingly dead pan about it till neither of us is quite sure if the other is still being sarcastic. She termed this a "sarcasm trap" a few years ago. We find it fun to see how far we can take it.
Birds Aren't Real seems way too on the nose for anyone to mistake it as serious, but there are some truly naive/gullible people in the world.
Foucault's Pendulum is a (fiction) book about some "Birds Aren't Real"-type protagonists who cross paths with people who went down the rabbit hole. They try to play their own game while staying separate from it. It does not end well.
Deleted Comment
Conspiracy theories are different, though because they start with a “what if” and move to belief instead of starting from evidence and moving to belief.
At least, this is the way I define the terms.
People aren't rational. They are rationalizers.
Rational thinking is when you use facts and draw a conclusion.
Rationalizing is when you have a conclusion, and you work backwards to justify it with rational-sounding arguments.
Conspiracy theories start with some ridiculous conclusion, and work backwards to make it sound intelligent. It's not intelligent, but it SOUNDS intelligent.
Any theory which alleges that some group of people secretly controls the world falls under #1. Trying to keep just 50 or 100 people organized and getting them to all do what you want is incredibly hard, let alone the entire world.
An example of #2: Here in Zambia, when the government started offering free COVID-19 vaccines, various conspiracy theories spread on social media: some said that anyone who accepted the vaccine would turn into a chimpanzee, others said that their bodies would become magnetic and attract iron objects, while others said that vaccinated persons would become sterile and be unable to produce children.
I don't think any advocate of these theories ever explained why the government would want to turn their citizens into chimpanzees, though.
Dead Comment
The phrasing of that poster is very specific. These people aren’t objectively and dispassionately weighing the evidence both in favor of and against a certain theory. No, that theory is their pet theory, and whether consciously or subconsciously, their thumb is on the scale in favor of proving it true. The reason being that an implication of most conspiracy theories is that there is a conspiracy of powerful people to keep the truth from being revealed.
I’ve come to believe THAT is the important component of any conspiracy. The specific “truth” which is being hidden, whether it’s aliens or lizard people or pedophiles running a pizza shop, is almost a McGuffin. The reason people believe conspiracy theories, and backwards-rationalize their perceived truthfulness, is that it helps them believe in some all-powerful, malevolent cabal whose agenda includes keeping down the “little guy”. It’s a way for them to justify the failures in their lives without having to take responsibility for those failures. It’s the oldest story in the book.
It doesn’t help that there are real-world examples of conspiracies that have been proven true, but I suspect it wouldn’t be a deal-breaker for these people even if that weren’t the case.
has illegality been proven? From what I could find they performed surveillance under FISA warrants. There are obviously greater conspiracy theories, but are they supported by evidence?
I remember hearing research about these in 2012. I went to school right next to the Air Force Research Laboratory which controls a $2B+ budget, and there were research projects around biomimicry, etc. As your link shows, miniature drones that look like birds and mimic actual bird movements definitely exist.
IIRC, there has been similar research devoted to small burrowing ground animals as well.
How prevalent these are in the wild, and where and what they are used for is a whole other topic, but their existence is crystal clear. I wonder how many people outside of engineering fields actually know about this vs think it is some sort of science fiction.
That does kind of sound like a punishment of the future: you have to do 'manual labour' - which people are so unwilling to do, that it also happens to be the highest paid.
White collar workers make TikToks for lattes, Blue Collar workers are the high income earners.
It's already kind of happening.
I can say, anecdotally, when I lived in Silicon Valley the blue-collar guy down the street had his own house painting business and did alright as near as I could tell. I know he got in a few hours of golf during most days.
Also on the golf course, realtors in the area.
https://www.thedronebird.com/aves/
In reality, the truth is always somewhere in the middle.
I've always held that lizard people control some of the government, and that the moon landing was fake but obviously shot on location.
Stanley Kubrick is nothing if not a true auteur. Also probably eats mice whole.
Few people tell their stories with full fidelity anyway, we gloss over our mistakes and make everything better and less banal by instinct.
This is a dumb take in the context of outlandish conspiracy theories.
But subliminal messaging is considered a conspiracy theory. Maybe it's not as obvious as messages played backwards, but if it's not happening already, there are definitely people working on it. The UK Government has a "nudge unit". I suppose arguably it's not a conspiracy theory any more because we all just assume it goes on.
Are the vaccine conspiracies really that outlandish, in a world where the US government once intentionally infected black people with syphilis and let them die in the Tuskegee syphilis study? (I'm triple vaxxed, just pointing it out.)
At one point before Snowden, the whole NSA thing was considered a conspiracy theory by many.
World governments have done some really crazy things in the past and kept it secret for a long time. Why do we assume now is any different?
Like a klein bottle but also not.
Deleted Comment
There are some real nut cases out there, like the whole "Q" thing. But I think that the true believers and the most fervently vocal ones are a fairly small minority and the rest look at it the same way as Santa and the Easter bunny.
Ha ha, as an atheist, I chuckled at where you stopped. After unraveling the Santa Conspiracy as a child I began to question all of our other "cultural lore".
Like the Easter Bunny.
The sociocultural use of the phrase 'conspiracy theory' is of course quite different. It's much more like a critique of religious belief - i.e. the notion there's an all-powerful, all-seeing force behind all events. Could it be the UFO aliens? Black helicopter-flying government agencies? The ancient gods and goddesses of Greek and Egyptian and Hindu theology? The more recent avatars of the Abrahamic traditions?
Now, today's media probably consists mostly of people for whom (Frank Herbert quote here) "religion is a kind of puppet show to amuse the populace and keep it docile, and who believe essentially that all phenomena - even religious phenomena - can be reduced to mechanical explanations."
Even so, it's unlikely that the Guardian would describe the religious beliefs of millions of their readers as 'conspiracy theories' as the phrase is perjorative and intended to belittle or disparage.
Regardless, some large-scale 'conspiracy theories' seem to have quite a bit of truth to them. For example, consider the notion that there was a deliberate conspiracy to fabricate evidence of WMDs in Iraq c. 2002-2003 run by the American and British governments in collusion with corporate media outlets from the NYTimes to FOX News and the BBC. Is that a 'conspiracy theory' or a credible allegation that still deserves serious criminal investigation?
For every vocal “5G causes cancer idiots” there are a thousand silent “well, with my own eyes I am watching a video of Hunter Biden smoking crack sitting on a bed talking to a naked prostitute explaining about how people stole his last laptop during an 18 day bender and are now black mailing him, so, no, I don’t think this whole laptop thing actually “Russian Disinformation””… but it seems the practice is just lump both of those things together now.
Something I learned early is that character means the things you do when no one is looking (pay attention here to the reaction). People that still want to hide the Hunter Biden stuff here and elsewhere don’t believe it’s a consultancy theory, they just want to censor it. Still call it the same thing because achieves the goal.
The fact that he occasionally does sincere interviews and then goes on to (back in character) deny that the interview took place seems a little unhealthy. I know it's all a big joke but it just feels like real people could fall into this satire conspiracy theory when he attacks the credibility of legitimate journalists.