Why Conspiracy Theories?

Murphy

Murphy

cat malogen

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<blockquote class="twitter-tweet"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Watching a roulette wheel in Boardwalk Empire. &quot;23&quot;. Lands on 23. Wtfffffff.</p>&mdash; Kelley O&#39;Connor (@keloconnor13) <a href="">March 22, 2017</a></blockquote> <script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

last one didn’t work too well embedding, best watch out today.
 
Mr. Tea

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
What do you all reckon to this? Miraculous 'flattening' of the USA's covid-19 curve since the Department of Health and Human Services took over from the CDC for the responsibility of reporting new COVID-19 cases:

cdc_vs_hhs.jpeg

Interesting difference between red and blue states, too:

covid_cases.JPG
 
shiels

shiels

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Conspiracy theorists that I know don’t do anything. This is the main thing. smug powerless paranoid bores. Servants really, unbeknownst ... but servants of power. It’s really sad to watch this exploitation by the far right. What do we do about it?
 
luka

luka

Well-known member
It is very interesting the way that crowd was captured by the far right. It must mean something.
 
pattycakes_

pattycakes_

Can turn naughty
If you take into account what Adam Curtis told us about Russian skullduggery w. Surkov, and maybe some ideological subversion stuff from Yuri Bezmenov, it is easier to understand what might be going on with all this stuff. Putin's game is confound & confuse. He's got the whole country in his palm. Its a proven strategy. Other governments are paying attention. It would be like a game to them. In the boardroom smoking cigars, drinking single malts, coming up with stories of the darkest calibre. Maybe a couple of pro authors on the payroll. Then when you get a nice one you send it to 4chan and let God take care of the rest.
 
pattycakes_

pattycakes_

Can turn naughty
Click the x at the top right

In case it wasn't obvious, I posted that in reply to @shiels saying that conspiracy people never do anything. It's quite possible as the world further unravels that we'll see more people cracking in that way.
 
IdleRich

IdleRich

IdleRich
What blows my mind is that these days you have so many people who are willing to believe this stuff. Of course there have always been nutters out there; tinfoil hatters, green crayon letter writers and suchlike, but they've always been on the fringe. It's really frightening that these ideas are now so close to the mainstream, so many people are completely happy to swallow obviously made up conspiracies that have no evidence in their support and which contradict themselves and which change every week when they are proven wrong.
How did this happen? Are people dumber than before? Less well-educated? Maybe the latter is true and part of it but I thought that the consensus of opinion from the last few years was that people are at least becoming more internet-savvy (even media-savvy in general) even if most of them can no longer count past twenty or spell words with more than four letters.
How did this happen? Oh, I've just got back to the title of the thread. But really "Why are conspiracy theories so prevalent now?" is possibly a better question now.
 
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R

RWY

Well-known member
IdleRich said:
How did this happen?
Click to expand...

This has probably already been articulated more profoundly elsewhere on the forum but the media environment in which individuals now find themselves (via social media) is overloaded with so much information from so many sources (via the democratisation of content production) that it is near-impossible for any single individual to feel as if their life is centred in the type of story or narrative that religion, politics and consumerism once provided. Conspiracy theories - or rather the single conspiracy theory which all conspiracy theories ultimately tend towards - work because they provide a narrative that encapsulates, and can continually accumulate, whatever this total information overload throws up next.
 
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Murphy

Murphy

cat malogen
High quantities of information at a very low quality of factual resolution, multiplied by socio-economic and political disenfranchisement.

Add the influences of any group or organisation with a vested interest in maintaining the above, via the internet and via traditional media like specific tv channels. The History Channel switching from a channel about documentaries to Ancient Aliens is a good example, but with Flat Earthers we may have reached peak conspiracy.

Heidegger talks about avoiding gossip because of the looming nothingness awaiting all of us. In this sense conspiracy theories serve to distract us from the simple fact that we’re alive beings with so much potential for inducing wholesale societal change. Anything can that undermine that will serve as a means to an end, conspiratorially speaking, or “by any means” as Burroughs coined it about Control.
 
shiels

shiels

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Yes so the critical faculties are being overwhelmed through sheer volume but also very clever targeted malicious destabilisation of Information
 
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