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[dragdeler]

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[Folly]

While the Do-Nothing Democrats waste valuable time and resources on baseless impeachment, our genius President is laser-focused on what really matters.

[Teneb]

So uh... a QAnon conspiracy has killed a freakin' mob boss because, according to him, ... the mobster was part of the "deep state" and working to undermine Trump. This is some next-level shit.

[Naturegirl1999]

What...wow. I don’t know how to respond to this

[MetalSlimeHunt]

That happened a while ago.

[Teneb]

That happened a while ago.

Aye, though the new development seems to be that folks are now asking themselves if believing in conspiracy theories counts, legally, as insanity.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Much as I'd like to establish a precedent that boomer conspiracies qualify as criminal insanity, that'd probably just be used to say that any form of leftist belief is insanity instead.

[SalmonGod]

Yeah, seriously, I've been sick for decades of how "conspiracy theorist" gets used as a pejorative to dismiss people who try to raise legitimate alarms about verified or highly likely behaviors of powerful people. 

People who tried to talk about mass surveillance before Snowden were conspiracy theorists. 
People who tried to talk about U.S. meddling in South America before a lot of CIA documents reached their timed declassification were conspiracy theorists. 
People who tried to warn about ACTA were conspiracy theorists.
People who tried to talk about war crimes and high level corruption in the Iraq War were conspiracy theorists before Manning. 
People who try to raise awareness of abuse and corruption in law enforcement are still called conspiracy theorists.
People who were suspicious of the case against Assange being about extradition were called conspiracy theorists, until the U.S. Justice Dept's charges were released the day Assange was taken into custody.
Any of the above might still get you called a conspiracy theorist by a normie who deliberately avoids paying attention to politics at all, and defaults to believing that powerful organizations only do bad things and hide it in movies.

And it lumps all the above into the same category as belief in lizard-people illuminati.  Please be careful about how you apply this terminology.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Plus, Epstein didn't kill himself 

[Teneb]

Hey, I ain't saying I support that, especially because of the reasons you two posted. Just pointing out what is happening.

[Il Palazzo]

Yeah, seriously, I've been sick for decades of how "conspiracy theorist" gets used as a pejorative to dismiss people who try to raise legitimate alarms about verified or highly likely behaviors of powerful people. 

People who tried to talk about mass surveillance before Snowden were conspiracy theorists. 
People who tried to talk about U.S. meddling in South America before a lot of CIA documents reached their timed declassification were conspiracy theorists. 
People who tried to warn about ACTA were conspiracy theorists.
People who tried to talk about war crimes and high level corruption in the Iraq War were conspiracy theorists before Manning. 
People who try to raise awareness of abuse and corruption in law enforcement are still called conspiracy theorists.
People who were suspicious of the case against Assange being about extradition were called conspiracy theorists, until the U.S. Justice Dept's charges were released the day Assange was taken into custody.
Any of the above might still get you called a conspiracy theorist by a normie who deliberately avoids paying attention to politics at all, and defaults to believing that powerful organizations only do bad things and hide it in movies.

And it lumps all the above into the same category as belief in lizard-people illuminati.  Please be careful about how you apply this terminology.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Plus, Epstein didn't kill himself 

If you ever insist a conspiracy to exist in the absence of evidence, you're a conspiracy theorist. That such evidence might later surface doesn't vindicate your previous lack of good judgement, nor does it make your other unsupported theories true.

[SalmonGod]

If you ever insist a conspiracy to exist in the absence of evidence, you're a conspiracy theorist. That such evidence might later surface doesn't vindicate your previous lack of good judgement, nor does it make your other unsupported theories true.

I question the good judgment of anyone who is hyper-critical whenever it's indicated that something which repeatedly happens is probably happening again.  Like someone who says "let's wait and see what the internal investigation turns up before making judgments" when a suspect shoots himself twice in the face with his hands cuffed behind his back in a police cruiser again.  Or someone who snidely dismisses probable claims with mountains of indirect evidence, just because there isn't 100% hard verification, as was the case with the state of mass surveillance prior to Snowden's leaks, for example.  Not saying you should just believe anything.  But off-hand dismissal of all the examples I listed were not good judgment and shitty behavior, imo.  I'm glad our culture is finally beginning to learn from those mistakes.

[Trekkin]

But off-hand dismissal of all the examples I listed were not good judgment and shitty behavior, imo.

Except that they existed among a pool of countless similar theories with just as much evidence at the time. 99% of conspiracy theories hide the truth of the rest of them, if you will; just because MKULTRA existed doesn't mean Earth is flat.

By the time you've defined what it is you think is happening and why you think it's happening again with sufficient precision to discriminate it from all other theories, you're most of the way toward being able to falsify it (EDIT: or rather, meaningfully test its predictive capacity) anyway.

[Il Palazzo]

It's fine to be suspicious. But knowing you're right on the basis subjectively perceived patterns is how we got the proliferation of proepidemics, truthers, birthers, AGW denialists and the rest of them. So I'm not glad this is how people are learning to think.

[SalmonGod]

Except that they existed among a pool of countless similar theories with just as much evidence at the time. 99% of conspiracy theories hide the truth of the rest of them, if you will; just because MKULTRA existed doesn't mean Earth is flat.

By the time you've defined what it is you think is happening and why you think it's happening again with sufficient precision to discriminate it from all other theories, you're most of the way toward being able to falsify it (EDIT: or rather, meaningfully test its predictive capacity) anyway.

I specifically didn't list anything like MKULTRA, because there are plenty of extreme examples like that, where I would see it as fine to be hyper-critical until there is hard proof, due to the absurd nature of the thing.

The examples I listed were all pretty mundane and there were lots of good reasons to believe them.  Most of them even had plenty of hard evidence, and it just took a long time for the mainstream media (i.e. information channels deemed legitimate enough by the broader public) to be forced to report on it.  But they were all broadly rejected by most people until that point.

[Trekkin]

And I deliberately did list MKULTRA in an attempt at steelmanning, because sometimes the tinfoil hat crowd are right. The problem is not what conspiracy theorists believe per se, but rather the methods by which they come to believe it, because those methods are not the most useful in understanding the world. In fact, they're worse than useless: they're actively toxic to having a framework for processing information that leads to believing as many demonstrably true things and as few demonstrably false things as possible.

The focus on plausibility over provability is a prime example. For one thing, the universe is provably implausible, but more importantly, your understanding of what is plausible is internal and subject to shifts in how you think. If you always think they are out to get you, that will feel more plausible to you, and you will start to see more evidence for it even if you have to bend it to fit. Moreover, other assertions with similar traits will also seem more plausible, which is how crank magnetism happens. Go far enough, and it becomes an implicit assumption that "they" planted all the contradictory evidence and hid all the proof and bought all the experts, at which point one can believe anything. It gets easier to operate in the realm of "isn't that interesting" and "what would we expect to see? exactly this" without all the fiddly checks and controls and other considerations, and it eventually soaks into your identity. Spend long enough thinking conspiratorially, and eventually all the experts have to be wrong, or else you're a fool who has wasted a ton of time on nonsense.

"Hard evidence" is great, but without a rigorous framework for defining for what it is supposed to be evidence and what other evidence would influence the probability of that theory being useful, it's just information, and can fit whatever pattern you want. "Critical thinking" is a fine idea, but without logical clarity it devolves into just casting aspersions on the credentials and motivations of anyone who disagrees with you. What our culture is evolving to do is to find ways of making reflexive, emotion-driven distrust sound smart to other people who don't know better, and conspiratorial thinking is leading the charge on that.

It sounds absurd, and I'm sure some smartass is going to put this in the quotes thread, but just because something happens to be true is not sufficient reason to believe it. Unfalsifiable things can be apparently true, as can things that aren't quite supported by the data but are concordant with it, and it's that latter that conspiracy theories evolve to run on. Believe in things only to the extent to which efforts to falsify them have returned confirmatory evidence, and then only with precision that borders on paranoia, because that's the last point at which one can stop before the slow slide into believing absolute nonsense.