Conspiracy Theories

[Woodbutcher]

Good to hear the protection is working. Speaking of appendages, don't you people up North use a lot of chain saws? Do you still have all your fingers and toes?

Good morning!

[Tero]

Looks quite Finnish!

[rainbow]

It's simple enough, the government controls us through them. Vaccinations, fluoridation and chem trails soften our brains and make us more susceptible to cosmic rays and alien broadcasts from our reptilian overlords from outer space. Our controllers live on the other side of our flat earth, beaming alien propaganda disguised as religious messages through the ley lines and pyramids to every person except a select few like me, who are able to resist the temptation to yield to the overlords because we were not circumcised at birth!

...which is why you need to hang a crystal over your bed at night and put on a tinfoil hat during the day so that their 'thought rays' don't control you.

[Tyrannical]

Can someone direct me to some reading material on this?

It’s either a drug company, Monsanto, a government agency or other invisible thing. Starts with an event or a bit of science even.

The conspiracy, alleged, brings out the facts of a case. There is some detail that does not fit. Almost immediately some Youtuber gives a passioned speech with LOTS of questions.

Where does the public go with this? I’m betting that all see this issue goes on the Youtuber side. The few that don’t do that have either money on it on the ”agency” side or are experts in the field.

A serious question deserves a serious answer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Roman_mysteries

It's not an exact fit, but a desire for 'forbidden knowledge'

[Brian Peacock]

"After watching this you will come to understand that the historic picture behind the origin of mankind and civilization is completely wrong. Sumer was located in modern day Iraq (known as Mesopotamia in ancient times) around 4500 BC. The Sumerians had a rather advanced civilization with their own elaborate language and system of writing. They also had extensive knowledge about our solar system, astronomy and mathematics."

10 minutes should be enough.

[Hermit]

"After watching this you will come to understand that the historic picture behind the origin of mankind and civilization is completely wrong. Sumer was located in modern day Iraq (known as Mesopotamia in ancient times) around 4500 BC. The Sumerians had a rather advanced civilization with their own elaborate language and system of writing. They also had extensive knowledge about our solar system, astronomy and mathematics."

10 minutes should be enough.

Better still, take a shortcut to Wikipedia's article about Zecharia Sitchin, then click on the link that mentions Nibiru. None of this explains why people want to believe in conspiracies, though. It's not even an example of a conspiracy.

[pErvinalia]

Unless the Nibiruans are in on it..

[Brian Peacock]

[... It's not even an example of a conspiracy.

Sure. I was thinking that it was an example of why people believe in conspiracies: The big idea that seems to fill in the gaps of one's own ignorance - something which appears as an answer to ignorance but which in fact just allows one to remain comfortably ignorant. I didn't listen to the whole thing - it was the description that got me.

[Brian Peacock]

So, during the downtime I caught up with the pile of light reading that's been stacking up, including some essays by the US historian and polemicist Richard Hofstadter....

... The distinguishing thing about the paranoid style is not that its exponents see conspiracies or plots here and there in history, but that they regard a "vast" or "gigantic" conspiracy as the motive ftlrce in historical events. History is a conspiracy. set in motion by demonic forces of almost transcendental power, and what is felt to be needed to defeat it is not the usual methods of political give­-and-take, but an all-out crusade.

The paranoid spokesman sees the fare of this conspiracy in apocalyptic terms--he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders. whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilisation. He constantly lives at a turning point: it is now or never in organising resistance to conspiracy. Time is forever just running out. Like religious mil­lenarians, he expresses the anxiety of those who are living through the last days and he is sometimes disposed to set a date for the apocalypse.

The apocalypticism of the paranoid style runs dangerously near to hopeless pessimism, but usually stops short of it. Apocalyptic warnings arouse passion and militancy. and strike at susceptibility to similar themes in Christianity. Properly expressed, such warnings serve somewhat the same function as a description of the horrible consequences of sin in a revivalist sermon: they portray that which impends but which may still be avoided. They are a secular and demonic version of adventism.

As a member of the avant-garde who is capable of perceiving the conspiracy before it is fully obvious to an as yet un­-aroused public, the paranoid is a militant leader. He does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil; the quality needed is not a willingness to compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Nothing but complete victory will do.

Since the enemy is thought of as being totally evil and totally unappeasable, he must be totally eliminated--if not from the world, at least from the theater of operations to which the paranoid directs his attention. This demand for unqualified victories leads to the formulation of hopelessly demanding and unrealistic goals, and since these goals are not even remotely attainable, failure constantly heightens the paranoid's frustration. Even partial success leaves him with the same sense of powerlessness with which he began, and this in turn only strengthens his awareness of the vast and terrifying quality of the enemy he opposes.

This enemy is clearly delineated: he is a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman: sinister, ubiquitous, powerful. cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. Unlike the rest of us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history, himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He is a free, active, demonic agent. He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history himself. or deflects the normal course of history in an evil way. He makes crises, starts runs on banks, causes depressions, manufactures disasters, and then enjoys and profits from the misery he has produced.

The paranoid's interpretation of history is in this sense distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the mean of history, but as the consequences of someone's will. Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he directs the public mind through "managed news"; he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind (brain washing); he has a special technique for seduction (the Catholic confessional); he is gaining a stranglehold on the educational system...

A final aspect of the paranoid style is related to that quality of pedantry to which I have already referred. One of the impressive things about paranoid literature is precisely the elaborate concern with demonstration it almost invariably shows. One should not be misled by the fantastic conclusions that are so characteristic of this style into imagining that it is not, so to speak, argued out along factual lines. The very fantastic character of its conclusions leads to heroic strivings for "evidence" to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed.

Of course, there are highbrow, lowbrow, and middlebrow paranoids, as there are likely to be in any political tendency, and paranoid movements from the Middle Ages onward have had a magnetic attraction for demi­-intellectuals. But respectable paranoid literature not only starts from certain moral commitments that can be justified to many non-paranoids but also carefully and all but obsessively accumulates "evidence."

The singular thing about all this laborious work is that the passion for factual evidence does not, as in most intellectual exchanges, have the effect of putting the paranoid spokesman into effective two-way communication with the world outside his group--least of all with those who doubt his views. He has little real hope that his evidence will convince a hostile world. His effort to amass it bas rather the quality of a defensive act which shuts off his perceptive apparatus and protects him from having to attend to disturbing considerations that do not fortify his ideas. He has all the evidence he needs; he is not a receiver, he is a transmitter....


Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style in American Politics, Harvard University Press, 1951
https://blog.lix.cc/wp-content/uploads/ ... litics.pdf

[Rum]

Interestingly, they appear to be seeking order and find it hard to accept that life on the planet just stumbles on from one fuckup to the next.

[laklak]

Life is sort of like the bastard child of Captain Jack Sparrow and MacGyver.

[Forty Two]

[Tero]

Trump has good reason to believe conspiracies: the world is against him! Even when it isn’t:
https://thinkprogress.org/republicans-c ... ff374c1a1/

[Rum]

https://www.upi.com/Health_News/2018/02 ... 517576892/

Study: 'Anti-vaxxers' often believe other conspiracy theories

New research show people who are strongly anti-vaccine often also believe in other unsupported conspiracy theories.- Think vaccines aren't safe? If so, you might also believe that Princess Diana was murdered.

That's the finding of new research into the relationship between conspiracy theory beliefs and anti-vaccination attitudes.

A survey of more than 5,300 people in 24 countries on five continents found that people who believe in conspiracy theories are more likely to believe that vaccines aren't safe, despite scientific evidence to the contrary.

The study findings were published Feb. 1 in the journal Health Psychology.

"Vaccinations are one of society's greatest achievements and one of the main reasons that people live about 30 years longer than a century ago," said the study's lead researcher, Matthew Hornsey, from the University of Queensland in Australia.

"Therefore, it is fascinating to learn about why some people are so fearful of them," he said in a journal news release.

Survey participants were asked their beliefs about vaccination and their thoughts on four conspiracy theories: that Princess Diana was murdered; that the U.S. government knew about the 9/11 attacks in advance and allowed them to happen; that a shadowy group of elites is plotting to create a new world order; and that there was an elaborate plot to assassinate President John F. Kennedy that has been covered up.

What the researchers found was that people most likely to oppose vaccination were those who strongly believed in conspiracies. That held true no matter where the people lived. Education levels also had little effect on attitudes about vaccination.

People with anti-vaccination attitudes also were found to be intolerant of limits on their freedom, and uneasy about blood and needles. They also were described as having an individualistic worldview.

"People often develop attitudes through emotional and gut responses," Hornsey said. "Simply repeating evidence makes little difference to those who have anti-vaccination attitudes."

He noted that a common target of conspiracy theorists is large drug companies, because they make money selling vaccines.

"For many conspiracy theorists, profits gained are a sign that the system is broken and the truth is being covered up by vested interests," Hornsey said.

"Trying to reduce people's conspiracy beliefs is notoriously difficult," he added. "An alternative possibility is to acknowledge the possibility of conspiracies, but to highlight how there are vested interests on the other side, too -- vested interests that are motivated to obscure the benefits of vaccination and to exaggerate their dangers."

[L'Emmerdeur]

Som corroboration of the above:

'Why People Believe Conspiracy Theories'

Once you believe that “one massive, sinister conspiracy could be successfully executed in near-perfect secrecy, [it] suggests that many such plots are possible.” With this cabalistic paradigm in place, conspiracies can become “the default explanation for any given event—a unitary, closed-off worldview in which beliefs come together in a mutually supportive network known as a monological belief system.”

This monological belief system explains the significant correlations between different conspiracy theories in the study. For example, “a belief that a rogue cell of MI6 was responsible for [Princess] Diana's death was correlated with belief in theories that HIV was created in a laboratory … that the moon landing was a hoax … and that governments are covering up the existence of aliens.” The effect continues even when the conspiracies contradict one another: the more participants believed that Diana faked her own death, the more they believed that she was murdered.

The authors suggest there is a higher-order process at work that they call global coherence that overrules local contradictions: “Someone who believes in a significant number of conspiracy theories would naturally begin to see authorities as fundamentally deceptive, and new conspiracy theories would seem more plausible in light of that belief.” Moreover, “conspiracy advocates' distrust of official narratives may be so strong that many alternative theories are simultaneously endorsed in spite of any contradictions between them.” Thus, they assert, “the more that participants believe that a person at the centre of a death-related conspiracy theory, such as Princess Diana or Osama [bin] Laden, is still alive, the more they also tend to believe that the same person was killed, so long as the alleged manner of death involves deception by officialdom.

The paper quoted in the above piece is available for free:

'Dead and Alive: Beliefs in Contradictory Conspiracy Theories'