To think that wacko conspiracy theories are ampilified to discredit "real" ones?

[BlueJuniper94]

AIBU to think that extreme tinfoil conspiracy theories are amped up to malign those who are skeptical of official narratives. And to think this only compounds the collapsing trust in mainstream media?

Sounds like a conspiracy theory... I know....

I think we have to lose this notion that people with different ideas from us are a bit thick. The RL conspiracy theorists I know are intelligent and often well educated people, often professional people. Conspiracy theory’s tend to attract intelligent people who see themselves as free thinkers who like to research issues. They often,though not always, have some other ‘vulnerability’.

We really need to get rid of this elitist ‘great unwashed’ idea about all those who see the world differently from us. We blind ourselves to the underlying issues of these groups if we do that.

It also displays a lack of curiousity if we do that, and I am increasingly convinced that a lack of curiousity is behind our increasing social division. We can’t be genuinely curious if we have already decided the other person is just a bit thick.

I'm not sure of your original post OP but I think there is something in it.

Take 9/11.

There are some clearly batshit crazy theories, probably 99% of them.

That stops you 'investigating'. Sorry I know sitting on a computer isn't really investigating and I don't have the skills anyway.

So just before 9/11 the US stock market market behaved oddly, in a way that suggested someone knew the stocks of American Airlines and United Airlines were going to collapse.

I would love to know who placed those 'puts'.

They see what they perceive as their own economic precarity and an intense influx of newcomers- this is the empirical knowledge to them that they base their beliefs on, not being misguided by myths - they haven't been persuaded, their discomfort is real

Whenever the ‘enlightened progressives’ try and discredit anything you say vehemently, and call you conspiracy theorists, know that your probably right.

Recent history is littered with examples.

WMDs in Iraq, of course there weren’t any. But you can’t question anything the government feeds you, can you.

Banking crash, orchestrated by the US treasury secretary who use to be a banker and who benefitted. The banks.

Covid originated in a lab. If you said that 5 years ago, you’d have been hounded off this forum. Then the FBI chief came out and admitted that it was.

Grandpa Biden had dementia and was being managed by his handlers in during 2020 presidential campaign, you could clearly see it in all the videos. But if you called it out, you’d be called names.

Hunter Biden’s laptop was conspiracy theory - until it turned out to be real.

If the authorities and the government are vehemently denying things, calling it fake news, it is most likely true.

Look at the faux surprise, wide eyed responses on this thread.

Oh but where are the examples of this discrediting.

When has a plausible theory ever been discredited.

Give us some examples OP

You are imagining this OP

These disingenuous people are the ones who swallow everything they are told, call everyone else names, then feel stupid afterwards when it turns out to be true and try and re-write history by pretending that they were always on the right side. Covid lab leak theory, the unnecessary forced lockdowns and the massive transfer of wealth being a case in point.

I always go back to the chess analogy. It really is the perfect illustration of how the world works. The vast majority are pawns. The King and Queen are symbols of authority and sovereignty. The object is to protect them. The knights represent honour and self sacrifice for the greater good. The rooks are defence. The bishops are religious / moral authority. Ultimately the players are in control, strategising "how to win" and these days it's ever more immaterial whether it's by fair means or foul. Self preservation is the order of the day.

My "conspiracy theory" is that we shall never really know who is pulling the strings. Elected or born leaders are figureheads essentially, with little direct power. People will claim Trump bucks this trend because he appears to bluster his way through, acting "autonomously" claiming to strike at corruption within the heart of the institution he leads. Technically his recent actions could be considered unconstitutional by normal standards, yet he was able to execute them with apparently no oversight. That only happened because of tacit agreement from - who knows? It makes the phrase "theatre of war" resonate.

So someone reading that will be rolling their eyes, and scoffing at my "belief" in the Illuminati, and an assumption that I also believe in shady meetings involving blood sacrifice and ancient ritual. Which may or may not occur. People do all sorts of weird and harmful things to bolster their egos and make them feel "special" or "elite". Religions of all stripes have committed atrocities to appease their Gods, and still do.

The Satanic panic of the 90s was a fubar of massive proportions. Most recently the Hampstead situation illustrates the dangers of unchecked fundamentalist.

The people who get invested in such things are not "thick". They have been primed, conditioned by fear, and wound up and set free on a moral crusade. The problem is it obfuscates real child abuse conspiracies and in the crusade to "save children" more actually fall through the cracks - everyone's looking for the performative, and over-looking the substance. And no doubt, some sick individuals do incorporate costume and ritual into their abuse. However, now that "Satanic Ritual Abuse" has been discredited, a child disclosing that would be regarded with suspicion. Who wins here? The abusers.

When they say the devil is in the detail, it's very apt. Not that I believe in "the devil". But that's a whole other thread.....

@lightonmetal

I think we have to lose this notion that people with different ideas from us are a bit thick. The RL conspiracy theorists I know are intelligent and often well educated people, often professional people. Conspiracy theory’s tend to attract intelligent people who see themselves as free thinkers who like to research issues. They often,though not always, have some other ‘vulnerability’.

We really need to get rid of this elitist ‘great unwashed’ idea about all those who see the world differently from us. We blind ourselves to the underlying issues of these groups if we do that.

Hard disagree on the point about intelligence. There is a fair amount of research which backs up the idea that a tendency to believe implausible conspiracy theories correlates with low cognitive ability and mental vulnerability.

"Seeing the world differently from us" isn't a problem. The problem is in the inability to distinguish between fantasies and the complex, muddy real world reality behind it and the need to identify a simple (false) causal effect behind everything that goes wrong in your life. It may be true that "elites" created problems by not listening to the concerns of ordinary people. But that doesn't mean that the solution to this is for "elites" and others to start accepting these false narratives.

Depends which meaning of theory you're using.

You seem to be using it in the vernacular sense of 'conjecture'.

Strictly speaking, it means 'principle proven by experimentation, predictable and reproducible'.

So 'precise' is exactly what that word isn't, because it has contradictory meanings.

However - do you feel skeptical about the theory of gravity? And if so, is there anything at all that you know for sure? And what makes you sure?

I think it's usual for anyone who questions what others blindly accept, to be met with aggression and derision.

This thread is a good example.

@MistressoftheDarkSide I agree that we don’t know who is really pulling the strings. It’s clear that Boris Johnson was not the one with the final say about lockdowns: he was reciting a script, and making his speeches under duress. His handlers, whoever they are, had to stop him blustering the wrong things, like “irreversible road map to freedom”, which allegedly caused some face palming behind the scenes. It’s parodied in Roald Dahl’s book Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator, in which the real power behind the presidential throne is not the president himself, but his eighty-nine year old nanny.

@MistressoftheDarkSide

My "conspiracy theory" is that we shall never really know who is pulling the strings.

But this is what conspiracy theorists get wrong in my view: and it underlines the flaw in the premise behind them.

There is no one person, or even one small cabal of people "pulling the strings". There are powerful networks of individuals who we could call the Establishment (and the flavour of this will vary from country to country). But the idea that its a coordinated attempt to coerce people into doing what it wants through cover-up is a misunderstanding of how it works.

Powerful people seek to hold onto that power by any means that they can and often they obfuscate and spin to distract from what they are doing. And society usually colludes, deliberately or otherwise, in keeping these people in power. That works both on a national level, with the government, and at a micro level, in the family or a workplace. A person or people will have "authority" and there is a notional chain of command which can be broken only in extreme circumstances or when authority is transferred. That's how most societies operate, with varying degrees of democray or authoritarianism.

But the preservation of power is far less organised and more organic than conspiracy theorists think.

To take a random example: the cover up by Democrats of Joe Biden's obviously decliing cognitive state is a case in point. It certainly was covered up. But I don't think there was necessarily an organised "conspiracy" to do this. It was an increasingly panic-driven series of actions taken by people who were scared that the organisation they worked for, and the beliefs they hold, were unravelling.

As someone (I forget who) once said, most of these things are more cock-up than conspiracy. People are rarely that good at maintaining absolute authority and keeping secrets.

That works both ways though doesn't it?

There is as much "blind acceptance" among the groups of people who believe COVID vaccines were an attempt to subjugate the population as there is among people who think the government has our best interests at heart.

Everyone has flaws in their cognition which lead them to misrepresent reality. Simply accepting official dogma on anything without questioning is foolish, but so is believing that every alternative theory thrown out must be true.

But that doesn't mean that the solution to this is for "elites" and others to start accepting these false narratives.
I didn’t say they should and it’s hard to understand how you took that from my post. That you said this does suggest that you think truly understanding someone’s post means agreeing with it. A mindset which is a huge problem today and is leading to an increasingly divided society.

As for you other point. There is a hard body of replicated evidence that more highly educated people are more likely to believe unbelievable things, as they use their intelligence to argue themselves into thinking they are true. Belief that gender identity trumps sex for how we should organise society is an excellent example of this. There is no evidence to support this premise and an overwhelming amount of evidence to counter it, yet educated professional ‘elites’ have been behind promoting it.

@lightonmetal

As for you other point. There is a hard body of replicated evidence that more highly educated people are more likely to believe unbelievable things, as they use their intelligence to argue themselves into thinking they are true. Belief that gender identity trumps sex for how we should organise society is an excellent example of this. There is no evidence to support this premise and an overwhelming amount of evidence to counter it, yet educated professional ‘elites’ have been behind promoting it.

Can you share this evidence? This contradicts most of what I've read.

I agree a lot of liberal types backed the wrong horse on gender/sex. I'm not sure I'd classify this as a conspiracy theory though. I don't think anyone genuinely believed that people were "born in the wrong body": it was a combination of a) well meaning but blinkered people at their wits' end trying to deal with their children's struggles with dysphoria and b) some particularly ideological organisations such as Stonewall and Mermaids who lobbied very hard on this for their own reasons. It was scandalous and shouldn't have happened but I think it was crazy ideology as opposed to conspiracy.

Sorry, I don't have time to look the references up ( meant to be starting work now). But this was not about conspiracy theories, which are a subset of the phenomena of people believing unlikely things.

No gender ideology is not a conspiracy theory, and I was not presenting it as if it were.. But it is a very clear, very global example (much wider that Stonewall and Mermaids, and much wider that frightened parents) of highly educated people believing and promoting something which is manifestly untrue and obviously harmful whilst denying that it is harmful to the contrary of all sense and evidence. It is also an example of highly educated people denying the evidence as it is gathered.

It is not possible to claim that educated people are less likely to believe unbelievable things after this.

And by they way, there were plenty of people who genuinely did/do believe that people are born in the wrong body and that female brains can end up in male bodies. I have personally spoken to people who believe this. One particular great quote was that ' transwomen are women who, for reasons that are yet unknown to science, are born in a male body.'

You talk about gender ideology as if it were in the past. Its not. Its still very much alive and being used at the way to organise society in many nations. And this is an idea which cannot define its own key terms and concepts, is utterly incoherent, can be well evidenced to cause harm, and has no evidence base to back it and a huge evidence base to counter it.

So yes, educated people are, en masse, susceptible to believing unbelievable things.

.

These disingenuous people are the ones who swallow everything they are told, call everyone else names, then feel stupid afterwards when it turns out to be true and try and re-write history by pretending that they were always on the right side.

The irony.

Interesting and I agree.

A good example of an event that became completely shrouded in smoke and mirrors and conspiracy is the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. There is a book called 'JFK, The Smoking Gun' (also a TV documentary). If you believe the theory suggested by the author, the truth is quite mundane but a cover-up was needed and put into action to protect JFK's own government and security (and the faith of a nation).

It is important to question official narratives and not be intimidated by authority.

Yes it is faux isn't it? Obviously so. I wonder what people gain from it? A feeling of superiority I suppose.

Too late to vote, but I agree with you

Also, as everything is in the UK, a class identifier. Still very important to believe in the BBC, no matter what. Very important to believe entire population of planet earth has the right to pitch up in the UK etc. Otherwise might not be seen as liberal, right-thinking middle-class good egg.

certainly puzzling

I think Occam's and Hanlon's Razors apply here.

I'm not sure that it's organised misdirection with intent for the most part, as much as the 24 hour news media being interested in rage baiting and engagement. So not control, but profit. I'm sure sometimes misdirection through the media is used by governments in order to soothe the masses, but I don't think they're competent enough to do that regularly and successfully.

But I don't write off all conspiracy theories - enough of them have been proven true over the years as things have become declassified, that it would be foolish to do so. After all, people in power are not squeamish about sacrificing others in order to achieve their goals.

The thing I notice about many conspiracy theories is that they just don't make sense, and can be dismissed on that basis. For instance, so many of the theories around Covid just didn't add up, and seemed nonsensical or contradictory. So while I would believe that Covid was accidentally leaked from a laboratory, I wouldn't believe that the vaccines were designed to kill people!
Or 9/11 being a false flag operation - that would make sense in order to justify an invasion of Iraq, mass surveillance of the American people, and to create an atmosphere of fear - it's plausible, so I don't dismiss that theory out of hand.

But I don't think the media is deliberately amplifying ridiculous theories in order to direct people away from actual conspiracies.