How a fake story about Angela Merkel led to a far-right cluster on Reddit
medium.com
medium.com
(What I don't really understand is why US conspiracyism limits itself only to things that don't exist - you don't hear so much about Watergate, Iran-Contra, COINTELPRO and so on.)
There's an easy answer: you can't wildly speculate when you have the facts. This is why "PizzaGate" is still being talked about. There will never be proof, because it's a ridiculous conspiracy. That leaves the conspiracy enthusiasts free to hunt for evidence and clues forever.
It's almost tautological: once we know something happened, it's no longer a conspiracy. Therefore, conspiracy enthusiasts will no longer care about it.
This. If there is a solid answer to the question then you can't have the pleasurable hobby of fitting puzzle pieces from different sets together to point to the coming apocalypse.
That's... not actually what "conspiracy" means.
"conspiracy (noun): a secret plan by a group to do something unlawful or harmful"
This article is just a great description of the network of people discussing the idea, not an an actual analysis of this theory in light of Merkel's actions.
We can't know what the intentions in her heart are, but if she's not deliberately trying to destroy Europe she's certainly running it into the ground.
Now, it seems like people do not care if what they write is true or not, as long as it gets repeated and upvoted enough. There is no self-correction either. When something like pizzagate turns out to be complete nonsense, they people who spread it are not discouraged from doing the same thing again. In their eyes it was a very successful social media campaign.
Unfortunately the internet is now a theatre for propaganda war, in addition to regular electioneering and marketing.
The article puts “EU Army” in scare quotes, but that part is actually true; Merkel does support the creation of an EU Army:
> "Mrs Merkel is backing a push by Mr Juncker to create an EU army." [1]
[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/eu/11861247...
The EU army would almost certainly be implemented by close cooperation between the existing armies of the member states, instead of being some kind of reincarnation of the Wehrmacht.
A much more plausible spin would be to frame it as an act of aggression towards Russia, but some people might even support such a thing.
/u/qgyh2 , for example, mods a ton of default subs in addition to the following country subs: canada, australia, greece, israel, malaysia, pakistan, england, srilanka.
How are we so sure that this is isolated to only shaping a far right narrative?
https://www.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/4xhyyh/okay_adm...
We can't know what Merkel's end goal is because we cannot read her mind, so this theory is obviously just conjecture that fits some of the facts and cannot be proven or disproven.
Are the majority of Trump (and Farage, and Petry, and so forth) voters similarly uninterested in actual facts? That seems unlikely to me, although certainly possible. I worry that the fringe of loud people on the internet isn't actually connected in a meaningful way to voters, and so analyzing the fringe isn't a good way to learn anything about the world at large, just about loud people on the internet.
Not just uninterested, but actively conspiratorial. It's hard to talk with a Trump voter when it veers into territory like "world leaders are withholding a cure for cancer" and "the Pope has a secret base in Antarctica."
"For years, as a conservative radio talk show host, I played a role in that conditioning by hammering the mainstream media for its bias and double standards. But the price turned out to be far higher than I imagined. The cumulative effect of the attacks was to delegitimize those outlets and essentially destroy much of the right’s immunity to false information. We thought we were creating a savvier, more skeptical audience. Instead, we opened the door for President Trump, who found an audience that could be easily misled."[1]
[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/04/opinion/sunday/why-nobody...
On the Right, we see the same thing with your side. Total blind faith in blank slate theories of human equality, and uninterested in the piles of twin studies and metastudies that clearly demonstrate innate differences between demographic groups, even actively conspiratorial. It's hard to talk to a Hillary voter when it veers into "Conservatives are all anti-science but the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study and the vast consensus of geneticists on MAOA-L gene expression is a racist conspiracy by white men."
I'm probably considered a wishy-washy, bleeding-heart, virtue-signalling, liberal cuck (or whatever the hell the current deliberately antognistic buzzwords are) but I actively disliked Clinton and to a slightly lesser extent Obama.
People need to stop painting eachother with broad brushes. It's naive sports-team tribalism that gets us nowhere other than a highly polarised and aggressively charged shitshow.
Predicating policy (e.g. education, criminal justice, employment) on fundamentally wrong and unscientific assumptions about people's capabilities inevitably leads to gross inefficiencies, and mental and social health problems.
So what? Why don't we focus on getting to a situation where all the people have the same opportunities (access to education, nutrition, equal treatment under the law, etc, etc, etc) and THEN we can worry about precision policymaking based on the differences.
"Even though everyone knew the rules of the game up front, Trump is not actually the legitimate president because his popular vote tally was lower",
"Trump is not a legitimate president because the Russians may have been involved in releasing some 'routine, not interesting' emails",
"Even though the U.S. has interfered in over 80 elections in the last 20 years (including Russia in 1996), and even though a significant percentage of the mainstream media is foreign owned, and even though there is significant foreign money and foreign influence involved in every election, this election is not legitimate because Russia may have helped release some emails",
"Enforcing existing immigration laws (and shoring up abused immigration laws) to protect American jobs and wages is racist"
----
I could go on for days, but the point is that people in general will say and believe a lot of stupid stuff if it helps their team. Pretending only people on the other team do it is pretty out there.
It's all about "Motivated Reasoning," a term I learned from Jonathan Haidt.
For things we want to do, we ask ourselves, "how can I?"
For things we don't want to do, we ask, "must I?"
Since I've learned this, about 95% of discussion has been reduced for me. It doesn't make things easier though. It's hard for me to take that so many people are operating in such a biased way.
And it's even harder because it means really thinking through concepts like fairness, immigration, sexism, etc. These are not easy to reason about. And it takes a lot of time.
I think what also contributes is the idea that the brain will twist and contort reality to protect foundational beliefs (beyond my own observation of human behavior, there are a number of studies backing this up). We make decisions based on what we believe to be true, and the more decisions based on and built on a belief, the more foundational that belief is to our life. The more foundational a belief, the harder the brain will work to protect you from facing something that contradicts the belief head on (because directly facing the fact, without being prepared for it, that a significant number of decisions in your life have been based on false information could cause real system damage). Changing foundational beliefs must occur in steps, as you can only move so far from the current belief at once. And in the other direction, we much more readily accept anything that reinforces our foundational beliefs, even more so when being bombarded with ideas that may challenge those beliefs at the same time.
Religion and politics are extremely foundational things for most people, thus people are much more likely to overlook facts contradicting their beliefs and accept irrational ideas that happen to reinforce the belief.
> Since I've learned this...It doesn't make things easier though...
Same.
EDIT: Another complex/interesting idea to think through is that Us vs. Them is baked into human nature. You can change who "us" and "them" are, but I don't think you can change that there is always an Us vs. Them, and that "us" is always the good guys and "them" is always the bad guys.
A conspiracy would be more like "Bush did 9/11", which the left was guilty of for a while. Eugh.
"Trump has had or wants to have sex with his daughter..see, here is this picture of her sitting on his lap when she was 12"
"Trump stayed in a Russian hotel room, found out the Obamas had previously stayed in that room so hired prostitutes to urinate on the bed in front of him"
"Russia sold 19% of their state owned oil company to an unknown party and there is a document 'procured' by the Never Trump movement that says something about 19%, so Russia made a deal with Trump to get him elected and give him 19% of their oil if he would lift sanctions"
And agree also on discussion, plenty of conspiracy theories on all sides that are actually probably worth discussing.
I voted for neither of the Status Quo Party candidates, because they both make me sick. Yet even as I wiped the vomit from my chin, I couldn't help but notice that the primary complaint about the election results was that the voters knew more about one of the candidates and her organization than she wanted them to know. Did we ever care about objectivity? If a losing R candidate made the same complaint, all of these pundits would laugh at that candidate: "Oh, someone leaked your email? In which you discussed the dirty deeds you did your poor little primary opponent? And the way they got that email was by phishing you? Well, boooo-hooooo! Next time use two-factor, sweetheart."
But that's not the complaint!
The complaint was that, based on the leaks of private emails, it was possible to construct innuendo that was untrue. Take the entire Spirit Cooking thing, for instance. It would be one thing if Podesta had participated in a Satanist ritual and didn't want people to know. But he didn't actually participate in one. People just insinuated he did, based on a vaguely-plausible interpretation of a private email between family members.
I don't think anyone really found the way the Hillary campaign treated the Bernie campaign to be "dirty deeds", just politics, and I certainly don't think that's what swung the election. (Maybe I'm wrong.)
Innuendo isn't some magic spell that requires eye of newt and leak of email. There was lots of innuendo about other candidates too. I especially loved how they piled on poor Johnson for forgetting the name of some benighted hellhole he had no plans to invade, ever. If the Russians' plan was a Xanatos Gambit of let's phish Podesta, then we'll publish his dinner invitations, ...., then Hillary will lose? And that worked? In that case they're smart enough to own us no matter what we do.
"Russian hacking": Allegation supported by multiple law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
From there social pressure, motivated reasoning, and the usual garden of cognitive biases lead people to believe there is more evidence than there actually is.
Edit: Getting downvoted for asking a question. To be clear I have no idea what the emails are about and zero agenda here. The emails came across as very weird to me which is why I am asking.
What is truly maddening about conspiracy theorists, especially those who have gained a following, is that even the simplest, most rational explanation can easily be cast as a coverup of the conspiracy. If you have already inspired fear in someone, and gained their general trust, you can perpetuate that fear indefinitely, so long as undeniable evidence to the contrary is not presented.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omlQHWrgmd4
Nothing conclusive here, but again, there are so many voices here who are so hysterically adamant about something that can't be proven either way that it makes me think that there's more to this.
The hysteria stems from the concept that your algorithm for detecting conspiracy is to grant credence to theories in direct proportion to their nefariousness. Your hypotheses are not falsifiable.
This guarantees that you will reject reasonable and logical explanations which are discordant with the conspiracy.
Your last sentence is a perfect example of this. The most villainous explanation for what you see as hysterical adamance is that every commenter here is covering up a pedophile ring.
Pedophile rings have been uncovered in many walks of life: religion, sports, hollywood and media, business, foreign governments, even Dennis Hastert and many others. Yet somehow the current US political establishment is immune to this?
Look, I'm not saying to lock up anybody without a trial or anything. We admittedly don't know if there's even a crime here yet. I just think the pile of circumstantial evidence is enough to at least warrant some kind of investigation. The media declared this "fake news" and brushed much of the weirdest facts under the rug.
Yes the media has misled it's viewers in the past. The media will mislead it's viewers in the future. But these facts are not sufficient to logically conclude that the media is misleading it's viewers on the pizzagate conspiracy. Journalism is not 100% misleading.
Yes pedophile rings have existed in the past, and will likely exist in the future. However, starting from the position that all organizations are assumed to be pedophile rings until proven otherwise is a complete inversion of our entire judicial system. The existence of other pedophile rings within powerful organizations does not infer that all powerful organizations contain pedophile rings.
Bias in journalism is an unavoidable reality. Choosing which stories to report upon is an example of bias. But the existence of bias does not infer an agenda. It is possible that journalists have an agenda, but it is not a requirement.
A simple analogy is that all squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares. Many of your arguments are analogous to saying that since some rectangles are squares, and we can't directly observe this particular rectangle, we must conclude that this rectangle is a square.
> both you and the media would need to possess the truth. Since that is clearly not the case, you are once again jumping to the conclusion that the conspiracy must be true,
I am not rushing to jump to the conclusion that this conspiracy is true. I said the allegations should have some type of investigation. It is actually the media that has determined, with no conclusive proof one way or another, that this story is absolutely false.
> However, starting from the position that all organizations are assumed to be pedophile rings until proven otherwise is a complete inversion of our entire judicial system.
I never stated this. When speaking about Pizzagate in the past, I've always maintained that everybody is innocent until proven guilty. Given the types of allegations being spread here however, I support some type of investigation.
> Many of your arguments are analogous to saying that since some rectangles are squares, and we can't directly observe this particular rectangle, we must conclude that this rectangle is a square.
No, I'm saying that since we can't directly observe this particular rectangle, I think it's wise to investigate before making a determination about it's shape. The media are the ones that have already decided what shape it is before having proof.
And if it is code, why is it code for a massive child prostitution ring? Because 4chan or UrbanDictionary once used "pizza" in this way? Why do we think Podesta documents his work on 4chan or UrbanDictionary? Like, yes, the handkerchief code is a thing, but is everyone who owns a white handkerchief a pedophile?