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Comment by eplanit | Hacker News Reader

"It is well-established that a complex set of conditions and factors enable people to adopt beliefs in conspiracy theories, including personality types, heuristics, and cognitive biases to sociological factors such as level of education and political orientation"

It's true. Some fools will believe that Covid was a grand plan by the elites to control society, while other fools will believe that the 2016 election was stolen by the Rooskies -- both for the reasons cited above, right? Or, I wonder if the author meant only "those people" (i.e. conservatives). I'm betting on the latter.

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Except the latter "conspiracy theory" is true, pretty definitively too. https://www.fbi.gov/wanted/cyber/russian-interference-in-201...

> Covid was a grand plan by the elites to control society, while other fools will believe that the 2016 election was stolen by the Rooskies

These are really bad examples to try to equate. There was intervention by Russia into the US election ("stolen" is a harsh word that is up for debate), while the idea that a government entity unleashed a virus on the worldwide population is a much more serious acquisition and far less evidence to support.

Not everything which is not perfectly proven is a conspiracy theory. Or at least there's levels of implausibility. The US has messed with elections and governments in many countries including through direct military intervention so belief that another country would likewise do to some extent isn't that unimaginable. On the other hand so far there's no evidence of some group of elites previously causing massive global events with hard to predict consequences and plenty of evidence of prior disease spreading (SARs, etc.). Claiming that certain subsets of elites secretly work together to benefit themselves is, for example, a more plausible scenario in that same vein and there's plenty of historical precedent for these sorts of collusions.

I feel like Americans are constantly concern trolling about left/right political conflict to divert from ever talking about Canadians.

You do admit that Canadians have their fair share of fools, right?

I just wonder if by "some fools" you betray a bias toward thinking the U.S. is the only country in the entire world.

Well that's a bit of a strawman. I don't think anyone would claim the "rooskies" stole the 2016 election as you put it. On the other hand we know for a fact that Putin and his military were dead set on interfering, and were successful in several operations. We also have mountains of real actual evidence, which people went to jail or were indicted over, that Donald and his associates sought and gained help to interfere with the election.

Putting blatant covid misinformation and facts about the 2016 election in the same category is complete bullshit.

I’m concerned about your characterization of 2016 election interference. I haven’t seen anyone claim the election was stolen. I do see that our intelligence apparatus in the United States believes the election was interfered with, through Russian amplification of misinformation in support of the Trump campaign, and through direct hacking. This is well documented: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_...

And there was election fraud in 2020 (there is always) ... The question is whether any of those things are of scale enough to actually change results.

Russia has always interfered with US elections and the US has always waged propaganda war in the Russia and former USSR.

There is always bought votes or people voting when they are not allowed and so on.

Russian impact on election was way smaller than the media time and mind share of democrats and vice versa for Republicans.

I've seen plenty of Republicans complaining this election cycle about fraud and a stolen election. Given how close these elections have been you don't need that much of an impact to cause changes.

The things you’re describing, bought votes and people voting when they shouldn’t, aren’t really issues.

Using propaganda effectively to make people believe fake things in service of a foreign power is an issue. And it changes votes at scale.

Exactly what scale is open for debate. How many votes do you think Russian propaganda influenced? And which study are you basing that belief off?

It’s clear russiagate was a disinformation campaign which was also a convenient cope for all those people that were losing their minds that America could elect Trump.

No, there's historical precedent, plenty of motive, and it's in line with the specific political tactics that have governed Russia for quite a while now. Adam Curtis's 'Hypernormalization' touched on this.

It's also been very clear to anyone who's watched it happen on places like Reddit that 'russiagate' itself is a meme driven by powerful media management, brigading, and trolling. Anytime you're in a community and have the ability to examine heavily downvoted content and analyze it for the likely reasons it got hammered with six times the downvotes any other post in the community got, you don't soon forget what you observed.

There is a difference between a successful disinformation campaign and idiots electing a demagogue. Yes there is always disinformation campaigns and espionage between governments. But was it significant enough to blame for Americans electing Trump? Nah.

If you are looking for a delusional character that will say that Russia doesn’t do this, go watch Jimmy Dore.

Many Americans still do not realize Trump won riding on $5 billions in free media advertising[1]

Hillary also edged Bernie in the primaries receiving over $740m over sanders $320m [2]

We also know free media is becoming more effective than political advertising [3]

Which all means if you want to blame anyone in stealing the election it’s the corporate media. Also brings up the point that we really need to reinstitute some kind of equal coverage time, otherwise all these election donation limits are meaningless when media bosses can give billions to their favorite candidates.

[1] https://www.thestreet.com/politics/donald-trump-rode-5-billi...

[2] https://money.cnn.com/2016/03/15/media/trump-free-media-cove...

[3] https://www.businessinsider.com/2020-election-confirmed-free...

There are four Americas.

Left fools, right fools, the people in charge and the people who aren’t in charge and are not fools.

The final group seems to be growing, as the lunacy of the others increases.

Does it? I suppose you're an optimist, I like that.

Not usually optimistic but the lunacy seems to be reaching the norm use and pissing them off.

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