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Comment by sh4un | Hacker News Reader

The problem are the people who are blindly following along and calling the other 50% white supremacists for not following along.

I think people are starting to give little credit to the tinfoil hat people because maybe out of all of us, their brand of crazy has merit.

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We are talking about a global issue; political/cultural divisions that are for the most part confined to the US are not "the problem".

Even within the US mass-surveillance predates the current political climate.

Vax passports most definitely are not confined to the US.

In Europe, and many other countries they are not a privacy issue; it's technically impossible to use them for surveillance as the QR codes do not contain any identifiable information.

There's a saying going around that the difference between a conspiracy theory and truth is 6-9 months. In other words, look at what the conspiracy theories are today for an idea of what could be understood as truth in the future. Caveat: obviously this is not 100%.

The term "conspiracy theory" is a slur intended to blur two distinct concepts into one.

On the one hand, it means "insane school of thought". i.e. the Earth is flat. Something which is either totally off the wall, or at least unfalsifiable.

On the other hand, it means "non-mainstream school of thought" i.e. phones are being used to track people. It might be true, might not (well, now we know it is), but it's totally plausible.

Once you realise that you basically come to the conclusion that people who waffle on about "conspiracy theories" aren't using sound reasoning, because they're not interested in being understood.

More specifically, both schools of thought that you mention involve powerful people taking intentional action, while the point of the slur is to convince you that a phenomenon is coincidence.

I agree with you mostly, with the exception that I think it used to mean "insane school of thought", but more recently people have been mislabeling those who have a non-mainstream school of thought the same in an attempt to slander. The effect seems to have weakened the term, and given power to some ideas which may have rightfully been conspiracy theories in the traditional sense.

Phones being used to track people: duh, both corps and govts are doing it.

Vaccines contain 5G chips being used to track people: conspiracy theory.

I think it's important to distinguish these two groups.

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