Birds Aren’t Real took on the conspiracy theorists
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
This is how the flat-Earthers started, isn't it? But every parody eventually runs into Poe's law.
I love sarcasm. My daughter loves it too. We sometimes engage in conversation where we're both clearly being sarcastic, but we get increasingly dead pan about it till neither of us is quite sure if the other is still being sarcastic. She termed this a "sarcasm trap" a few years ago. We find it fun to see how far we can take it.
Birds Aren't Real seems way too on the nose for anyone to mistake it as serious, but there are some truly naive/gullible people in the world.
Foucault's Pendulum is a (fiction) book about some "Birds Aren't Real"-type protagonists who cross paths with people who went down the rabbit hole. They try to play their own game while staying separate from it. It does not end well.
Conspiracy theories are different, though because they start with a “what if” and move to belief instead of starting from evidence and moving to belief.
At least, this is the way I define the terms.
People aren't rational. They are rationalizers.
Rational thinking is when you use facts and draw a conclusion.
Rationalizing is when you have a conclusion, and you work backwards to justify it with rational-sounding arguments.
Conspiracy theories start with some ridiculous conclusion, and work backwards to make it sound intelligent. It's not intelligent, but it SOUNDS intelligent.
In college we had to read Freud's Civilization and its Discontents for a literature class. The only thing I remember about that entire book was him saying that no matter what, if people wanted to do something, they would find a way to rationalize it to themselves to avoid cognitive dissonance.
That one concept has been illustrated over and over in the 30 years since!
Any theory which alleges that some group of people secretly controls the world falls under #1. Trying to keep just 50 or 100 people organized and getting them to all do what you want is incredibly hard, let alone the entire world.
An example of #2: Here in Zambia, when the government started offering free COVID-19 vaccines, various conspiracy theories spread on social media: some said that anyone who accepted the vaccine would turn into a chimpanzee, others said that their bodies would become magnetic and attract iron objects, while others said that vaccinated persons would become sterile and be unable to produce children.
I don't think any advocate of these theories ever explained why the government would want to turn their citizens into chimpanzees, though.
Understanding the capabilities and motives of others depends on haaving developed a theory of mind.
Going by Keagans developmental stages, people are getting stuck in stage 3.
The phrasing of that poster is very specific. These people aren’t objectively and dispassionately weighing the evidence both in favor of and against a certain theory. No, that theory is their pet theory, and whether consciously or subconsciously, their thumb is on the scale in favor of proving it true. The reason being that an implication of most conspiracy theories is that there is a conspiracy of powerful people to keep the truth from being revealed.
I’ve come to believe THAT is the important component of any conspiracy. The specific “truth” which is being hidden, whether it’s aliens or lizard people or pedophiles running a pizza shop, is almost a McGuffin. The reason people believe conspiracy theories, and backwards-rationalize their perceived truthfulness, is that it helps them believe in some all-powerful, malevolent cabal whose agenda includes keeping down the “little guy”. It’s a way for them to justify the failures in their lives without having to take responsibility for those failures. It’s the oldest story in the book.
It doesn’t help that there are real-world examples of conspiracies that have been proven true, but I suspect it wouldn’t be a deal-breaker for these people even if that weren’t the case.
has illegality been proven? From what I could find they performed surveillance under FISA warrants. There are obviously greater conspiracy theories, but are they supported by evidence?
that being said, in 2020:
The panel held that the government may have violated the Fourth Amendment when it collected the telephony metadata of millions of Americans ... pursuant to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)
> perhaps unsurprisingly it is still being fought in court, because the US government is very slow to investigate itself.
Perhaps, it is slow because it is complicated topic, which is not clearly described in constitution: where to draw the line for personal privacy.
What government programs unrelated to Snowden's disclosure collect millions of Americans telephony metadata?
Check page 13. They directly reference Snowden. I'm getting a strong sense that you are a troll.
I sometimes make mistakes, I was not aware that Snowden leaked this program too.
Anyway, illegality of this program is not proven yet, all collection happened under FISA warrants as I initially said, I think this was the topic?
> Your understanding, based on ignoring the linked document?
I obviously didn't go through all 60 pages of court document, I believe it was your burden to provide exact citation to support of your point for the sake of discussion.
That does kind of sound like a punishment of the future: you have to do 'manual labour' - which people are so unwilling to do, that it also happens to be the highest paid.
White collar workers make TikToks for lattes, Blue Collar workers are the high income earners.
It's already kind of happening.
Alberta Oil workers are 1% 'petrochemical' Engineers. They are 'everything else'. Cooks, drivers, daycare workers, maintenance, carpenters, electricians, managers, team leads etc. etc. and earn about $120-200K, and while at the camp everything is provided for them in quantity (food is amazing if you like 'Denny's' kind of food).
I can say, anecdotally, when I lived in Silicon Valley the blue-collar guy down the street had his own house painting business and did alright as near as I could tell. I know he got in a few hours of golf during most days.
Also on the golf course, realtors in the area.
Another is if you take millionaire to mean “feel well off or rich” then being in a lower wealth industry will help that vs having everyone around you also be wealthy.
I remember hearing research about these in 2012. I went to school right next to the Air Force Research Laboratory which controls a $2B+ budget, and there were research projects around biomimicry, etc. As your link shows, miniature drones that look like birds and mimic actual bird movements definitely exist.
IIRC, there has been similar research devoted to small burrowing ground animals as well.
How prevalent these are in the wild, and where and what they are used for is a whole other topic, but their existence is crystal clear. I wonder how many people outside of engineering fields actually know about this vs think it is some sort of science fiction.
In reality, the truth is always somewhere in the middle.
[1] https://googlethatforyou.com/?q=are%20sources%20important
[2] https://poop.is/elementaryly-rapid
[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/NCIS_(TV_series)
[4] https://poop.is/raggedly-anguished
[5] https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/research_and_citation/mla_style/m...
I've always held that lizard people control some of the government, and that the moon landing was fake but obviously shot on location.
Stanley Kubrick is nothing if not a true auteur. Also probably eats mice whole.
This is a dumb take in the context of outlandish conspiracy theories.
A lot of conspiracy theorists think they’re in the middle. They identify some crazies in their group but still hang out with them and use their presence to justify their own, still extreme, opinions as the moderate view.
Calling it a "dumb take" however is more likely to invite fighting rather than discussion.
Is there any historical evidence that the conspiracy theorists were ever half-right (or right at all)? To be sure, there have been conspiracies in the past but our inability to keep a secret seems to have always trumped attempts to conceal (but IANAH, I am not a historian).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance
You should not assume views have merit by default.
But subliminal messaging is considered a conspiracy theory. Maybe it's not as obvious as messages played backwards, but if it's not happening already, there are definitely people working on it. The UK Government has a "nudge unit". I suppose arguably it's not a conspiracy theory any more because we all just assume it goes on.
Are the vaccine conspiracies really that outlandish, in a world where the US government once intentionally infected black people with syphilis and let them die in the Tuskegee syphilis study? (I'm triple vaxxed, just pointing it out.)
At one point before Snowden, the whole NSA thing was considered a conspiracy theory by many.
World governments have done some really crazy things in the past and kept it secret for a long time. Why do we assume now is any different?
They didn’t infect them afaik. They didn’t treat them in order to study the progression. Only slightly less monstrous.
But yea, most of the vaccine conspiracies are outlandish. Like the number 666 being in some patent number means it’s the end times, etc.
Clearly the vaccine conspiracy theories are mostly nuts, but I think what GP poster was getting at is that the truth is often somewhere in the middle. Yeah there are no microchips from Bill Gates in there, but.. I don't know.. will we end up finding that a bunch of safety data was fudged to get a vaccine out quickly? Maybe. That happens anyway, so it wouldn't surprise me that much. Certainly in the UK, some of the data was technically correct but presented to the public in a misleading way.
Point is, I'm sure our governments are up to all sorts of shady stuff, just as they always have been, and in the future we'll find out that some of the conspiracy theories were not completely incorrect. The fact that they have done so much shady stuff in the past is what drives many of these conspiracy theories.
And back to the original point, does it really seem that outlandish that CIA psyops might be intentionally seeding these groups with nutty beliefs because they were getting uncomfortably close to something actually true? We'll find out in 50 years, I suppose, if we're still alive...
Not that outlandish but my own experience has shown that people can come up with crazy all on their own. Time will reveal, or it won’t.
Believing the vaccine has microchips in it is bottom percentile stupidity.
What is the theory you’re wondering about?
Call me a conspiracy theorist if you wish, but I am not so sure these people actually exist. Except of course the occasional nut case that goes out yelling on the streets and you would simply ignore IRL.
But my question still stands, if not the microchip thing, what is a conspiracy theory about the vaccines that has merit worth considering given 5 minutes of critical thinking and research? None, as far as I’m aware.
Like a klein bottle but also not.
Few people tell their stories with full fidelity anyway, we gloss over our mistakes and make everything better and less banal by instinct.
There are some real nut cases out there, like the whole "Q" thing. But I think that the true believers and the most fervently vocal ones are a fairly small minority and the rest look at it the same way as Santa and the Easter bunny.
Ha ha, as an atheist, I chuckled at where you stopped. After unraveling the Santa Conspiracy as a child I began to question all of our other "cultural lore".
Like the Easter Bunny.
The sociocultural use of the phrase 'conspiracy theory' is of course quite different. It's much more like a critique of religious belief - i.e. the notion there's an all-powerful, all-seeing force behind all events. Could it be the UFO aliens? Black helicopter-flying government agencies? The ancient gods and goddesses of Greek and Egyptian and Hindu theology? The more recent avatars of the Abrahamic traditions?
Now, today's media probably consists mostly of people for whom (Frank Herbert quote here) "religion is a kind of puppet show to amuse the populace and keep it docile, and who believe essentially that all phenomena - even religious phenomena - can be reduced to mechanical explanations."
Even so, it's unlikely that the Guardian would describe the religious beliefs of millions of their readers as 'conspiracy theories' as the phrase is perjorative and intended to belittle or disparage.
Regardless, some large-scale 'conspiracy theories' seem to have quite a bit of truth to them. For example, consider the notion that there was a deliberate conspiracy to fabricate evidence of WMDs in Iraq c. 2002-2003 run by the American and British governments in collusion with corporate media outlets from the NYTimes to FOX News and the BBC. Is that a 'conspiracy theory' or a credible allegation that still deserves serious criminal investigation?
For every vocal “5G causes cancer idiots” there are a thousand silent “well, with my own eyes I am watching a video of Hunter Biden smoking crack sitting on a bed talking to a naked prostitute explaining about how people stole his last laptop during an 18 day bender and are now black mailing him, so, no, I don’t think this whole laptop thing actually “Russian Disinformation””… but it seems the practice is just lump both of those things together now.
Something I learned early is that character means the things you do when no one is looking (pay attention here to the reaction). People that still want to hide the Hunter Biden stuff here and elsewhere don’t believe it’s a consultancy theory, they just want to censor it. Still call it the same thing because achieves the goal.
The fact that he occasionally does sincere interviews and then goes on to (back in character) deny that the interview took place seems a little unhealthy. I know it's all a big joke but it just feels like real people could fall into this satire conspiracy theory when he attacks the credibility of legitimate journalists.
Is it a manifestation of mental illness and therefore some defect in brain chemistry or structure, in which case they need psychiatry more than fact checking?
Is this not some kind of schizophrenia variant but maybe a pseudoreligion which fills the hole that in an earlier era might have been filled with fire and brimstone Baptist bible thumping or End Times theology, except Alex Jones got to them before the preacher did?
Is it an information problem? Did their fourth grade science teacher just not do a very good job of explaining how Foucault's pendulum works and now they are into Flat Earth and all the rest but they can still be saved if we can just get them to read the Snopes article debunking it?
How many are doing this just to be edgy (while possibly attracting some followers in the above three groups in a symbiotic relationship), because it's a pretty easy way to get media attention right now? Come up with some ridiculous stuff about the Flat Earth 5G Dead Internet Bird Hoax and The Guardian/NYT/WaPo/etc will write a bunch of hand-wringing articles fretting about the latest disinformation campaign which has been debunked six ways to Sunday by all right-thinking people. How else can you be transgressive and shocking in the 2020s?
Trump Is Right About the Deep State. Thank God! https://slate.com/culture/2022/04/ukraine-ambassador-marie-y...
Flat earth is also interesting because it tends to be correlated with strongly religious.
>Flat earth is also interesting because it tends to be correlated with strongly religious.
I think it would be more interesting to see how many of them haven't been on a plane and how long ago they last read non-fiction literature.
I think the new strategy is just to write about any and every internet phenomenon as if it is the harbinger of a revolution. 1% of the time (Qanon, GME) you'll get it right and look like incredibly prescient. The other articles will be forgotten.
It is human after all.
I'm sure many people are ready to point out that there are actually people that believe the satire, but that's true of most satire.
The people quoting Bible verses to "prove" a flat earth are generally unironic