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Apply this logic elsewhere, and you cannot trust social institutions; for example, your local human services department when they come to warn you about your domicile being unfit for human habitation. Next, you can't trust the medical profession after you've been involuntarily committed to a mental institution after threatening the local schoolchildren (although we all know you were only warning them about the coming danger). You can't trust the state medical authority to regulate the medication that is used to treat paranoid schizophrenia. Now you're stuck in a padded room, unable to move your arms to scratch that incessant itch on your nose, pleading with your caretakers to just listen to reason, open their eyes to the truth.
All you wanted to do was alert the world to the alarming fact that the United States obviously staged evidence that someone intentionally cut an undersea communications cable to Svalbard, Norway on the 7th of January, 2022.
Instead of a magic formula, you take things on a case-by-case basis, examining sources and possible motives of those sources, looking at past experience with them for hints. This sounds like work because it is. It's very easy to just accept what you're told, but it's not heroic or even reasonable.
> All you wanted to do was alert the world to the alarming fact that the United States obviously staged evidence that someone intentionally cut an undersea communications cable to Svalbard, Norway on the 7th of January, 2022.
Meanwhile, the United States government is like "that line of thinking ultimately leads to the conclusion that trust is impossible."
For about half the population of the US right now if the Daily Wire or like Joe Rogan came out and said that refrigerators are a deep state conspiracy that has been transing the kids, that would be it. No more refrigerators. There would be piles of refrigerators miles high at landfills across the country and having cold drinks would be a sure sign youre a corrupted liberal.
Also rather than not having cold drinks going back to using ice boxes is probably the better option.
More seriously, we do live in a complex world, we can't function without trust but we also have to be open to changing our opinions based on new evidence. I'm just reading "How to talk to a science denier" and it's got some interesting takes on these topics.
We literally had a wide spread conspiracy about secret DNA editing viruses that were controlled by 5G cellular antennas, because They™ wanted to mind control people and make them sterile for population replacement by Them™.
I’d say that it’s not about being plausible in any sort objective sense, but rather a successful conspiracy theory must reinforce existing beliefs and biases.
See also: Ultraterrestrials, and UFOs as satanic entities battling Jesus.
There's another category of fables I'd call "religious fables". Those are ones that can't be falsified. Feels like your other examples fit in those. Religious people believe all sort of things in these categories. They're not really related to the factual reality. This is different IMO from your run of the mill conspiracy theory because those generally have enough counter-evidence where you can make a reason/logic based assessment of the probability of true vs. false. An analogy is flat earthers pointing to some "evidence" that in their mind supports the idea that the earth is flat while ignoring the bulk of evidence demonstrating it's not. Even if you do not have the ability to directly observe whether the earth is flat or not you can weigh the evidence. It's true religion and conspiracy often intersect. Religion by its nature is belief without facts.
Create some story about the “hum” of an air compressor being linked to declining birth rates or whatever and someone will believe it. Keep harping on it long enough and it goes from a fringe idea to vaguely plausible surprisingly quickly. Just look at the Anti Vax movement and those are well over 200 years old.
I feel like for something to stick there does need to be more than that. But who knows, give it a try and see! If you look at the common conspiracies they seem to target more complex things.
Anti-vax is a lot more complex. There was Andrew Wakefield's fraud. There are real side effects for many vaccines. There are public health considerations. The science is definitely not at a fridge level. Pharma companies can have conflicts of interest. Maybe the original cowpox gives immunity to smallpox is more intuitive but mRNA vaccines that cause cells to make the Covid spike protein are not as simple. Covid vaccines were rushed to market (one can argue for good reasons) and they did have side effects (e.g. myocarditis, tinnitus?). Authorities have walked the line of being open about the considerations vs. trying to force public health policies, sometimes eroding trust while they do that. Even experts differed on some finer policy points. I know I was really upset with people who didn't vaccinate for Covid because I believed we could get herd immunity but then new variants showed up that were so more infectious and got around the vaccine where that didn't matter.
That’s two different standards, and only relevant if either of them was a significant percentage of total population. Most people don’t even understand why a refrigerator door gets briefly stuck after you close it. It’s practically a magic box that gets cold which is perhaps why they fall for conspiracy theories so readily, any explanation is equally plausible.
And sure at a high level I understand both, but to really understand a refrigerator the same way you would need to really understand 5G etc, you would need to know the actual pressures involved etc. People don’t know the chemical properties and makeup of the refrigerant. What’s the acceptable impurity levels. What lubricants are in use, etc. The physical geometry of all the mechanical parts and so forth.
Though ultimately yea a smartphone extremely complex. I’m just saying being able to have a high level understanding is very different than knowing how to maintain or design something.
All of them.
No. It's simply the _commercial product_ the police used for markers. It shows both cm and inches. You don't think that the police themselves are actually manufacturing these things, do you?
There's no conspiracy here. They're just taking photos with both sets of measurements.
Conspiracy was the furthest thing from my mind; I’ve seen photos from police in the US with centimeters and I thought it was hilarious: Americans using cm and Europeans using inches. What’s the world coming to?
If there was a conspiracy I think they would not have made such a foolish and obvious error.
It's indeed more likely the police just bought an off-the-shelf measuring device. They often come with both imperial and proper units.
> If there was a conspiracy I think they would not have made such a foolish and obvious error.
Alas, that's not necessarily a good rule-of-thumb. Incompetence is a thing.
Compare to eg how the Russian spooks placed three copies of the game SIMS 3 in the pictures they published of an alleged assassins' lair.
(Most likely, some superior officer told the grunts to put three SIM cards for burner phones in the picture.)
Ah but how the media has such different standards for conspiracy theories when it furthers a desired narrative, rather than contradicts it.
> [...], which was then mistaken by an officer on the scene for being meaningful.
Well, my narrative here is that one way or another the officers were incompetent. Either in staging (more likely), or in assigning meaning (less likely).