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Why Are People Attracted To Conspiracy Theories?
- Thread starter Webster
- Start date
Why are flies attracted to shit?
Many many reasons....
-Dumbing down of society
-Mistrust in institutions due to past actions
-Mistrust in institutions due to systemic racism
-Historical mistrust of certain races, classes, etc.
-Wanting to control the narrative
Etc., etc., etc.
Exactly.
Best to let flies be flies and let them wallow in shit whilst hoping that they don't get any on you.
I mean we are beyond the goldencalf Trump statute now..
Quite frankly, I am disappointed that almost none of the media covered that crazy shit when it happened.. I mean has no one seen the 10 Commandments? I am no where near religious, but I saw it every Easter on ABC growing up.. so the fact that this happened, and alarm bells didn't go off is astonishing..
I think this is the end result of the GOP shutting down mental institutions in the 70s, and No Child Left Behind much later on..
But really this could be summed up in 3 words.. stupidity is contagious.
Best to let flies be flies and let them wallow in shit whilst hoping that they don't get any on you.
I mean we are beyond the golden
Quite frankly, I am disappointed that almost none of the media covered that crazy shit when it happened.. I mean has no one seen the 10 Commandments? I am no where near religious, but I saw it every Easter on ABC growing up.. so the fact that this happened, and alarm bells didn't go off is astonishing..
I think this is the end result of the GOP shutting down mental institutions in the 70s, and No Child Left Behind much later on..
But really this could be summed up in 3 words.. stupidity is contagious.
Which is a fools' errand because eventually it does get on you, either by commission or by omission.
Nothing new here.
As proof I'll trot out the witch craze in Wurzburg, Germany where some 90,000 people were tried, and many thousands executed in the 1620s and 30s.
hchroniclesblog.wordpress.com
Now tell me about how conspiracies and fake news are new.
As proof I'll trot out the witch craze in Wurzburg, Germany where some 90,000 people were tried, and many thousands executed in the 1620s and 30s.
Würzburg witch trial
The Würzburg witch trial, which took place in Germany in 1626–1631, is one of the biggest mass-trials and mass-executions seen in Europe during the Thirty Years War; 157 men, women and children in …
hchroniclesblog.wordpress.com
Now tell me about how conspiracies and fake news are new.
They're not new, Doc, in that they exist; that part you're spot-on about.
What's new is the degree and effect to which they spread and how the general public perceives them.
Pardon me while I drop back and punt.... you get to field this one, and, again, tell me what has changed in the last thirty years or so, with the exception of replacing the check out lane gossip rags with the online gossip rags.
How Hollywood star Jean Seberg was destroyed by the FBI
As a biopic about the troubled actor arrives in UK cinemas, Geoffrey Macnab looks back at one of the strangest and most contradictory film careers of the postwar years
www.independent.co.uk
I think part of it is the dumbing down on education in America; we're no longer teaching critical skills in school anymore which opens people up to whatever fashionable crackpot theory comes down the pike.
Part of it is the proliferation of so-called "citizen experts" whose sole background is "well, I found it on Google!".
Part of it is the vast cynicism people have nowadays; there's more but those come to mind.
The liberals that run the school system cannot risk teaching critical thinking skills, because then those 'young brains full of mush' might begin to think about what they've been force fed from Kindergarten up instead of just accepting it.
Remember the first verse of this old song?
Remember the first verse of this old song?
…acceptance avoidance I guess is one of the things with some theories…helplessness and fear…some aspects of conspiracy theories might feel as though a sense of control has been regained…as with COVID, for instance…the theories for some, diminished the fears and feelings of helplessness and distracted the focus on to something else….and often in mass grief, like the death of Princess Diana when it’s hard to find any sense of reasoning, hard to make sense of young deaths/shock deaths…those are gathering spaces for conspiracy theories…I think now on social media as well, there can often be detective mentality as well, which is quite dangerous….
That goes both ways, Doc.
Name a school system in a major city that runs a conservative curriculum.
Any of them within the state of Florida counts; why?
Because state law mandates what they have to teach and what books are allowed.
You got that point. But if I remember the scuttlebutt from down there, that is working its way into court under home rule.
In any case, in most of the rest of the country, the teacher's unions do more to dictate what is taught, and equally, NOT taught, than the school board does.
Not really, it all depends on the person.. for me personally, I have a tendency to distrust most things.. and people so I am a bit more cautious for that reason.. I leaned in on learning instead of anger from the 2016 election, but I double and triple checked just about everything I read online, and I had this feeling, where if I agree with something a little too much, or it seemed like b.s. then I looked into it.. and 6/10 it was half true.. other times it was false.. and often times it was my love and knowledge of both politics and history, and my instincts that tipped me off..
Other times, I would close my eyes, and recall what I just read, and if I were able to imagine a Klansman saying the same thing, then there was a strong possibility that I had just read something posted be a bot account.. and about 9/10 of them had the U.S. flag and was started on or just after 2015, or just before 2016 election season kicked off.
Other times, I would wonder if these supposedly American accounts, were actually living in this country and paying attention to the news, at the times they were making these claims about Trump.. when that happened, I immediately got the feeling that I was dealing with a bot account..
But I am no stranger to conspiracy theories and I have been debunking them for at least 2 decades.. it is not something I set out to do, but I do it when someone brings it to my attention.. even on social media, which I am not on.. I miss when they were hilariously false, like that stupid 9/11 Wing Dings hoax and the QNY33 bus or whatever it was..
It would seem that these theories have gotten better over the years, and more sophisticated since then. They still follow the same formula and rely more heavily on the laziness of the reader, their ego, how much they fear being wrong and how easily they are to rile up, therefore interfering with logic process and triggering certain emotions.. and always with the "THE LIBRUL MEDIA WONT LET YOU SEE THIS !!!!!111111ONEONE" b.s. or "pass this along to someone who needs to see this.."
A lot of older people are easily susceptible to this for these reasons, and they have an unwillingness to learn about why they were wrong, and just assume that because someone is much younger than they are, that they couldn't possibly know what they are talking about.. but they just know there is no way that they could be wrong themselves, and instead they double down on being wrong because of their ego.
These people don't care about the facts, just their feelings, and this is why I don't care to try to correct or debate them. Feelings aren't facts, and facts aren't feelings.
These people want their opinions validated, and no matter what you say, or how many facts you present as counterpoints, you won't sway them, but the fact that you spent that time trying to do so, only validates their absurdity, and causes others to do the same.. and I am not going to waste my energy on that.
Prager U indoctrination (Dennis Prager has acknowledged that this is indoctrination himself) will be in at least 4 states here, including Florida. And I believe Texas is said to be next as well.
PragerU: Coming to a Public School Near You?
Not an accredited teaching institution, PragerU just saw its right-wing curriculum approved for use in Florida. Two other states are considering the same, which one historian sees as a way “to replace American history with propaganda and indoctrination.”
The Conservative Censorship Campaign Reaches Its Natural Conclusion
Some states are adopting a cartoon version of the past into their curricula.
www.theatlantic.com
But you know what they say about pointing fingers..
The super wealthy want a nation of uneducated slaves, and this is exactly how they are going about accomplishing it. Just look at how the most conservative states in our country rank in terms of education, health, happiness, and anything else. Having an entire nation like this will only benefit those who have ill intent towards it.
I honestly don't understand why these people aren't just content with having their religious beliefs at home, in church or private religious schools, and instead seek to force them on to other people. It is bad enough that SCOTUS has ruled that public funds must finance these schools as well, so even the right to a separation of church and state is starting to wane as well.
And then they turn around and complain about blue states like New York and California and Illinois and New Jersey when those states aren't even getting a 1-to-1 exchange on dollars back from D.C. for dollars sent (whereas "the makers" like Mississippi get over 3 dollars back and others like.... *gasp* Florida! ...get over 2.5 dollars back).
Ahhh, Carson v. Makin, another in a line of cases going back to Trinity Lutheran (though, to be fair, Trinity had more to do w/eliminating the anti-Catholic Blaine Amendments from the law, which finally met the dustbin of history in Espinoza) which didn't so much as say that taxpayer dollars had to subsidize religious schools but that state governments couldn't disburse said tax dollars only to secular private schools. On that point, Chief Justice Roberts is right: you cannot discriminate on the basis of religion in this regard (if you read Roberts' opinion, he essentially "if you are going to disburse public monies to private schools, you must treat secular and religious schools equally).
Go back and read the opinions in Trinity, Espinoza and Carson. The commonality in all three is that you cannot use the power of government to favor secular institutions over religious ones and that both must be treated equally under the Constitution.
Go back and read Carson; as I mentioned earlier, you cannot give public monies to secular K-12 schools and not do likewise to religious K-12 schools (FWIW, Angel, I think you shouldn't give tax dollars to any private schools but that's a different conversation).
There's always been a balancing act btwn the Establishment Clause (i.e. government can't favor or establish a state religion) and the Religious Freedom clause (i.e. government can't prohibit an individual's free exercise of religion in the public square) and until the past few years SCOTUS always kept to the broad middle. Unfortunately, with the past few years they've skewed hard to the right (just look at the piece of work that was 303 Creative as an example where I think the Court's headed in) and that worries me, not only in regards to the Constitution but also as an LGBTQ American.
