Yep, I concur.
[quote=“echoreply, post:150, topic:931268”]
When confronted with the dangers of tobacco use, tobacco companies launched a long term effort to deny, confuse, and cover up scientific evidence…Safety recalls where the company had evidence there was a problem, but didn’t act until forced to, such as Takata’s airbags, GMs ignition switches, or Tesla’s flash memory.[/quote]
Yes, and they continue payola to the Movie Industry, just not for brand identification, but simply to promote smoking.
Toyota and the unintended acceleration thing, where Toyota pushed hard via propaganda to show it was all driver error. Yes, it wasnt due to onboard computers, but instead due to how the gas pedal was arranged.
Yes, impossible to not have some, and in fact this applies to nearly all plant based foods.
No. No taste issues, and the % is so low it is unlikely you could do so anyway.
My own personal conspiracy theory is that I blame the X-Files for popularization of the idea of conspiracy theories. Sure they existed prior to that, but it was stuff like Elvis, UFOs and JFK. Illuminati and things were more jokes than anything people believed. The X-Files brought it into the mainstream. Sure everybody watching the show knew it was fiction, but then a few years later people forget where they heard stuff. Was it the Fox News or Fox Mulder?
Similarly, I blame 24 for the idea that torture is a great way to get information out of people.
Those are my own CTs, so I won’t believe any evidence to the contrary, like that people have believed lies about out groups, or lies about in groups being oppressed, for all of recorded history.
More seriously, a thing to keep in mind is that being stupid and believing in conspiracy theories do not have to go together. Believing in the theories is a lack of critical thinking in a certain domain, not lack of intelligence.
People can believe in conspiracy theories because they accept the stories without question, even when they do have incite in other areas. Some of it is certainly deliberate blindness: “I’m a racist, therefore I won’t question these ideas about $OUTGROUP being inferior.” So well educated, otherwise intelligent people, can end up falling down a Qanon hole.
One thing the outing of the seditious Trump rioters has shown is that these are “normal” people. They’re your neighbors and colleagues for the most part, not backwood hicks too dump to understand they’re being manipulated.
People are stupid first. But they don’t believe, specifically, in Bigfoot until they’re fed the specific bullshit about Bigfoot. No chicken, no egg.
My dad’s college roommate ended up being a physics professor. Then he ended up being a 9/11 truther. Then he ended up not being a professor.
I’ve heard that highly intelligent people have their own special way of being stupid regarding conspiracy theories - when they hear something outside their specialty they sometimes will forget that just because they know about subject X, that doesn’t make them an expert on subject Y. If there’s something about Y that makes sense to them, they could start thinking that not only is Y right, but the fact that they, a smart person, believes in it proves that it must be right.
Given that Q reportedly operates its ARG on the model of dropping ‘breadcrumbs’ and letting you ‘figure out’ the truth, I would imagine smart people would be as likely as anybody to fall for it. The major limiting factor would be that the conclusions that you’re being led to are stupid as fuck, so the smart person would have to thread the needle where they believe their conclusions without really thinking about them.
Of course it probably helps that (inserting personal unproven theory) that the kind of groupthink and cultish environment here can actually make a person learn to be stupider over time. So even if a person was intelligent before, they very well might not be now (outside of isolated bubbles independent of their cultthink, like their specific profession).
I read this story in the Onion and one line stood out:
“On the other hand, though, maybe it’s the stress of a news cycle in which people from both political parties are invested in a series of increasingly baroque conspiracy theories guided by the grotesque and increasingly obvious lies we tell ourselves about American exceptionalism that’s making me feel kind of sad.”
I laughed and thought of this thread, but I’m not seeing exceptionally weird or baroque conspiracy theories on the left.
Trump winning in 2016 kind of put Alex Jones in a bind. AJ had supported Trump (he even had Trump on his show at least once), because Trump was the “ultimate outsider” who AJ could portray as being in the good fight against the New World Order, which in the Alex Jones Universe encompasses pretty much every level of government in the world.
Of course, like the rest of us, AJ figured there was no way Clinton would lose, so actively supporting a candidate for President shouldn’t have been a problem.
Then the fucker went and won, and AJ was stuck without his usual, “The Government is all corrupt!” script.
This selective blindness, the lack of critical thinking in certain arenas, is learned behavior.
I believe that conservatives are vulnerable to conspiracy theories and magical thinking because they’ve been groomed to be. About 15 years ago, conservative media figured out how to work their viewership for profit and they’ve been slowly dragging them down the rabbit hole ever since.
And it’s a conservative phenomenon. If you need proof, look back to April 2020, when half the population was convinced a cheap untested drug, a snake oil clad in the thinnest of possible veneer of legitimacy, would provide a miracle cure for the pandemic.
And we all know which half of the population succumbed to this delusion.
If you’re talking about hydroxychloroquine, that wasn’t an entirely right-wing phenomenon, despite the reckless touting of the drug for Covid-19 by Trump and his supporters. A bunch of the early hype came from “maverick” doctors of various stripes and Silicon Valley types including Elon Musk, whose politics are mixed.
As to conspiracies with seemingly bipartisan backing, another one just crashed to earth. There has been widespread conspiracy-mongering among the anti-Big Pharma and antivax set about the death of a 44-year-old activist named Brandy Vaughan who died in December, supposedly done in at the behest of corporate fiends who were trying to shut her up. The coroner’s office in California did a detailed investigation because of all the hoopla, and found that she died of pulmonary artery embolism - in other words, natural causes. So far there are subdued mutterings of discontent among the Holistic Healer Murder Conspiracy* crowd, but they’ll probably soon move on to other plots and skulduggery.
*according to this conspiracy as flogged by impeccable sources such as Health Nut News, dozens of Holistic Doctors (everything from chiropractors to off-the-rails M.D.s) have met suspicious deaths due to their, well, holisticness. None of the deaths has been linked to any conspiracy, but the list keeps enlarging anyway.
I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the theory that fireworks being set off around July 4 were due to the CIA trying to keep BLM activists from sleeping, which got huge traction among prominent liberal and left-wing organs (e.g. Why the Fireworks Conspiracies Are So Believable – Rolling Stone).
The idea that people in their 20s and 30s could come up with no precedent for “fireworks being set off in the summer” reminds me of the Trumpists who insisted in December that no one ever used the term “president-elect” before 2020 - it requires not just stupidity, but dishonesty to an unbelievable level. I simply don’t believe that a person who has lived their entire life in the U.S. can’t figure out why fireworks are used at certain times of the year, or has never heard the term “president-elect” before.
Be very careful with this thinking. Do not believe that progressives have any kind of armor that protects them from falling for their own conspiracy theories. I absolutely agree that at the moment it is conservatives that have a huge problem in this area, but progressives are not immune.
The important thing, for both sides, is to remain skeptical. A big part of remaining skeptical is knowing what information to accept, and being willing to change your view as new information becomes available.
The history of why conservatives have this problem is a different question than if conservatives are predisposed to this problem. Thought question: Where would we be if Rupert Murdoch had been a flaming liberal?
Woo, alternative medicine, and that type of crap has stereotypically been attributed to hippies, but then moved on to soccer moms, or whatever other derogatory terms are used to designate some group being belittled. At the moment, this type of magical thinking is pretty non-partisan.
Frankly, the various left-wing theories about the covid vaccine are just as damaging as the right-wing ones and based on as much nonsense.
For a ready example: Anywhere from 33 to 50 percent of black people are refusing the vaccine, and the reason given is some fear of “medical experimentation,” usually connected with a handwave to the Tuskegee experiment.
*Why would this vaccine be used for some sort of experimentation or insidious purpose on black people, when black Americans aren’t particularly more likely to be antivax in general? Wouldn’t the measles vaccine be just as good a vector for any of these ideas? Why would the forces looking to use vaccines against blacks wait until 2020 to do it instead of using any other vaccination program?
*How would this work, logistically? How could “the experimental vaccine for black people” and “the real vaccine for white people” be shipped to thousands of pharmacies across the country without a single person noticing or objecting? How could every nurse, doctor, and pharmacist including the black ones be convinced to go along with the plan without a single person refusing or blowing the whistle? Or do they believe that every single white person is only pretending to be vaccinated, again with no one dissenting or squealing about the plan?
*Why is “Tuskegee happened, therefore all medicine is biased against black people” considered reasonable? Tuskegee had nothing to do with vaccines in the first place. Is there any amount of historical progress that will convince people that this is a hasty generalization? Jews aren’t refusing the vaccine because of Dr. Mengele. That would be considered ridiculous.
Because Tuskegee was real and because there’s a “don’t criticize black political beliefs” norm in liberal circles, this sort of anti-vax CT is considered something that must be taken as reasonable and engaged with rationally, but breaking it down shows that it’s completely insane and based on an understanding of human behavior that bears no correspondence to reality.
I think it would have been fairer to say that, since the rise to prominence of conservative media, said media has been actively and aggressively grooming its audience to be susceptible to conspiracy theories. This makes conservatives much more likely than liberals to be susceptible, simply because there’s no equivalent indoctrination system actively in place for liberals.
All that said, I personally think that the vast majority of americans have been indoctrinated since birth to engage in compartmentalized magical thinking, due to that being a core element of religion. So most people in both parties are already wired to believe things uncritically - republicans are just being trained to break down the walls that usually limit that to religious topics.
I’m not sure the conservative media has been grooming their viewers, so much as giving the conspiracy theories credence. Now all of the sudden it isn’t a weird conspiracy theory, but something that Tucker Carlson was talking about. I mean, he’s on national TV and all.
I also blame the rest of the media for trying to treat those theories with respect. They have this love of showing both sides of an issue. They do this regardless of whether the issue has zero sides (it is a complete lie), or many sides (as do most complicated things).
This has of course been happening for a century or more. I think it is only in the last 2 or 3 decades though where “both sides” all of the sudden gives conservative nutters a platform, when they probably should just be ignored from the outset, and if they gain traction, soundly attacked for their quackery.
The problem isn’t the early hype, it’s the amplification of that hype. Doctors that conduct early trials aren’t the problem, the problem is the amplification and distortion of an early result that is so preliminary as to be essential meaningless. If there was anything bipartisan about it, it’s that the hype and desperation was so intense it sucked in some of the more gullible liberals.
I wrote a LOT about the subject at the time on this board, it was very personal to me. Not Hydroxychloroquine specifically but medical scams disguised by the thin veneer of legitimate medicine.
Early in the days of hydroxychloroquine hype, I saw a controversy erupt on Fox News. They had a doctor at a NYC hospital promoting the stuff, giving the impression he was an ER doctor, and the controversy erupted because he was an oncologist that had not been working in the ER with COVID patients.
But he wasn’t just any oncologist. Out of all the oncologists in the world, it was the one that scammed my fiancé when he had pancreatic cancer in 2005. The one that had the secret no one else had. Grifters gonna grift.
That experience pissed me off so much I spent a couple of years helping cancer patients evaluate research critically, which was an informative experience.
In April, I researched about a half dozen of the doctors that were hyping the drug on Fox News, and they all had connections to conservative politics, and most of them were in a position to financially profit from the drug. Now, maybe that’s because I only researched the doctors that were hyping it on Fox News - but that’s the only place I saw doctors hyping it.
It was one of those times when I felt EVERYONE -liberal media included- caved to Trump.
It became another false “both sides” issue — it’s an untested treatment, maybe it will work, maybe it won’t —- leaving the average person thinking there was a good chance, at least, that it might work. But very little was said about the history of the drug with other emergent viruses, not just AIDS (your link talks about that) but other SARS viruses, new strains of flu. It’s one of those drugs that always shows promising results in in vitro studies yet it’s never panned out as an anti-viral.
For a while the European left seemed to have a CT that Yassir Arafat, longtime leader of the PLO, was murdered by radiation poisoning, rather than dying of a stroke. It seems to have died down in recent years.
In general, progressives do have better critical thinking capabilities, or “armor” if you will.
What remains vital is willingness to recognize and call out dangerous conspiratorial bullshit wherever it occurs, and not ignore, downplay or deny it on the basis that “the right is so bad, what infects our side isn’t worthy of discussion”.