fides' Jack's Mega Anti-Vax Thread

[hakutaku]

I personally think that the proliferation of conspiracy theories among religious communities is a "natural" phenomenon.

• Humans have a natural tendency to find organization, plans, in the world, and to ascribe bad outcomes to malevolent actors.
• Many people have a tendency to place undue trust in information billed as "secret," "suppressed," or "hidden."  (I.e. the kind of people targeted by "one weird trick, doctors hate her!" kinds of ads)

Religion literally teaches that there are global plans afoot, that God is constantly sending hidden messages, that their truths are under attack or have been forgotten, and that there are pervasive malevolent forces out to get people.

So considering people who are strongly affected to both of those drives:

Lord, to whom shall they go?  They shall go disproportionately to religion.

Now this does not mean that religion is exclusively made up of these people, just that most of these people will end up religious, and there will be very few of these people outside of religious communities.

So when conspiracy theories involving global malevolent actors comes along, where is the fertile ground for these seeds?  The fertile ground is basically all inside of religious communities.

 

[Peace]

32 minutes ago, hakutaku said:

I personally think that the proliferation of conspiracy theories among religious communities is a "natural" phenomenon.

• Humans have a natural tendency to find organization, plans, in the world, and to ascribe bad outcomes to malevolent actors.
• Many people have a tendency to place undue trust in information billed as "secret," "suppressed," or "hidden."  (I.e. the kind of people targeted by "one weird trick, doctors hate her!" kinds of ads)

Religion literally teaches that there are global plans afoot, that God is constantly sending hidden messages, that their truths are under attack or have been forgotten, and that there are pervasive malevolent forces out to get people.

So considering people who are strongly affected to both of those drives:

Lord, to whom shall they go?  They shall go disproportionately to religion.

Now this does not mean that religion is exclusively made up of these people, just that most of these people will end up religious, and there will be very few of these people outside of religious communities.

So when conspiracy theories involving global malevolent actors comes along, where is the fertile ground for these seeds?  The fertile ground is basically all inside of religious communities.

This is a rather untenable argument I think. The vast majority of people on the planet earth believe in God and have religious belief (however weak or strong), so obviously you will find plenty of conspiracy theorists among the religious. You will also find that the vast majority of modern science from say the 15th century was conducted by religious people. Is religion also the cause of modern science and rational thinking because the vast majority of scientific development in the history of the world was conducted by religious?

To prove your theory, at the very least you need hard data that demonstrates that there is a significant statistical correlation between holding religious views and belief in conspiracies. You have none. So you are just blowing smoke, really.

[hakutaku]

26 minutes ago, Peace said:

This is a rather untenable argument I think. The vast majority of people on the planet earth believe in God and have religious belief (however weak or strong), so obviously you will find plenty of conspiracy theorists among the religious. You will also find that the vast majority of modern science from say the 15th century was conducted by religious people. Is religion also the cause of modern science and rational thinking because the vast majority of scientific development in the history of the world was conducted by religious?

To prove your theory, at the very least you need hard data that demonstrates that there is a significant statistical correlation between holding religious views and belief in conspiracies. You have none. So you are just blowing smoke, really.

Oh, there is plenty of data but I didn't lead with it because I find that when I do that, people try to deny that this is the kind of question that can actually be answered with data. 

Belief in a creator and belief in conspiracy theories are correlated due to teleological thinking.

Religious fundamentalist groups have excessively high rates of conspiracy theory belief.

Belief in all kinds of supernatural processes positively associated with conspiracy theory acceptance.

 

[Era Might]

1 hour ago, hakutaku said:

I personally think that the proliferation of conspiracy theories among religious communities is a "natural" phenomenon.

• Humans have a natural tendency to find organization, plans, in the world, and to ascribe bad outcomes to malevolent actors.
• Many people have a tendency to place undue trust in information billed as "secret," "suppressed," or "hidden."  (I.e. the kind of people targeted by "one weird trick, doctors hate her!" kinds of ads)

Religion literally teaches that there are global plans afoot, that God is constantly sending hidden messages, that their truths are under attack or have been forgotten, and that there are pervasive malevolent forces out to get people.

So considering people who are strongly affected to both of those drives:

Lord, to whom shall they go?  They shall go disproportionately to religion.

Now this does not mean that religion is exclusively made up of these people, just that most of these people will end up religious, and there will be very few of these people outside of religious communities.

So when conspiracy theories involving global malevolent actors comes along, where is the fertile ground for these seeds?  The fertile ground is basically all inside of religious communities.

 

I think we have to keep in mind that America is a "peculiar institution" all its own. America is a land of weirdos (religious and otherwise) and always has been. The weirdos weren't wanted in Europe so they came to America. Religion plays a central role in America in part became Americans never embraced the "nation-state" as a substitute for religion the way Europe did and had to (following the Third Year's War and the Treaty of Westphalia). The fantasy in America has always been one man, one vote, one plot of land, one Bible, etc. Even when America became the land of global industrialism, what is the myth that developed around these its "captains of industry" (Carnegie, etc.)? They were interpreted as "self-made men" in American mythology, not as global capitalists. American religion is Protestant through and through (one man, one Bible, one gun). It's ironic that many of today's white conservative Catholics share a derisive fear of "globalists" along with white conservative Protestants, because Catholics literally belong to a church that aspires to globalism. And that was the historical feature of American Catholicism, its globalism rooted in immigrant communities (which is why good white people in America hated Catholics as much as they hated Jews). And now white Catholics in America are finding common cause with the weirdos in American Protestantism because they are all uniting around a common white identity, which they express through American hyper-nationalism.

Case in point, just look what's happening in actual Catholic countries south of the border. I was just reading a story this morning about 13 young Guatemalans massacred in Mexico trying to make it to the United State:

In 2010, members of the Zetas cartel stopped two tractor-trailers packed with migrants and took them to a ranch in the town of San Fernando, which is also in Tamaulipas state.

The gangsters asked the migrants to become hit men for their cartel. When the migrants refused, they were blindfolded, tied up and shot. Just one man survived, a young Ecuadorian who played dead and then escaped, walking miles to alert authorities.

The next year, there was an even worse massacre in the same region. Several buses were stopped and nearly 200 migrants were ordered off, killed and buried in graves discovered by police soon after.

The perils of the migrant trail are well known throughout Central America. That’s why Maria Isidro was so worried.

“I don’t want you to go,” she told her son firmly.

“No, Mom,” he said. “I’m going.”

A group of Guatemalan bishops issued a statement calling on law enforcement authorities to investigate the attack “the same way they organized to stop the caravan,” a reference to a recent group of thousands of mostly Honduran migrants who were turned back by Guatemalan security forces before they could cross into Mexico.

These are the people who Trump used to catapult himself into global power, symbolized by a massive wall to keep out all these migrants who are trying to survive in a global economy, THE SAME global economy that has turned white people in West Virginia or Alabama into economically irrelevant and uncompetitive serfs, destroying themselves by meth, heroin, suicide, etc. and retreating into "crisis cults" like Trumpism and Evangelical white nationalism.

Again, America is a nation of religious weirdos divorced from global reality. The white Catholics in America, to the extent that they are weirdos, are just clones of American Protestants, because this is a Protestant country. This is why all these conservative white Catholics do their best to explain away everything the Pope says. They're virulent "anti-globalists" who bizarrely belong to a global church. America has never been noted for rational religious people.

The vaccination campaign against Covid-19 in the Vatican which began on Wednesday continues with both Pope Francis and Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI receiving their first doses of the vaccine.

“I can confirm that as part of the vaccination program of the Vatican City State, as of today, the first dose of the Covid-19 vaccine has been administered to Pope Francis and to the Pope Emeritus,” said Matteo Bruni, director of the Holy See Press Office in response to journalists’ questions.

It's sad to see Phatmass overrun by Catholic white nationalists. There used to be a lot of different views on here, now it seems to just be a place to hunker down and find like-minded white people who are afraid of what's going on in the world.

[hakutaku]

40 minutes ago, Era Might said:

I think we have to keep in mind that America is a "peculiar institution" all its own. America is a land of weirdos (religious and otherwise) and always has been. The weirdos weren't wanted in Europe so they came to America. Religion plays a central role in America in part became Americans never embraced the "nation-state" as a substitute for religion the way Europe did and had to (following the Third Year's War and the Treaty of Westphalia).

We may be weirdos, but I don't think we're so different as you propose.

To hold your position, I think you would have to paper over events in Europe, e.g. the Catholic Christian Social Party which rose to power on anti-semetic canards, or the various host desecration conspiracy theories that drove Catholics to kill Jews in the middle ages.  There is also the example of quite prominent Catholics in Rome promulgating conspiracy theories in official documents, such as Merry de Val being concerned in 1928 about, and I quote:

Quote

I would hope that these Amici Israel would not fall into a trap laid by the Jews themselves, who insinuate themselves throughout modern society and seek with whatever means to minimize the memory of their history and take advantage of the good will of Christians.

 

[Era Might]

20 minutes ago, hakutaku said:

We may be weirdos, but I don't think we're so different as you propose.

To hold your position, I think you would have to paper over events in Europe, e.g. the Catholic Christian Social Party which rose to power on anti-semetic canards, or the various host desecration conspiracy theories that drove Catholics to kill Jews in the middle ages.  There is also the example of quite prominent Catholics in Rome promulgating conspiracy theories in official documents, such as Merry de Val being concerned in 1928 about, and I quote:

 

Well, we have to make a distinction between the modern and pre-modern periods. Europe changed in the modern period, and America arose in that context. Europe today is largely dechristianized because the politics of modern nation-states was the primary vehicle of ideological activity. In other words, Europeans in the modern period fought over nation-states rather than religion. World War II was a modern religious war, but the "religions" at stake were liberalism, communism and fascism, not Catholicism and Protestantism. America was not founded as a nation-state but as a society of individualists united primarily by economic rather than political activity. There is no substitute for religion in America, religion is still religion, it's the the only real common identity people have. Americans are deeply distrustful of modern nation-building of the sort that took place in Europe. The closest thing Americans have to a secular religion is the US military, the greatest force of globalism the world has ever known. White religious zealots in America probably can't agree on two points of doctrine, but they virtually all agree that the US military is the savior of the world. This is basically Republican doctrine, to defund everything except the military.

I agree with you that religious groups are prone to magical thinking for obvious reasons, but religion itself has made peace with the modern world. The Pope doesn't go around spouting wild conspiracy theories. It's religious people who feel abandoned or persecuted who resort to such thinking, because they need some way to explain the world. This is what we're seeing with white people in America. And not all of them are Christians, the QAnon Shaman guy at the capitol riot represents a strong pagan element, because American people have no real identity, so of they're not connected to traditional religions, they may reach back to pagan times for a common identity. Religion is an identity, just as politics is. Politics is secular religion. There are few hard-core positivists in the world who base their worldview on empirical evidence alone. Stalin and the Bolsheviks turned the peasants into a  conspiracy theory (kulaks), and he did it in an atheist state (he also used ant-semitism to mobilize traditional Russian/Orthodox nationalism).

Edited January 31, 2021 by Era Might

[Peace]

2 hours ago, hakutaku said:

Oh, there is plenty of data but I didn't lead with it because I find that when I do that, people try to deny that this is the kind of question that can actually be answered with data. 

Belief in a creator and belief in conspiracy theories are correlated due to teleological thinking.

 

Take a look at the specific testing methodology. The authors took an online survey of 1,252 people from a single country in the world (France). “Creationism” was measured by a single item on the survey: “God created humans and the Earth since less than 10'000 years". That is, these are Young Earth Creationists. The authors found a positive correlation between Young Earth Creationism and beliefs in certain named conspiracies (JFK assassination, etc.) So what you have is data that demonstrates that French Young Earth Creationists are more likely to believe that the US Government shot JFK. That ain’t exactly hard data that the Church or religion at large is producing quacks at a disproportionate rate.

Quote

Religious fundamentalist groups have excessively high rates of conspiracy theory belief.

The above article barely says anything about religion at all. There is a single sentence in the entire article that says anything about religion, and here it is:

"Also ‘underground’ extremist movements (e.g., groups of Neo‐Nazis, violent anti‐globalists, religious fundamentalists, and the like) are characterized by excessive conspiracy beliefs."

Quote

Belief in all kinds of supernatural processes positively associated with conspiracy theory acceptance.

This article is a general overview of literature in this emerging field. Again, the article barely has anything to say about religion at all. The main predictors are hypothesized as follows:

“A multitude of studies view conspiracy beliefs as a symptom of an underlying psychological disorder, the prodromal phases of a psychological disorder or the traits associated with them. Amongst those, paranoia (Bruder et al., 2013), paranoid ideation, and schizotypy (Darwin et al., 2011) were prominently found to harbor connections with conspiracy beliefs. Paranoid ideation and schizotypy share similar traits, including suspicion, magical thinking, and odd and unusual beliefs (Barlow and Durand, 2009). In paranoid ideation, people are harboring thoughts that external agents have an intention of hostility toward them; this hostility may be in the form of physical or verbal threats and, relevant for conspiracy beliefs, fearing deception, exploitation, and disloyalty (Freeman et al., 2005; Darwin et al., 2011).”

I am guessing that you read a few sound bites on one of your atheist-friendly blogs and did a cut and paste job without actually reading or conducting your own independent thought?

Edited January 31, 2021 by Peace

[Era Might]

Conspiracy theories perhaps always reflect, not reality, but at least a real situation. The conspiracy theories of the American right reflect a real division between elites and regular people. It's obvious that there are elites who run the world. If you're the head of the Federal Reserve, you're obviously privy to a world of power and wealth that most people have no idea of. Trump made a big deal about the election, and I think it's because he knows how the system actually works. The conspiracy he invented for the masses was obviously false, there was no literally rigged election, but Trump knows that the system is rigged at a much higher level, because he's one of the people who rigs it. The conspiracy he invented for the masses was just a way to interpret this in a way they could grasp, but the real people he was talking to were people like himself who know how the system actually works, how money and power and sex and God knows what else operates among them. Trump created a character, but he's not the stupid oaf he played on TV. He's a global capitalist who is playing a much higher game. The masses are just pawns in whatever game he is playing, and conspiracy theories are part of the circus he creates to mobilize people in the direction he wants to move them. Even anti-semitic conspiracies reflect a real situation, not about Jews themselves, but about people who feel threatened, and need a scapegoat to explain something real that they can't explain except through the symbol of the scapegoat.

Edited January 31, 2021 by Era Might

[Era Might]

Doctors’ Plot, (1953), alleged conspiracy of prominent Soviet medical specialists to murder leading government and party officials; the prevailing opinion of many scholars outside the Soviet Union is that Joseph Stalin intended to use the resulting doctors’ trial to launch a massive party purge.

On Jan. 13, 1953, the newspapers Pravda and Izvestiya announced that nine doctors, who had attended major Soviet leaders, had been arrested. They were charged with poisoning Andrey A. Zhdanov, Central Committee secretary, who had died in 1948, and Alexander S. Shcherbakov (d. 1945), who had been head of the Main Political Administration of the Soviet army, and with attempting to murder several marshals of the Soviet army. The doctors, at least six of whom were Jewish, also were accused of being in the employ of U.S. and British intelligence services, as well as of serving the interests of international Jewry. The Soviet press reported that all of the doctors had confessed their guilt.

The trial and the rumoured purge that was to follow did not occur because the death of Stalin (March 5, 1953) intervened. In April Pravda announced that a reexamination of the case showed the charges against the doctors to be false and their confessions to have been obtained by torture. The doctors (except for two who had died during the course of the investigation) were exonerated. In 1954 an official in the Ministry of State Security and some police officers were executed for their participation in fabricating the cases against the doctors.

Edited January 31, 2021 by Era Might

[hakutaku]

3 hours ago, Peace said:

That ain’t exactly hard data that the Church or religion at large is producing quacks at a disproportionate rate.

That wasn't ever my point though?  My point was never that religion makes people susceptible to conspiracy theories.  For someone leveling the charge of "not actually reading," this is an awfully hypocritical mistake to make.

I stated my point quite clearly:

8 hours ago, hakutaku said:

So considering people who are strongly affected to both of those drives:

Lord, to whom shall they go?  They shall go disproportionately to religion.

Now this does not mean that religion is exclusively made up of these people, just that most of these people will end up religious, and there will be very few of these people outside of religious communities.

Now I have submitted some data which directly supports my thesis: most strongly the first article which directly relates teleological thinking (as I put it "a natural tendency to find organization, plans, in the world, and to ascribe bad outcomes to malevolent actors") to conspiracy theories and certain religious beliefs. 

You seem to have missed some critical pieces of the final paper (slightly condensed):

Quote

Paranormal belief... was positively linked to conspiracy beliefs as well. Paranormal belief also includes magical, superstitious, and religious thinking...

Religious individuals are more likely than non-religious to believe in conspiracy theories (Oliver and Wood, 2014b; Lahrach and Furnham, 2017).

Now you are correct: It may be the case that there exist religions which do not attract these people, but I will not write more defensively and explicitly say that religious beliefs which do not involve teleological reasoning may not attract these people.  The papers I posted are in fact evidence for my thesis even if you judge it to fall short of proof.

I deny, however, that you have made a substantive complaint against the literature on fundamentalists.  Fundamentalist Catholics are still Catholics; indeed my theory would say that these people are the most likely to be attracted to fundamentalism insofar as fundamentalism is basically the assertion "we have forgotten the fundamental truths of our religion."

[Peace]

1 hour ago, hakutaku said:

That wasn't ever my point though?  My point was never that religion makes people susceptible to conspiracy theories.  For someone leveling the charge of "not actually reading," this is an awfully hypocritical mistake to make.

I think you are attempting to backtrack now. I thought that is what you were insinuating when you wrote "So when conspiracy theories involving global malevolent actors comes along, where is the fertile ground for these seeds?  The fertile ground is basically all inside of religious communities."

I made it clear that is what I thought you were insinuating in my first response to you. I wrote "You will also find that the vast majority of modern science from say the 15th century was conducted by religious people. Is religion also the cause of modern science and rational thinking because the vast majority of scientific development in the history of the world was conducted by religious? To prove your theory . . ."

Then when I challenged you to prove that theory, you basically responded by saying "Oh there is plenty of data to show that . . ." You didn't respond at that time by clarifying "Oh that is not what I was trying to assert."

Now, only after I criticized your use of the articles, you want to go back and say "Oh that isn't really what I was trying to say at all."

I don't buy it pal.

Quote

I stated my point quite clearly:

Lord, to whom shall they go?  They shall go disproportionately to religion.

Now this does not mean that religion is exclusively made up of these people, just that most of these people will end up religious, and there will be very few of these people outside of religious communities.

Now I don't think you have demonstrated either of these. But even if you can, who cares? Quacks are also more likely to drink milk, watch Star Wars Episode 3, and do a million other things. Essentially this is kind of an attempt to make an Ad Hominem sort of attack on religion, is it not? Many people who hold religious beliefs are quacks, therefore there must be something intrinsically wrong with religion. Now, I'm sure you won't admit that this is what you are attempting to insinuate, but you aren't fooling anybody.

Quote

Now I have submitted some data which directly supports my thesis: most strongly the first article which directly relates teleological thinking (as I put it "a natural tendency to find organization, plans, in the world, and to ascribe bad outcomes to malevolent actors") to conspiracy theories and certain religious beliefs. 

Friend, you did not submit any data at all. What you submitted were the conclusions that the authors of that article drew from the data that they collected. Neither you nor they have produced any hard data whatsoever. And if you look at the methodology from the first study mentioned in the article, I am surprised how you can even take it seriously. The authors conducted a survey of 157 college freshmen on a single college campus. That is not serious data science. That is fluff science. Certainly not anything approaching what you need to prove up your claims.

Quote

You seem to have missed some critical pieces of the final paper (slightly condensed):

Now you are correct: It may be the case that there exist religions which do not attract these people, but I will not write more defensively and explicitly say that religious beliefs which do not involve teleological reasoning may not attract these people.  The papers I posted are in fact evidence for my thesis even if you judge it to fall short of proof.

Yeah I saw those portions, but they are meaningless conclusions. They are nothing more than conclusory statements based on the author's review of studies that other people made. The author cites one study for one sentence, a completely different study for the next sentence, a third study for the next sentence, and so forth. This is his opinion and the conclusions that he drew from the works of others. We don't have the data or even the methodology or definitions used from any of those underlying studies, so we have nothing to go on other than the author's opinion. And if you look at the abstracts of the underlying articles (the only thing that we have) - the articles themselves do not appear to have anything to do with religion, or even to attempt to address the question raised by your assertion. Like I said, show me the hard data that proves your assertions. Citing the conclusions of someone who may have similar opinions as you is really nothing more than a sort of an veiled attempt to make an appeal to authority. In my original post I said you had no hard data. You have still not produced any.

Quote

I deny, however, that you have made a substantive complaint against the literature on fundamentalists.  Fundamentalist Catholics are still Catholics; indeed my theory would say that these people are the most likely to be attracted to fundamentalism insofar as fundamentalism is basically the assertion "we have forgotten the fundamental truths of our religion."

If any so-called fundamentalists (however you want to define them)  want to jump in an take issue with whatever you think about them that is up to them. It's really no concern of mine because I am not a fundamentalist.

Edited February 1, 2021 by Peace

[fides' Jack]

As a fundamentalist, just based on the definition above (that we believe "we have forgotten the fundamental truths of our religion"), I would say, no, I'm not going to jump up and take issue with how you think about us.  Despite my hard and straight language that I've used in several threads here, of late, I'm a very agreeable person by nature.  

I do object to being called a conspiracy theorist, but I also think anyone who holds fast to truth these days will be called much worse than that.  If they're not being called names, they're probably not as faithful as they think...

[hakutaku]

Really good deep-dive into the flat earth society, including their eventual subsumption into the "big tent" of Qanon theories.  Goes in-depth into people's motivations and why such groups are so uniquely immune to reality.

Edited February 8, 2021 by hakutaku

[ReasonableFaith]

23 hours ago, hakutaku said:

Really good deep-dive into the flat earth society, including their eventual subsumption into the "big tent" of Qanon theories. 

Thank you for sharing the movie. I found it entertaining, informative, and helpful. 

[Ice_nine]

Yes conspiracies never happen. Take this section of an article written by alt-right, facio-supreme propaganda outlet Time Magazine:

"That’s why the participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told, even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream–a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information. They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it."

Ahh, no worries. No elections were rigged, per se, they were fortified. Now I feel MUCH better.

https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/

I find the discussion of religion and conspiracy theories and religion a fun time. For years the hyper-rational new atheists cry and cry about how religion destroys everything. And now the far-left progressives are eating these people alive, because they are just as religious as any troglodyte from the Bible-belt you can conjure up. Sam Harris is not having a good time with them.

See, people are inherently religious. That's the rub. Even the hyper-rationalist intellectuals who do a good job pretending they are above all of that "superstitious nonsense."

[Anomaly]

Is being committed to your beliefs despite rational thought and evidence mean being religious?

[Ice_nine]

3 hours ago, Anomaly said:

Is being committed to your beliefs despite rational thought and evidence mean being religious?

I can only imagine that this is the wrong question, or that it doesn't make much sense.

Any set or beliefs or tenets that are embodied in custom or ritual and contain a meta-narrative seems to be a good workable definition of religion. So someone who holds to belief and practices the requisite rituals could be said to be "religious."

So yes you can be religious despite rational thought and evidence. You can also be religious because of rational thought and evidence. If I were a more well-trained logician there's probably a better way to describe your question. For now, I can only say I don't see the point of the question.

[Peace]

1 hour ago, Ice_nine said:

I can only imagine that this is the wrong question, or that it doesn't make much sense.

Any set or beliefs or tenets that are embodied in custom or ritual and contain a meta-narrative seems to be a good workable definition of religion. So someone who holds to belief and practices the requisite rituals could be said to be "religious."

So yes you can be religious despite rational thought and evidence. You can also be religious because of rational thought and evidence. If I were a more well-trained logician there's probably a better way to describe your question. For now, I can only say I don't see the point of the question.

I thought that it was a back-handed way to insinuate that religion is contrary to rational thought and evidence. That is, the essence of religion is to believe something that defies thought and evidence.

If that is what was intended it is quite ironic, given that atheism is one of the most irrational and evidence-free assertions in history of mankind.

[ReasonableFaith]

7 hours ago, Ice_nine said:

I find the discussion of religion and conspiracy theories and religion a fun time.

Perhaps some of the fun time discussion should be spent on the deaths, bodily injury, emotional trauma, property damage, ruined careers and potential threats to public health cause by today’s most popular conspiracy theories. 

[hakutaku]

45 minutes ago, ReasonableFaith said:

Perhaps some of the fun time discussion should be spent on the deaths, bodily injury, emotional trauma, property damage, ruined careers and potential threats to public health cause by today’s most popular conspiracy theories. 

Conspiracy theories have had disastrous consequences for entire democracies.

7 hours ago, Ice_nine said:

Ahh, no worries. No elections were rigged, per se, they were fortified. Now I feel MUCH better.

I wonder about the course of German politics, for example, if there had been a deliberate effort to combat the "Jewish Bolshevism" and stab in the back conspiracy theories, similar to the efforts described in the Time article.

Edited February 19, 2021 by hakutaku