Conspiracy lunatic thread - people who believe in absurd nonsense are dangerous

Pale Rider

...and Hell followed with him.
Citizen
FB friend:
The great societal danger of superstitions, cults, and mythologies is not just that they directly harm people, but that they can interfere with a society's ability to discern cause and effect.

People say "what's the harm in people believing what they want to believe", but If the crop yield is bad and people choose to blame witchcraft rather than disease or inadequate irrigation, they're about to do some serious harm.

Moreover, once they've misattributed the cause, the horrible things they do afterward MIGHT ACTUALLY BE LOGICAL. The thing about logic is that it's like a chain: it's only as strong as its weakest link. If you have one terrible non sequitur in your logic, you can employ flawless logic from that point on, but you'll still end up in the wrong place, because of that initial mistake.

Think about it: once you've decided that the famine was caused by witchcraft, it's actually logical to conclude that you must eliminate the witches in order to save the village. Why wouldn't it be? That decision, as insane as it may appear, actually follows logically from the root mistake, ie- your faulty conclusion that the famine was caused by witchcraft.

This is the biggest mistake people make when they think of what it means to be irrational. They think that an irrational person should be irrational all the time. That's not true, and no one could even function that way. Barring actual psychosis, irrational people are perfectly capable of being rational. They can operate cars, invest money wisely, program computers, etc. They just break with logic at critical junctures, usually involving large-scale cause and effect.

We see this in our society every day: people blaming all manner of social or economic problems on scapegoats chosen not after diligent scientific study, but after being roused to anger by a raving demagogue. Or a social media algorithm.
 

NovaSaber

Well-known member
Citizen
There are people fitting that description (and they are indeed very dangerous; "killing their own kids" dangerous, even), but let's not underestimate the degree to which some people actually will be irrational about 50 more things to avoid letting go of one already-held irrational belief.
 

NovaSaber

Well-known member
Citizen

Conspiracy theorists working for and within the US government are perpetuating myths about UFOs that millions of taxpayer dollars are then spent looking into, a “self-licking ice cream cone”, according to the Pentagon’s former chief investigator of unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAP).

Sean Kirkpatrick made the claim in a podcast this week after stepping down last month as the first director of the defense department’s all-domain anomaly resolution office (Aaro). It was set up in 2022 to collate military reports of UAP sightings and to be more transparent about what the government knows.
 

Paladin

Well-known member
Citizen
MAGALand is now convinced Taylor Swift is an evil siren who's rigged the Super Bowl for President Biden.


 

Pale Rider

...and Hell followed with him.
Citizen
I hope they keep it up. My niece is a Swiftie and she just turned 18. And she registered to vote. There are many more just like her out there.
 

Covert Agent Rodimal

Active member
Citizen
Niners all the way!!!!
Has a 49ers fan, when (okay okay, if) San Francisco wins, rubbing it these idiots face will just be a hugh bonus.

On another note, keep it up Morons, the more you talk, the more an entire generation of women (and a lot of men) turns against you.
 

The Predaking

Administrator
Staff member
Council of Elders
Citizen
My dad's family is from Kansas, so I got to root for the chiefs. However, the 49ers have Cameron Latu, so you know I got root for one of Saban's boys too.
 

Rhinox

too old for this
Citizen
There were at least 2 separate shooters with different instances/motives.
Per eyewitnesses, one shooter was literally some "kids" fighting and one pulled a gun. This event caused one fatality. Haven't heard anything on victim info.
There was at least one more shooter with a separate instance in a slightly different area of the parade route.
Currently 3 in custody, one taken down by fans who tackled him as he tried to flee.
 

abates

unfortunate shark issues
Citizen
The fatality was a 43 year old DJ named Lisa Lopez-Galvan. She hosted a Tex-Mex music show on a community radio station.
 

wonko the sane?

You may test that assumption at your convinience.
Citizen
There aren't enough buckets of turkey in the world to fix what that excuse of an intestinal parasite has done.
 

Ungnome

Grand Empress of the Empire of One Square Foot.
Citizen
I hope everything he owns is worth half of that.
Probably won't be. I hope they can garnish his future income, though. People who were once rich can usually grift their way back into money easily after all.
 


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