I’ve been saying this for a while. The real malicious actors are right there in the open, telling you what they’re doing. I think people gravitate toward the clearly fake conspiracies because it helps soothe their conscience - clearly their guy is Different, you don’t even have to think about it, right?
If someone falsely accuses you of anything, assume they did that first. Investigate the accuser.
Like when someone farts in a conservative household, for all you conservative readers
It’s wild how long the Republicans have been plainly stating what their goals are, and people keep looking for alternative, easier to accept explanations.
It’s still crazy to me how much of the bad shit the government has done has been declassified and publicly available and people still just kind of ignore it. Who needs censorship when people are just willing to overlook reality? Or even worse, just make up nonsense.
There’s also a feeling of “knowing” more than other people. You don’t know about how Albert Einstein and Nikola Tesla invented a time traveling aircraft carrier? Have I got some research that you need to do on your own. But if you did know about it, then it’s junk meant to distract you from what’s really going on.
None of that “knowledge” derives from any level of credible sources, but it does bring a certain level of superiority over people on Facebook. If it’s actually well documented and widely known, then that isn’t something where I get to feel better than other people.
Conspiracy theorists are only interested in the idea of a conspiracy, and lose focus when the conspiracy is found to be true.
I have concepts of a conspiracy.
That’s were all that sweet, sweet serotonin is.
I have a direct example of this:
I was at the UFO museum in Roswell, NM and the guy that was giving a talk was a self-described Ufologist and this was after the government released the UFO footage. He talked the whole time about government coverup of past UFO crashes, etc.
In the Q&A, someone asked if the recent footage gave him hope that we’ll begin to learn more about UFOs now that the government seems more forthright with the information… And he got pissed at them for even asking. It was as if his whole retirement activity of uncovering conspiracies was challenged and his brain couldn’t handle it except by getting angry at an honest question.
His conspiracy seemed to be more boring than he thought (and spent decades “researching”) so he wouldn’t allow the truth to shatter it. It was fascinating to see in real-time.
This is not a conspiracy theory. It’s a conspiracy observation.
The Theorying is half the fun
Conspiracy theorists are not about the actual theories. They are about being special. They are smart and figured out monkeys have been influencing the course of human politics since the roman empire. *They * are the only ones who “get it” that bic biro pens have finger print scanners the CIA uses to locate disobedient citizens.
As soon as it becomes confirmed, they are no longer special, because everyone “gets it”.
When they say “wake up sheeple”, they wouldn’t know what to do if you “woke up”.
That’s why the idea of wokeism is so repugnant to right-wing conspiracy theorists. The idea that they are the ones asleep but also there are many others who woke up before them is so counter to their own self-image that they will alter their perception of the world before they will allow such a thing to be true.
I don’t always agree with 4chan but when I do…
Off topic:
I’m new to Lemmy so I don’t know if there’s a good workaround for this, but OP posted this to /c/4chan as well as /c/greentext and both came to my feed one after the other.
Am I supposed to block OP for cross posting, block one of the two communities? Both ideas seem kinda stupid.
It’s because OP made two separate posts and therefore uploaded the image twice so lemmy doesn’t recognize it as cross-post (check the image URLs, they are different). If OP properly cross-posted it, the URL would be the same and you wouldn’t see it twice in your feed.
Seeing double posts is IMO not frequent enough to require mechanisms to fix it (and I can’t even imagine a built-in mechanism against it).
c/greentext should be blocked because it’s full of annoying fake stories, though.
They’re also gay.
The only consistency you should expect from the right wing is that they’ll consistently drop their “principles” the instant it’s convenient.
Well, it’s only a bad thing, if the others are doing it. Didn’t you know?
There’s no way Elon is as rich as Bezos lol. Does he claim to be the richest person in the world?
Edit: that’s crazy, like literally I’ve never used anything Elon’s companies have produced, and pretty much the whole web uses Amazon web services. Are emerald mines really that profitable? 🤣
Elon funded PayPal, and they forced him out when it became successful and he wanted to change its name to X. I’m not making that up. So you likely used PayPal at some point.
anon was promptly banned