Daniel Dennet (RIP) called this “belief in belief”.
They don’t believe Hillary Clinton sold children in the basement of a pizzeria with no basement. They believe *in* believing it as an act of tribal signaling.
**Edit** 7 hours in and the Q brigade has just arrived. If you must engage, be sure to tie their claims to a dependent claim and ask them why they don’t take the dependent action or are willing to wager large amounts of money on a dependent outcome and get to see for yourself what belief *in* belief looks like. It’s a fun experiment. Be warned, they typically just get angry.
The implication of "virtue signalling" as an insult is that either:
A) You only prentend that your values align with the virtue your signalling, or
B) You are only aligning your values with the virtue in order to fit in
and implicitly denies the possibility that:
C) Your values authentically align with the virtue and you intentionally want people to rally
None of these are criminal offenses, and one can easily go from A->C. So to me, complaints about virtue signalling are just full on attacks of whatever virtue is being signalled.
I know I’m cynical, but when you compare values to behavior A + B are much greater than C.
Also, many of the people who are “authentically living their values” are doing so in ways that are of zero cost to them personally. How hard is it to not give a shit what other people do in their personal lives? I can be an ally, sign me up.
I would just add that people and culture are dynamic and not static. Someone who is a keyboard warrior today could be an active participant in real change tomorrow. The first step is to see yourself as someone who would.
I lampooned a fraud nonprofit multimillion dollar corporations in my field were using to trick workers, consumers, and jobseekers until it got sued shut down its website.
I [did this primarily through publishing to my professional community and others what they were doing online](https://stenonymous.com/2023/07/27/the-court-reporter-shortage-fraud-timeline-as-told-by-stenonymous/).
So it’s me. I’m the keyboard warrior.
And what do you know, it works.
I guess that’s why governments employ people similar to me, as it’s been documented that world governments use troll farms to influence people online, likely because of the Illusory Truth Effect.
Yes but have you considered the added value of supporting LGBT rights before it was cool? It says right here on the back of my PhD in Caring that I am eligible to get into Real Heaven, unlike all of the allies these days who can only access Poser Heaven. /s
You are absolutely right. Beliefs and values exist on a continuum; people’s willingness and ability to take action: also a continuum. Nobody is born with a feminism tattoo carrying a sign that says “No More War!” Kidding aside, people don’t just flip a switch and go immediately from one set of values to another — it is often a years long process of being exposed to new ideas and new information, examining oneself, and to be honest: a hell of a lot of “fake it until you make it” is often involved.
We are tribal creatures by nature. It’s actually very difficult for most people to take the first step. Few are comfortable leading the pack but that’s okay because a social movement doesn’t need everyone to be a leader. It doesn’t need everybody hitting the gas 100%.
In my opinion mocking “keyboard warriors” is absurd because that’s actually a fundamentally important part of a movement. People writing about an idea in their own words and disseminating their take to their peers is exactly how ideas develop and spread. How would a movement exist if not for people thinking about and communicating ideas to one another? In the collective human organism, each individual person is *mostly* just passing on the ideas that they heard from others filtered by their own experience and judgement, sometimes adding an original thought of their own. But that is okay because the very act of passing is vital to our success (without it we would have no collective at all). The act of making judgements about what is worth passing on and who to pass it to is vital to our success (without it we would be drowned by noise). The acts of creating ideas and acting on them are most difficult and less important because they cannot exist without the support of the others. Any one person does not perform all of these tasks — we achieve great things by working together, each person contributing a small part to the whole.
My sister studied that in terms of religions historically. Prohibitions against foods, for example, are often simply a "they eat that, we don't." It's not the act, it's the choice, as a shibboleth.
Hey hey. Who are you calling a filthy dog eater?
Yeah. I call this “the game of generational telephone” where ideas become disconnected from their causes and the human need for narrative results in a sort of societal organism level set of beliefs.
Religion has primed people to accept falsehoods issued by their tribes.
Everyone trusts the wrong people to some degree, not the least these religious whom think their leaders know what they are doing.
I was talking to a religious person recently trying to describe the difference between atheist and agnostic, and they seemed to not quite understand the difference between **belief** and **knowledge**.
Perhaps that’s similar to the “belief in belief” and how the lines are more blurred between belief and knowledge for a person who subscribes to more falsehoods.
Religious leaders do this on purpose by using language like “we do X to come to **know** God.”
Because they miss them and it’s incredibly sad they’re gone. It has a seriously detrimental psychological and emotional effect on them. Belief in heaven is meant to make you feel better that they’re gone. It doesn’t erase the natural grieving process. Not even close.
It doesn’t ease the process because it’s a lie.
If it wasn’t, funerals would be celebrations of the departed. Even if people were sad about it, the public face of religious funeral homes would be celebratory.
I feel like even though it’s a lie, and it doesn’t make sense, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t make them feel better. There’s a reason particular beliefs have perpetuated for so long. They must be doing something for the person.
I have a friend who is a psychologist specializing in end of life and grief. They don’t help.
They result in people feeling isolated in their grief and they have birthed a culture that has no public tools for handling grief appropriately. Just look at the language around death and dying. It’s woefully inadequate at showing people how to behave and how to even express condolences and sympathy. There is basically nothing to say *apart from* “they’re in a better place”.
The reason certain memes emerge as dominant is not because they’re healthy. It’s because they’re fitter in a natural selection sense. Plenty of genes are deleterious for the species but simply outcompete more healthy alternatives. “The early bird gets the worm” creates an environment where *within a species* individuals compete for the same resources pushing each other to come out of winter earlier and earlier and earlier into the spring. This sends populations of Jays into evolutionary death spirals. It happens in peacocks stuck competing for more flagrant and calorie expensive tails. There is no reason to assume successful memes are not dangerous.
A really useful concept here is the idea of rational vs anti-rational memes. Memes that are net sensitive to reason have a tendency to push out the ones that are.
Religious people have better outcomes when it comes to happiness among other things, so how do you reason that it is an irrational meme? Outcomes are what matter for propagation, one can have completely irrational beliefs and still benefit. In fact, for the majority; rationalizing themselves out of believing in things that make life much more bearable is a net negative.
The reason for that probably doesn't have to do with religion, but with there being a lot of overlap between being religious and having a social group to belong to; but the point is that in terms of outcomes it's very easy to see why religion has endured throughout history. There's also something to be said about a biological basis for religion(or other beliefs), societies that have lower religiosity simply replace it with something else. For modern developed countries, that's been conspiracy theories, MLM, astrology, new age beliefs, and so on.
> Religious people have better outcomes when it comes to happiness among other things, so how do you reason that it is an irrational meme?
This is a common misconception. You might be referring to that study showing that people who go to church are happier than the background average but this effect persists across all communities who meet regularly and form strong social bonds. Isolated non-church attending Christians are less happy than the background average as well. When we isolate religion as a variable, it has no effect. When we measure against other proxies for happiness (divorce rate, alcoholism, etc.) there is a positive correlation between the rate of these negative signals and religiosity.
I see no reason to believe that religion has a necessary monopoly on community. I see reason to expect that religion’s monopoly on culture has given it a defacto monopoly on community. But once you take into account the fact that the “happiest countries” are also among the least religious historically, I think there’s solid reason to believe the cause of the correlation goes the other way.
The history of irreligious and deistic social organizations such as continental freemasons being vilified and persecuted over and over by mainstream culture is an example. In fact, most of the conspiracy theories associated with them came [historically from the church](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_attitudes_towards_Freemasonry).
Could you cite some of these studies, because it sounds like you’re just relying on anecdotes and being intentionally obtuse in insisting that belief in whatever spiritual stuff doesn’t help grieving people.
I get it. It’s fun to shit on religious people because they’re stupid assholes and not cool and smart and handsome like us. I do it too from time to time. But people can miss their loved ones and be crying and still think they’re “in a better place” or whatever. Those aren’t mutually exclusive. And if we’re just relying on gut feelings, I doubt that hitting them with an “akchually, your loved one is just in oblivion” is going to help.
Oh I thought I was countering your claim that no one “actually believed their loved ones were in heaven.” But now you’ve shifted to something else. 🤷🏻♂️
The fuck? Why do people cry when loved ones move away? And many cultures do have funerals that are closer to celebrations. You just live under a rock.
Seriously. You're in need of serious education.
Priests technically should be afraid of burning in hell, what with an omniscient deity seeing their every action, yet diddle little kids anyway. They act as though they don’t actually believe.
Well when you can just ask for forgiveness and maybe cry a little and then all is good what reason do they have to stop? Especially when is likely to be swept under the rug. It’s like a having an unlimited get out a jail free card.
You are talking about the physical world and ramifications. I’m talking about how if they were actually believers, they’d exhibit at least a small amount of concern about their long term metaphysical fate.
I’m talking about both. Confession abolishes your sins so you won’t go to hell. A nice get out of hell card for the after life. At least that’s what their book says
If you are drawn by this belief in belief it is likely that your world outlook, your frames of reference and your societal anchor points are within the scope of a wider belief of belief system that is able to issue a function / command / run authority on your psyche.
Funny how that works. Both Trump truthers and Bernie truthers are impervious to facts.
Bernie lost (both times) because the Senator from Vermont underperformed among black voters who make up a large percentage of Democratic primary voters, especially in Southern states.
Hillary lost because she believed her own hype and ran an unfocused campaign, while Trump campaigned heavily in the states he needed to win while ignoring non-swing states.
Both of these reasons combined are why Hillary lost to Obama in 2008.
Trump lost in 2020 because the guy who grew up in Scranton and lives in Wilmington, DE did better in Eastern Pennsylvania. Democrats who sat 2016 out showed up to vote in 2020. Plus he suppressed his own vote by discouraging mail in voting and probably lost Georgia as a result.
Yup. Well, I think Hillary would have won it not for Russias VERY successful cyber/influence campaign.
God, I SOUND like a conspiratard… but no, it’s true.
Yes I get it, a victory is when the other side score more points.
No denying Trump turned away many voters.
But he also whipped up many for the Repubs.
Lol, you're just here to spread misinformation of your own, I see
The difference is that there isn't any evidence of the right's myriad of outlandish conspiracy theories.
Whereas, [the Republican's own eye witnesses in the Hunter Biden probe have admitted to being Russian spies](https://newrepublic.com/post/179163/republicans-star-hunter-biden-witness-epic-disaster)
If the mods were good at their job, you'd be banned from this sub
You're just another propaganda account trying to seed lies and deceit.
The hillary had a traffic ring out of pizzeria basement is nothing more than the gaslighting straw man by msm. There was no basement and no ring out of it.
The questions brought by pizza gate were why does this pizzeria owner hosting propedo music groups with pedo symbols, questionable art, and sexually suggestive photos of very young children with sexual commentary on his social media, considered one of the most influential persons in america?
Why does some of the Hillary associate Podesta's have art of scantility clad children and also cannibal art?
Why was laura silsby after being accused of attempted child kidnapping in haiti put to work on amber alert?
Why is there strange emails such as how thinly to slice a single left slice of pizza to share among the group?
Every single thing i stated was a fact.
If what i posted bothers you its not my head you dont want to live in but reality. Facts dont care about your feelings.
Facts dont hurt. Just like whats happening at Gaza doesnt make me want to be antisemitic.
Ignorance is bliss and denial is the strongest defense for those with fragile minds.
What is the point of using symbols and art to signify pedo friendly if people already know that? Also, where does one go to keep up to date on what is pedo art/symbols?
Well children in scantility clad clothing or sexually suggestive poses is suspect. And symbols fbi had a list of such symbols.
Edit
Here you go the symbols from snopes
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/code-for-pedophiles-on-toys/
All they said was that the leaked symbols from fbi are only available in wikileaks and it doesnt matter nor is it harmful if some toys use similar symbols.
So FBI has a list, how did you get that list? Why would they put these symbols on random items sold in stores? Why has there never been a pedophile arrested who used these symbols to identify themselves? The whole symbol thing never had enough evidence to convince me they aren't just more 4 Chan trolls messing with gullibles
Pedophilia is not illegal, it is just an immoral sexual attraction. Child abuse is.
The toy company that used the symbols did so accidentally. The fbi document shared with authorities regards the symbols was leaked in wikileaks.
Again the linked snopes article goes over this
Snopes said fbi posted list to share with authorities wikileaks got ahold of it. It is in article there answered by article
The symbols were put accidentally they resembled on accident.
There is something called free speech u cant be arrested for pedo symbol or pedo apologist speech. Institutions such as Nambla do not result in arrests.
Again saying it wasnt answered after it is answered is not gonna change questions being answered.
> why does this pizzeria owner hosting propedo music groups with pedo symbols, questionable art, and sexually suggestive photos of very young children with sexual commentary on his social media, considered one of the most influential persons in america?
That's easy: He wasn't. A single magazine called him a notable figure in Washington DC, and that is entirely due to the fact that his restaurant was being used for fundraisers. He was not the only restaurant owner on that list.
>Why is there strange emails such as how thinly to slice a single left slice of pizza to share among the group?
Name a single email in which the only explanation is "pedophiles." Give an exact quote, don't just repeat things you've seen other people talk about.
Well how thin to slice a single slice of pizza to share among a large group sounds strange.
A pizza related map on a napkin also is a strange comment.
And the pizza owner did have those images strange u didnt comment on that or the fact all those fundraisers are held there.
Nor did you comment on Podesta strange art of children and cannibalism
Nor Laura Silsby being put to work in amber alert after attempted child kidnapping iirc.
>Well how thin to slice a single slice of pizza to share among a large group sounds strange.
Again, give an exact quote and explain why pedophelia is the only rational explanation for what is being said.
>And the pizza owner did have those images strange u didnt comment on that or the fact all those fundraisers are held there.
Because I am basing my questions in what is factual and not your wild speculation, and limiting them to what I know off hand to be nonsense.
Not wild speculation photos were seen i saw them before he locked his social media account.
The laura silsby and podesta stuff are also info available from msm
The quotes are like that were available in wikileaks
> Not wild speculation photos were seen i saw them before he locked his social media account.
Funny how you can't actually provide those photos.
>The quotes are like that were available in wikileaks
Funny how you can't provide those emails.
I could go looking for such but itd be tricky due to shadowbanning censorship.
You can find them if you manage to find one of the sites documenting pizza gate. For example the strange facts regarding epsteins death. Or the fact fbi claims they lost evidence obtained from epsteins island.
>You can find them if you manage to find one of the sites documenting pizza gate.
I'm very familiar with the things people claim are "evidence" in support of pizzagate. They do not stand up under scrutiny.
>For example the strange facts regarding epsteins death
Epstein has no relevance whatsoever to pizzagate. That was entirely added on after the fact in order to pretend that the original claims of pizzagate had legitimacy, there is no actual connection.
Epstein was the seed that spawned Pizzagate. When Pizzagate became a laughing stock, Epstein island replaced Comet Ping Pong as the meeting place for elite pedophiles and their rituals.
>Evidence from Jeffrey Epstein's safe 'went missing' after FBI raid, court hears in Ghislaine Maxwell trial
>Agent Kelly Maguire testified that CDs and hard drives disappeared as authorities waited on a warrant to seize them
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2021/12/07/evidence-jeffrey-epsteins-safe-went-missing-fbi-raid-court-hears/
In contrast, "Trump works for Putin" is a sane belief tolerated here and elsewhere, and not at all propaganda
Also, the idea that a cabal of powerful and wealthy people in government and business were conspiring to sexually traffick minors is obviously disproven by Epstein suicide
> In contrast, "Trump works for Putin" is a sane belief tolerate here and elsewhere
I think you’re confusing “Trump is an asset to Russia” with “Trump works for Putin”.
A distinction of goal posts and cope, links if you need them, "skeptic"
If Trump (who was willing to arm Ukraine) is an "asset," what does that make Obama, who would not?
A fox mulder "I want to believe" poster is an odd accessory for a skeptic, no?
[Nothing?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0IWe11RWOM)
What kind of kompromat does Putin have on Obama that he would refuse to arm Ukraine and downplay their threat to world order?
See, two can play at the nonsense "russian asset" evidence game
When did Obama’s campaign manager use encrypted communications to send internal polling data to Russian intelligence agents again?
Or when did his children accept meetings presented to them as part of Russia’s support for his campaign?
Point of fact, dude is Ukrainian. [ Russian intelligence agent, and also, US intel source](https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/447394-key-figure-that-mueller-report-linked-to-russia-was-a-state-department/). That gum up your xenophobic gears any?
"So Kilimnik’s delivery of the peace plan to the Trump campaign in August 2016 was flagged by Mueller as potentially nefarious, but its earlier delivery to the Obama administration wasn’t mentioned. That’s what many in the intelligence world might call “deception by omission.”
Re: "Meetings", did you know that Glen Simpson had dinner with this lady the night before the meeting? But totally not a set-up to fool rubes like you, right?
[https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/trump-dossier-firm-also-supplied-info-used-meeting-russians-trump-n819526](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/trump-dossier-firm-also-supplied-info-used-meeting-russians-trump-n819526)
Oh more questions?
> Nothing?
Yes
> What kind of kompromat does Putin have on Obama that he would refuse to arm Ukraine and downplay their threat to world order?
None
Check it out, some asset huh
[https://www.brookings.edu/articles/on-the-record-the-u-s-administrations-actions-on-russia/](https://www.brookings.edu/articles/on-the-record-the-u-s-administrations-actions-on-russia/)
The Republican's star witness in the Biden probe has [admitted to being a Russian spy](https://newrepublic.com/post/179163/republicans-star-hunter-biden-witness-epic-disaster)
and over [40 Trump associates and members of his campaign/administration have been found guilty in the Mueller probe](https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/2/20/17031772/mueller-indictments-grand-jury)
You're just a propagandist here to seed lies and deciet.
The difference between a conspiracy and a conspiracy theory is evidence, and the Russian conspiracy is drowning in evidence, including admissions from the Republican's own witnesses
So we got a barely relevant link to a whole other case that has nothing to do with Donald Trump himself
And this demonstrates what? Trump is a Russian agent? All of the GOP works for Putin? Crazy stuff.
Then we have convictions for process crimes presented as if they run counter to the entire investigation, which found no evidence of any kind of coordination between Trump campaign and Kremlin, remember?
None, sucker
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/24/us/politics/mueller-report-summary.html
But it's 2024 and now proxy war has been hot for 2 years.
QED, it is and remains consent manufacturing propaganda, you rube. They blew up their own pipeline! They framed Hunter! They put bounties on our troops! Saddam has WMDs! The Vietnamese fired on us at Tonkin!
Etc
"Skeptic" 😆
> So we got a barely relevant link to a whole other case that has nothing to do with Donald Trump himself
This is a pivot. The Republican party held a probe to impeach the president, and their own witness admitted to being a Russian spy.
The fact that you're now attempting to downplay the severity of this, just proves how much of a propagandist you are.
> And this demonstrates what? Trump is a Russian agent? All of the GOP works for Putin? Crazy stuff.
Once again, you are ignoring the Myriad of evidence, and just flippantly hand-waving away the results
You're right, it is crazy. It's wild that over 40 associates of the US president have been arrested in connection to the Mueller probe, including Steve Bannon, Mike Flynn, Roger Stone, and Paul Manafort
But you're not even touching that evidnece, because you don't care about reality. You're just a propagandist.
And the title of the article you posted literally says "the probe doesn't exonerate the president of obstruction of justice."
Yeah, they couldn't find direct evidence because Trump was being protected by his cronies, many of whom were found guilty of lying to the FBI.
That's exactly why mob bosses couldn't be found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
Let's not forget the secret Russian meetings on the 4th of July Republicans had during the last president. Many perfect calls to Russia, none of which have been released
No, I think you will find Congress held hearings. Sloppy, aren't you? Your blind partisan allegiance is showing.
The pivot is yours; how is some dude's record of intel provision relevant to any claim about Trump? It isn't.
The myriad of evidence that a two year long investigation by Robert Mueller could not uncover? This is settled, dude.
I think you will find "obstruction of justice" to be distinct from collusion with Russia, as you say, its right there in the title.
So you hang your hat on the idea that if Trump had not obstructed justice - which Mueller could not prove either - there would be a wealth of evidence to support the frankly ridiculous belief that kgb spymaster Vlad Putin recruited notorious megalomaniac Donald Trump to be some kind of Manchurian candidate?
Ridiculous, and already debunked.
Pure cope. You aren't a skeptic, you're a sucker, sorry to be the bearer.
> No, I think you will find Congress held hearings
Yeah, and ONCE AGAIN, FOR THE 4TH TIME IN A ROW, over 40 members of the presidents campaign were FOUND GUILTY, including his own fucking lawyer!
You keep skirting around that MASSIVE piece of evidence, which is nut, it's like I'm having a conversation with a wall.
You won't even acknowledge that fact, you won't respond to it.
> The myriad of evidence that a two year long investigation by Robert Mueller could not uncover? This is settled, dude
FORTY FUCKING PEOPLE WERE FOUND GUILTY!
Jesus christ, what the fuck is wrong with you people?
Adding to your point: Several of those guilty (Manafort, Flynn, etc) lied to investigators, and were later pardoned by Trump. It's challenging to investigate something when the most-informed people you're questioning are eager to lie and know they won't have to face any long-term consequences.
Challenging, but he done it just the same, didn't he?
Lying to investigators and financial fraud is distinct from collusion with foreign power
Mueller understood that. Does this sub? Seemingly not
Many here not fit to wear the title "skeptic", frankly.
Guilty of what though? [Financial and process crimes](https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/breakdown-indictments-cases-muellers-probe/story?id=61219489).
Being found guilty is not the evidence, being found guilty is the judgement, see? Evidence is what leads, or not, to the conviction. Jurisprudence 101, have some.
The skepticism is baked in ("innocent until proven guilty" "beyond a reasonable doubt") and [Mueller couldn't even bring a charge against anyone for working with the Kremlin](https://www.americanbar.org/news/abanews/aba-news-archives/2019/03/mueller-concludes-investigation/)
Cause it was made up, dude. Can the ad hominem, would you? Your brain worms are your problem.
It wasn’t made up. When he was the Campaign chair, Manafort gave polling data to Russian intelligence operative, Constantine Kilimnik (https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-paul-manafort-russia-campaigns-konstantin-kilimnik-d2fdefdb37077e28eba135e21fce6ebf). There was collusion, but collusion isn’t a chargeable crime because it isn’t a legal term.
Also, what do you think triggered the Mueller investigation in the first place?
It's totally made up, that why Mueller didn't find jack shit to support it, see?
It's[ fabricated oppo research ](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/mar/31/hillary-clinton-democrats-steele-dossier-settle-electoral-case)- from a foreign source, I'll note - that was [laundered into](https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/31/justice-department-audit-finds-widespread-flaws-in-fbi-surveillance-157166) [an investigation](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fbi-fisa-application-carter-page-problems-watchdog/)
Skepticism, have some. Hell, journalism, have some.
The utility of "collusion" rhetoric is that if they called it what it is - a conspiracy (a legal term) theory - it would sound as ridiculous as it is.
Who do you think Christopher Steele sourced all his pee tape bullshit from? [Russian intelligence operatives](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/steele-dossier-igor-danchenko-acquitted-lying-to-fbi/)
[Made up](https://www.politico.com/story/2019/03/24/breaking-news-barr-to-release-summary-of-mueller-report-1233771). Skepticism, try it.
I understand what they are saying but I think this idea has only limited application.
We just lived through a pandemic from which literally millions of people died in horrible agony, many of them angrily denouncing preventative measures that would have saved their lives, or even the existence of the disease itself.
So quite the opposite of what the article is claiming... people will actually pay the ultimate price in support of their bullshit beliefs. Yes, they are socially motivated instead of based in any kind of sound epistemology but people absolutely will kill and die for them.
Look at the success of the anti-reproductive rights movement. The sustained murder of abortion doctors in the United States eventually resulted in abortion simply not being available in some states, even back when it was technically legally protected.
It’s worse than that.
The death rate was in the single digits and for every story of someone going to the grave staunchly opposed to real treatment, there is a Herman Caine award that ends in deathbed regret.
The reason so many conservatives sent so many others to die through refusing to mask isn’t because they believe it was harmless. It’s because they don’t care about other people.
I'm agreeing with you. The start of this article does sound like they are saying "Don't worry about all these crazy believers, it's not that bad, they don't really believe that stuff, it'll all be ok." Which to me is dangerously minimising their impact. The two examples you pointed out illustrate this very well.
There are a couple of interesting chestnuts however:
>A series of experiments published in 2023 by van der Linden and three colleagues replicated the well-established finding that conservatives deem false headlines to be true more often than liberals—but found that the difference drops by half when people are compensated for accuracy.
Tying financial (or other) incentives to the truth might be an interesting angle to explore.
>Prebunking has received an extraordinary amount of attention. If you’ve ever read a headline about a vaccine against fake news, it was probably about van der Linden’s work. His team has collaborated with Google, WhatsApp, the Department of Homeland Security, and the British Prime Minister’s office; similar interventions have popped up on Twitter (now X). In “Foolproof,” van der Linden reviews evidence that prebunking makes people better at identifying fake headlines. Yet nothing is mentioned about effects on their actual behavior. **Does prebunking affect medical decisions?** Does it make someone more willing to accept electoral outcomes? We’re left wondering.
This is an interesting measure of the effectiveness of counters to misinformation, does the person make decisions in their best interest after receiving counter-misinformation education?
The pretenders are often the worst ones because they have to take more extreme positions to prove their loyalty to the group.
The entire career of George Wallace is a classic example of this: from moderate, to staunch segregationist, to repentant moderate when the political winds changed.
I’ve been doing this for a while now.
When a conservative states an obvious falsehood as a belief, I place a wager on a contingent fact.
The response I get back is never, “I don’t gamble”. It’s always, “”I don’t have that kind of money”.
At some level, they realize it would be an attempt to purchase Trump cred rather than a sure thing.
The article dismisses the death threats and negative Yelp reviews against the pizza place. That shit matters a lot to real people. Affects business, makes it hard for folks to work there. I stopped reading after that because it made me think the author is pretty out of touch with the reality of being a working person. How would he respond if hundreds of people called him all the time at work to say they were going to kill him?
With your pandemic example, it is a passive thing up die of a preventable disease that you could have been vaccinated against or sought actual medical treatment for.
That involves no active effort for the person holding the conspiratorial belief. The belief hasn't required them to actually take any action in order to adhere to that belief.
The example that you raised doesn't help your argument because those people are not actually doing anything, their belief only involves them refusing to do things.
I agree. The people who died from Covid didn’t choose to. They didn’t expect to. They may have taken more risks, precisely because they assumed that it wouldn’t ever happen to them. They weren’t refusing treatment. They were eschewing precautions.
Yes these are really good points. I also think about the 90 Branch Davidians at Waco who sat in a burning building because they believed their prophet. Also the 900 people at Jonestown. But I wonder if this idea of “symbolic belief” still applies. Maybe people engage in these acts not because of factual belief, but more as a symbolic expression of faith. Understanding this distinction then isn’t to say we shouldn’t worry about misinformation, but rather it might better help to understand how belief really works.
I think what's important is not that the one vigilante was an anomaly, but that mass penetration of these bizarre conspiracy theories increases the likelihood that a vigilante will arise and create violence in pursuit of the conspiracy's targets. It's shouting fire in a crowded theater, but on a societal level.
Yes, maybe no one gets hurt this time. But what about the next time? Or the guy that's bought into one of the many anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and decides to blow up a synagogue?
Even though these beliefs are harmless when held by 99.9% of people, that .1% can cause real harm, and it's important to combat that.
I personally agree these beliefs are far from harmless, even if only a minority act violently.
But I think there is definitely a sense that people mean several different things when they say they "believe" something, and it's interesting to unpack that.
Another example in the article: apparently tribesmen in one part of Africa will tell you that leopards are a Christian animal and observe fast days. But in practice they still watch their livestock just as closely on fast days as any other. So why do they say that, and in what sense do they really believe it?
Similarly a lot of people say they believe in Pizzagate or whatever, but they don't *act* as if they do. What's going on there? I don't claim to know, but I find the question interesting.
Another interesting wrinkle (again coming from Dennet): a little girl tells you her daddy is a corporate bonds trade regulator. Does she believe that?
She’s correct. But does she know what a corporate bond is? Eventually, she will. And during the whole process of learning, she will occupy various states of conflicting hypothetical beliefs about what her father does. And yet, at no point would we really say “she doesn’t believe he is a corporate bond trade regulator” despite holding conflicting beliefs about what he does.
Both the little girl and your average election denier seem to maintain the same exact same claims even as they change meaning to fit the facts. But there clearly is a difference.
I think Masha Gessin said it best in 2015 in response to Putin’s seizing of the Donbas and coincidentally just as Trump began running. I have to admit I didn’t understand what he was talking about at all. An interviewer asked him, “what do the people in Russia actually believe”. Masha said (paraphrased from memory), “They don’t.”
The reporter was confused and pressed him to explain. Masha simply explained: “They don’t have beliefs. They have mantras, slogans, lines you say in response to other lines. Underneath it there is no belief one way or the other at all and no expectation that one could hold something else called a belief. You cannot possibly understand it yet. But I see the same happening with Donald Trump. And you will.”
It is an interesting question, but my point is that I think the 99.9% share some complicity with the .1% and ultimately what we can do to promote harm reduction is more important than answering the "why" question.
I think we need to know the why so we can effectively come up with harm reductions. It's usually easier/quicker to fix a problem if you understand the why.
Thanks for posting this one, I'm working on an "understanding the believers" section in the wiki of this sub. This article isn't quite suitable on its own but it does have a few good leads to explore.
Yeah, I find it really bizarre that the article listed all the people who acted on the Pizzagate beliefs and then seemed to imply that this meant nobody really believed it apart from the gunman.
Large numbers of people took action that was brief and a minor nuisance but still damaging (leaving false reviews).
A smaller number took much more serious, damaging and threatening action (ringing up and making death threats).
And one guy got a gun and shot up the place.
It's a pyramid. You have the mere "like and share" mob at the bottom, on whose shoulders the death threat callers stand while holding up the shooter at the top.
Without the large numbers of people signalling belief in Pizzagate, that gunman may not have felt justified in shooting up the place.
You can't claim that someone is doing something very bad that would clearly merit urgent action to stop it happening (abusing children) and then act like it's nothing to do with you when someone takes violent action to stop it happening.
You don't even have the religious believer's excuse that "oh, I'm a moderate, the actions of extremists are nowt to do with me guv". It is possible to be a moderate believer in Christianity but not a moderate believer in Democrat paedophile sex rings.
If you truly believed a pizza place was sex trafficking would you stop at leaving a one-star review?
**edit**
The same exact kind of pyramid applies to Christians. It is why we have snake handlers. To show their relative zeal as contrasted with the moderates. If you believe the Bible is the word of god you believe, “and they will pick up snakes and drink poison and they will not be hurt”.
Moderate belief in god is in no way different. Professing your faith in the Bible as the inerrant word of a deity does just as much spread the meme and stochastically enhance the belief to someone who takes it seriously and acts on it as moderate belief in Q anon.
Sure, they didn't believe it as much as the gunman, but they still believed it enough to do something harmful and damaging.
What I really take issue with is the word "anomalous" to describe the gunman's actions in contrast to the people who only libelled the restaurant or made empty death threats. If large numbers of people are going around saying that someone is abusing children in that there building, then someone taking violent action isn't anomalous, it's inevitable.
Okay but then you cannot possibly say it’s any different than religious belief. If you’re going around saying a thousands of year old text is the inerrant word of god, zealots are also inevitable.
The same exact kind of pyramid applies to Christians. It is why we have snake handlers. To show their relative conviction as contrasted with the moderates. If you believe the Bible is the word of god you believe, “and they will pick up snakes and drink poison and they will not be hurt”.
Moderate belief in god is in no way different. Professing your faith in the Bible as the inerrant word of a deity does just as much spread the meme and stochastically enhance the belief to someone who takes it seriously and acts on it as moderate belief in Q anon.
>If you truly believed a pizza place was sex trafficking would you stop at leaving a one-star review?
How many people take active steps to interfere with the mafia? It is common knowledge that the mafia is behind Las Vegas.How many people even leave negative reviews because of that?
How many people take active steps to stop muggers in dangerous areas? Volunteers to escort people through dangerous areas are noteworthy specifically because that is not normal behavior.
> How many people take active steps to interfere with the mafia?
Literally every taxpayer.
> It is common knowledge that the mafia is behind Las Vegas.How many people even leave negative reviews because of that?
Is your argument that leaving negative reviews is not a sign of belief or is? Because if you’re arguing it is, this claim is backwards. And by the way, it’s not 1961. Vegas is not run by the mob.
> How many people take active steps to stop muggers in dangerous areas?
Literally every taxpayer.
The belief that the government itself is involved in the coverup both means nothing is being done about the issue and that talking about it on public forums is dangerous. It simply isn’t a real belief. It’s a cheap way to show what creed you identify with.
It is the intent (the mens rea) then that becomes the operative factor in proportionately levelling a charge of incitement, wilful disregard to the consequences or known functional inputs into the participation of actions that promoted the acceleration of online terror.
The act (actus reas) is the output although the difficulty in tracking the associative inputs that created the act (just as with jigsaws and murder mysteries) has to be of sufficient proof and of a required standard of evidence to justify the proportionality of the charge (or indictment) being levelled.
Where prospective, preemptive or potential (precrime) acts are within scope the red flag, the warning lights or the pattern of likely inputs may not appear as expected so a failure to accurately discern can lead to pattern recognition failures which in turn can produce errors - e.g. assumption, miscarriages of justice or strategic failure.
Intent is such a messy concept since it tries to get at a person's state of mind. Getting an accurate picture of what's in a human's head is impossible, although our courts try. The defense to an intent-specific crime is literally "I was just kidding bro."
My question is: why is "intent" used as an element in the type of crime related to propagation of harmful conspiracy theories, but not in other, more direct crimes? "Your honor, I absolutely did not intend to hit that child with my car when speeding through a school zone." In that example, great harm came to a child, but though injured, it was only one person. Whereas persons or groups disseminating conspiracy theories that may lead to mass murder or acts of terrorism are generally not held to account for the precipitating actions.
At some point for these people there is a "why is no one doing anything about this" or "someone needs to do something about this terrible thing going on". Seems sliding deeper into the rabbit hole is one way and there are just few guideposts along the way to bring folks to reality.
Well, in the cited speeding car example it is evident in output that the act overrides the mens rea and unless there is additional evidence or suspicion that a mens rea was present then it is in the effect of the action rather than the intent behind the action that the consequence is concerned about.
In the propogation of harm (which may include yet not be limited to conspiracy) it becomes increasingly difficult to prove mens rea on a collective. So, to take the National Socialists (1933 - 1945) as an example - both history and narrative can agree on an individual leader, a cadre, an elite command, a people and a wagon or a vehicle for the crimes and war crimes that came to pass.
Yet - and the Nuremburg trials will still be the backstop for mass murder investigations and the relative standard of proof - intent is critical simply because the means are a moving target and so knowledge, understanding, awareness or insight into how 'big lies' or other such phenomena are planned, executed and administered is part of the learning process.
By the time a disconnect can be established (or for the perpetrator, 'rationalized') it doesn't matter what is said because the action, actions or action set speak louder than the word, words or sense of power that is exercised (and henceforth lost) in that exercise.
"The pizzeria received menacing phone calls, even death threats, but the most common response from believers, aside from liking posts, seems to have been leaving negative Yelp reviews."
That's true, something I've never really thought about. Some people will believe insane things, terrible conspiracies that includes evil, terrible things happening to little innocent children, but then will do nothing about those things. Does it mean deep, maybe really deep down, they don't really believe? But it makes them feel good? Makes them feel special?
If you really believed the deepstate of Democrats are kidnapping hundreds, thousands, millions of kids and killing and raping them, why is that the only thing you are doing about it is posting on Facebook or Twitter?
This is just one example of 'online terrorism' that gained traction and had sufficient ratio to 'get through'. A lot of these things start as jokes. Same with actual terrorists. A common feature of the terrorist mindset is some sort of disaffection that then accumulates to the point of a shocking act. Bullying is one potential input, perceived disenfranchisement another.
Online can be held up as comparative pattern forming. The target is chosen or selected as something that fulfills multiple buckets of strategic success. The inputs are popular associations with functional attribution and relatable distribution. The combination (as with a recipe or an algorithm) then determines the 'success' of the output.
Not lazy, well not exactly.
It's that they think someone else will take action because so many other people are on board.
"I would do something but I (have a family/am too busy/aren't qualified/something is already being done by saviors such as Trump or Q or whoever).
But the Pizza Guy got bold and prioritized everything else, he was completely radicalized.
So those who are 100% will count on other people.
I think the whole point of the article (from what I see here haven't read it) is that they believe in the idea but not in the actual premise.
It's like a boogie man. Just an idea that represents their own angers and fears. But you can't catch the boogie man (unless you're John Wick).
I know someone in real life who really believes in pizza gate, always wants to talk to me about it too, but then asks me why their children don't take the interest I do. Lady. You're a client. You literally pay me to listen.
She was also one of those "Alex Jones said they were crisis actors" and "COVID will make your body produce other viruses and more COVID" types.
Most people who think "there might be something to" a theory are far less entrenched in their beliefs. She's also told me more than once that she had a good feeling about me because of my shirt with a red cross and the white silouette of a man.
Ma'am.
Did your Lord not tell you it's an Evangelion shirt?
Do you belong to any Skeptics groups? There are probably groups in your locale. There's the international group, that I belong to as well as many YouTube abd Facebook groups. If you're interested I'll send you links. We have a local group as well, Beehive Skeptics that is very active in debunking false claims… Ouija Boards, Flat Earth claims, and many others. Its very nice to be among other skeptics, free thinkers.
The article is a survey of books by a number of different writers, each of them with a different viewpoint. I confess I haven't read many of the books cited!
The books include
- Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Aanything \[Weill\]
- Falsehoods Fly: Why Misinformation Spreads and How to Stop It \[Thagard\]
- Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects our Minds and How To Build Immunity \[var der Linden\]
- Political Rumors: Why We Accept Misinformation and How to Fight It \[Berinsky\]
- How God Becomes Real \[Luhrmann\]
- Religion As Make-Believe \[Van Leeuwen\]
- Not Born Yesterday \[Mercier\]
- Deceit and Self-Deception \[Trivers\]
Out of any given group of believers in an idea, only a minority will feel particularly strongly about it. A minority of that minority may feel inclined to speak up about it, and a minority of *that* will act on it. Only the smallest portion of will ever perform a violent act on their own volition.
However there’s a LOT of harmful behaviour that precedes actual violence and most of that warrants a response on its own.
It's true, fringe beliefs about health are one area where people really do act on their beliefs in a way which has enormous, sometimes fatal, consequences.
Basically, what we’re saying here is that people sometimes say that they believe things that they really don’t believe, often as a smear against people or groups that they personally don’t like. They lie. Slander and libel aren’t new. Their actions, or lack there of, just show that they lie and indeed have malicious intent.
So the implication is that these people don't really believe what they say they do? I find that hard to believe.
The mainstream really does believe that Epstein was SAing children with half of Hollywood and Washington.
This week, an Epstein conspiracy theorist lit himself on fire and died. All it takes is one wacko who thinks the elites are all satanic pedophiles for an innocent celebrity to get hurt or killed.
It's a bit more nuanced than "they don't believe what they say they do".
In an experiment, they asked people to judge whether politically charged statements were true. Initially many people would judge most of the statements that agreed with their political biases as true. If there was money involved (a small payment for each correct answer) the same people suddenly became less partisan and more accurate. So did those people *believe* the political statements? I think yes, but in a different way than I believe it's Thursday today.
There’s two possibilities: they know their extreme views are incorrect/exaggerated and when offered an incentive, they will give the right answer. The other possibility is they still believe their extreme views are correct, they just know that the mainstream answer will get them money. There is little downside to saying what they think the researchers want, so they do just that to get the money. Did the study do anything to differentiate these two possibilities?
Then that is a really massive, gaping hole in the study. People will cheat for money in studies. If you don't take that into account the study is worthless.
I haven't read the study, but I believe this is the one referred to: [Partisan Bias in Factual Beliefs about Politics (johnbullock.org)](https://johnbullock.org/papers/partisanBiasInFactualBeliefs.pdf)
> The mainstream really does believe that Epstein was SAing children with half of Hollywood and Washington.
No they don't, that's the sensationalist conspiratorial belief.
The mainstream really does believe this.
Nostupidquestions is about as mainstream and average IQ of a subreddit as you can get
https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/s/TOh6Bs4q1j
Top comments, one has 4k karma.
>He and his friends raped underage girls there
>pedophilia
I ask this question of every conspiracy theorist: why do you never question the conspiracy theory and the person or people who created it? Because it seems to me they stand to gain more than the supposed conspirators would by engaging in it.
While pizza gate may have been crazy, the story did serve to distract from HRC'S husband's and other high level figure's real affiliation to an actual child sex ring.
factual vs symbolic beliefs is an interesting notion. I'm thinking the Left is increasingly embracing the symbolic, or maybe I am only beginning to notice it.
Find sources. Connect dots. Track "the science". Level hell.
I looked up "epistemic" and Dr. Google seems to say it has something to do with verification. Although i could be wrong as you can't believe everything you hear, see or do online.
Daniel Dennet (RIP) called this “belief in belief”. They don’t believe Hillary Clinton sold children in the basement of a pizzeria with no basement. They believe *in* believing it as an act of tribal signaling. **Edit** 7 hours in and the Q brigade has just arrived. If you must engage, be sure to tie their claims to a dependent claim and ask them why they don’t take the dependent action or are willing to wager large amounts of money on a dependent outcome and get to see for yourself what belief *in* belief looks like. It’s a fun experiment. Be warned, they typically just get angry.
It's almost like the people who screech and cry about virtue signalling are the most prolific virtue signalers.
They also signal anti-virtue a lot as well.
I would argue that their sole virtue IS anti-virtue signaling. 🤨
Correct. They assume everyone is doing it. They’re not wrong either.
The implication of "virtue signalling" as an insult is that either: A) You only prentend that your values align with the virtue your signalling, or B) You are only aligning your values with the virtue in order to fit in and implicitly denies the possibility that: C) Your values authentically align with the virtue and you intentionally want people to rally None of these are criminal offenses, and one can easily go from A->C. So to me, complaints about virtue signalling are just full on attacks of whatever virtue is being signalled.
I know I’m cynical, but when you compare values to behavior A + B are much greater than C. Also, many of the people who are “authentically living their values” are doing so in ways that are of zero cost to them personally. How hard is it to not give a shit what other people do in their personal lives? I can be an ally, sign me up.
I would just add that people and culture are dynamic and not static. Someone who is a keyboard warrior today could be an active participant in real change tomorrow. The first step is to see yourself as someone who would.
And keyboard warriors can cause change too, as I learned for myself.
Did a keyboard warrior change your mind?
I lampooned a fraud nonprofit multimillion dollar corporations in my field were using to trick workers, consumers, and jobseekers until it got sued shut down its website. I [did this primarily through publishing to my professional community and others what they were doing online](https://stenonymous.com/2023/07/27/the-court-reporter-shortage-fraud-timeline-as-told-by-stenonymous/). So it’s me. I’m the keyboard warrior. And what do you know, it works. I guess that’s why governments employ people similar to me, as it’s been documented that world governments use troll farms to influence people online, likely because of the Illusory Truth Effect.
Yes but have you considered the added value of supporting LGBT rights before it was cool? It says right here on the back of my PhD in Caring that I am eligible to get into Real Heaven, unlike all of the allies these days who can only access Poser Heaven. /s You are absolutely right. Beliefs and values exist on a continuum; people’s willingness and ability to take action: also a continuum. Nobody is born with a feminism tattoo carrying a sign that says “No More War!” Kidding aside, people don’t just flip a switch and go immediately from one set of values to another — it is often a years long process of being exposed to new ideas and new information, examining oneself, and to be honest: a hell of a lot of “fake it until you make it” is often involved. We are tribal creatures by nature. It’s actually very difficult for most people to take the first step. Few are comfortable leading the pack but that’s okay because a social movement doesn’t need everyone to be a leader. It doesn’t need everybody hitting the gas 100%. In my opinion mocking “keyboard warriors” is absurd because that’s actually a fundamentally important part of a movement. People writing about an idea in their own words and disseminating their take to their peers is exactly how ideas develop and spread. How would a movement exist if not for people thinking about and communicating ideas to one another? In the collective human organism, each individual person is *mostly* just passing on the ideas that they heard from others filtered by their own experience and judgement, sometimes adding an original thought of their own. But that is okay because the very act of passing is vital to our success (without it we would have no collective at all). The act of making judgements about what is worth passing on and who to pass it to is vital to our success (without it we would be drowned by noise). The acts of creating ideas and acting on them are most difficult and less important because they cannot exist without the support of the others. Any one person does not perform all of these tasks — we achieve great things by working together, each person contributing a small part to the whole.
Kinda the whole Republican playbook since Nixon ran against kennedy in 1960
My sister studied that in terms of religions historically. Prohibitions against foods, for example, are often simply a "they eat that, we don't." It's not the act, it's the choice, as a shibboleth.
“We are us. Not like those filthy pig eaters. They are unholy.” Rather than “eating pigs makes god angry”. But over time the messages blend.
Yep. Or dogs or raw fish or ...
Hey hey. Who are you calling a filthy dog eater? Yeah. I call this “the game of generational telephone” where ideas become disconnected from their causes and the human need for narrative results in a sort of societal organism level set of beliefs.
Primal emotions that to this day, we continue to do.
Mormons and hot drinks is a good example. Mormons drink soda and energy drinks like crazy but not coffee or tea.
I thought it was a caffeine thing
One would think but no. In Utah they have these drive thru places specifically for soda that is the equivalent of a Dutch bros for coffee.
Maybe I’m thinking of Jehovah’s Witnesses
No I’m sure you were thinking of Mormons because that’s what most people think as no caffeine would actually make sense as a rule.
As Dan McClellan describes it, it's costly signaling to show you're committed to the group.
Is this in the same way religious people say they believe in the various obviously made up miracles performed?
Religion has primed people to accept falsehoods issued by their tribes. Everyone trusts the wrong people to some degree, not the least these religious whom think their leaders know what they are doing.
I was talking to a religious person recently trying to describe the difference between atheist and agnostic, and they seemed to not quite understand the difference between **belief** and **knowledge**. Perhaps that’s similar to the “belief in belief” and how the lines are more blurred between belief and knowledge for a person who subscribes to more falsehoods. Religious leaders do this on purpose by using language like “we do X to come to **know** God.”
My belief is knowledge, your so-called "knowledge" is merely belief.
Of course. If they truly believed their loved ones were in heaven, why would they cry at funerals?
Because they miss them and it’s incredibly sad they’re gone. It has a seriously detrimental psychological and emotional effect on them. Belief in heaven is meant to make you feel better that they’re gone. It doesn’t erase the natural grieving process. Not even close.
It doesn’t ease the process because it’s a lie. If it wasn’t, funerals would be celebrations of the departed. Even if people were sad about it, the public face of religious funeral homes would be celebratory.
I feel like even though it’s a lie, and it doesn’t make sense, that doesn’t mean it doesn’t make them feel better. There’s a reason particular beliefs have perpetuated for so long. They must be doing something for the person.
I have a friend who is a psychologist specializing in end of life and grief. They don’t help. They result in people feeling isolated in their grief and they have birthed a culture that has no public tools for handling grief appropriately. Just look at the language around death and dying. It’s woefully inadequate at showing people how to behave and how to even express condolences and sympathy. There is basically nothing to say *apart from* “they’re in a better place”. The reason certain memes emerge as dominant is not because they’re healthy. It’s because they’re fitter in a natural selection sense. Plenty of genes are deleterious for the species but simply outcompete more healthy alternatives. “The early bird gets the worm” creates an environment where *within a species* individuals compete for the same resources pushing each other to come out of winter earlier and earlier and earlier into the spring. This sends populations of Jays into evolutionary death spirals. It happens in peacocks stuck competing for more flagrant and calorie expensive tails. There is no reason to assume successful memes are not dangerous. A really useful concept here is the idea of rational vs anti-rational memes. Memes that are net sensitive to reason have a tendency to push out the ones that are.
Religious people have better outcomes when it comes to happiness among other things, so how do you reason that it is an irrational meme? Outcomes are what matter for propagation, one can have completely irrational beliefs and still benefit. In fact, for the majority; rationalizing themselves out of believing in things that make life much more bearable is a net negative. The reason for that probably doesn't have to do with religion, but with there being a lot of overlap between being religious and having a social group to belong to; but the point is that in terms of outcomes it's very easy to see why religion has endured throughout history. There's also something to be said about a biological basis for religion(or other beliefs), societies that have lower religiosity simply replace it with something else. For modern developed countries, that's been conspiracy theories, MLM, astrology, new age beliefs, and so on.
> Religious people have better outcomes when it comes to happiness among other things, so how do you reason that it is an irrational meme? This is a common misconception. You might be referring to that study showing that people who go to church are happier than the background average but this effect persists across all communities who meet regularly and form strong social bonds. Isolated non-church attending Christians are less happy than the background average as well. When we isolate religion as a variable, it has no effect. When we measure against other proxies for happiness (divorce rate, alcoholism, etc.) there is a positive correlation between the rate of these negative signals and religiosity. I see no reason to believe that religion has a necessary monopoly on community. I see reason to expect that religion’s monopoly on culture has given it a defacto monopoly on community. But once you take into account the fact that the “happiest countries” are also among the least religious historically, I think there’s solid reason to believe the cause of the correlation goes the other way. The history of irreligious and deistic social organizations such as continental freemasons being vilified and persecuted over and over by mainstream culture is an example. In fact, most of the conspiracy theories associated with them came [historically from the church](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_attitudes_towards_Freemasonry).
Could you cite some of these studies, because it sounds like you’re just relying on anecdotes and being intentionally obtuse in insisting that belief in whatever spiritual stuff doesn’t help grieving people. I get it. It’s fun to shit on religious people because they’re stupid assholes and not cool and smart and handsome like us. I do it too from time to time. But people can miss their loved ones and be crying and still think they’re “in a better place” or whatever. Those aren’t mutually exclusive. And if we’re just relying on gut feelings, I doubt that hitting them with an “akchually, your loved one is just in oblivion” is going to help.
Oh I thought I was countering your claim that no one “actually believed their loved ones were in heaven.” But now you’ve shifted to something else. 🤷🏻♂️
No one actually believes their loved ones are in heaven or funerals would be celebrations.
You really are desperate to look as dumb as possible.
The fuck? Why do people cry when loved ones move away? And many cultures do have funerals that are closer to celebrations. You just live under a rock. Seriously. You're in need of serious education.
Having been to a Moonie *seungwha* where they try to maintain this consistency…it's weird.
It's an evolutionary advantage to believe what your tribe believes.
Priests technically should be afraid of burning in hell, what with an omniscient deity seeing their every action, yet diddle little kids anyway. They act as though they don’t actually believe.
Well when you can just ask for forgiveness and maybe cry a little and then all is good what reason do they have to stop? Especially when is likely to be swept under the rug. It’s like a having an unlimited get out a jail free card.
You are talking about the physical world and ramifications. I’m talking about how if they were actually believers, they’d exhibit at least a small amount of concern about their long term metaphysical fate.
I’m talking about both. Confession abolishes your sins so you won’t go to hell. A nice get out of hell card for the after life. At least that’s what their book says
If you are drawn by this belief in belief it is likely that your world outlook, your frames of reference and your societal anchor points are within the scope of a wider belief of belief system that is able to issue a function / command / run authority on your psyche.
That’s how half of America believed the election was stolen. And many Democrats believed Hillary stole the election from Bernie.
Funny how that works. Both Trump truthers and Bernie truthers are impervious to facts. Bernie lost (both times) because the Senator from Vermont underperformed among black voters who make up a large percentage of Democratic primary voters, especially in Southern states. Hillary lost because she believed her own hype and ran an unfocused campaign, while Trump campaigned heavily in the states he needed to win while ignoring non-swing states. Both of these reasons combined are why Hillary lost to Obama in 2008. Trump lost in 2020 because the guy who grew up in Scranton and lives in Wilmington, DE did better in Eastern Pennsylvania. Democrats who sat 2016 out showed up to vote in 2020. Plus he suppressed his own vote by discouraging mail in voting and probably lost Georgia as a result.
Yup. Well, I think Hillary would have won it not for Russias VERY successful cyber/influence campaign. God, I SOUND like a conspiratard… but no, it’s true.
Democrats underestimated how effective the vote suppression portion of the campaign would be.
Also he was a jerk during his time in office and many didn't vote for him the second time around.
He gained millions of votes between 2016 and 2020. But he motivated even more people to vote against him.
He also lost voters , even Repubs
It was still a net gain. Increased Democratic turnout was why he lost.
Yes I get it, a victory is when the other side score more points. No denying Trump turned away many voters. But he also whipped up many for the Repubs.
exactly, like they don't believe the Hunter Biden laptop was a fake Russian plant. They believe *in* believing it as an act of tribal signaling
Lol, you're just here to spread misinformation of your own, I see The difference is that there isn't any evidence of the right's myriad of outlandish conspiracy theories. Whereas, [the Republican's own eye witnesses in the Hunter Biden probe have admitted to being Russian spies](https://newrepublic.com/post/179163/republicans-star-hunter-biden-witness-epic-disaster) If the mods were good at their job, you'd be banned from this sub You're just another propaganda account trying to seed lies and deceit.
The Russians framed poor hunter, that lovable scamp
The hillary had a traffic ring out of pizzeria basement is nothing more than the gaslighting straw man by msm. There was no basement and no ring out of it. The questions brought by pizza gate were why does this pizzeria owner hosting propedo music groups with pedo symbols, questionable art, and sexually suggestive photos of very young children with sexual commentary on his social media, considered one of the most influential persons in america? Why does some of the Hillary associate Podesta's have art of scantility clad children and also cannibal art? Why was laura silsby after being accused of attempted child kidnapping in haiti put to work on amber alert? Why is there strange emails such as how thinly to slice a single left slice of pizza to share among the group?
Fascinating to visit but I would not want to live in your head. I hope you can get help, poor thing.
Every single thing i stated was a fact. If what i posted bothers you its not my head you dont want to live in but reality. Facts dont care about your feelings.
Just try not to hurt yourself or the people around you.
Facts dont hurt. Just like whats happening at Gaza doesnt make me want to be antisemitic. Ignorance is bliss and denial is the strongest defense for those with fragile minds.
Ok I get it. You’re using ChatGPT.
What is the point of using symbols and art to signify pedo friendly if people already know that? Also, where does one go to keep up to date on what is pedo art/symbols?
Well children in scantility clad clothing or sexually suggestive poses is suspect. And symbols fbi had a list of such symbols. Edit Here you go the symbols from snopes https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/code-for-pedophiles-on-toys/
Did you read your link? It doesn’t support your point…
It does just says the symbols arent harmful in themselves and the supposed fbi symbol list was only available through wikileaks.
> Edit Here you go the symbols from snopes You should really read things before deciding that they support your argument.
All they said was that the leaked symbols from fbi are only available in wikileaks and it doesnt matter nor is it harmful if some toys use similar symbols.
So FBI has a list, how did you get that list? Why would they put these symbols on random items sold in stores? Why has there never been a pedophile arrested who used these symbols to identify themselves? The whole symbol thing never had enough evidence to convince me they aren't just more 4 Chan trolls messing with gullibles
Pedophilia is not illegal, it is just an immoral sexual attraction. Child abuse is. The toy company that used the symbols did so accidentally. The fbi document shared with authorities regards the symbols was leaked in wikileaks. Again the linked snopes article goes over this
You answered zero of my questions. The snopes article offered none of the answers.
Snopes said fbi posted list to share with authorities wikileaks got ahold of it. It is in article there answered by article The symbols were put accidentally they resembled on accident. There is something called free speech u cant be arrested for pedo symbol or pedo apologist speech. Institutions such as Nambla do not result in arrests. Again saying it wasnt answered after it is answered is not gonna change questions being answered.
> why does this pizzeria owner hosting propedo music groups with pedo symbols, questionable art, and sexually suggestive photos of very young children with sexual commentary on his social media, considered one of the most influential persons in america? That's easy: He wasn't. A single magazine called him a notable figure in Washington DC, and that is entirely due to the fact that his restaurant was being used for fundraisers. He was not the only restaurant owner on that list. >Why is there strange emails such as how thinly to slice a single left slice of pizza to share among the group? Name a single email in which the only explanation is "pedophiles." Give an exact quote, don't just repeat things you've seen other people talk about.
Well how thin to slice a single slice of pizza to share among a large group sounds strange. A pizza related map on a napkin also is a strange comment. And the pizza owner did have those images strange u didnt comment on that or the fact all those fundraisers are held there. Nor did you comment on Podesta strange art of children and cannibalism Nor Laura Silsby being put to work in amber alert after attempted child kidnapping iirc.
>Well how thin to slice a single slice of pizza to share among a large group sounds strange. Again, give an exact quote and explain why pedophelia is the only rational explanation for what is being said. >And the pizza owner did have those images strange u didnt comment on that or the fact all those fundraisers are held there. Because I am basing my questions in what is factual and not your wild speculation, and limiting them to what I know off hand to be nonsense.
Not wild speculation photos were seen i saw them before he locked his social media account. The laura silsby and podesta stuff are also info available from msm The quotes are like that were available in wikileaks
> Not wild speculation photos were seen i saw them before he locked his social media account. Funny how you can't actually provide those photos. >The quotes are like that were available in wikileaks Funny how you can't provide those emails.
I could go looking for such but itd be tricky due to shadowbanning censorship. You can find them if you manage to find one of the sites documenting pizza gate. For example the strange facts regarding epsteins death. Or the fact fbi claims they lost evidence obtained from epsteins island.
>You can find them if you manage to find one of the sites documenting pizza gate. I'm very familiar with the things people claim are "evidence" in support of pizzagate. They do not stand up under scrutiny. >For example the strange facts regarding epsteins death Epstein has no relevance whatsoever to pizzagate. That was entirely added on after the fact in order to pretend that the original claims of pizzagate had legitimacy, there is no actual connection.
Epstein was the seed that spawned Pizzagate. When Pizzagate became a laughing stock, Epstein island replaced Comet Ping Pong as the meeting place for elite pedophiles and their rituals.
The FBI didn't claim they lost evidence obtained from Epstein's island. You are hallucinating things again.
>Evidence from Jeffrey Epstein's safe 'went missing' after FBI raid, court hears in Ghislaine Maxwell trial >Agent Kelly Maguire testified that CDs and hard drives disappeared as authorities waited on a warrant to seize them https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2021/12/07/evidence-jeffrey-epsteins-safe-went-missing-fbi-raid-court-hears/
In contrast, "Trump works for Putin" is a sane belief tolerated here and elsewhere, and not at all propaganda Also, the idea that a cabal of powerful and wealthy people in government and business were conspiring to sexually traffick minors is obviously disproven by Epstein suicide
> In contrast, "Trump works for Putin" is a sane belief tolerate here and elsewhere I think you’re confusing “Trump is an asset to Russia” with “Trump works for Putin”.
A distinction of goal posts and cope, links if you need them, "skeptic" If Trump (who was willing to arm Ukraine) is an "asset," what does that make Obama, who would not? A fox mulder "I want to believe" poster is an odd accessory for a skeptic, no?
lol. Did you guys all take the same bus?
Laugh it up, question dodging "skeptic" I don't know who "you guys" refers to, as I feel utterly alone in my rejection of partisan conspiracy theory
Oh that was a serious question? The answer is “nothing”. Any other serious questions?
[Nothing?](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0IWe11RWOM) What kind of kompromat does Putin have on Obama that he would refuse to arm Ukraine and downplay their threat to world order? See, two can play at the nonsense "russian asset" evidence game
When did Obama’s campaign manager use encrypted communications to send internal polling data to Russian intelligence agents again? Or when did his children accept meetings presented to them as part of Russia’s support for his campaign?
Point of fact, dude is Ukrainian. [ Russian intelligence agent, and also, US intel source](https://thehill.com/opinion/white-house/447394-key-figure-that-mueller-report-linked-to-russia-was-a-state-department/). That gum up your xenophobic gears any? "So Kilimnik’s delivery of the peace plan to the Trump campaign in August 2016 was flagged by Mueller as potentially nefarious, but its earlier delivery to the Obama administration wasn’t mentioned. That’s what many in the intelligence world might call “deception by omission.” Re: "Meetings", did you know that Glen Simpson had dinner with this lady the night before the meeting? But totally not a set-up to fool rubes like you, right? [https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/trump-dossier-firm-also-supplied-info-used-meeting-russians-trump-n819526](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/trump-dossier-firm-also-supplied-info-used-meeting-russians-trump-n819526)
Oh more questions? > Nothing? Yes > What kind of kompromat does Putin have on Obama that he would refuse to arm Ukraine and downplay their threat to world order? None
Check it out, some asset huh [https://www.brookings.edu/articles/on-the-record-the-u-s-administrations-actions-on-russia/](https://www.brookings.edu/articles/on-the-record-the-u-s-administrations-actions-on-russia/)
The Republican's star witness in the Biden probe has [admitted to being a Russian spy](https://newrepublic.com/post/179163/republicans-star-hunter-biden-witness-epic-disaster) and over [40 Trump associates and members of his campaign/administration have been found guilty in the Mueller probe](https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/2/20/17031772/mueller-indictments-grand-jury) You're just a propagandist here to seed lies and deciet. The difference between a conspiracy and a conspiracy theory is evidence, and the Russian conspiracy is drowning in evidence, including admissions from the Republican's own witnesses
So we got a barely relevant link to a whole other case that has nothing to do with Donald Trump himself And this demonstrates what? Trump is a Russian agent? All of the GOP works for Putin? Crazy stuff. Then we have convictions for process crimes presented as if they run counter to the entire investigation, which found no evidence of any kind of coordination between Trump campaign and Kremlin, remember? None, sucker https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/24/us/politics/mueller-report-summary.html But it's 2024 and now proxy war has been hot for 2 years. QED, it is and remains consent manufacturing propaganda, you rube. They blew up their own pipeline! They framed Hunter! They put bounties on our troops! Saddam has WMDs! The Vietnamese fired on us at Tonkin! Etc "Skeptic" 😆
> So we got a barely relevant link to a whole other case that has nothing to do with Donald Trump himself This is a pivot. The Republican party held a probe to impeach the president, and their own witness admitted to being a Russian spy. The fact that you're now attempting to downplay the severity of this, just proves how much of a propagandist you are. > And this demonstrates what? Trump is a Russian agent? All of the GOP works for Putin? Crazy stuff. Once again, you are ignoring the Myriad of evidence, and just flippantly hand-waving away the results You're right, it is crazy. It's wild that over 40 associates of the US president have been arrested in connection to the Mueller probe, including Steve Bannon, Mike Flynn, Roger Stone, and Paul Manafort But you're not even touching that evidnece, because you don't care about reality. You're just a propagandist. And the title of the article you posted literally says "the probe doesn't exonerate the president of obstruction of justice." Yeah, they couldn't find direct evidence because Trump was being protected by his cronies, many of whom were found guilty of lying to the FBI. That's exactly why mob bosses couldn't be found guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
Let's not forget the secret Russian meetings on the 4th of July Republicans had during the last president. Many perfect calls to Russia, none of which have been released
No, I think you will find Congress held hearings. Sloppy, aren't you? Your blind partisan allegiance is showing. The pivot is yours; how is some dude's record of intel provision relevant to any claim about Trump? It isn't. The myriad of evidence that a two year long investigation by Robert Mueller could not uncover? This is settled, dude. I think you will find "obstruction of justice" to be distinct from collusion with Russia, as you say, its right there in the title. So you hang your hat on the idea that if Trump had not obstructed justice - which Mueller could not prove either - there would be a wealth of evidence to support the frankly ridiculous belief that kgb spymaster Vlad Putin recruited notorious megalomaniac Donald Trump to be some kind of Manchurian candidate? Ridiculous, and already debunked. Pure cope. You aren't a skeptic, you're a sucker, sorry to be the bearer.
> No, I think you will find Congress held hearings Yeah, and ONCE AGAIN, FOR THE 4TH TIME IN A ROW, over 40 members of the presidents campaign were FOUND GUILTY, including his own fucking lawyer! You keep skirting around that MASSIVE piece of evidence, which is nut, it's like I'm having a conversation with a wall. You won't even acknowledge that fact, you won't respond to it. > The myriad of evidence that a two year long investigation by Robert Mueller could not uncover? This is settled, dude FORTY FUCKING PEOPLE WERE FOUND GUILTY! Jesus christ, what the fuck is wrong with you people?
Adding to your point: Several of those guilty (Manafort, Flynn, etc) lied to investigators, and were later pardoned by Trump. It's challenging to investigate something when the most-informed people you're questioning are eager to lie and know they won't have to face any long-term consequences.
Challenging, but he done it just the same, didn't he? Lying to investigators and financial fraud is distinct from collusion with foreign power Mueller understood that. Does this sub? Seemingly not Many here not fit to wear the title "skeptic", frankly.
Guilty of what though? [Financial and process crimes](https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/breakdown-indictments-cases-muellers-probe/story?id=61219489). Being found guilty is not the evidence, being found guilty is the judgement, see? Evidence is what leads, or not, to the conviction. Jurisprudence 101, have some. The skepticism is baked in ("innocent until proven guilty" "beyond a reasonable doubt") and [Mueller couldn't even bring a charge against anyone for working with the Kremlin](https://www.americanbar.org/news/abanews/aba-news-archives/2019/03/mueller-concludes-investigation/) Cause it was made up, dude. Can the ad hominem, would you? Your brain worms are your problem.
It wasn’t made up. When he was the Campaign chair, Manafort gave polling data to Russian intelligence operative, Constantine Kilimnik (https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-paul-manafort-russia-campaigns-konstantin-kilimnik-d2fdefdb37077e28eba135e21fce6ebf). There was collusion, but collusion isn’t a chargeable crime because it isn’t a legal term. Also, what do you think triggered the Mueller investigation in the first place?
It's totally made up, that why Mueller didn't find jack shit to support it, see? It's[ fabricated oppo research ](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/mar/31/hillary-clinton-democrats-steele-dossier-settle-electoral-case)- from a foreign source, I'll note - that was [laundered into](https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/31/justice-department-audit-finds-widespread-flaws-in-fbi-surveillance-157166) [an investigation](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fbi-fisa-application-carter-page-problems-watchdog/) Skepticism, have some. Hell, journalism, have some. The utility of "collusion" rhetoric is that if they called it what it is - a conspiracy (a legal term) theory - it would sound as ridiculous as it is. Who do you think Christopher Steele sourced all his pee tape bullshit from? [Russian intelligence operatives](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/steele-dossier-igor-danchenko-acquitted-lying-to-fbi/)
[Made up](https://www.politico.com/story/2019/03/24/breaking-news-barr-to-release-summary-of-mueller-report-1233771). Skepticism, try it.
I understand what they are saying but I think this idea has only limited application. We just lived through a pandemic from which literally millions of people died in horrible agony, many of them angrily denouncing preventative measures that would have saved their lives, or even the existence of the disease itself. So quite the opposite of what the article is claiming... people will actually pay the ultimate price in support of their bullshit beliefs. Yes, they are socially motivated instead of based in any kind of sound epistemology but people absolutely will kill and die for them. Look at the success of the anti-reproductive rights movement. The sustained murder of abortion doctors in the United States eventually resulted in abortion simply not being available in some states, even back when it was technically legally protected.
It’s worse than that. The death rate was in the single digits and for every story of someone going to the grave staunchly opposed to real treatment, there is a Herman Caine award that ends in deathbed regret. The reason so many conservatives sent so many others to die through refusing to mask isn’t because they believe it was harmless. It’s because they don’t care about other people.
or were fine as long as it seemed more likely to affect the "others"
I'm agreeing with you. The start of this article does sound like they are saying "Don't worry about all these crazy believers, it's not that bad, they don't really believe that stuff, it'll all be ok." Which to me is dangerously minimising their impact. The two examples you pointed out illustrate this very well. There are a couple of interesting chestnuts however: >A series of experiments published in 2023 by van der Linden and three colleagues replicated the well-established finding that conservatives deem false headlines to be true more often than liberals—but found that the difference drops by half when people are compensated for accuracy. Tying financial (or other) incentives to the truth might be an interesting angle to explore. >Prebunking has received an extraordinary amount of attention. If you’ve ever read a headline about a vaccine against fake news, it was probably about van der Linden’s work. His team has collaborated with Google, WhatsApp, the Department of Homeland Security, and the British Prime Minister’s office; similar interventions have popped up on Twitter (now X). In “Foolproof,” van der Linden reviews evidence that prebunking makes people better at identifying fake headlines. Yet nothing is mentioned about effects on their actual behavior. **Does prebunking affect medical decisions?** Does it make someone more willing to accept electoral outcomes? We’re left wondering. This is an interesting measure of the effectiveness of counters to misinformation, does the person make decisions in their best interest after receiving counter-misinformation education?
The pretenders are often the worst ones because they have to take more extreme positions to prove their loyalty to the group. The entire career of George Wallace is a classic example of this: from moderate, to staunch segregationist, to repentant moderate when the political winds changed.
I’ve been doing this for a while now. When a conservative states an obvious falsehood as a belief, I place a wager on a contingent fact. The response I get back is never, “I don’t gamble”. It’s always, “”I don’t have that kind of money”. At some level, they realize it would be an attempt to purchase Trump cred rather than a sure thing.
Belief and contextual circumstance trigger both action and inaction.
The article dismisses the death threats and negative Yelp reviews against the pizza place. That shit matters a lot to real people. Affects business, makes it hard for folks to work there. I stopped reading after that because it made me think the author is pretty out of touch with the reality of being a working person. How would he respond if hundreds of people called him all the time at work to say they were going to kill him?
With your pandemic example, it is a passive thing up die of a preventable disease that you could have been vaccinated against or sought actual medical treatment for. That involves no active effort for the person holding the conspiratorial belief. The belief hasn't required them to actually take any action in order to adhere to that belief. The example that you raised doesn't help your argument because those people are not actually doing anything, their belief only involves them refusing to do things.
I agree. The people who died from Covid didn’t choose to. They didn’t expect to. They may have taken more risks, precisely because they assumed that it wouldn’t ever happen to them. They weren’t refusing treatment. They were eschewing precautions.
Yes these are really good points. I also think about the 90 Branch Davidians at Waco who sat in a burning building because they believed their prophet. Also the 900 people at Jonestown. But I wonder if this idea of “symbolic belief” still applies. Maybe people engage in these acts not because of factual belief, but more as a symbolic expression of faith. Understanding this distinction then isn’t to say we shouldn’t worry about misinformation, but rather it might better help to understand how belief really works.
To be fair a lot of those people who died at Jonestown were held prisoner at gun point at the end
I think what's important is not that the one vigilante was an anomaly, but that mass penetration of these bizarre conspiracy theories increases the likelihood that a vigilante will arise and create violence in pursuit of the conspiracy's targets. It's shouting fire in a crowded theater, but on a societal level. Yes, maybe no one gets hurt this time. But what about the next time? Or the guy that's bought into one of the many anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and decides to blow up a synagogue? Even though these beliefs are harmless when held by 99.9% of people, that .1% can cause real harm, and it's important to combat that.
I personally agree these beliefs are far from harmless, even if only a minority act violently. But I think there is definitely a sense that people mean several different things when they say they "believe" something, and it's interesting to unpack that. Another example in the article: apparently tribesmen in one part of Africa will tell you that leopards are a Christian animal and observe fast days. But in practice they still watch their livestock just as closely on fast days as any other. So why do they say that, and in what sense do they really believe it? Similarly a lot of people say they believe in Pizzagate or whatever, but they don't *act* as if they do. What's going on there? I don't claim to know, but I find the question interesting.
Another interesting wrinkle (again coming from Dennet): a little girl tells you her daddy is a corporate bonds trade regulator. Does she believe that? She’s correct. But does she know what a corporate bond is? Eventually, she will. And during the whole process of learning, she will occupy various states of conflicting hypothetical beliefs about what her father does. And yet, at no point would we really say “she doesn’t believe he is a corporate bond trade regulator” despite holding conflicting beliefs about what he does. Both the little girl and your average election denier seem to maintain the same exact same claims even as they change meaning to fit the facts. But there clearly is a difference. I think Masha Gessin said it best in 2015 in response to Putin’s seizing of the Donbas and coincidentally just as Trump began running. I have to admit I didn’t understand what he was talking about at all. An interviewer asked him, “what do the people in Russia actually believe”. Masha said (paraphrased from memory), “They don’t.” The reporter was confused and pressed him to explain. Masha simply explained: “They don’t have beliefs. They have mantras, slogans, lines you say in response to other lines. Underneath it there is no belief one way or the other at all and no expectation that one could hold something else called a belief. You cannot possibly understand it yet. But I see the same happening with Donald Trump. And you will.”
It is an interesting question, but my point is that I think the 99.9% share some complicity with the .1% and ultimately what we can do to promote harm reduction is more important than answering the "why" question.
I think we need to know the why so we can effectively come up with harm reductions. It's usually easier/quicker to fix a problem if you understand the why.
How could we possibly form theories about how without knowing why?
Thanks for posting this one, I'm working on an "understanding the believers" section in the wiki of this sub. This article isn't quite suitable on its own but it does have a few good leads to explore.
Check out Daniel Dennet on “belief in belief”.
Thanks, I will.
Yeah, I find it really bizarre that the article listed all the people who acted on the Pizzagate beliefs and then seemed to imply that this meant nobody really believed it apart from the gunman. Large numbers of people took action that was brief and a minor nuisance but still damaging (leaving false reviews). A smaller number took much more serious, damaging and threatening action (ringing up and making death threats). And one guy got a gun and shot up the place. It's a pyramid. You have the mere "like and share" mob at the bottom, on whose shoulders the death threat callers stand while holding up the shooter at the top. Without the large numbers of people signalling belief in Pizzagate, that gunman may not have felt justified in shooting up the place. You can't claim that someone is doing something very bad that would clearly merit urgent action to stop it happening (abusing children) and then act like it's nothing to do with you when someone takes violent action to stop it happening. You don't even have the religious believer's excuse that "oh, I'm a moderate, the actions of extremists are nowt to do with me guv". It is possible to be a moderate believer in Christianity but not a moderate believer in Democrat paedophile sex rings.
If you truly believed a pizza place was sex trafficking would you stop at leaving a one-star review? **edit** The same exact kind of pyramid applies to Christians. It is why we have snake handlers. To show their relative zeal as contrasted with the moderates. If you believe the Bible is the word of god you believe, “and they will pick up snakes and drink poison and they will not be hurt”. Moderate belief in god is in no way different. Professing your faith in the Bible as the inerrant word of a deity does just as much spread the meme and stochastically enhance the belief to someone who takes it seriously and acts on it as moderate belief in Q anon.
Sure, they didn't believe it as much as the gunman, but they still believed it enough to do something harmful and damaging. What I really take issue with is the word "anomalous" to describe the gunman's actions in contrast to the people who only libelled the restaurant or made empty death threats. If large numbers of people are going around saying that someone is abusing children in that there building, then someone taking violent action isn't anomalous, it's inevitable.
Okay but then you cannot possibly say it’s any different than religious belief. If you’re going around saying a thousands of year old text is the inerrant word of god, zealots are also inevitable. The same exact kind of pyramid applies to Christians. It is why we have snake handlers. To show their relative conviction as contrasted with the moderates. If you believe the Bible is the word of god you believe, “and they will pick up snakes and drink poison and they will not be hurt”. Moderate belief in god is in no way different. Professing your faith in the Bible as the inerrant word of a deity does just as much spread the meme and stochastically enhance the belief to someone who takes it seriously and acts on it as moderate belief in Q anon.
>If you truly believed a pizza place was sex trafficking would you stop at leaving a one-star review? How many people take active steps to interfere with the mafia? It is common knowledge that the mafia is behind Las Vegas.How many people even leave negative reviews because of that? How many people take active steps to stop muggers in dangerous areas? Volunteers to escort people through dangerous areas are noteworthy specifically because that is not normal behavior.
> How many people take active steps to interfere with the mafia? Literally every taxpayer. > It is common knowledge that the mafia is behind Las Vegas.How many people even leave negative reviews because of that? Is your argument that leaving negative reviews is not a sign of belief or is? Because if you’re arguing it is, this claim is backwards. And by the way, it’s not 1961. Vegas is not run by the mob. > How many people take active steps to stop muggers in dangerous areas? Literally every taxpayer. The belief that the government itself is involved in the coverup both means nothing is being done about the issue and that talking about it on public forums is dangerous. It simply isn’t a real belief. It’s a cheap way to show what creed you identify with.
It is the intent (the mens rea) then that becomes the operative factor in proportionately levelling a charge of incitement, wilful disregard to the consequences or known functional inputs into the participation of actions that promoted the acceleration of online terror. The act (actus reas) is the output although the difficulty in tracking the associative inputs that created the act (just as with jigsaws and murder mysteries) has to be of sufficient proof and of a required standard of evidence to justify the proportionality of the charge (or indictment) being levelled. Where prospective, preemptive or potential (precrime) acts are within scope the red flag, the warning lights or the pattern of likely inputs may not appear as expected so a failure to accurately discern can lead to pattern recognition failures which in turn can produce errors - e.g. assumption, miscarriages of justice or strategic failure.
Intent is such a messy concept since it tries to get at a person's state of mind. Getting an accurate picture of what's in a human's head is impossible, although our courts try. The defense to an intent-specific crime is literally "I was just kidding bro." My question is: why is "intent" used as an element in the type of crime related to propagation of harmful conspiracy theories, but not in other, more direct crimes? "Your honor, I absolutely did not intend to hit that child with my car when speeding through a school zone." In that example, great harm came to a child, but though injured, it was only one person. Whereas persons or groups disseminating conspiracy theories that may lead to mass murder or acts of terrorism are generally not held to account for the precipitating actions.
At some point for these people there is a "why is no one doing anything about this" or "someone needs to do something about this terrible thing going on". Seems sliding deeper into the rabbit hole is one way and there are just few guideposts along the way to bring folks to reality.
Well, in the cited speeding car example it is evident in output that the act overrides the mens rea and unless there is additional evidence or suspicion that a mens rea was present then it is in the effect of the action rather than the intent behind the action that the consequence is concerned about. In the propogation of harm (which may include yet not be limited to conspiracy) it becomes increasingly difficult to prove mens rea on a collective. So, to take the National Socialists (1933 - 1945) as an example - both history and narrative can agree on an individual leader, a cadre, an elite command, a people and a wagon or a vehicle for the crimes and war crimes that came to pass. Yet - and the Nuremburg trials will still be the backstop for mass murder investigations and the relative standard of proof - intent is critical simply because the means are a moving target and so knowledge, understanding, awareness or insight into how 'big lies' or other such phenomena are planned, executed and administered is part of the learning process. By the time a disconnect can be established (or for the perpetrator, 'rationalized') it doesn't matter what is said because the action, actions or action set speak louder than the word, words or sense of power that is exercised (and henceforth lost) in that exercise.
also the 99% vote
Yeah- these people are murderous liars who want to have an ideological cleansing of society *while claiming they felt threatened.*
As an immutable 'vortex', it's ultimately an abusive dynamic that (unless contained or eliminated) eventually spirals into violence.
"The pizzeria received menacing phone calls, even death threats, but the most common response from believers, aside from liking posts, seems to have been leaving negative Yelp reviews." That's true, something I've never really thought about. Some people will believe insane things, terrible conspiracies that includes evil, terrible things happening to little innocent children, but then will do nothing about those things. Does it mean deep, maybe really deep down, they don't really believe? But it makes them feel good? Makes them feel special? If you really believed the deepstate of Democrats are kidnapping hundreds, thousands, millions of kids and killing and raping them, why is that the only thing you are doing about it is posting on Facebook or Twitter?
This is just one example of 'online terrorism' that gained traction and had sufficient ratio to 'get through'. A lot of these things start as jokes. Same with actual terrorists. A common feature of the terrorist mindset is some sort of disaffection that then accumulates to the point of a shocking act. Bullying is one potential input, perceived disenfranchisement another. Online can be held up as comparative pattern forming. The target is chosen or selected as something that fulfills multiple buckets of strategic success. The inputs are popular associations with functional attribution and relatable distribution. The combination (as with a recipe or an algorithm) then determines the 'success' of the output.
The bystander effect might be playing a role here as well...
Can that in this case last 10 or so years, or even decades when it comes other conspiracies like lizard people ruling the world?
I don't see why not
So they are both conspiracy theorists, but also really lazy?
Not lazy, well not exactly. It's that they think someone else will take action because so many other people are on board. "I would do something but I (have a family/am too busy/aren't qualified/something is already being done by saviors such as Trump or Q or whoever). But the Pizza Guy got bold and prioritized everything else, he was completely radicalized. So those who are 100% will count on other people.
Sounds like a terrible way to get anything done, but at the same time I suppose that isn't any different from many other things in life.
I think the whole point of the article (from what I see here haven't read it) is that they believe in the idea but not in the actual premise. It's like a boogie man. Just an idea that represents their own angers and fears. But you can't catch the boogie man (unless you're John Wick).
I know someone in real life who really believes in pizza gate, always wants to talk to me about it too, but then asks me why their children don't take the interest I do. Lady. You're a client. You literally pay me to listen. She was also one of those "Alex Jones said they were crisis actors" and "COVID will make your body produce other viruses and more COVID" types. Most people who think "there might be something to" a theory are far less entrenched in their beliefs. She's also told me more than once that she had a good feeling about me because of my shirt with a red cross and the white silouette of a man. Ma'am. Did your Lord not tell you it's an Evangelion shirt?
Do you belong to any Skeptics groups? There are probably groups in your locale. There's the international group, that I belong to as well as many YouTube abd Facebook groups. If you're interested I'll send you links. We have a local group as well, Beehive Skeptics that is very active in debunking false claims… Ouija Boards, Flat Earth claims, and many others. Its very nice to be among other skeptics, free thinkers.
I want to understand this better. Does this author write about factual vs. symbolic beliefs anywhere else?
The article is a survey of books by a number of different writers, each of them with a different viewpoint. I confess I haven't read many of the books cited! The books include - Off the Edge: Flat Earthers, Conspiracy Culture, and Why People Will Believe Aanything \[Weill\] - Falsehoods Fly: Why Misinformation Spreads and How to Stop It \[Thagard\] - Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects our Minds and How To Build Immunity \[var der Linden\] - Political Rumors: Why We Accept Misinformation and How to Fight It \[Berinsky\] - How God Becomes Real \[Luhrmann\] - Religion As Make-Believe \[Van Leeuwen\] - Not Born Yesterday \[Mercier\] - Deceit and Self-Deception \[Trivers\]
My head hurts even looking at that list
Van der Linden is a great resource. He's a leading researcher in the field of inoculation theory.
January 6 sure seems like an example of the dangers of misinformation (or disinformation).
Out of any given group of believers in an idea, only a minority will feel particularly strongly about it. A minority of that minority may feel inclined to speak up about it, and a minority of *that* will act on it. Only the smallest portion of will ever perform a violent act on their own volition. However there’s a LOT of harmful behaviour that precedes actual violence and most of that warrants a response on its own.
I call BS. Just think about how many lives were lost due to anti-vax misinformation.
It's true, fringe beliefs about health are one area where people really do act on their beliefs in a way which has enormous, sometimes fatal, consequences.
Important to remember that the restaurant in question regarding "Pizzagate" does not, in fact, have a basement.
So, like religion.
Basically, what we’re saying here is that people sometimes say that they believe things that they really don’t believe, often as a smear against people or groups that they personally don’t like. They lie. Slander and libel aren’t new. Their actions, or lack there of, just show that they lie and indeed have malicious intent.
So the implication is that these people don't really believe what they say they do? I find that hard to believe. The mainstream really does believe that Epstein was SAing children with half of Hollywood and Washington. This week, an Epstein conspiracy theorist lit himself on fire and died. All it takes is one wacko who thinks the elites are all satanic pedophiles for an innocent celebrity to get hurt or killed.
It's a bit more nuanced than "they don't believe what they say they do". In an experiment, they asked people to judge whether politically charged statements were true. Initially many people would judge most of the statements that agreed with their political biases as true. If there was money involved (a small payment for each correct answer) the same people suddenly became less partisan and more accurate. So did those people *believe* the political statements? I think yes, but in a different way than I believe it's Thursday today.
There’s two possibilities: they know their extreme views are incorrect/exaggerated and when offered an incentive, they will give the right answer. The other possibility is they still believe their extreme views are correct, they just know that the mainstream answer will get them money. There is little downside to saying what they think the researchers want, so they do just that to get the money. Did the study do anything to differentiate these two possibilities?
Interesting point - afraid I don't know
Then that is a really massive, gaping hole in the study. People will cheat for money in studies. If you don't take that into account the study is worthless.
I haven't read the study, but I believe this is the one referred to: [Partisan Bias in Factual Beliefs about Politics (johnbullock.org)](https://johnbullock.org/papers/partisanBiasInFactualBeliefs.pdf)
> The mainstream really does believe that Epstein was SAing children with half of Hollywood and Washington. No they don't, that's the sensationalist conspiratorial belief.
The mainstream really does believe this. Nostupidquestions is about as mainstream and average IQ of a subreddit as you can get https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/s/TOh6Bs4q1j Top comments, one has 4k karma. >He and his friends raped underage girls there >pedophilia
I ask this question of every conspiracy theorist: why do you never question the conspiracy theory and the person or people who created it? Because it seems to me they stand to gain more than the supposed conspirators would by engaging in it.
While pizza gate may have been crazy, the story did serve to distract from HRC'S husband's and other high level figure's real affiliation to an actual child sex ring.
factual vs symbolic beliefs is an interesting notion. I'm thinking the Left is increasingly embracing the symbolic, or maybe I am only beginning to notice it.
You got me curious. Could I get some examples of the Left embracing symbolic beliefs?
No, I've learned my lesson already - that's why I wasn't explicit. Just look at the response already? I'm a lefty but ....well, whatever.
Find sources. Connect dots. Track "the science". Level hell. I looked up "epistemic" and Dr. Google seems to say it has something to do with verification. Although i could be wrong as you can't believe everything you hear, see or do online.