‘’Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.’’ – Mark Twain
Obviously. 2+2=4 is itself a conspiracy in the minds of those who are likely to believe in conspiracies*
*This could be a conspiracy.
Do ur research!
Facts don’t matter to people who reject science SCHOCKA!
Graduates of the University of life and the school of hard knocks tend to be unreasonable. It’s just easier to laugh at them
Wow, I’m enlightened
Sam Harris puts it well (paraphrasing) – they throw loads of shite at you, and unless you can counteract every single bit of the shite they go off happy with themselves and convinced they are right. “Haven’t you heard about Project Omega and the trained Dolphins carrying the 5g chips out to the seabases of the lizard people and that’s why the F27s were diverted there during 9/11 as a distraction”.
I’m happier just telling them to fuck off and leave me alone these days, I think we need to stop engaging and treat them like the fools they are.
The problem with conspiracies is, they exist and the real ones take years to come out and are usually “two government officials conspired to comit insider trading”
It’s never “aliens invented covid to help China kill straight white men” but to conspiracy nuts, the fact that one type exists proves that they all exist.
If there is a world wide conspiracy to kill off the population then the covid vaccine was a really shitty way to do it.. especially since there’s so much “information” online about why it’s evil.. if your aunt on Facebook is talking about it then it’s a pretty shit conspiracy lads.
People hate conspiracies they don’t believe in but love the ones they do.
Plenty people here think that the approximate 25% of government TDs who are landlords have the control over government to worsen the housing crisis.
This has been known for a long time and highlights the media’s approach to weirdos and extremists has been so wrong. They think getting them on the TV or radio and battering them with facts is “holding them to account” and exposing them. Meanwhile the conspiracy adjacent people hear a really biased and unfair interview – further cementing the anti-MSM bias theory and exposing the argument to a much wider audience. The MSM laugh at the contributors after “embarrassing” them, but the joke is on them because the contributor has been legitimised and given a larger audience.
They don’t want a debate, they want attention.
Literally nothing you say to them will change that. They will, at best, just move on to another topic.
Belief in conspiracies comes from peoples core beliefs, like distrusting the government or believing in god. And it’s almost impossible to change what people believe in at a core level with facts. If somebody really believes in god then pointing out theories on the origin of the universe won’t stop them believing in hell.
Having a highly educated society with people who are able to employ critical thinking is seriously underrated.
It’s because beliefs are frequently tied to identity and belonging to a group. Logic and reason don’t work so well as it’s perceived as an attack on identity.
What kept conspiracy people quiet before the internet was the mockery they received when they opened their mouth. But now they can find each other and feel part of a “movement”. Facts don’t work. Only mockery did the job. It wasn’t respectful but it was good for these people’s mental health and family life to be made to shut up. But those days are gone.
I suspect conspiracy beliefs will have to be something specifically addressed in the early education curriculum in the near future. I can’t think of any solution for people who are already lost to that kind of thinking, but the next generation can perhaps be helped with critical thinking skills taught in primary.
The rise in far right shitheads is a result of a massive feeling that governments don’t take concerns seriously, don’t act in their best interests and sometimes actively implement policies to make their lives worse.
Until these are addressed we’ll a lot more lunatics around.
Because it doesn’t appeal to the emotion. It’s one of the reason the Remain campaign lost in the UK with Brexit. Leave used emotions while Remain used facts and figures
You just have to one up them. “I don’t believe the moon landings were real” “You believe the moon is real?” Etc
I engaged with one of these loonies recently on tiktok as one of his lives came up on my feed.
He was a young gay man from Finglas out protesting the airport.
He said his issue was “unvetted men coming in”. I asked him “was he vetted?”. He said he was but it turned out later he thought he was vetted because he filled out a visa application to travel to America. He hadn’t a clue what vetting actually was. Later in the live he had a girl join his live from her profile who must have been no older than 12 and starts asking her was she afraid of all the men coming in. He saw no issue with this and didn’t see it as inappropriate because he is gay.
I asked him what he thinks about gay men being persecuted, who are trying to flee countries that are criminalising them and how their home countries could vet them to a credible degree when they might be wanted. He then said he was so sick of the LGBT movement and starting ranting about kids drag shows and the trans agenda. When asked again, he just said “they’re welcome to come if they’re vetted”. He had not learned a single thing despite me and numerous others doing our best to explain things rationally to him.
Do I regret wasting my time? No. I think there’s a degree of countering these eejits so they’re can’t form their echo chambers online. At the very least his live embarrassed him in the eyes of most even if he couldn’t grasp rational thought…
You can’t argue against emotions. Facts make conspiracy types more emotional- and thus just serve to reinforce the paranoia and anger that powers them.
I have learned this over the last few years. It’s why I quit Facebook. There’s no arguing with fucking stupid. So now I stick to Instagram, post my silly pics of me and my dog and silly videos to entertain my friends and I’m all the better for it mentally.
How do they expect us to believe this study is true? Using facts and empirical evidence??
Nice try nerds!
I think that the whole realm of conspiracies and conspiratorial thinking is quite interesting, and it warrants a bit more subtlety than it is generally treated with. To preface this, I don’t want to justify beliefs that are wildly contrary to reality, and a good deal of what are labelled “conspiracy theories” are indeed so out of sync with almost every fact about the world that we can generally write them off without too much thought – nonsense ideas like the flat earth stuff, for example, would require a far more complicated set of physical interactions and political entanglements to hold true than the much more simple reality that the world is as round as it was when the Greeks first came up with the maths to prove it.
But the example of flat earth also highlights the issue with a term like “conspiracy theory”, because it is affixed indiscriminately to anything that runs contrary to “the narrative” i.e. what is coming from official channels – governments, established media, powerful people online. Not everything is as plain as the flat earth example, and such clearly fallacious ideas are used to beat down things with far more nuance. One example that is worth keeping in mind is the sort of mass surveillance that the NSA in the US was carrying out for years until the lid came off it. Someone talking about that prior to the general revelations would have equally been tarred with the “conspiracy theory” brush. Or, in the more recent example of COVID, people were very quick to pile onto others suggesting an origin other than the wet market for the virus, even though that has been brought further into question more recently, with a possible origin elsewhere. When it comes to things that are not necessarily wholly “fact based” – and by that I mean cases in which the plain recounting of available facts may not be enough to prove one side or another (freedom fighter vs terrorist, protest vs riot, etc.) it gets an order of magnitude more complicated. The reality that we perceive is one that we construct variously through our immediate perception, the lens of our own beliefs and memories, and what is told to us by wider society (and that includes science, news, media). It is ultimately a subjective image, and one based on certain premises that we assume reflect an underlying reality. The issue is the degree to which that underlying reality can be extended in concretising increasingly more complex and abstract ideas and situations. For example, it is quite easy to demonstrate the concept that 1+1=2. One simply takes two separate objects and places them together. It is a fundamental truth. By way of contrast, a statement such as “the US involvement in the Vietnam War was justified” is almost impossible to “prove”. All you can really do is provide as much evidence (which will never be enough) on the topic and try to make a case. But it will never be proven in the way that a basic fact can.
What I am saying here is that the need to write off ideas that go against either what we want to believe or have been told to believe is in itself not a healthy or even rational way of thinking. And shutting down such ideas is even worse. What is healthy is an educated, moderate skepticism to any information, whether it is from a government, the media, or people on the street. This should be the default. It would be far better to have a term that describes ideas that deviate from the norm that does not assume, upfront, malignant intentions or ignorance, because ideas that are either valid or worth considering can be too easily disregarded, and that suits only those who stand to gain from the notion that questioning narratives is a bad thing.
No shit.
There’s no actually examples given in said piece to test the veracity of the claims made. Not all theories are equal too; lizards running the world, the earth being flat, are not equal to things like: MK Ultra, CIA overthrowing governments they don’t like, wars happening for profit and not power.
This site regularly treats polling as being factual too, when the methodology of polls in never shared, so we can’t judge the quality fairly. A large, large amount of academic work is done with bad methodology too, using selective data and ignoring inconvenient data to reaches conclusions that they like, yet once again, said studies are treated like facts on here.
This will be downvoted too, which helps support my point.
Trying to explain 5G to my conspiracy-riddled sisters as an experienced network engineer was when I realised facts don’t work, I broke down every one of their ridiculous questions and beliefs and it did nothing but embolden them more.
The next time I saw my sister she took out her phone, loaded up a WiFi analyzer app and read the surrounding network signals as radiation levels as if the app was a geiger counter.
I called her out and she mocked me in front of everyone like I hadn’t a clue what I was talking about, I’d never been so enraged in my life dealing with pure unrelenting stupidity.
Some people into this stuff operate on an emotional level and want to belong to a community / movement. My sisters’ fears with 5G were rooted on their developed hatred for the EU as they were on board the Irexit train. (They believed that the EU was using 5G to chop down trees in the middle of nowhere to install 5G aerials)
Nice try George Sorros!
When you decide something is true before trying to explain how it’s true, you’re already cherry-picking your information.
Facts then only serve to either facilitate your belief or be another lie concocted by the conspirators.
Look at Jeffrey Epstein. It was revealed that the world is controlled by a cabal of billionaire child molesters. Instead of doing anything with that information, a whole fiction was created in Q-Anon that Donald Trump was secretly fighting against them and that some day the storm would come to sweep everyone away.
Arguing with them doesn’t work because they don’t want to know the truth, they want to feel like they have hidden knowledge that others do not.
Let’s be honest here, the broader public have shown themselves to be profoundly stupid.
If a lot of these conspiracies were true, and I were in government – I wouldn’t tell the public either.
Most conspiracy theories are really a form of safety blanket for the people who believe in them. If you consider housing, it’s much nicer to believe that Varadkar shut down the factory that makes the houses rather than to confront the fact that successive generations of voters have created this problem due to short-termist, selfish and localised thinking.
Best documentary about conspiracy theories on Netflix is “Behind the Curve”. It’s very sensitively done and resists being patronising. Essentially, a lot of conspiracy theorists want to be a part of something “special”, and a community. I suppose it’s what the church used to offer back in the day in Ireland – a sense of belonging and community.
Conspiracy culture is an emotional experience. The ‘belief system’ is no more than a cult. You can’t argue with q-tards or anybody on that spectrum because they don’t need facts to get where they’re going which is a form of unreality. The whole critical thinking might work if they didn’t go psuedosceptic on you then – tis like nailing jelly to a wall.
Top comment “Ya right, another government sponsored article masquerading as an informative study, I can smell the left all over this. FAKE NEWS.” 🤣
The usual *iamverysmart* smug shite from the twerps at thejournal… Remember folks, its only true when their fact checkers tell you so
I think most of conspiracy theorists just don’t trust authority and I don’t really blame them for it.
Journal is some hypocrite with their fake fact checks.
36 comments
As the saying goes:
‘’Never argue with stupid people, they will drag you down to their level and then beat you with experience.’’ – Mark Twain
Obviously. 2+2=4 is itself a conspiracy in the minds of those who are likely to believe in conspiracies*
*This could be a conspiracy.
Do ur research!
Facts don’t matter to people who reject science SCHOCKA!
Graduates of the University of life and the school of hard knocks tend to be unreasonable. It’s just easier to laugh at them
Wow, I’m enlightened
Sam Harris puts it well (paraphrasing) – they throw loads of shite at you, and unless you can counteract every single bit of the shite they go off happy with themselves and convinced they are right. “Haven’t you heard about Project Omega and the trained Dolphins carrying the 5g chips out to the seabases of the lizard people and that’s why the F27s were diverted there during 9/11 as a distraction”.
I’m happier just telling them to fuck off and leave me alone these days, I think we need to stop engaging and treat them like the fools they are.
The problem with conspiracies is, they exist and the real ones take years to come out and are usually “two government officials conspired to comit insider trading”
It’s never “aliens invented covid to help China kill straight white men” but to conspiracy nuts, the fact that one type exists proves that they all exist.
If there is a world wide conspiracy to kill off the population then the covid vaccine was a really shitty way to do it.. especially since there’s so much “information” online about why it’s evil.. if your aunt on Facebook is talking about it then it’s a pretty shit conspiracy lads.
People hate conspiracies they don’t believe in but love the ones they do.
Plenty people here think that the approximate 25% of government TDs who are landlords have the control over government to worsen the housing crisis.
This has been known for a long time and highlights the media’s approach to weirdos and extremists has been so wrong. They think getting them on the TV or radio and battering them with facts is “holding them to account” and exposing them. Meanwhile the conspiracy adjacent people hear a really biased and unfair interview – further cementing the anti-MSM bias theory and exposing the argument to a much wider audience. The MSM laugh at the contributors after “embarrassing” them, but the joke is on them because the contributor has been legitimised and given a larger audience.
They don’t want a debate, they want attention.
Literally nothing you say to them will change that. They will, at best, just move on to another topic.
Belief in conspiracies comes from peoples core beliefs, like distrusting the government or believing in god. And it’s almost impossible to change what people believe in at a core level with facts. If somebody really believes in god then pointing out theories on the origin of the universe won’t stop them believing in hell.
Having a highly educated society with people who are able to employ critical thinking is seriously underrated.
It’s because beliefs are frequently tied to identity and belonging to a group. Logic and reason don’t work so well as it’s perceived as an attack on identity.
What kept conspiracy people quiet before the internet was the mockery they received when they opened their mouth. But now they can find each other and feel part of a “movement”. Facts don’t work. Only mockery did the job. It wasn’t respectful but it was good for these people’s mental health and family life to be made to shut up. But those days are gone.
I suspect conspiracy beliefs will have to be something specifically addressed in the early education curriculum in the near future. I can’t think of any solution for people who are already lost to that kind of thinking, but the next generation can perhaps be helped with critical thinking skills taught in primary.
The rise in far right shitheads is a result of a massive feeling that governments don’t take concerns seriously, don’t act in their best interests and sometimes actively implement policies to make their lives worse.
Until these are addressed we’ll a lot more lunatics around.
Because it doesn’t appeal to the emotion. It’s one of the reason the Remain campaign lost in the UK with Brexit. Leave used emotions while Remain used facts and figures
You just have to one up them. “I don’t believe the moon landings were real” “You believe the moon is real?” Etc
I engaged with one of these loonies recently on tiktok as one of his lives came up on my feed.
He was a young gay man from Finglas out protesting the airport.
He said his issue was “unvetted men coming in”. I asked him “was he vetted?”. He said he was but it turned out later he thought he was vetted because he filled out a visa application to travel to America. He hadn’t a clue what vetting actually was. Later in the live he had a girl join his live from her profile who must have been no older than 12 and starts asking her was she afraid of all the men coming in. He saw no issue with this and didn’t see it as inappropriate because he is gay.
I asked him what he thinks about gay men being persecuted, who are trying to flee countries that are criminalising them and how their home countries could vet them to a credible degree when they might be wanted. He then said he was so sick of the LGBT movement and starting ranting about kids drag shows and the trans agenda. When asked again, he just said “they’re welcome to come if they’re vetted”. He had not learned a single thing despite me and numerous others doing our best to explain things rationally to him.
Do I regret wasting my time? No. I think there’s a degree of countering these eejits so they’re can’t form their echo chambers online. At the very least his live embarrassed him in the eyes of most even if he couldn’t grasp rational thought…
You can’t argue against emotions. Facts make conspiracy types more emotional- and thus just serve to reinforce the paranoia and anger that powers them.
I have learned this over the last few years. It’s why I quit Facebook. There’s no arguing with fucking stupid. So now I stick to Instagram, post my silly pics of me and my dog and silly videos to entertain my friends and I’m all the better for it mentally.
How do they expect us to believe this study is true? Using facts and empirical evidence??
Nice try nerds!
I think that the whole realm of conspiracies and conspiratorial thinking is quite interesting, and it warrants a bit more subtlety than it is generally treated with. To preface this, I don’t want to justify beliefs that are wildly contrary to reality, and a good deal of what are labelled “conspiracy theories” are indeed so out of sync with almost every fact about the world that we can generally write them off without too much thought – nonsense ideas like the flat earth stuff, for example, would require a far more complicated set of physical interactions and political entanglements to hold true than the much more simple reality that the world is as round as it was when the Greeks first came up with the maths to prove it.
But the example of flat earth also highlights the issue with a term like “conspiracy theory”, because it is affixed indiscriminately to anything that runs contrary to “the narrative” i.e. what is coming from official channels – governments, established media, powerful people online. Not everything is as plain as the flat earth example, and such clearly fallacious ideas are used to beat down things with far more nuance. One example that is worth keeping in mind is the sort of mass surveillance that the NSA in the US was carrying out for years until the lid came off it. Someone talking about that prior to the general revelations would have equally been tarred with the “conspiracy theory” brush. Or, in the more recent example of COVID, people were very quick to pile onto others suggesting an origin other than the wet market for the virus, even though that has been brought further into question more recently, with a possible origin elsewhere. When it comes to things that are not necessarily wholly “fact based” – and by that I mean cases in which the plain recounting of available facts may not be enough to prove one side or another (freedom fighter vs terrorist, protest vs riot, etc.) it gets an order of magnitude more complicated. The reality that we perceive is one that we construct variously through our immediate perception, the lens of our own beliefs and memories, and what is told to us by wider society (and that includes science, news, media). It is ultimately a subjective image, and one based on certain premises that we assume reflect an underlying reality. The issue is the degree to which that underlying reality can be extended in concretising increasingly more complex and abstract ideas and situations. For example, it is quite easy to demonstrate the concept that 1+1=2. One simply takes two separate objects and places them together. It is a fundamental truth. By way of contrast, a statement such as “the US involvement in the Vietnam War was justified” is almost impossible to “prove”. All you can really do is provide as much evidence (which will never be enough) on the topic and try to make a case. But it will never be proven in the way that a basic fact can.
What I am saying here is that the need to write off ideas that go against either what we want to believe or have been told to believe is in itself not a healthy or even rational way of thinking. And shutting down such ideas is even worse. What is healthy is an educated, moderate skepticism to any information, whether it is from a government, the media, or people on the street. This should be the default. It would be far better to have a term that describes ideas that deviate from the norm that does not assume, upfront, malignant intentions or ignorance, because ideas that are either valid or worth considering can be too easily disregarded, and that suits only those who stand to gain from the notion that questioning narratives is a bad thing.
No shit.
There’s no actually examples given in said piece to test the veracity of the claims made. Not all theories are equal too; lizards running the world, the earth being flat, are not equal to things like: MK Ultra, CIA overthrowing governments they don’t like, wars happening for profit and not power.
This site regularly treats polling as being factual too, when the methodology of polls in never shared, so we can’t judge the quality fairly. A large, large amount of academic work is done with bad methodology too, using selective data and ignoring inconvenient data to reaches conclusions that they like, yet once again, said studies are treated like facts on here.
This will be downvoted too, which helps support my point.
Trying to explain 5G to my conspiracy-riddled sisters as an experienced network engineer was when I realised facts don’t work, I broke down every one of their ridiculous questions and beliefs and it did nothing but embolden them more.
The next time I saw my sister she took out her phone, loaded up a WiFi analyzer app and read the surrounding network signals as radiation levels as if the app was a geiger counter.
I called her out and she mocked me in front of everyone like I hadn’t a clue what I was talking about, I’d never been so enraged in my life dealing with pure unrelenting stupidity.
Some people into this stuff operate on an emotional level and want to belong to a community / movement. My sisters’ fears with 5G were rooted on their developed hatred for the EU as they were on board the Irexit train. (They believed that the EU was using 5G to chop down trees in the middle of nowhere to install 5G aerials)
Nice try George Sorros!
When you decide something is true before trying to explain how it’s true, you’re already cherry-picking your information.
Facts then only serve to either facilitate your belief or be another lie concocted by the conspirators.
Look at Jeffrey Epstein. It was revealed that the world is controlled by a cabal of billionaire child molesters. Instead of doing anything with that information, a whole fiction was created in Q-Anon that Donald Trump was secretly fighting against them and that some day the storm would come to sweep everyone away.
Arguing with them doesn’t work because they don’t want to know the truth, they want to feel like they have hidden knowledge that others do not.
Let’s be honest here, the broader public have shown themselves to be profoundly stupid.
If a lot of these conspiracies were true, and I were in government – I wouldn’t tell the public either.
Most conspiracy theories are really a form of safety blanket for the people who believe in them. If you consider housing, it’s much nicer to believe that Varadkar shut down the factory that makes the houses rather than to confront the fact that successive generations of voters have created this problem due to short-termist, selfish and localised thinking.
Best documentary about conspiracy theories on Netflix is “Behind the Curve”. It’s very sensitively done and resists being patronising. Essentially, a lot of conspiracy theorists want to be a part of something “special”, and a community. I suppose it’s what the church used to offer back in the day in Ireland – a sense of belonging and community.
Conspiracy culture is an emotional experience. The ‘belief system’ is no more than a cult. You can’t argue with q-tards or anybody on that spectrum because they don’t need facts to get where they’re going which is a form of unreality. The whole critical thinking might work if they didn’t go psuedosceptic on you then – tis like nailing jelly to a wall.
Top comment “Ya right, another government sponsored article masquerading as an informative study, I can smell the left all over this. FAKE NEWS.” 🤣
The usual *iamverysmart* smug shite from the twerps at thejournal… Remember folks, its only true when their fact checkers tell you so
I think most of conspiracy theorists just don’t trust authority and I don’t really blame them for it.
Journal is some hypocrite with their fake fact checks.