A buddy and I were recently talking thru the implications of conspiratorial thinking. He's got a co-worker who is apparently convinced of the Black Knight Satellite conspiracy. I won't bore you but it's on Wikipedia if you care.
He was thinking of having him canned. If the dude's crazy, he's a risk was my buddy's thought. I disagreed. Most times it doesn't seem to matter what sort of nonsense folks claim to believe. As long as they can still do their job and I don't have to ride shotgun in a truck cab with them, who cares.
Exceptions to that are abundant. Like if you think vaccines are being used by Bill Gates to implant microchips, maybe you shouldn't be working at the front desk of the doctors office.
For me the more interesting question is what part of our evolutionary journey caused us to be so very vulnerable to this sort of crap. You'd think nature would have snapped this twisted branch of crazy off.
Unless of course you believe in creationism.
Sigh.
But it does SEEM like loony is on the rise, doesn't it? I acknowledge that it could be just my media habits and biases. I hope that's all it is.
It could also be the changes in our media environment are amplifying conspiracy theories accidentally. Or because they sell. So maybe it's just my perception.

But we now have Q devotees in Congress.

And look at this board.
Guys who are hiding in their basements in fear of lesbians and vegans. It seems like a phase shift.

Back several decades ago the average IQ dropped world wide. It was lead. Every child was getting dosed with it from womb to grave. Mass development issues world wide.  Same thing happened in Rome right before it fell apart. It was the water pipes.

I wonder if there's something like that happening now. Maybe the excess CO2 is hitting some trip wire in the brains of the vulnerable. Cause darn it seems like there's a lot more crazy out there.

And look at this board.
Guys who are hiding in their basements in fear of lesbians and vegans. It seems like a phase shift.

WTF are you talking about?

Our fair and balanced moderator on here ( along with vast percentages of Democrats)  thinks a 17 year old straight A student, son of a local judge in Maryland, held gang rape parties all summer where the attendees were from a few Catholic high schools in an upper middle class neighborhood where virtually everyone knew everyone else and the same girls were gang raped multiple times and NO ONE KNEW OR SAID ANYTHING about it until some crazy woman made up a story to cover her affair that came out in marriage counseling 20 years later....and you’re about some obscure Black Knight conspiracy......

 There's a lot of study regarding conspiracy based thinking.  It is rather easy to research as it takes something as simple as making something up, posting it on Twitter and tracking the activity.

 A lot has to do with how our brains are programmed to recognize patterns, and it creates them if there aren't any around.  

 Another is the fact we are connected in a way we never have been before by the internet, and our continual failure to realize we are consistently corralled into like-minded spaces for profit.  We know it happens, but won't do anything about it because the positive feedback loop of hearing others identify with your suspicions is a very addictive drug.

 If I think maybe a blue gelatinous being is living under my refrigerator I can get online, look for it and find people out there that think the same thing.  Very unlikely if I didn't have billions of people to ask and had to just ask around town.

 Now if I find someone online saying they have a reddish green jelly that moves under their stove my brain will assemble the pattern and tell me this guy has the same problem I do.  

 Then some high school kid playing in the dark web will make a whole back story to these ideas, connecting them to Government research and Alien tech, toss it out there and now there's some real substance to that monster under my fridge.

  Toss in search engine redirecting based off of location, search history, demographics etc. and the irresponsible "sharing" and "liking" of anything that held our interest for more than 4 seconds and in no time plenty of people will have the same gelatinous Government engineered alien under their kitchen appliances.


 Now if I had to scrape up that blue cr ap under my fridge and take it to a lab,  talk to other people around town about my suspicions, some biologists, most likely a janitor, and have to justify my stance with more than a post on Facebook, I bet the conspiracy wouldn't go nearly as far.

 Liking it isn't the issue.

 Its the physical assault of kicking him in the nuts you claim you would engage in that is the issue.

WebsterMark wrote on 11/18/20 at 17:33:54:


Says the person without apparent irony who dines exclusively on fantasies, conspiracies, nut job sites and a smorgasbörd of petty stories extrapolated into some grotesque idea of the world from your very tiny perspective, with only cursory bad faith engagement.

eau de sauvage wrote on 11/18/20 at 21:18:22:

Says the person without apparent irony who dines exclusively on fantasies, conspiracies, nut job sites and a smorgasbörd of petty stories extrapolated into some grotesque idea of the world from your very tiny perspective, with only cursory bad faith engagement.

So, ONLY, Conservative, Intelligent, Responsible, Adults,
Are capable of, ‘conspiracy’.

Yet when a believer in the, UL, DFI, FDS, Socialist, woke/way,
does, says, and posts things like:
dines exclusively on fantasies,
conspiracies,
nut job sites,
smorgasbörd of petty stories,

It is the equivalent of,
'in whatever Religion you believe'
Gods Word !
(Unless one believes in, 'Not believing')