7 ms·

> Are the majority of Trump (and Farage, and Petry, and so forth) voters similarly uninterested in actual facts? Not just uninterested, but actively conspirato

> Are the majority of Trump (and Farage, and Petry, and so forth) voters similarly uninterested in actual facts? Not just uninterested, but actively conspiratorial. It's hard to talk with a Trump voter when it veers into territory like "world leaders are withholding a cure for cancer" and "the Pope has a secret base in Antarctica."

jessaustin 10y ago
"The Russians phished some Hillary staffers, and that's why she was so unpopular with voters!"
- 1_2__3 10y ago
  "world leaders have a cure for cancer": Made up nonsense. "Russian hacking": Allegation supported by multiple law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
  - ticviking 10y ago
    You are missing a key point of what makes a conspiracy theory different from a normal lie. The theory has just enough evidence to pull some fraction of vulnerable non-believers into examining it. From there social pressure, motivated reasoning, and the usual garden of cognitive biases lead people to believe there is more evidence than there actually is.
- ticviking 10y ago
  Yes both sides have their conspiracy theories. The issue is is that the scale of conspiracies imagined by the left just doesn't compare to what is imagined on the right. Imagining that "a group largely ruled by the same people we have been playing spy-games with for a century might be playing spy-games with us" is distinctly different from, "A large part of the US ruling class is part of a satanic cult with food based code to cover up massive child abuse." These differences include both the scope of the claims, and the number of imagined conspirators required to keep the claims a secret.
  - jessaustin 10y ago
    That certainly could be an issue, if that's what seems important to somebody. The main issue to me is that the one group of conspiratorial goofballs is invisible to me (silly Pizzagate dude was arrested before I even heard of "Pizzagate"), while the other group of conspiratorial goofballs is everywhere: on the TV, on NPR, in Congress, on social media. I can't escape them. I voted for neither of the Status Quo Party candidates, because they both make me sick. Yet even as I wiped the vomit from my chin, I couldn't help but notice that the primary complaint about the election results was that the voters knew more about one of the candidates and her organization than she wanted them to know. Did we ever care about objectivity? If a losing R candidate made the same complaint, all of these pundits would laugh at that candidate: "Oh, someone leaked your email? In which you discussed the dirty deeds you did your poor little primary opponent? And the way they got that email was by phishing you? Well, boooo-hooooo! Next time use two-factor, sweetheart."
    - geofft 10y ago
      > the primary complaint about the election results was that the voters knew more about one of the candidates and her organization than she wanted them to know. But that's not the complaint! The complaint was that, based on the leaks of private emails, it was possible to construct innuendo that was untrue. Take the entire Spirit Cooking thing, for instance. It would be one thing if Podesta had participated in a Satanist ritual and didn't want people to know. But he didn't actually participate in one. People just insinuated he did, based on a vaguely-plausible interpretation of a private email between family members. I don't think anyone really found the way the Hillary campaign treated the Bernie campaign to be "dirty deeds", just politics, and I certainly don't think that's what swung the election. (Maybe I'm wrong.)
      - jessaustin 10y ago
        OK well I never heard of "Spirit Cooking" until now, and now that I've googled it I'm not sure why anyone would care that John Podesta does it. It's certainly not why I voted Green. If you polled voters in my 80% Trump county, I doubt you'd find a single person who had heard of this thing. Innuendo isn't some magic spell that requires eye of newt and leak of email. There was lots of innuendo about other candidates too. I especially loved how they piled on poor Johnson for forgetting the name of some benighted hellhole he had no plans to invade, ever. If the Russians' plan was a Xanatos Gambit of let's phish Podesta, then we'll publish his dinner invitations, ...., then Hillary will lose? And that worked? In that case they're smart enough to own us no matter what we do.
acomjean 10y ago
There was a good opinion piece by a conservative radio host: "Why Nobody Cares the President Is Lying" "For years, as a conservative radio talk show host, I played a role in that conditioning by hammering the mainstream media for its bias and double standards. But the price turned out to be far higher than I imagined. The cumulative effect of the attacks was to delegitimize those outlets and essentially destroy much of the right’s immunity to false information. We thought we were creating a savvier, more skeptical audience. Instead, we opened the door for President Trump, who found an audience that could be easily misled."[1] [1]https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/04/opinion/sunday/why-nobody-cares-the-president-is-lying.html?mtrref=topics.nytimes.com&assetType=opinion https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/04/opinion/sunday/why-nobody...
thraway2016 10y ago
Interesting. On the Right, we see the same thing with your side. Total blind faith in blank slate theories of human equality, and uninterested in the piles of twin studies and metastudies that clearly demonstrate innate differences between demographic groups, even actively conspiratorial. It's hard to talk to a Hillary voter when it veers into "Conservatives are all anti-science but the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study and the vast consensus of geneticists on MAOA-L gene expression is a racist conspiracy by white men."
- iak8god 10y ago
  Why is it so important to you people to believe you were born better than someone else? This is a serious question, not just snark.
  - jdpedrie 10y ago
    "When did you stop beating your wife?"
  - thraway2016 10y ago
    It has nothing to do with "better". It has to do with policy. Predicating policy (e.g. education, criminal justice, employment) on fundamentally wrong and unscientific assumptions about people's capabilities inevitably leads to gross inefficiencies, and mental and social health problems.
    - iak8god 10y ago
      Let's suppose there is an indisputable 10 point IQ gap between the mean Green person and the mean Purple person that couldn't possibly be explained by confounding factors like, oh, say the legacy of Purple people, who are the dominant group in the society in question, treating Green ones as subhuman for centuries. So what? Why don't we focus on getting to a situation where all the people have the same opportunities (access to education, nutrition, equal treatment under the law, etc, etc, etc) and THEN we can worry about precision policymaking based on the differences.
- 10y ago
ta_donk_gt 10y ago
"Violence against Trump supporters is justified because he is literally Hitler", "Even though everyone knew the rules of the game up front, Trump is not actually the legitimate president because his popular vote tally was lower", "Trump is not a legitimate president because the Russians may have been involved in releasing some 'routine, not interesting' emails", "Even though the U.S. has interfered in over 80 elections in the last 20 years (including Russia in 1996), and even though a significant percentage of the mainstream media is foreign owned, and even though there is significant foreign money and foreign influence involved in every election, this election is not legitimate because Russia may have helped release some emails", "Enforcing existing immigration laws (and shoring up abused immigration laws) to protect American jobs and wages is racist" ---- I could go on for days, but the point is that people in general will say and believe a lot of stupid stuff if it helps their team. Pretending only people on the other team do it is pretty out there.
- dibujante 10y ago
  These are all shitty arguments, but they're not conspiracies. They're just shitty arguments. A conspiracy would be more like "Bush did 9/11", which the left was guilty of for a while. Eugh.
  - ta_donk_gt 10y ago
    Initially, the point was that it is only Trump supporters that are uninterested in actual facts, but sure, plenty of conspiracy theories on the left as well (was just trying to keep it clean): "Trump has had or wants to have sex with his daughter..see, here is this picture of her sitting on his lap when she was 12" "Trump stayed in a Russian hotel room, found out the Obamas had previously stayed in that room so hired prostitutes to urinate on the bed in front of him" "Russia sold 19% of their state owned oil company to an unknown party and there is a document 'procured' by the Never Trump movement that says something about 19%, so Russia made a deal with Trump to get him elected and give him 19% of their oil if he would lift sanctions"
    - dibujante 10y ago

jessaustin 10y ago

"The Russians phished some Hillary staffers, and that's why she was so unpopular with voters!"

1_2__3 10y ago
"world leaders have a cure for cancer": Made up nonsense. "Russian hacking": Allegation supported by multiple law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
- ticviking 10y ago
  You are missing a key point of what makes a conspiracy theory different from a normal lie. The theory has just enough evidence to pull some fraction of vulnerable non-believers into examining it. From there social pressure, motivated reasoning, and the usual garden of cognitive biases lead people to believe there is more evidence than there actually is.
ticviking 10y ago
Yes both sides have their conspiracy theories. The issue is is that the scale of conspiracies imagined by the left just doesn't compare to what is imagined on the right. Imagining that "a group largely ruled by the same people we have been playing spy-games with for a century might be playing spy-games with us" is distinctly different from, "A large part of the US ruling class is part of a satanic cult with food based code to cover up massive child abuse." These differences include both the scope of the claims, and the number of imagined conspirators required to keep the claims a secret.
- jessaustin 10y ago
  That certainly could be an issue, if that's what seems important to somebody. The main issue to me is that the one group of conspiratorial goofballs is invisible to me (silly Pizzagate dude was arrested before I even heard of "Pizzagate"), while the other group of conspiratorial goofballs is everywhere: on the TV, on NPR, in Congress, on social media. I can't escape them. I voted for neither of the Status Quo Party candidates, because they both make me sick. Yet even as I wiped the vomit from my chin, I couldn't help but notice that the primary complaint about the election results was that the voters knew more about one of the candidates and her organization than she wanted them to know. Did we ever care about objectivity? If a losing R candidate made the same complaint, all of these pundits would laugh at that candidate: "Oh, someone leaked your email? In which you discussed the dirty deeds you did your poor little primary opponent? And the way they got that email was by phishing you? Well, boooo-hooooo! Next time use two-factor, sweetheart."
  - geofft 10y ago
    > the primary complaint about the election results was that the voters knew more about one of the candidates and her organization than she wanted them to know. But that's not the complaint! The complaint was that, based on the leaks of private emails, it was possible to construct innuendo that was untrue. Take the entire Spirit Cooking thing, for instance. It would be one thing if Podesta had participated in a Satanist ritual and didn't want people to know. But he didn't actually participate in one. People just insinuated he did, based on a vaguely-plausible interpretation of a private email between family members. I don't think anyone really found the way the Hillary campaign treated the Bernie campaign to be "dirty deeds", just politics, and I certainly don't think that's what swung the election. (Maybe I'm wrong.)
    - jessaustin 10y ago
      OK well I never heard of "Spirit Cooking" until now, and now that I've googled it I'm not sure why anyone would care that John Podesta does it. It's certainly not why I voted Green. If you polled voters in my 80% Trump county, I doubt you'd find a single person who had heard of this thing. Innuendo isn't some magic spell that requires eye of newt and leak of email. There was lots of innuendo about other candidates too. I especially loved how they piled on poor Johnson for forgetting the name of some benighted hellhole he had no plans to invade, ever. If the Russians' plan was a Xanatos Gambit of let's phish Podesta, then we'll publish his dinner invitations, ...., then Hillary will lose? And that worked? In that case they're smart enough to own us no matter what we do.

acomjean 10y ago

There was a good opinion piece by a conservative radio host: "Why Nobody Cares the President Is Lying" "For years, as a conservative radio talk show host, I played a role in that conditioning by hammering the mainstream media for its bias and double standards. But the price turned out to be far higher than I imagined. The cumulative effect of the attacks was to delegitimize those outlets and essentially destroy much of the right’s immunity to false information. We thought we were creating a savvier, more skeptical audience. Instead, we opened the door for President Trump, who found an audience that could be easily misled."[1] [1]https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/04/opinion/sunday/why-nobody-cares-the-president-is-lying.html?mtrref=topics.nytimes.com&assetType=opinion https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/04/opinion/sunday/why-nobody...

thraway2016 10y ago

Interesting. On the Right, we see the same thing with your side. Total blind faith in blank slate theories of human equality, and uninterested in the piles of twin studies and metastudies that clearly demonstrate innate differences between demographic groups, even actively conspiratorial. It's hard to talk to a Hillary voter when it veers into "Conservatives are all anti-science but the Minnesota Transracial Adoption Study and the vast consensus of geneticists on MAOA-L gene expression is a racist conspiracy by white men."

iak8god 10y ago
Why is it so important to you people to believe you were born better than someone else? This is a serious question, not just snark.
- jdpedrie 10y ago
  "When did you stop beating your wife?"
- thraway2016 10y ago
  It has nothing to do with "better". It has to do with policy. Predicating policy (e.g. education, criminal justice, employment) on fundamentally wrong and unscientific assumptions about people's capabilities inevitably leads to gross inefficiencies, and mental and social health problems.
  - iak8god 10y ago
    Let's suppose there is an indisputable 10 point IQ gap between the mean Green person and the mean Purple person that couldn't possibly be explained by confounding factors like, oh, say the legacy of Purple people, who are the dominant group in the society in question, treating Green ones as subhuman for centuries. So what? Why don't we focus on getting to a situation where all the people have the same opportunities (access to education, nutrition, equal treatment under the law, etc, etc, etc) and THEN we can worry about precision policymaking based on the differences.
10y ago

ta_donk_gt 10y ago

"Violence against Trump supporters is justified because he is literally Hitler", "Even though everyone knew the rules of the game up front, Trump is not actually the legitimate president because his popular vote tally was lower", "Trump is not a legitimate president because the Russians may have been involved in releasing some 'routine, not interesting' emails", "Even though the U.S. has interfered in over 80 elections in the last 20 years (including Russia in 1996), and even though a significant percentage of the mainstream media is foreign owned, and even though there is significant foreign money and foreign influence involved in every election, this election is not legitimate because Russia may have helped release some emails", "Enforcing existing immigration laws (and shoring up abused immigration laws) to protect American jobs and wages is racist" ---- I could go on for days, but the point is that people in general will say and believe a lot of stupid stuff if it helps their team. Pretending only people on the other team do it is pretty out there.

dibujante 10y ago
These are all shitty arguments, but they're not conspiracies. They're just shitty arguments. A conspiracy would be more like "Bush did 9/11", which the left was guilty of for a while. Eugh.
- ta_donk_gt 10y ago
  Initially, the point was that it is only Trump supporters that are uninterested in actual facts, but sure, plenty of conspiracy theories on the left as well (was just trying to keep it clean): "Trump has had or wants to have sex with his daughter..see, here is this picture of her sitting on his lap when she was 12" "Trump stayed in a Russian hotel room, found out the Obamas had previously stayed in that room so hired prostitutes to urinate on the bed in front of him" "Russia sold 19% of their state owned oil company to an unknown party and there is a document 'procured' by the Never Trump movement that says something about 19%, so Russia made a deal with Trump to get him elected and give him 19% of their oil if he would lift sanctions"
  - dibujante 10y ago