5 ms·
Which are the more boring ones?
by Joeboy 5y ago
Which are the more boring ones?
- Lendal 5y agoTake your pick. As soon as I mention one your lack-of-interest meter will immediately shut it down. How about campaign finance? How about the fact that it is against the interest of the two American political parties to solve any politicized problem? Immigration, for instance, will never be solved because as long as it remains a political issue it brings in money to both parties. Nobody will harm that golden goose. It's the same reason that nobody inside Facebook will solve the problems with Facebook. Because those very problems are what fund the income of everyone who works there. Ergo, it will never be solved, at least not from within.
- Joeboy 5y agoI just wasn't sure if they were saying fake conspiracies are more boring or real ones are more boring. I could imagine it being either. I suppose the ordering of the sentence implies it's the former that are more boring.
- dools 5y agoReal conspiracies are super boring. For example we had this guy in Australia James Ashby who was the chief of staff for Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party. They play to a lot of the fake conspiracy types that also fall into the “basket of deplorables” from which other conservative governments globally garner their support. However all the outlandish shit that PHON either spread directly or nurture indirectly (such as NASA doctoring climate change data) is far more interesting than the actual conspiracy they were alleged to have perpetrated which was James Ashby pressuring candidates to use his signage company: https://www.afr.com/politics/knives-out-for-hanson-staffer-ashby-accused-of-profiting-off-candidates-20161220-gtepe4 https://www.afr.com/politics/knives-out-for-hanson-staffer-a...
- Joeboy 5y agoI guess my go-to ideas of "conspiracy theories" are things like MKULTRA, Gladio, COINTELPRO, Stargate Project, ECHELON etc. Which seem extremely interesting, to me anyway, and I think we can say those things are "real". Whereas I find the QAnon, AntiVax etc stuff fairly tedious (although I do find the sociology behind them interesting). Maybe it's more about my relationship with these things, rather than than the theories themselves.
- dools 5y agoYeah I guess those things don’t really strike me as conspiracies, like I guess they fit the technical definition in some ways especially if they’re deemed illegal but just because a program is covert doesn’t make it a conspiracy. It might just be a dumb or poorly executed idea (although I suppose also “harm” may be in the eye of the beholder)
- Joeboy 5y agoMaybe it's an age difference thing (I'm old), but to me MKULTRA feels like the absolute archetype of "conspiracy theory" material. I'm fairly sure that's how it was regarded before the Church Committee investigation, and to a large extent afterwards. I think if you were applying the "real conspiracies are boring" heuristic you'd have dismissed it pretty quickly. Edit: There's a bit in Jon Ronson's Them: Adventures with Extremists, where he hangs out with Alex Jones, who tells him about secret events where powerful men don robes and perform weird rituals. Which sounds outlandish but Ronson goes along with Jones to infiltrate Bohemian Grove, and sure enough there are powerful men in robes, performing weird rituals. At that point, Ronson notes that it no longer seems outlandish, it just seems like some middle aged men letting off steam. I think perhaps things just seem inherently more boring when there's no mystery attached.
- everybodyknows 5y agoExamples here: https://www.emptywheel.net/ https://www.emptywheel.net/ Well researched, endless detail, often leading to no resolution.