The flip side of Poe's Law. Fifteen years ago, my father used to love rense.com and a couple of other conspiracy sites. He thought it was good fun. He thought t

The flip side of Poe's Law. Fifteen years ago, my father used to love rense.com and a couple of other conspiracy sites. He thought it was good fun. He thought the people running and contributing to them were just blowing off steam by poking dark fun at how stupid people could be, basically liberals doing some mean-spirited LARPing as conservatives. Knowing that some people would take them seriously just made it funnier in his mind. I never asked him later (like after 2016) if he had revised his estimate of how many people on those sites were deadly serious versus poking fun. When I first got my hands on a Frank Miller graphic novel, I had been led to believe that it was a critical examination of how people are seduced by violence, be careful when you look into the abyss, etc., but I was old enough to realize as I read it that the reason it was wildly popular was because it worked as wish fulfillment violence porn, and I couldn't see any sign that the author intended it to be read in any other way. Not that I was too good to enjoy it on that level, but after I finished it, I felt that it would be wrong to go back for more.