5 ms·

Mainstream press never really looks at the deeper causes of why these conspiracies exist in the first place. Looking at it dialectically, at least one possibil

Mainstream press never really looks at the deeper causes of why these conspiracies exist in the first place. Looking at it dialectically, at least one possibility seems quite simple. Thesis: The government wants to make laws that attack workers, to make them pay for stopping climate change (that was primarily caused by corporations and their wealthy owners.) Antithesis: Workers don't want to be attacked. Synthesis: Some workers deny the existence of what the government says they want to make them pay for.

ivan_gammel 3y ago
Conspiracy of meteorologists suppported by the government to scare workers by the weather… do you seriously consider this a possibility? How about Ockham’s razor and much simpler explanation that the weather is actually changing?
- GenerocUsername 3y ago
  He didn't say the weather isnt changing, he said the proposed solutions misplace the blame and spread the burdon of solutions disproportionatly from the source of the problem.
  - ivan_gammel 3y ago
    I do not really understand that “misplacing of the blame”. It’s an ordinary Joe who buys a car and a fuel for it. It is an ordinary Joe who hunts for cheap airline tickets and buys all those tiny things that are shipped overseas. The same Joe votes for politicians that deregulate and offer tax reductions and binges Netflix instead of reading some good books. Ignorance is a choice of majority of population. Ten billionaires cannot spoil the climate by overconsumption. Ten million Joes can easily do that and capitalism just found the way to help them.
    - brookst 3y ago
      “Misplace the blame” just means asking me to accept some responsibility rather than my preferred outgroups.
    - imoverclocked 3y ago
      Your lines drawn are odd to me. Billionaires are regular Joes but with a lot more influence and buying power. Instead of the plane ticket for a week vacation, it’s a rocket program to get one ride to space. A single rocket launch is easily the equivalent of 10 average Americans yearly co2 production. There are hundreds (thousands?) of people employed to make the things go, all of which has its own carbon footprint. There are many rockets launched and engine tests in the development of a rocket program. In 2022 SpaceX launched 180 successful rockets. Without private jets and carbon emissions of other business practices, we are already at a multiplier of over a thousand for a single billionaire. Ten billionaires produce a small towns worth of co2 (again, without private jets and extended effects of their business models) When we look at the average Joe who can not afford to live close to work or buy an electric vehicle, it gets even harder to try and say, “The problem is created by you and needs to be solved by you.” The problem is all of ours. You, the reader of this comment and me, the writer, are both part of the problem and solution. People with a lot of influence that control information are huge multipliers in solving or prolonging the problem. That is why huge corporations shifting the blame and disrupting the truth is such an issue.
- archsurface 3y ago
  Weapons of mass destruction? Governments lie. Politicians don't stop lying. Look up a video of British politician Matt Hancock "crying" about covid - it's brazen. I understand why people push back; I don't believe a word that comes out of governments. To what degree (ahem) are the meteorologists at fault? I don't know, but I'm reminded of Neil Ferguson whose models were news here on HN and elsewhere. Scientists get grants just as politicians get lobbied. Trust is hard won, and you don't get it by forcing 15 minute cities on people while private jets are free to fly.
croes 3y ago
Thesis: Governments want to make laws to stop climate change Antithesis: Big corporation don't want to lose money, pay people to create disinformation campaign, claiming all is a ruse to get money from the workers and enforce woke lifestyles like veganism onto them. Synthesis: Some people believe them and attack scientists and politicians who actually try to safe mankind's environment
- 128bytes 3y ago
  This analysis is silly because it neglects the fact that the poor are disproportionally reliant on polluting infrastructure that does not have any safe and affordable alternative, while also being those most affected by its dangers. Big corporations have ways to make lots of money from so called 'green technology' and they have the capital to diversify into it and they do, poor people do not. People want to act like there's a simple solution but anyone whose analysed the situation closely enough realizes that climate change is already locked in and renewable technology is not a good enough replacement given the power output and resource wastage. There is no way to even reduce energy demand since any reduction from one entity will be made up for by another entity, nobody has any desire for meaningful degrowth. Now that we have AI just watch us spin up nuclear reactor after reactor, drinking the ocean, and leaving every beach bare for the sake of 'progress'. Society is already collapsing into violence and BOE is a couple years away if we're lucky. There is a reason I don't bother investing in retirement. It's a tragedy and people are in denial.
  - croes 3y ago
    Pretty short sighted analysis of my post. The companies I'm talking about do this since more than 50 years, that's why the infrastructure wasn't changed when the costs would have been lower because there was more time This changed would have benefited the poor too. Now the time is running out and they choices are they suffer now because of higher costs or suffer later from the effects of climate change. They are the victims one way or the other.
    - 128bytes 3y ago
wefarrell 3y ago
Workers in developed countries have benefited from environmental exploitation. We can travel hundreds or miles in comfortable cars, or thousands of miles in a day in planes. We can enjoy bananas and other tropical fruit in northern latitudes in the winter. We can live in relatively large spaces that are heated. It’s the workers in developing countries who are lying the price. They’re the ones who are being told they can’t exploit their land and live the same lifestyle as their northern counterparts.
- netsharc 3y ago
  There's always a richer class who people can be mad about. The incredibly well-off average Westerners (compared to factory workers in e.g. Bangladesh) then look at the CEOs and super-rich who fly on private planes and vacation on yachts and say "Look at those CEOs, profiteering off exploiting our hard work!" -- it doesn't mean they don't have a case, just look at Bezos and the average Amazon warehouse worker.
  - VagueMag 3y ago
    > There's always a richer class who people can be mad about. I mean, not for one class in particular, right? One which happens to be making a whole lot of noise about this issue while not volunteering to make any sacrifices on its own part to fix it?
throw0101b 3y ago
> Mainstream press never really looks at the deeper causes of why these conspiracies exist in the first place. This is because reporting on psychology is boring: * https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/people-drawn-to-conspiracy-theories-share-a-cluster-of-psychological-features/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/people-drawn-to-c... * https://www.apa.org/news/podcasts/speaking-of-psychology/conspiracy-theories https://www.apa.org/news/podcasts/speaking-of-psychology/con... * https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0963721417718261 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/096372141771826... * https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/28/health/psychology-conspiracy-theories.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/28/health/psychology-conspir...
- somenameforme 3y ago
  I think there's another more simple explanation: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henny_Penny https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henny_Penny Henny Penny is Chicken Little. And this really does seem to explain these issues to the point of being a tautology. As an institution loses trust then people stop believing what they say. 'My opinion is no worse than your falsehoods.' There have been a million and one trust-destroying events in the past couple of decades. So seeing ever more people come out with their own explanations, some being somewhat less than well thought out, is hardly some inscrutable phenomena. The Google ngram for 'conspiracy theory' [2] is also quite telling. It seems to have risen somewhat during the Red Scare years, but then just went to the Moon shortly after November 22, 1963. [3]. And it's difficult to imagine why anybody might not think everything wasn't on the up and up there. I mean it's only been 60 years, and only 3% of the records remain classified. --- [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor's_New_Clothes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor's_New_Clothes [2] - https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=conspiracy%20theory&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B,conspiracy%20theory%3B,c0t1 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=conspiracy%20t... [3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_John_F._Kennedy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_John_F._Kenne...
  - eesmith 3y ago
    > The Google ngram for 'conspiracy theory' [2] is also quite telling. I disagree that it's telling. It could have replaced a previous term. What did people call helicopter parents before there were helicopters? We know there were conspiracy theorists well before even the First Red Scare - Henry Ford believed in the international Jewish conspiracy theory, as described by the fabricated antisemitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion, written ca. 1900. Or, from "Conspiracy Theories Abounded in 19th-Century American Politics" at https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/conspiracy-theories-abounded-19th-century-american-politics-180971940/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/conspiracy-theories-a... : "conspiracies flourished in the 1820s and 1830s, when modern-day American political parties developed, and the expansion of white male suffrage increased the nation’s voting base. These new parties, which included the Democrats, the National Republicans, the Anti-Masons, and the Whigs, frequently used conspiracy accusations as a political tool to capture new voters—ultimately bringing about a recession and a collapse of public trust in the democratic process." Since you mentioned Kennedy, President Garfield's assassination also resulted in conspiracies, including using the term "conspiracy theory". From https://academic.oup.com/book/25369/chapter-abstract/192453115?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false https://academic.oup.com/book/25369/chapter-abstract/1924531... : > Conspiracy theories have been around for a long time, though how long is a matter of debate. As for the concept of conspiracy theory, it might seem reasonable to expect a more exact answer about the moment of its emergence. When do we first find people talking and writing about conspiracy theories? While much of the literature points to the twentieth-century philosopher Karl Popper and his famous work The Open Society and Its Enemies (1st edition: 1945), newspaper databases allow us to locate earlier occurrences of “conspiracy theory.” They reveal that the term proliferates in newspapers from the 1870s onward, particularly after the assassination of President Garfield in July 1881. What can this discovery then tell us about the modern-day phenomenon of conspiracy theories? The full text, available at https://archive.org/details/uscinski-conspiracy-theories-and-the-people-who-believe-them/page/n89/mode/2up?q=garfield https://archive.org/details/uscinski-conspiracy-theories-and... , says "First occurrence of CTs related to assassination of Garfield: "One of the conspiracy theories has been exploded," Boston Journal, July 12, 1881." The article goes into depth on the context behind the word "theory" for this sort of description, at https://archive.org/details/uscinski-conspiracy-theories-and-the-people-who-believe-them/page/n95/mode/2up?q=%22theory+in+the+newspapers%22 https://archive.org/details/uscinski-conspiracy-theories-and... with examples of "murder theory", "abduction theory", and "fraud theory" before going into details about publications of a conspiracy theory "linking Guiteau to a circle of undiscovered and unidentified associates ... that foreshadows the later shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby—Guiteau himself became the target of an attempt on his life a few days after his trial began in November 1881, speculation once more arose about a conspiracy." Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.
alexfromapex 3y ago
If you look into methane release being tracked by NASA, it looks like it may be causing a lot of the issues: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/methane-super-emitters-mapped-by-nasa-s-new-earth-space-mission https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/methane-super-emitters-mapp...
DoItToMe81 3y ago
this isn't what dialectics are
tjpnz 3y ago
>Synthesis: Some workers deny the existence of what the government says they want to make them pay for. Wouldn't it involve less in the way of mental gymnastics to simply say they don't want to be left holding the bag?
DANmode 3y ago
You mean conspiracy theories, right?

ivan_gammel 3y ago

Conspiracy of meteorologists suppported by the government to scare workers by the weather… do you seriously consider this a possibility? How about Ockham’s razor and much simpler explanation that the weather is actually changing?

GenerocUsername 3y ago
He didn't say the weather isnt changing, he said the proposed solutions misplace the blame and spread the burdon of solutions disproportionatly from the source of the problem.
- ivan_gammel 3y ago
  I do not really understand that “misplacing of the blame”. It’s an ordinary Joe who buys a car and a fuel for it. It is an ordinary Joe who hunts for cheap airline tickets and buys all those tiny things that are shipped overseas. The same Joe votes for politicians that deregulate and offer tax reductions and binges Netflix instead of reading some good books. Ignorance is a choice of majority of population. Ten billionaires cannot spoil the climate by overconsumption. Ten million Joes can easily do that and capitalism just found the way to help them.
  - brookst 3y ago
    “Misplace the blame” just means asking me to accept some responsibility rather than my preferred outgroups.
  - imoverclocked 3y ago
    Your lines drawn are odd to me. Billionaires are regular Joes but with a lot more influence and buying power. Instead of the plane ticket for a week vacation, it’s a rocket program to get one ride to space. A single rocket launch is easily the equivalent of 10 average Americans yearly co2 production. There are hundreds (thousands?) of people employed to make the things go, all of which has its own carbon footprint. There are many rockets launched and engine tests in the development of a rocket program. In 2022 SpaceX launched 180 successful rockets. Without private jets and carbon emissions of other business practices, we are already at a multiplier of over a thousand for a single billionaire. Ten billionaires produce a small towns worth of co2 (again, without private jets and extended effects of their business models) When we look at the average Joe who can not afford to live close to work or buy an electric vehicle, it gets even harder to try and say, “The problem is created by you and needs to be solved by you.” The problem is all of ours. You, the reader of this comment and me, the writer, are both part of the problem and solution. People with a lot of influence that control information are huge multipliers in solving or prolonging the problem. That is why huge corporations shifting the blame and disrupting the truth is such an issue.
archsurface 3y ago
Weapons of mass destruction? Governments lie. Politicians don't stop lying. Look up a video of British politician Matt Hancock "crying" about covid - it's brazen. I understand why people push back; I don't believe a word that comes out of governments. To what degree (ahem) are the meteorologists at fault? I don't know, but I'm reminded of Neil Ferguson whose models were news here on HN and elsewhere. Scientists get grants just as politicians get lobbied. Trust is hard won, and you don't get it by forcing 15 minute cities on people while private jets are free to fly.

croes 3y ago

Thesis: Governments want to make laws to stop climate change Antithesis: Big corporation don't want to lose money, pay people to create disinformation campaign, claiming all is a ruse to get money from the workers and enforce woke lifestyles like veganism onto them. Synthesis: Some people believe them and attack scientists and politicians who actually try to safe mankind's environment

128bytes 3y ago
This analysis is silly because it neglects the fact that the poor are disproportionally reliant on polluting infrastructure that does not have any safe and affordable alternative, while also being those most affected by its dangers. Big corporations have ways to make lots of money from so called 'green technology' and they have the capital to diversify into it and they do, poor people do not. People want to act like there's a simple solution but anyone whose analysed the situation closely enough realizes that climate change is already locked in and renewable technology is not a good enough replacement given the power output and resource wastage. There is no way to even reduce energy demand since any reduction from one entity will be made up for by another entity, nobody has any desire for meaningful degrowth. Now that we have AI just watch us spin up nuclear reactor after reactor, drinking the ocean, and leaving every beach bare for the sake of 'progress'. Society is already collapsing into violence and BOE is a couple years away if we're lucky. There is a reason I don't bother investing in retirement. It's a tragedy and people are in denial.
- croes 3y ago
  Pretty short sighted analysis of my post. The companies I'm talking about do this since more than 50 years, that's why the infrastructure wasn't changed when the costs would have been lower because there was more time This changed would have benefited the poor too. Now the time is running out and they choices are they suffer now because of higher costs or suffer later from the effects of climate change. They are the victims one way or the other.
  - 128bytes 3y ago

wefarrell 3y ago

Workers in developed countries have benefited from environmental exploitation. We can travel hundreds or miles in comfortable cars, or thousands of miles in a day in planes. We can enjoy bananas and other tropical fruit in northern latitudes in the winter. We can live in relatively large spaces that are heated. It’s the workers in developing countries who are lying the price. They’re the ones who are being told they can’t exploit their land and live the same lifestyle as their northern counterparts.

netsharc 3y ago
There's always a richer class who people can be mad about. The incredibly well-off average Westerners (compared to factory workers in e.g. Bangladesh) then look at the CEOs and super-rich who fly on private planes and vacation on yachts and say "Look at those CEOs, profiteering off exploiting our hard work!" -- it doesn't mean they don't have a case, just look at Bezos and the average Amazon warehouse worker.
- VagueMag 3y ago
  > There's always a richer class who people can be mad about. I mean, not for one class in particular, right? One which happens to be making a whole lot of noise about this issue while not volunteering to make any sacrifices on its own part to fix it?

throw0101b 3y ago

> Mainstream press never really looks at the deeper causes of why these conspiracies exist in the first place. This is because reporting on psychology is boring: * https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/people-drawn-to-conspiracy-theories-share-a-cluster-of-psychological-features/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/people-drawn-to-c... * https://www.apa.org/news/podcasts/speaking-of-psychology/conspiracy-theories https://www.apa.org/news/podcasts/speaking-of-psychology/con... * https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0963721417718261 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/096372141771826... * https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/28/health/psychology-conspiracy-theories.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/28/health/psychology-conspir...

somenameforme 3y ago
I think there's another more simple explanation: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henny_Penny https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henny_Penny Henny Penny is Chicken Little. And this really does seem to explain these issues to the point of being a tautology. As an institution loses trust then people stop believing what they say. 'My opinion is no worse than your falsehoods.' There have been a million and one trust-destroying events in the past couple of decades. So seeing ever more people come out with their own explanations, some being somewhat less than well thought out, is hardly some inscrutable phenomena. The Google ngram for 'conspiracy theory' [2] is also quite telling. It seems to have risen somewhat during the Red Scare years, but then just went to the Moon shortly after November 22, 1963. [3]. And it's difficult to imagine why anybody might not think everything wasn't on the up and up there. I mean it's only been 60 years, and only 3% of the records remain classified. --- [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor's_New_Clothes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor's_New_Clothes [2] - https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=conspiracy%20theory&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&direct_url=t1%3B,conspiracy%20theory%3B,c0t1 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=conspiracy%20t... [3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_John_F._Kennedy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_John_F._Kenne...
- eesmith 3y ago
  > The Google ngram for 'conspiracy theory' [2] is also quite telling. I disagree that it's telling. It could have replaced a previous term. What did people call helicopter parents before there were helicopters? We know there were conspiracy theorists well before even the First Red Scare - Henry Ford believed in the international Jewish conspiracy theory, as described by the fabricated antisemitic Protocols of the Elders of Zion, written ca. 1900. Or, from "Conspiracy Theories Abounded in 19th-Century American Politics" at https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/conspiracy-theories-abounded-19th-century-american-politics-180971940/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/conspiracy-theories-a... : "conspiracies flourished in the 1820s and 1830s, when modern-day American political parties developed, and the expansion of white male suffrage increased the nation’s voting base. These new parties, which included the Democrats, the National Republicans, the Anti-Masons, and the Whigs, frequently used conspiracy accusations as a political tool to capture new voters—ultimately bringing about a recession and a collapse of public trust in the democratic process." Since you mentioned Kennedy, President Garfield's assassination also resulted in conspiracies, including using the term "conspiracy theory". From https://academic.oup.com/book/25369/chapter-abstract/192453115?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false https://academic.oup.com/book/25369/chapter-abstract/1924531... : > Conspiracy theories have been around for a long time, though how long is a matter of debate. As for the concept of conspiracy theory, it might seem reasonable to expect a more exact answer about the moment of its emergence. When do we first find people talking and writing about conspiracy theories? While much of the literature points to the twentieth-century philosopher Karl Popper and his famous work The Open Society and Its Enemies (1st edition: 1945), newspaper databases allow us to locate earlier occurrences of “conspiracy theory.” They reveal that the term proliferates in newspapers from the 1870s onward, particularly after the assassination of President Garfield in July 1881. What can this discovery then tell us about the modern-day phenomenon of conspiracy theories? The full text, available at https://archive.org/details/uscinski-conspiracy-theories-and-the-people-who-believe-them/page/n89/mode/2up?q=garfield https://archive.org/details/uscinski-conspiracy-theories-and... , says "First occurrence of CTs related to assassination of Garfield: "One of the conspiracy theories has been exploded," Boston Journal, July 12, 1881." The article goes into depth on the context behind the word "theory" for this sort of description, at https://archive.org/details/uscinski-conspiracy-theories-and-the-people-who-believe-them/page/n95/mode/2up?q=%22theory+in+the+newspapers%22 https://archive.org/details/uscinski-conspiracy-theories-and... with examples of "murder theory", "abduction theory", and "fraud theory" before going into details about publications of a conspiracy theory "linking Guiteau to a circle of undiscovered and unidentified associates ... that foreshadows the later shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby—Guiteau himself became the target of an attempt on his life a few days after his trial began in November 1881, speculation once more arose about a conspiracy." Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

alexfromapex 3y ago

If you look into methane release being tracked by NASA, it looks like it may be causing a lot of the issues: https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/methane-super-emitters-mapped-by-nasa-s-new-earth-space-mission https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/methane-super-emitters-mapp...

DoItToMe81 3y ago

this isn't what dialectics are

tjpnz 3y ago

>Synthesis: Some workers deny the existence of what the government says they want to make them pay for. Wouldn't it involve less in the way of mental gymnastics to simply say they don't want to be left holding the bag?

DANmode 3y ago

You mean conspiracy theories, right?