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It's not coincidence, and it's not conspiracy. It's zeitgeist, and people seeing one place do something and decide that's a good idea, and people following ever
by danaris 3y ago
It's not coincidence, and it's not conspiracy. It's zeitgeist, and people seeing one place do something and decide that's a good idea, and people following everything from scientific (and pseudoscientific) studies that came out around the time, to philosophical works published around the time, to all of the above that were old but re-popularized around the time.
You can just as easily ask "why was there a rise of right-wing nationalist and fascist sentiment throughout the Western world in the mid-to-late 2010s?" There's no grand conspiracy to any of it, and looking for one is likely to lead you down exactly the road that far too many conspiracy theorists have gone recently.
And, um, closely related, be aware that the "lizard people rule the world" thing isn't just a funny joke. It's deeply and inextricably rooted in a raft of antisemitic tropes, slurs, and propaganda going back...I forget exactly how long, but at least many decades. In fact, in general, when you encounter any conspiracy theory that posits a shadowy group of people secretly ruling the world, the chances are nearly 100% that you can trace it back to a version where that "shadowy group" is explicitly Jews. This is a big part of why conspiracy theorists have a tendency to find themselves in a pipeline to fascism.
- teddyh 3y agoThe entire world was (and still is, to some extent) horribly racist. Every nation, institution and venerable principle you hold sacred has horrible racism lurking in its very bones, if you dig deep enough. You can’t, therefore, dismiss anything on that basis alone. Argue with an issue on its merits alone; to attack the supposed secret origin of an issue is equivalent to an ad hominem argument. Also, alternative explanation of the lizard people thing: <http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8600 http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=8600>
- thriftwy 3y agoWhat if the entire world is mostly rational, and it is the HN crowd / snowflakes from the richest US suburbs who are bonkers?
- danaris 3y agoAh, yes; the good old "everything is impure, which means that everything is equally bad, so it doesn't matter if I do/support bad things, because I have no choice!" Yeah, no. That doesn't fly. There's a massive difference between, say, "the fact that I am a person of European descent living in upstate NY is only possible because of the genocide of and racism against generations of Native Americans; therefore, my entire existence is predicated on structural racism" and "many, many groups have vilified Jewish people for centuries for a variety of reasons (that are out of scope of this discussion); that vilification has led to ostracism and genocide on numerous occasions and still does to this day, frequently based entirely on completely false stereotypes; the propagation of those stereotypes still to this day leads real people to choose to ostracize and murder Jewish people; "lizard people who rule the world" is one of those stereotypes, and participating in its propagation does actual, measurable harm to Jewish people."
- teddyh 3y agoYou are willfully mischaracterizing my statement. Of course everything has different degrees of badness. But everything has enough badness for it to be dismissed just as easily as you dismissed the lizard people theory as a secret racist conspiracy. I’m curious how far this stretches. Do you claim that “They Live” is antisemitic?