But habits are hard to break. After weeks of ignoring her feed, Ramona logged back on to Facebook. She missed the sense of community she had found in QAnon forums — the people, not the beliefs — and wanted to reconnect… But the Facebook group was gone, purged by Facebook
Deplatforming works. It’s true they’ll go somewhere else, but they’ll lose lots of people every time.
Conspiracy theories are older than the republic. But experts say it would be wrong to dismiss believers as simply stupid or deranged.
That’s right. You have to dismiss them as stupid and deranged. For real though, the article makes the point that it’s more than stupidity, it’s a fear of what people can’t control that turns them to conspiracies.
But why do they feel so out of control? Why do they not understand how anything works?
They feel out of control because they ARE being exploited by systems that are designed to obscure the fact. They don’t understand how anything works, because those systems have replaced their education with propaganda.
Big time. Try opening a publicly funded law school, teaching the rulebook to the plebs, see the power structures try to jam it up, see if local corporate media doesn’t publish constant articles about how much money it will cost and constant op-eds like “does [name of local area] really need more lawyers?,” while their parent corporations and advertisers are represented in all things by lawyers at firms with 1,000 attorneys that each make in an hour what most working people make in a week. I’m telling y’all, it’s sabotage.
“why do so many people believe in conspiracies”
“Well, to understand that, you have let me tell you about how The System is designed to replace education with propaganda.”
Problem is that lots of seemingly regular Americans believe in some conspiracy theories to a greater or lesser extent. Having spent significant time living on both the US and Europe, I’m pretty shocked how many Americans always seem to think that someone is “out to get them.” If it’s not some random person, it’s a criminal, it’s the government, it’s the school board, it’s the gays. Anyone, really. It’s tiresome.
Edit (case in point): https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/suspect-fathers-decapitation-went-rails-college-knew-say-rcna136647
In my experience it seems more effective to counter conspiracies with laughter and mockery than dismantle it. Which may sound strange since it sounds intuitive to counter a falsehood with truth or reason… But disproving takes far more effort than the original conspiracy theory, and that’s how these things get out of control. But laughing it off, mockery, and general comedy takes less time and still gets the message across to bystanders.
On the flip-side I do agree doing it wrong can send them deeper into the hole because at its core it’s about a sense of community, and everyone has issues with ego and self-esteem clouding better judgment. It’s just the circumstances these people are in, well, it makes them far more vulnerable to grifters preying on their ignorance, lack of time, lack of education, etc.
Definitely! There are some things in society that are harmful to the public, antisocial, breaches of the social contract–such as being unvaccinated, not washing your hands after taking a huge dump, or spreading conspiracies–but which are not illegal or redeemable in tort, things for which public shaming is a just and maybe only remedy.
Isolated from friends and family, distrustful of the explanations offered by officials and the media, Ramona and Don began to prepare. The military might try to put Americans like them in concentration camps run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA. They had to be ready to flee.
I understand we’re getting specific examples to flesh out the story, but this is a failure of critical thinking skills.
They are former fast food workers in western Tennessee that one now works at an auto assembly plant and the other is in a local college to become a school teacher.
- Why would the government want to put them in a concentration camp?
Lets assume for a moment there is a plausible “why” to continue the thought experiment. It doesn’t even pass back-of-the-napkin math.
How could the government go about do this?
If the bar for being rounded was up all college students and all automobile assembly workers, it would likely include hundreds of other jobs of the same level. There are just too many people to put in a camp! Who would build the camp? Wouldn’t we see the camps all over the country under construction? No? Would Western Tennessee be the FIRST camp to be built? Who are they going to get to run the camp? The entirety of people employed at FEMA is only 20,000 people That’s not even enough people to run camps in just Western Tennessee. Memphis alone has population of 655,569. Where are you gonna put all those folks? Who are their jailers?
This claim of camps should have fallen apart with the smallest of scrutiny.
I give credit to the woman who was deep into this that figured this out for herself eventually. She was also pretty young and just entering the adult world which itself is pretty scary irrespective of a never before seen global pandemic.
conspiracy theories are perfect for certain types of people to latch on to because the narrative presented is malleable. If the theory is wrong it can be re-shaped into something new to explain the new unknown.
if you scrutinised a conspiracy then yes they would generally fall flat, but if someone were the dispenser of that knowledge who imbued themselves with the self-importance of knowing secret details, they could always shift the goalposts and weave a new version of the story to maintain the reality they want to revel in.
Tldr - the answer was domestic violence.
Literally slapped back to reality.
