I get the people who are bothered by equating mental illness and conspiracy theories, but the rabbit hole is an inescapable trap for it, and being in an insular group that reinforces your actions and beliefs isn't a healthy place to be.
Most people with mental illness are much less "crazy" than these guys. A chemical imbalance that causes you to see life as bleak, or a compulsion to wash your hands, is nothing compared to the bizarre conspiracies Q-anon comes up with.
If you see something like PSTD as a mental illness, then deep conspiracy theorists are definitely mentally ill.
I get the people who are bothered by equating mental illness and conspiracy theories, but the rabbit hole is an inescapable trap for it, and being in an insular group that reinforces your actions and beliefs isn't a healthy place to be.
Most people with mental illness are much less "crazy" than these guys. A chemical imbalance that causes you to see life as bleak, or a compulsion to wash your hands, is nothing compared to the bizarre conspiracies Q-anon comes up with.
If you see something like PSTD as a mental illness, then deep conspiracy theorists are definitely mentally ill.
PTSD is probably a worse comparison than depression adjacent personality and emotional disorders, it's sometimes associated with delusions but tend to be more focused and not invented or adopted but built from the trauma.
Delusional disorders are a wide category, though, and there's several books and volumes of papers linking them to conspiracy theories and analogous behaviors.
Capgras and Fregoli syndromes involve facial recognition, and have been loosly linked to things like reptilian/replicant/other replacement theories. A paper a few years ago identified a strong pattern suggesting Fregoli syndrome in a few accounts that drive a lot of the crisis actor theories but the only person they got to actually see backed out at the last second - a common theme in this and other mental illness research, actual diagnoses require consent that patients are prone to withdraw as it is, but moreso when they know a journal paper may be forthcoming.
Paranoid schizophrenia and the manic side of bipolar are both associated with delusions, and the most common are persecution delusions and control delusions, both of which have actually been linked with conspiracy theories and CT-like behavior observationally, individuals sharing their delusion with each other will sometimes concoct more detailed and coherent shared versions, or will come into dispute and develop more detailed conflicting ones to argue about.
Control delusion (the delusional belief that some seen or unseen entity has total control over one's life, environment, world, etc) has some interesting parallels with conspiracy theories because it can be coped with by the equally delusional belief that by knowing who is in control you are already somehow thwarting them.
If you go through a CT forum for any length you will see a number have been diagnosed with a delusional disorder of some sort, usually after family convince them to seek help. Often they talk about from treatment when they believe it threatens their CT beliefs, their doctor now becoming part of the conspiracy, not trying to help but to pacify. There's a good reason why so many wildly disconnected theories also somehow end up including a direct mistrust of mental health.
My first degree was in this shit, so be careful who you say doesn't know shit. It wasn't a good time and there's a reason why I went back for a different bachelor's after a year in PTSD research and prefer not to talk about the first, but don't mistake me for the guy who had a semester of PSY100 and knows how everything works now. Yes, many people who are mentally ill are not "that crazy" - a patronizing sentence if I've ever heard one, but it gets the point I guess. Most simply have compulsive behaviors.
Millions of people in the world, however, do not perceive reality normally. They may believe that people they see on the street are not human, or abruptly start believing somebody close to them is no longer the same person. They might keep seeing the same face on many people. Some see some pattern in the people or cars or even animals passing them and believe they are being surveiled or stalked. Some simply believe a simple or complex falsehood but have reinforced that belief to the point that their whole life and sense of self is consumed by it, like a secular version of religious ecstacism.
Hevach on
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Caulk Bite 6One of the multitude of Dans infesting this placeRegistered Userregular
edited April 2019
Okay, neat, you know your stuff on mental illness, and I’m sorry I suggested otherwise. You could have led with that. Provided examples of what you meant. Instead, it looked like you were painting large swathes of self-deluded people with the mental illness brush.
It rankled, to say the least.
Edit: I mean, what you led with was basically “I know that saying conspiracy theorists are mentally ill puts people off, but I’m gonna say it anyway”, full stop. No real expansion of the point.
Conspiracy Theorism seems to tie into a sense of victimhood, of being oppressed and persecuted for knowing the truth, it gives life struggle and meaning. If you are raised to reject intellectualism, to desire revelation and have a very disconnected view of the world? Well. You're ripe for this shit.
Fascism works off the same appeal, and Conspiracy Theorists are often White Supremacists and Neo-Fascists. The people who believe in Conspiracy Theories are the people that Goebbels talked about as the critical element of the fascist movement, and you can see Goebbel's concept of fascist communication in the language of Conspiracy Theorists.
We can’t forget the atheist “rational” movement. Many of whom pride themselves as intellectuals but then spew awful racist shit
I suspect that for some of this (but probably not all, not even most) it's because if you're religious and then become an atheist then, well, you've already accepted that one thing you were taught all your life is a lie perpetuated by large organizations. And if that was a lie, what else is? You clearly can't just trust the people in power to tell you what's right (they lied about God et. al., after all!), so you need to be, well, sceptical.
In some cases they might also already be anti-intellectual through a conservative Christian upbringing (climate change isn't real, evolution is a myth, young earth creationism etc.) and so they might bring that mindset forward without throwing it out alongside their former religion.
It doesn't help that there's a mild distaste for scientists out there already: think about every joke you've heard about how butter flip-flops between being healthy and unhealthy, or every sneer you've heard at the idea that dinosaurs had feathers. It's easy to see how this can escalate to a general "can't trust those scientists" mindset, especially when you bring in stuff like tobacco companies sponsoring studies that show that tobacco has no ill side effects (see? you can't trust them!)
Also, of course, racism is areligious. The fear of the Other seems regretfully universal.
The scary thing is that one doesn't have to necessarily suffer from any sort of mental illness to fall into conspiracy theories. Nor does one have to have poor education or lack of intelligence.
Humans are wired to try and find patterns and categorize things. And studies have shown that intelligent people are better at convincing themselves they're right even after being confronted with contradictory information.
Conspiracy Theorism seems to tie into a sense of victimhood, of being oppressed and persecuted for knowing the truth, it gives life struggle and meaning. If you are raised to reject intellectualism, to desire revelation and have a very disconnected view of the world? Well. You're ripe for this shit.
Fascism works off the same appeal, and Conspiracy Theorists are often White Supremacists and Neo-Fascists. The people who believe in Conspiracy Theories are the people that Goebbels talked about as the critical element of the fascist movement, and you can see Goebbel's concept of fascist communication in the language of Conspiracy Theorists.
We can’t forget the atheist “rational” movement. Many of whom pride themselves as intellectuals but then spew awful racist shit
I suspect that for some of this (but probably not all, not even most) it's because if you're religious and then become an atheist then, well, you've already accepted that one thing you were taught all your life is a lie perpetuated by large organizations. And if that was a lie, what else is? You clearly can't just trust the people in power to tell you what's right (they lied about God et. al., after all!), so you need to be, well, sceptical.
I think some of this probably comes with what started the move from faithful to atheist. Some people have a crisis of faith when they feel God failed them, others when they can't muster the cognitive dissonance to believe one thing on Sunday and another the rest of the week, others because they are fed up with their fellow faithful.
Basically, whether their core problem is with Christ, Christianity, or Christians will, I think, make you a different kind of atheist.
Being an atheist has nothing to do with one's greater moral philosophy outside of not believing in a divine being. Finding a more-encompassing description for atheists with similar moral beliefs has been a never-ending quest within secular communities. It's kind of like herding cats, honestly.
I had been a fan of simply calling myself a "skeptic" for a while, but that term has become tainted in the last ~10 years with the rise and radicalization of skeptical YouTubers, podcasters, etc.
If nothing else, the radicalization of the so-called New Atheists goes to show that religion isn't to blame for people throughout history holding abhorrent viewpoints. It was merely the most readily-available way for them to justify their viewpoints.
I get the people who are bothered by equating mental illness and conspiracy theories, but the rabbit hole is an inescapable trap for it, and being in an insular group that reinforces your actions and beliefs isn't a healthy place to be.
Most people with mental illness are much less "crazy" than these guys. A chemical imbalance that causes you to see life as bleak, or a compulsion to wash your hands, is nothing compared to the bizarre conspiracies Q-anon comes up with.
If you see something like PSTD as a mental illness, then deep conspiracy theorists are definitely mentally ill.
PTSD is probably a worse comparison than depression adjacent personality and emotional disorders, it's sometimes associated with delusions but tend to be more focused and not invented or adopted but built from the trauma.
My point here isn't related to the symptoms, it's the fact that it develops entirely from "non-medical" factors. You don't need to be mentally ill to develop PTSD, but once you have you arguably have developed a mental illness. In the same way, you don't need to be mentally ill to become a conspiracy theorist, but once you've dived in deep enough you're arguably mentally ill.
“[Pepe the Frog] is a symbol of free speech,” Jones said. “There’s now a movement to try to then control and own symbols that have entered the public domain and public use….and so now I see it as basically a tombstone of free speech and fair use in the Western world. So I see it for what it is, from the perspective of the corporate fascists.”
Last year, Jones was sued by Pepe the Frog artist Matt Furie for allegedly infringing Furie’s copyright on the cartoon frog by putting Pepe on a poster that Infowars was selling. Jones is fighting the case. The court documents are part of a 159- page deposition given on December 18, 2018 as part of the case, and is embedded below.
I'm pretty sure that the entire corpus of copyright law disagrees with you, Alex.
“[Pepe the Frog] is a symbol of free speech,” Jones said. “There’s now a movement to try to then control and own symbols that have entered the public domain and public use….and so now I see it as basically a tombstone of free speech and fair use in the Western world. So I see it for what it is, from the perspective of the corporate fascists.”
Last year, Jones was sued by Pepe the Frog artist Matt Furie for allegedly infringing Furie’s copyright on the cartoon frog by putting Pepe on a poster that Infowars was selling. Jones is fighting the case. The court documents are part of a 159- page deposition given on December 18, 2018 as part of the case, and is embedded below.
I'm pretty sure that the entire corpus of copyright law disagrees with you, Alex.
Wha-?
He's not taking anyone's free speech dipshit, he's protecting his artistic property! You weren't even trying to use it under fair use or some noble non-profit reason, but trying to exploit for a goddamn monies ARGARBAGRLAAAAA!
I just can't even with this fucking guy.
Battlenet ID: MildC#11186 - If I'm in the game, send me an invite at anytime and I'll play.
“[Pepe the Frog] is a symbol of free speech,” Jones said. “There’s now a movement to try to then control and own symbols that have entered the public domain and public use….and so now I see it as basically a tombstone of free speech and fair use in the Western world. So I see it for what it is, from the perspective of the corporate fascists.”
Last year, Jones was sued by Pepe the Frog artist Matt Furie for allegedly infringing Furie’s copyright on the cartoon frog by putting Pepe on a poster that Infowars was selling. Jones is fighting the case. The court documents are part of a 159- page deposition given on December 18, 2018 as part of the case, and is embedded below.
I'm pretty sure that the entire corpus of copyright law disagrees with you, Alex.
Wha-?
He's not taking anyone's free speech dipshit, he's protecting his artistic property! You weren't even trying to use it under fair use or some noble non-profit reason, but trying to exploit for a goddamn monies ARGARBAGRLAAAAA!
I just can't even with this fucking guy.
The problem is that it's a stupid argument that will nonetheless resonate with a certain sort who has never really thought critically about freedom of speech. He's playing to the peanut gallery - and unfortunately, Jones is good at that.
“[Pepe the Frog] is a symbol of free speech,” Jones said. “There’s now a movement to try to then control and own symbols that have entered the public domain and public use….and so now I see it as basically a tombstone of free speech and fair use in the Western world. So I see it for what it is, from the perspective of the corporate fascists.”
Last year, Jones was sued by Pepe the Frog artist Matt Furie for allegedly infringing Furie’s copyright on the cartoon frog by putting Pepe on a poster that Infowars was selling. Jones is fighting the case. The court documents are part of a 159- page deposition given on December 18, 2018 as part of the case, and is embedded below.
I'm pretty sure that the entire corpus of copyright law disagrees with you, Alex.
Wha-?
He's not taking anyone's free speech dipshit, he's protecting his artistic property! You weren't even trying to use it under fair use or some noble non-profit reason, but trying to exploit for a goddamn monies ARGARBAGRLAAAAA!
I just can't even with this fucking guy.
The problem is that it's a stupid argument that will nonetheless resonate with a certain sort who has never really thought critically about freedom of speech. He's playing to the peanut gallery - and unfortunately, Jones is good at that.
Free speech in the WESTERN world, he is talking to a very specific audience, this guy has layers of dogwhistling.
Yes, with a quick verbal "boom." You take a man's peko, you deny him his dab, all that is left is to rise up and tear down the walls of Jericho with a ".....not!" -TexiKen
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Caulk Bite 6One of the multitude of Dans infesting this placeRegistered Userregular
On a weird plus side, if he somehow wins, that spells precedence doom for Disney.
And basically everyone else, as the other down side.
On a weird plus side, if he somehow wins, that spells precedence doom for Disney.
And basically everyone else, as the other down side.
He won't win. The entire corpus of copyright law is against him. This isn't a "nobody beats Big Mouse" thing, it's a "that's...that’s not how this works" thing. But, there are people who don't understand copyright law that his slide dogwhistle will call to.
Nelson is a Bulgarian Griffon Vulture with a satellite tracker on his leg, one of 14 tagged for tracking and conservation efforts. He was believed dead last November shortly after crossing into Yemen. It turns out his tracker got him arrested for spying.
He is now in the hands of a local conservationist who's treating him for a broken wing, neck injury, abrasions from being tied up, and weight loss from being starved. In a few weeks he will hopefully be released and will get the fuck out of Yemen.
It's sort of a bad-news-gone-right situation where so many Yemenis worked together to try and rescue Nelson despite the terrible situation their country is in.
"Simple, real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time." -Mustrum Ridcully in Terry Pratchett's Hogfather p. 142 (HarperPrism 1996)
The town where he was captured (Taiz) and the capital (Sanaa), where the conservationist came from, are in hands of different factions, too. That guy seriously risked his life to save a vulture.
So the main thing that's interesting for me is that it seems that there have been multiple, reliable cases of unidentified UFOs that don't seem to follow known technology.
Metzger MeisterIt Gets Worsebefore it gets any better.Registered Userregular
Oh my yes dozens. Military officials and personnel spot UFOs, or in the modern parlance UAP (unidentified aerial phenomenon) all the time, especially pilots, but often face harsh ridicule and even censure for reporting them. Incidents like the Nimitz Incident for example, or the famous GoFast sighting by US Air Force pilots who actually managed to get radar lock on an object, were classified for years and the eyewitnesses basically discounted and mocked by their peers.
A lot of "doesn't follow known technology" conclusions have ended up being based on faulty assumptions. There was in South America last year or the year before that didn't appear on radar and was maneuvering at seemingly impossible speeds. It zoomed from many miles ahead of the witness's helicopter right past them at hypersonic speeds and vanished when they turned around.
They were assuming they were seeing something the size of a fighter aircraft seen from a great distance. It turned out to be a drone a few hundred feet away, when they turned towards it, they just flew right over it and it crashed in their rotor wash and was recovered during the investigation.
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ShadowfireVermont, in the middle of nowhereRegistered Userregular
I remember reading somewhere that a lot of those unknown objects pilots were seeing were things like ball lightning.
knitdanIn ur baseKillin ur guysRegistered Userregular
Unidentified UFO is a redundancy
UFO is Unidentified Flying Object which just means “we aren’t sure what it is” but everyone takes to mean alien spaceship.
“I was quick when I came in here, I’m twice as quick now”
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
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KetarCome on upstairswe're having a partyRegistered Userregular
I remember in grade school I did a 1 week debate camp at a local college one summer. One of the first debates I was assigned was over whether UFOs were real. My partner and I spent hours in the library amassing as much evidence as possible for the best-reasoned case we could put together disproving the existence of UFOs.
Debate day arrives. We do our two minute opening, which we were very pleased with. Then our opponents start their opening by throwing something across the room. "Can anyone identify that object? That object that just flew across the room? Would it be fair to say that was an unidentified flying object?"
Fffffffffffffffff....
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Metzger MeisterIt Gets Worsebefore it gets any better.Registered Userregular
edited April 2019
Again though, we have trained military pilots unable to identify these objects with infrared cameras, radar, lidar, some of the most advanced tech in the world is at their fingertips and they show genuine confusion and concern oftentimes when faced with these situations.
Something weird is going on. Something weird enough to scramble multi-million dollar military assets aboard one of the United States Navy's biggest and most advanced warships.
Again though, we have trained military pilots unable to identify these objects with infrared cameras, radar, lidar, some of the most advanced tech in the world is at their fingertips and they show genuine confusion and concern oftentimes when faced with these situations.
Something weird is going on. Something weird enough to scramble multi-million dollar military assets aboard one of the United States Navy's biggest and most advanced warships.
Its not so weird if you consider that pilots are high as balls on speed, or as they call it the go pill.
Yes, with a quick verbal "boom." You take a man's peko, you deny him his dab, all that is left is to rise up and tear down the walls of Jericho with a ".....not!" -TexiKen
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Metzger MeisterIt Gets Worsebefore it gets any better.Registered Userregular
Again though, we have trained military pilots unable to identify these objects with infrared cameras, radar, lidar, some of the most advanced tech in the world is at their fingertips and they show genuine confusion and concern oftentimes when faced with these situations.
Something weird is going on. Something weird enough to scramble multi-million dollar military assets aboard one of the United States Navy's biggest and most advanced warships.
Its not so weird if you consider that pilots are high as balls on speed, or as they call it the go pill.
Infrared cameras do speed, do they? Radar systems out there gettin cranked out and hittin the club?
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L Ron HowardThe duckMinnesotaRegistered Userregular
Again though, we have trained military pilots unable to identify these objects with infrared cameras, radar, lidar, some of the most advanced tech in the world is at their fingertips and they show genuine confusion and concern oftentimes when faced with these situations.
Something weird is going on. Something weird enough to scramble multi-million dollar military assets aboard one of the United States Navy's biggest and most advanced warships.
Its not so weird if you consider that pilots are high as balls on speed, or as they call it the go pill.
Infrared cameras do speed, do they? Radar systems out there gettin cranked out and hittin the club?
You've found the real conspiracy! No one is supposed to know! You know too much!
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Metzger MeisterIt Gets Worsebefore it gets any better.Registered Userregular
edited April 2019
FINALLY! I'VE WANTED TO KNOW TOO MUCH SINCE I'VE KNOWN THINGS!
edit: i will fully acknowledge the drug problems in the armed forces tho, i used to live in Cheyenne, aka "that one place where all the nuclear missile technicians cheat on their tests and snort adderall"
Metzger Meister on
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L Ron HowardThe duckMinnesotaRegistered Userregular
I will admit the one captured by the Venezuelan(?) Air Force or Navy where it's spraying(?) clouds is pretty compelling.
Again though, we have trained military pilots unable to identify these objects with infrared cameras, radar, lidar, some of the most advanced tech in the world is at their fingertips and they show genuine confusion and concern oftentimes when faced with these situations.
Something weird is going on. Something weird enough to scramble multi-million dollar military assets aboard one of the United States Navy's biggest and most advanced warships.
Thing is, when you take all those crazy advanced sensors and input and put them into a computer, and then drop it all in the chaos of a real world environment, there's always going to be anomalies that completely skew the shit out of what you see, even these days. It doesn't surprise me that we see UFOs tbh, it'd be weird if we didn't almost.
Solar on
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Metzger MeisterIt Gets Worsebefore it gets any better.Registered Userregular
I tend to give pilots a bit more credit with their reports just given the fact that they're all trained professionals in charge of millions of dollars of equipment and, like, they tend to be pretty good at their jobs! Maybe that just comes from living in a military town/my grandpa used to be a NAVY aviator.
The fact is that UFOs will always be sighted - but people forget that the U stands for Unidentified. People love to assume they're all extraterrestrial in origin because that's provocative and stimulating but the vast majority are just weather oddities or reflections of light or whatever other sort of extremely unlikely combination of events lead to instruments reading/pilot seeing something odd.
EDIT: And while someone might go "oh but didn't you say the odds of those things happening is extremely low," I will say "yes but better odds than extraterrestrials with FTL capabilities, given the lack of verifiable evidence of such"
edit: this isn't really worth arguing about i guess! YOU'RE ALL IN ON IT ANYWAY! YOU'RE REPTILIANS! OR ROBOTS! OR ROBOREPTILES!
Or Wakandans, UFOs dont necesarily have to be extraterrestrial, they could be made by a secret civilization with far more advanced technology.
If I had to guess, they probably stil wear greek attires for some reason.
Yes, with a quick verbal "boom." You take a man's peko, you deny him his dab, all that is left is to rise up and tear down the walls of Jericho with a ".....not!" -TexiKen
The fact is that UFOs will always be sighted - but people forget that the U stands for Unidentified. People love to assume they're all extraterrestrial in origin because that's provocative and stimulating but the vast majority are just weather oddities or reflections of light or whatever other sort of extremely unlikely combination of events lead to instruments reading/pilot seeing something odd.
EDIT: And while someone might go "oh but didn't you say the odds of those things happening is extremely low," I will say "yes but better odds than extraterrestrials with FTL capabilities, given the lack of verifiable evidence of such"
The aliens don't have FTL, they've been here the whole time. Hiding
The fact is that UFOs will always be sighted - but people forget that the U stands for Unidentified. People love to assume they're all extraterrestrial in origin because that's provocative and stimulating but the vast majority are just weather oddities or reflections of light or whatever other sort of extremely unlikely combination of events lead to instruments reading/pilot seeing something odd.
EDIT: And while someone might go "oh but didn't you say the odds of those things happening is extremely low," I will say "yes but better odds than extraterrestrials with FTL capabilities, given the lack of verifiable evidence of such"
The aliens don't have FTL, they've been here the whole time. Hiding
The real aliens were the friends we made along the way... Wait, I'm on to you all now
The fact is that UFOs will always be sighted - but people forget that the U stands for Unidentified. People love to assume they're all extraterrestrial in origin because that's provocative and stimulating but the vast majority are just weather oddities or reflections of light or whatever other sort of extremely unlikely combination of events lead to instruments reading/pilot seeing something odd.
EDIT: And while someone might go "oh but didn't you say the odds of those things happening is extremely low," I will say "yes but better odds than extraterrestrials with FTL capabilities, given the lack of verifiable evidence of such"
The aliens don't have FTL, they've been here the whole time. Hiding
I'm really disappointed that flat earth has displaced the hollow earth conspiracy theories.
Posts
If you see something like PSTD as a mental illness, then deep conspiracy theorists are definitely mentally ill.
PTSD is probably a worse comparison than depression adjacent personality and emotional disorders, it's sometimes associated with delusions but tend to be more focused and not invented or adopted but built from the trauma.
Delusional disorders are a wide category, though, and there's several books and volumes of papers linking them to conspiracy theories and analogous behaviors.
Capgras and Fregoli syndromes involve facial recognition, and have been loosly linked to things like reptilian/replicant/other replacement theories. A paper a few years ago identified a strong pattern suggesting Fregoli syndrome in a few accounts that drive a lot of the crisis actor theories but the only person they got to actually see backed out at the last second - a common theme in this and other mental illness research, actual diagnoses require consent that patients are prone to withdraw as it is, but moreso when they know a journal paper may be forthcoming.
Paranoid schizophrenia and the manic side of bipolar are both associated with delusions, and the most common are persecution delusions and control delusions, both of which have actually been linked with conspiracy theories and CT-like behavior observationally, individuals sharing their delusion with each other will sometimes concoct more detailed and coherent shared versions, or will come into dispute and develop more detailed conflicting ones to argue about.
Control delusion (the delusional belief that some seen or unseen entity has total control over one's life, environment, world, etc) has some interesting parallels with conspiracy theories because it can be coped with by the equally delusional belief that by knowing who is in control you are already somehow thwarting them.
If you go through a CT forum for any length you will see a number have been diagnosed with a delusional disorder of some sort, usually after family convince them to seek help. Often they talk about from treatment when they believe it threatens their CT beliefs, their doctor now becoming part of the conspiracy, not trying to help but to pacify. There's a good reason why so many wildly disconnected theories also somehow end up including a direct mistrust of mental health.
My first degree was in this shit, so be careful who you say doesn't know shit. It wasn't a good time and there's a reason why I went back for a different bachelor's after a year in PTSD research and prefer not to talk about the first, but don't mistake me for the guy who had a semester of PSY100 and knows how everything works now. Yes, many people who are mentally ill are not "that crazy" - a patronizing sentence if I've ever heard one, but it gets the point I guess. Most simply have compulsive behaviors.
Millions of people in the world, however, do not perceive reality normally. They may believe that people they see on the street are not human, or abruptly start believing somebody close to them is no longer the same person. They might keep seeing the same face on many people. Some see some pattern in the people or cars or even animals passing them and believe they are being surveiled or stalked. Some simply believe a simple or complex falsehood but have reinforced that belief to the point that their whole life and sense of self is consumed by it, like a secular version of religious ecstacism.
It rankled, to say the least.
Edit: I mean, what you led with was basically “I know that saying conspiracy theorists are mentally ill puts people off, but I’m gonna say it anyway”, full stop. No real expansion of the point.
I suspect that for some of this (but probably not all, not even most) it's because if you're religious and then become an atheist then, well, you've already accepted that one thing you were taught all your life is a lie perpetuated by large organizations. And if that was a lie, what else is? You clearly can't just trust the people in power to tell you what's right (they lied about God et. al., after all!), so you need to be, well, sceptical.
In some cases they might also already be anti-intellectual through a conservative Christian upbringing (climate change isn't real, evolution is a myth, young earth creationism etc.) and so they might bring that mindset forward without throwing it out alongside their former religion.
It doesn't help that there's a mild distaste for scientists out there already: think about every joke you've heard about how butter flip-flops between being healthy and unhealthy, or every sneer you've heard at the idea that dinosaurs had feathers. It's easy to see how this can escalate to a general "can't trust those scientists" mindset, especially when you bring in stuff like tobacco companies sponsoring studies that show that tobacco has no ill side effects (see? you can't trust them!)
Also, of course, racism is areligious. The fear of the Other seems regretfully universal.
Humans are wired to try and find patterns and categorize things. And studies have shown that intelligent people are better at convincing themselves they're right even after being confronted with contradictory information.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
I think some of this probably comes with what started the move from faithful to atheist. Some people have a crisis of faith when they feel God failed them, others when they can't muster the cognitive dissonance to believe one thing on Sunday and another the rest of the week, others because they are fed up with their fellow faithful.
Basically, whether their core problem is with Christ, Christianity, or Christians will, I think, make you a different kind of atheist.
I had been a fan of simply calling myself a "skeptic" for a while, but that term has become tainted in the last ~10 years with the rise and radicalization of skeptical YouTubers, podcasters, etc.
If nothing else, the radicalization of the so-called New Atheists goes to show that religion isn't to blame for people throughout history holding abhorrent viewpoints. It was merely the most readily-available way for them to justify their viewpoints.
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
My point here isn't related to the symptoms, it's the fact that it develops entirely from "non-medical" factors. You don't need to be mentally ill to develop PTSD, but once you have you arguably have developed a mental illness. In the same way, you don't need to be mentally ill to become a conspiracy theorist, but once you've dived in deep enough you're arguably mentally ill.
I'm pretty sure that the entire corpus of copyright law disagrees with you, Alex.
Wha-?
He's not taking anyone's free speech dipshit, he's protecting his artistic property! You weren't even trying to use it under fair use or some noble non-profit reason, but trying to exploit for a goddamn monies ARGARBAGRLAAAAA!
I just can't even with this fucking guy.
Battlenet ID: MildC#11186 - If I'm in the game, send me an invite at anytime and I'll play.
The problem is that it's a stupid argument that will nonetheless resonate with a certain sort who has never really thought critically about freedom of speech. He's playing to the peanut gallery - and unfortunately, Jones is good at that.
Free speech in the WESTERN world, he is talking to a very specific audience, this guy has layers of dogwhistling.
And basically everyone else, as the other down side.
He won't win. The entire corpus of copyright law is against him. This isn't a "nobody beats Big Mouse" thing, it's a "that's...that’s not how this works" thing. But, there are people who don't understand copyright law that his slide dogwhistle will call to.
Yemeni fighters have detained and imprisoned a vulture for suspected espionage.
Nelson is a Bulgarian Griffon Vulture with a satellite tracker on his leg, one of 14 tagged for tracking and conservation efforts. He was believed dead last November shortly after crossing into Yemen. It turns out his tracker got him arrested for spying.
He is now in the hands of a local conservationist who's treating him for a broken wing, neck injury, abrasions from being tied up, and weight loss from being starved. In a few weeks he will hopefully be released and will get the fuck out of Yemen.
So the main thing that's interesting for me is that it seems that there have been multiple, reliable cases of unidentified UFOs that don't seem to follow known technology.
They were assuming they were seeing something the size of a fighter aircraft seen from a great distance. It turned out to be a drone a few hundred feet away, when they turned towards it, they just flew right over it and it crashed in their rotor wash and was recovered during the investigation.
UFO is Unidentified Flying Object which just means “we aren’t sure what it is” but everyone takes to mean alien spaceship.
-Indiana Solo, runner of blades
Debate day arrives. We do our two minute opening, which we were very pleased with. Then our opponents start their opening by throwing something across the room. "Can anyone identify that object? That object that just flew across the room? Would it be fair to say that was an unidentified flying object?"
Fffffffffffffffff....
Something weird is going on. Something weird enough to scramble multi-million dollar military assets aboard one of the United States Navy's biggest and most advanced warships.
Its not so weird if you consider that pilots are high as balls on speed, or as they call it the go pill.
Infrared cameras do speed, do they? Radar systems out there gettin cranked out and hittin the club?
You've found the real conspiracy! No one is supposed to know! You know too much!
edit: i will fully acknowledge the drug problems in the armed forces tho, i used to live in Cheyenne, aka "that one place where all the nuclear missile technicians cheat on their tests and snort adderall"
Thing is, when you take all those crazy advanced sensors and input and put them into a computer, and then drop it all in the chaos of a real world environment, there's always going to be anomalies that completely skew the shit out of what you see, even these days. It doesn't surprise me that we see UFOs tbh, it'd be weird if we didn't almost.
EDIT: And while someone might go "oh but didn't you say the odds of those things happening is extremely low," I will say "yes but better odds than extraterrestrials with FTL capabilities, given the lack of verifiable evidence of such"
Rock Band DLC | GW:OttW - arrcd | WLD - Thortar
Ball lightning is more of a theory than a real explanation, as far as I know.
Or Wakandans, UFOs dont necesarily have to be extraterrestrial, they could be made by a secret civilization with far more advanced technology.
If I had to guess, they probably stil wear greek attires for some reason.
The aliens don't have FTL, they've been here the whole time. Hiding
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The real aliens were the friends we made along the way... Wait, I'm on to you all now
I'm really disappointed that flat earth has displaced the hollow earth conspiracy theories.