Current Events > Remember when conspiracy theorists were mocked and derided?

(+) Yeah! (+)

And then they randomly gained in number and volume despite still being laughably wrong and stupid?

Feels bad man

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I remember when conspiracies were fun nonsense like jfk was assassinated by mole people with laser guns

Yeah, well, blame the Internet, I guess.

We got almost eight Billion people on the planet and all the crazies can contact each other quick, easy and 24/7.

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I feel like it's because this narrative arose that was like "they're wrong but they're all potential scientists that are being rejected by the norm and being further alienated by that rejection". Some might be swayed to less fallacious ways of thinking but some people are so far down the rabbit hole that they're convinced they're right, and they can and will pull as many people down with them as they can.

Letting blatant bullshit have a platform has let the proponents of that bullshit lure more people in. The idea of gently nudging people towards the ideas and techniques we accept as factually correct is nice, but it's just led to the most twisted fuck-ups either manipulating those practices to justify their blatant bullshit and lend it an air of credance, or further radicalised them against the scientific majority for going so far against what they believe to be fact.

A narrative arose asking us to treat them with compassion and understanding, and the biggest con artists of the pseudoscience movement used that goodwill to take a shit in science's mouth and radicalize more people.

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CouldBeAnAlt posted...

I remember when conspiracies were fun nonsense like jfk was assassinated by mole people with laser guns

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CouldBeAnAlt posted...

I remember when conspiracies were fun nonsense like jfk was assassinated by mole people with laser guns

As I've gotten older, shit like that has gotten less innocent to me. Like idk if this is just me applying modern rhetoric to stupid loony bullshit from the past that's not necessarily that deep, but when I hear "mole people with laser guns", I can't help but hear an intended message of "Jews with top-secret weapons of the elite".

We know that terms like "mole person" and "elite" can be anti-Semitic dogwhistles, and we also know that anti-semitism has existed throughout human history - Jewish people have been a scapegoat of the ruling class for dozens of generations at least. There were anti-semitic conspiracy theories years before WWII that might have introduced those nested meanings to terms like "elite" and "mole person", and those meanings could have survived into the 60's as opposed to being re-introduced to the discourse by the first wave of neo-Nazis. After all, even through WWII, America was a deeply anti-semitic nation - it's not much of a stretch for this prejudice to survive in fringe groups, even through the era where the horrors of Nazi Germany were still being extolled.

The question is whether the conspiracy crowd of the 60s and beyond were using "mole person" exclusively to refer to a subterranean group of cryptids, or if there was an effort to conflate the idea of an underground race of masterminds committing murder to control the population with Jewish people.

That can of worms has been opened. I'd like to go back to a point in time where I hear "mole person with a ray gun" and say "wow that's such a silly idea", but with the reality of the situation - with the deeply prejudiced underbelly of conspiracy theories and anti-science movements that speak in nested terms like that - I can't separate a silly word from a nefarious intended meaning that hate groups are using to this day. Conspiracy theories just aren't that innocent any more, because I'm not that innocent any more.

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