Conspiracy Theories and meta chat

Is there a link between true crime and conspiracy? I know that loads and loads of people are into true crime and the overwhelming majority of them are gonna be completely fine (and I can enjoy a bit of true crime myself when it’s not really fucking grizzly or upsetting), but I had to cut off a friend last year because a true crime community on Facebook, mainly US based turned her anti covid Vax, and then from there she got into being convinced that most medication is fake. Specifically I stopped trying and closed the door on her when she started posting about the Tavistock v Bell case, saying kids are being made trans to hook them on medication for life. She seemed oddly pleased when I told her I’m not speaking to her again, like in some way she’d been proved right… Unpleasant. Anyway there’s another friend who had been going to true crime events with her irl for years, and she told me that the people she’d meet there had always had a huge element of that streak. She’d been convinced by them that Sandy Hook was fake until she made a dick of herself opening her gob in work and went and actually looked into it. I wonder if she just hit a bad group or if this is a wider thing.

1 Like

I don’t mean to dumb down what you said but I see it as a coping mechanism to deal with the absolute shitshow this world is. So I have sympathy rather than anger

3 Likes

I was just going to say this. My mum says stuff sometimes that I truly think she doesn’t 100% believe and can’t defend when challenged - but it’s a way of making sense of a world that she now struggles to understand that is changing so quickly from when she was younger.

6 Likes

Yep - my mum spent 65 years believing the world just turns and everyone does as they are told, and then the last 3 trying to convince me not to get a vaccine (even though she loaded me with them at birth)

Facebook.

1 Like

not read the thread yet, but it’s frustrating that people’s distrust leads them to fantastical, easily digestible stuff

also understandable because the real underhand stuff is a tangled headfuck that also kind of requires a person to dismantle their whole worldview, sense of self, etc

Epstein, Diana + Britney in with UFOs??

1 Like

Good thread.

The way I see it is that, until last century, religion was the ‘crutch’ that supported many people in this random world. The overload of information and a general move away from organised religion created a vacuum that has been filled by conspiracy theories. Just people trying to make sense of the world.

9 Likes

I worked with someone who before our work shut because of the pandemic kept going on about how it was going to kill us all. When it re-opened, he kept saying how it was all a hoax and he is so smart and so above it all. I think he just liked the sound of his own voice, as many of these people do.

4 Likes

yep @iamwiggy

just want to add that when my mum’s been in a particularly bad place (psychotic phases), there have been parallels with the patterns of thought + behaviour you see with folks who get deep into conspiracy theories

(she isn’t into conspiracy theories herself, fwiw)

the slippery slope from poor logic to tinfoil hatting is just another way in which society erodes our mental health, isn’t it?

2 Likes

heart of it is a failure to see that it’s mostly just chaotic, flawed individuals + that the wider sociological stuff is just emergent, patterns of behaviour

(you know I know you know all of that, just agreeing out loud :face_in_clouds: (what is this emoji))

wish kids were taught about assuming ignorance, falsifiability, etc, as a basis for all schooling or something

got to be more proactive in dismantling the narrative-first way of understanding

(please imagine these words were a coherent post)

We have questions!

I have no questions about UFOs!

I think I might?

2 Likes

what are your questions? :alien: :male_detective:

1 Like

I think there’s a lot of nuance out there too. I actually am halfway to wondering whether organisations like the CIA or FBI intentionally fan conspiracies to levels that make them seem utterly untenable via covert actors.

Once you have people going on about second shooters on the grassy knoll that somehow no one saw and ‘magic bullets’ and the rest, or indeed ‘jet fuel can’t melt steel beams’ you make it hard for anyone to try to dig into any actual hand someone in ‘the govt/deep state’ had in these proceedings, no matter how small, without looking like they are hugely delusional.

@Owensmaterob’s post here is sort of a classic example (and I’m not having a go man because it’s part of the thing)

Why is it always a package deal? I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who thinks, say, 9/11 was perpetrated by the US government but concedes that on balance, we probably did go to the moon a few times. Or that Covid is a hoax who doesn’t also think 9/11 was an inside job, etc etc

If you listen to @ghostalo’s podcast you can see how people can actually believe there are questions around 9/11 (say) without believing the other stuff you mention. But the majority of people are exactly as you describe and it helps to muddy those waters.

(I also think there’s a huge amount of chaos out there that affects things. E.g. if we imagine the idea the US Govt got wind of the 9/11 attacks happening and let it happen because they thought it would be useful as an excuse for war, then we can also accept they absolutely wouldn’t have expected it to result in two huge buildings falling and so many deaths. This is also part of why conspiracy stuff wigs out so much, I reckon, because no one really ever stops to think that decisions and consequences are very rarely going to be strongly controlled/expected.)

Anyway, I try to balance my cynicism with Occam’s Razor as much as possible and stay grounded.

ahhhhhhhhhhh sweet, adopting this one for sure :smiley:

1 Like

I need to do some googling but I seem to recall there is a documented case of this happening - I’ll butcher the details here but broadly, someone was sharing information about UFOs which may or may not have been extraterrestrial, or possibly experimental government craft. Either way, they were contacted by someone from the US government who basically said, “Yeah, you got us. We’re going to give you some more information” and then gave them a whole load of complete bunk info which they published, was instantly debunked, and discredited everything they’d done beforehand.

Prior to the Sandy Hook lawsuit I could actually have been convinced that Alex Jones was some kind of government plant but between the stories Jon Ronson has told and his actions during his various court cases (including the one where he claimed he was playing a character) I have no idea what to believe (which, again, would be exactly the point).

So yeah, I actually agree with you here. I guess I’m talking about people I’ve actually met IRL, which of course is a huge sampling error.

1 Like

Yeah I mean as I say, you are right in the sense that what you say definitely covers 99.99% of people maybe an even larger percentage.

I just wanted to highlight the edge cases. Typical tin foil stuff :wink:

1 Like

What’s the podcast you’re referring to please?