I’m still a firm believer in some cryptids, UFO encounters, and JEFFREY EPSTEIN DIDN’T KILL HIMSELF

  • communistthrowaway69 [none/use name]
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    4 years ago

    There is no codified way to analyze "conspiracy theories."

    Everything in the "confirmed" category was, for the vast majority of the relevance of the theory, firmly in crackpot territory. You had to aggressively believe it anyway, in spite of the lack of (official) evidence and all the consent manufacturing going on.

    This image has one foot in the door in liberalism, in the idea that there is a trustworthy consensus hegemony that's just rooted in "the facts" and has no agenda.

    A better tool is just to accept that everyone has an agenda, implicit or explicit, conscious or unconscious, individual or institutional. You have to just analyze those and make a judgment call.

    At the end of the day, you just have to pick who you trust, and see how much explanatory power the theory has.

    You'll still be wrong all the time, but you'll at least be empowered to make decisions without being crippled by some phony fucking consensus.

    • joshieecs [he/him,any]
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      4 years ago

      I saw the creator of this chart present it a TikTok video (posted on Twitter, naturally). She was not intending to create a consensus about any particular conspiracy theories, she was writing a paper on conspiracy theories and wanted to come up with some kind of reasonably coherent system to do so. And this is what she came up with. So whether you agree or disagree with her illustrative examples, the taxonomy she is presenting is, in my opinion, quite clever.

      The idea would be, if you should find yourself wanting to categorize conspiracy theories, here is a way you could do it. Create your own chart and put the conspiracies where you subjectively think they belong.

      But I as far as I can tell, these are all categorized exactly where I would have put them. Except maybe Hollow Earth. The old Agartha legends probably belongs in the pink zone, but I reckon she means "Nazis Underground in Antarctica" variant of the of Hollow Earth.