Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat Jan 13, 2024 5:36 pm
phyllo wrote: ↑Sat Jan 13, 2024 5:19 pm
Conspiracy theories start with the deliberate propagation of misinformation by movements such as QAnon. Someone has an agenda, and manipulating as many people as possible by feeding them lies is part of a strategy to further it; this much is obvious. In whose interests is it for people to believe the Covid conspiracy theory, and what could the nature of those interests possibly be? This is what puzzles me. Maybe I'm looking for something that isn't there; perhaps the purpose is to create social disorder merely for its own sake.
Conspiracy theories don't require lies. They merely require attributing reasons for events to individuals or groups with some particular intent. These reasons may be correct or incorrect.
Lies are ancillary.
We also have a new phenomenon today: the use of the phrase "conspiracy theory" to damn any criticism before the actual reasons for it can be produced. The term "conspiracy theory" has now become a tool of obscurantism by the mass media, just as "disinformation" has become the excuse for silencing dissent in other areas. In both cases, the point is to shut down the critique before it can even begin, and discredit the discussion before it can be had, without having to justify the silencing or censorship beyond that it's preventing a theory allegedly already known to be hair-brained to be aired.
Example: The fact of Joe Biden's cognitive decline has been abundant and impossible not to recognize. Let's face it: at this point, not just Republicans but Democrats too are very apprehensive about Biden's possible re-election. And a rudimentary cognitive test performed on Biden would show whether or not such anxiety was even remotely justified...but the Democrats will not allow such a test to be made, or made public.
Did the Democrats know, during the last election, that they were putting up a cognitively impared candidate? Of course they did. We all knew.
And yet "joseph biden" still won, and/or still got in.
Which could say a lot about the people in that country who voted at that time.
But I guess choosing between one who is cognitively impaired in another one form, from the cognitive impairment of the one they voted for, did not leave the voters 'much', to choose from at all.
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat Jan 13, 2024 5:36 pm
We just had to see the man on TV for five minutes, and every one of us could see there was something badly wrong with the guy.
But which, obviously, must of been 'less badly wrong' from the 'other guy'.
Otherwise why was 'that one' chosen, after all?
But what the voters cannot blame, other than "themselves", is that they had 'chosen' those two obviously and very clearly 'cognitively impaired' human beings to be the only last two left to be able to choose from.
Which, actually, does show and say a lot about the people in that country, who vote.
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat Jan 13, 2024 5:36 pm
However, that has not at all stopped the defenders of that choice from claiming any statement about Biden's incompetence is a "conspiracy theory." And that speaks to just how extreme the weaponized use of the term has become -- it's used to prevent a public discussion of the most powerful man in the world's mental competence, even when every last one of us knows he's got a problem.
The real 'problem' I see and observe here is;
Do you people, when this is being written, really consider and class one human being and especially that human being, over absolutely anyone else, as the so-called 'most powerful one in the world'?
If yes, then really?
Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat Jan 13, 2024 5:36 pm
That's a fair bit of power for a propagandistic term to have, isn't it?
If 'I' were 'you' I would, first, start off by having a discussion about how and why through 'cognition' some of you people class and/or consider that just one very little and very tiny human being in one very little and very tiny country on earth, in one very little and very tiny moment is supposedly 'the most powerful one in the world'?
Before I moved on to looking at other's 'cognitive impairments'.