<html><head><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body dir="auto">On Jun 27, 2020, at 8:01 AM, SR Ballard via extropy-chat <extropy-chat@lists.extropy.org> wrote:<br><div><div dir="ltr"><blockquote type="cite">Conspiracies never die. It might be bots but also conspiracies do this by themselves anyways.</blockquote></div><blockquote type="cite"><div dir="ltr"><br><div dir="ltr">SR Ballard</div></div></blockquote><br></div><div><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">I wouldn’t say they never die, but they do tend to stick around long past their debunking. Today, of course, it’s much easy for them to stick around given quick and easy access to them online.</span></div><div><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><br></span></div><div><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">I think there’s also more a conspiratorial mindset. People who have this to a large degree tend to be much more immediately accepting of a given conspiracy theory and tend to have very high bars for falsification. There seems to be some evidence of this given that people who believe one conspiracy theory often will be easy sell on others. (To be fair, though, conspiracy theories are fairly widespread — not relegated to the lunatic fringe or one section of the political spectrum or even to particular income or education levels.)</span><div style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><br></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">That said, I don’t mean to imply that there are no conspiracies. There definitely are, but there tend be much more mundane* and not global in reach.</div><div style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><br></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">By the way, again, I’d like to bring up Jesse Walker’s _The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory_. He goes over conspiracy theories from Colonial times to today in America. (I’d like to see a more global treatment because US-Americans certainly aren’t peculiar in this fashion.)<br><br><div dir="ltr"><div style="line-height: normal;"><div style="line-height: normal;"><span style="line-height: 20px;">Regards,</span></div><div style="line-height: normal;"><span style="line-height: 20px;"><br></span></div><div><div style="line-height: normal;"><span style="line-height: 20px;">Dan</span></div><div style="line-height: normal;"><span style="line-height: 20px;"> Sample my Kindle books at:</span></div><div style="line-height: normal;"><p style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">http://author.to/DanUst</span></p><p style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;"><br></span></p><p style="margin: 0px; font-stretch: normal; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal; font-family: Helvetica;"><span style="font-size: 12pt;">* Think of any bank job involving more than one person. Definitely a conspiracy, but not one involving world leaders or likely to change the fate of nations.</span></p></div></div></div></div></div></div></body></html>