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The Onion buys rightwing conspiracy theory site Infowars with plans to make it ‘very funny, very stupid’
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 14 Nov 2024
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They should harness the crazy for good. Make conspiracy theory-sounding stories, but make them factual and get people to take positive action.
"They created chemicals you can inject into the bloodstream that keeps them from getting the Measels."
"The overlords in their golden towers want to tell you who you are and aren't allowed to love."
The vaccine one would probably be better as: “independent thinking researchers developed a means of using your own body’s immune response to prevent diseases with a mere injection. Some of them even refused to patent it. But then the media started lying to you about them, trying to get you to stop accepting these miracles? Why, just so some companies could make more money selling you proprietary snake oil to keep you comfortable while you’re sick.”
Coming from a reformed conspiracy theorist, that was frighteningly good.
Thanks! The trick is to understand the emotions they aim for and the baseline rhetorical tricks.
Conspiracies stem from knowing you’re getting fucked, but that most people are good. It’s an attempt to find explanations when the world feels wrong. Someone did it. You just have to sell the truth in the tone that they’re used to hearing. Especially with vaccines where the truth does sound like a free lunch, until you realize that it’s governments and insurers paying for vaccines and it saves them and the economy money by you not getting sick or needing stronger medicines. These are the two groups that desperately want you to exercise, eat right, and quit smoking
And then there's ones that don't have much of a modern-day effect but are still stupid. My English teacher truly believes that the Titanic was sunk on purpose for insurance purposes.
She also believes that a Secret Service agent might have shot JFK
Those too are an attempt to create order out of a scary and chaotic world. The JFK assassination theories are often used as the textbook example of that fact.
While it is true that JFK’s family was heavily involved in the mob and that he wasn’t the favorite of the out of control CIA, the evidence we have after many eyes on it for decades asserts one thing: a man by the name of Lee Harvey Oswald was an exceptional marksman in his time in the marines, and had a tendency towards political radicalization that wasn’t particularly directed, and so in an attempt to curry favor with the Cuban government (he was a communist but had been disillusioned by the USSR), but without their permission (they would have asked him not to), he hid in a book repository along the route of the presidential motorcade, laid in wait, and when the time came fired two shots directly into the skull of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. He like every successful presidential assassin acted alone and based on political grievances.
And the fact is, that that’s terrifying to a lot of people. One person changed so much with one act. Conspiracy theories here are an attempt to find an alternative explanation for something so jarring. One marine sniper shouldn’t be able to, but the cia or the mob or Cuba or the ussr… A group, conspiring should be able to, and they’re shadowy and hiding the truth…
The fact is that the difference between the Kennedy assassination and the attempted assassinations of trump are of marksmanship and chance, not of conspiracy. Nobody says the Reagan assassin wasn’t working alone because he failed