why do i hate that artist thing that people keep posting on my facebook so much? why am i such a jerk?

News Trolls.

these people are so dumb and sad and oblivious i try not to be too mad at them

but yeah what a horrible hobby

I'm just not used to it cropping up with people that I either know IRL or are connected to them. This girl I met recently at a wedding, who'd just posted a pretty intelligent comment on gender constructs hours earlier, posts the video LEGITIMATELY asking "what do you think" (uhm, that it's retarded), only to get a reply of "makes you think" from their friends.

here's a rundown of it from inside the paranoidosphere (imo)

http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2012/12/facebook-purges-political-activists.html

(fwiw barry ritholz reruns washingtonsblog shit all the time, wtf is with that)

already got the "Snopes is invalid" argument from that troll, too. There's a few angles they play, either that they're in the pockets of Liberals, or the new one, which is that they're "only a husband and wife team with no investigative experience". It's great circular reasoning. I feel like playing that one clip from the psychologist in Terminator to them....except he turned out to be real so fuck that.

It's interesting to imagine that the gov't is powerful and coordinated enough to orchestrate this sweeping conspiracy through coordinating the actions of hundreds of thousands of public and private citizens, yet is unable to simply delete your conspiracy post on Facebook.

barry ritholz is kinda dumb

sometimes he posts good links tho

quick, someone post another un-truther related stupid JPG you saw today so I can forget about this crap.

There must be a deluge of Community memes today, right?

its really kind of amazing how big this conspiracy shit has gotten, its got to have a hold to some extent on like a third of the country

I would like to point out that every single living organism on earth is as much the product of "3.8 billion years of evolutionary success" as I am. So, if I lay my eggs under your skin, and they hatch, travel through the bloodstream to your brain and begin to eat it, I don't want to hear any complaining.

http://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1314902446p5/545.jpg

“Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stupendous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo---which, given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of all time. Everyone and everything that wasn't a stupendous badass was dead.”

- Neal Stephenson

If anything, sea turtles should have greater bragging rights because they had things right all along

i remember the first time a friend of mine brought this conspiracy shit up like it was a real thing, we were in a mexican restaurant in ft collins and and elderly man there with his wife asked me to stop yelling and swearing

If there's one thing science and religious evangelists can both agree on, it's that the human race is special and the pinnacle of creation! Go us!

Pre-internet and early internet days, these types of people were no less omnipresent, but you could ignore them easier because you weren't splattered with their BS.

unfortunately the internet has allowed ppl like this to construct meaningful-looking quote macros that, just for a second, make other ppl "think"

the only conspiracy nut i ever met was the husband of my old p0t dealer. he would literally scream and rave about all the people who wanted to 'take him down', and every day of his life was like a battle against all the scumbags of the world who had it out for him. he was also a proud rifle owner. he's all about Alex Jones now on FB, and is a truly frightening person.

imho these fuckers were way less omnipresent pre internet, internet has lead to a real flowering of this shit

It's been said before, but one huge downside of the Internet is that it has made it really easy for people whose views are alarming and dangerous to civil society to find each other, form communities, and convince themselves they are part of a movement rather than the isolated cranks they would be in the olden days. Granted, there were newsletters and other means to stay in touch with the larger kook network, but now, if you keep your head down at work and just soldier on til 5 PM, your entire social world can effectively consist of people on the lunatic fringe, who amplify, reinforce and radicalize your nascent nuttiness.

Which is all true of ILX too, I guess, but the collective project here is at least marginally more valuable to human existence.

thing is i dont think conspiracy nutterism can really be considered fringe anymore, thx to the 'net

Yeah the net has become this incredibly powerful tool for genuine fringe lunatics to rope in much larger numbers of mere stupid assholes.

i feel like yeah pre-net if you were 'alone' in your stupid beliefs you might eventually get over them, but the net only exacerbates them. of course on the flipside pre-net i'm sure a lot of marginalized folks like gay kids in small conservative communities etc didn't find others like them too.

in theory a lot of stuff is more easily disproven w/ the internet too, so I think the odds of someone moderately intelligent believing in fringe stuff goes down at the same time

the net is the best overall imho but it has some unfortunate side effects

The net and computers also allow ordinary jackasses to make much slicker propaganda. It used to be that conspiracy theories were mostly printed on bizarre-looking, badly xeroxed leaflets handed out by a bugeyed guy in Washington Square Park. Now you get well-edited youtube videos.

i think the mind of the conspiracy theorist readily dismisses enough hard evidence in favor of vaporous fantasies that i'm not sure even coherently disproving stupid notions will have any effect on a lot of them.

youtube particularly was huge for conspiracies, they like to communicate through videos, those prosumer production values convey legitimacy, loose change brought a lot of people into the fold

the odds of someone moderately intelligent believing in fringe stuff goes down at the same time

the internet has done some things to change my idea of what "intelligent" can mean

there are many types of intelligence!

Woah did all those people really get suddenly deactivated?! I don't think that's a good idea to just shut down dissent like that even if it is annoying and insensitive. And some of those people, like Amber Lyon, are actual journalists covering stuff like police crack-downs on Occupy groups and stuff and not just talk radio kooks. Makes FB look pretty bad IMO shutting down the pages of people who cover actual abuses of power from the government and not just theoretical moonbat ones.

i think you guys are underestimating how easily and widely distributed fringe stuff was in the pre-'net days. behold a pale horse was a bestseller

max otm

Or is actual documented FBI and local-PD infiltration of the Occupy movement in order to destabilize it just a wacko conspiracy you'd have to be an idiot to believe?

kicking all those people off looks FB look just fine imo

xp to max: yeah, erich von daniken and all that end too. people love weird shit! how seriously they take it, eh, idk if that can really be quantified. if anything the net makes the question of exact quantification more pressing.

god, mailed newsletters about stuff like this seem like the most unimaginably old-fashioned things ever now

I think the odds of like, 'someone on ilx' beliving something a little fringey about this or that because they were poorly informed and never really looked into it woulda been way higher in 1985 but who knows

makes those journalists look pretty bad to be associating with crackpots to begin with, imo

ilx was pretty weird in 1985, it's true

1 thing the web does thats new is create a self-reinforcing loop via search engines, people search for 'illuminati', illuminati content is created to fulfill that demand, which leads to more people seeing it, which leads to more people searching for it.

this is not unrelated to what goole is saying about quantifying it, like its hard to tell exactly how big the audience for this content is. if 8.5 million people have 'viewed' the sandy hook truth video, how many of them believe it, how many are gawking, how many are getting mad

i mean, i saw that post about FACEBOOK SILENCES PROMINENT POLITICAL CRITICS, and then the list turns out to be all the lizard people bilderburger chemtrails whackadoos

at first i was like... and then i lol'd

i think you guys are underestimating how easily and widely distributed fringe stuff was in the pre-'net days. behold a pale horse was a bestseller

― max, Wednesday, January 16, 2013 2:55 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

As someone actually alive back then, I have to disagree.

i think you guys are underestimating how easily and widely distributed fringe stuff was in the pre-'net days. behold a pale horse was a bestseller

― max, Wednesday, January 16, 2013 2:55 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

max otm

― mh, Wednesday, January 16, 2013 2:55 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDx1GLqvBO8

hey look this copy of loose change has 3m views

we have a delightful thread on the satanic ritual abuse conspiracies of the 1980s that people were sure reached into the government. pretty much every evangelical person, or middle-american person who was in contact with such, heard all about these illicit child abuse satanists

FACEBOOK SILENCES PROMINENT POLITICAL CRITICS

except this one

just my own observations obvs not quantified, and speaking as someone who did keep an eye on conspiracy stuff before the net blew up, theres no comparison as far as the popularity of this stuff before and after

underestimating the past doesn't necessarily mean overestimating the present

the prob is just how anecdotal everyones pre-net experience is

can you imagine how annoying facebook would be if 'jfk' came out now? ppl forget how many folks were taking that movie at face value. mainstream film critics were all 'he's onto something here'