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    Related to a certain extent... Archived Message

    Posted by Raskolnikov on December 27, 2018, 11:25 am, in reply to "Re: Off Guardian on spread of anti-BDS legistlation"

    Another fraudian attack on "conspiracy theorists"...

    https://www.dumptheguardian.com/sport/2018/dec/27/stephen-curry-kyrie-irving-conspiracy-theories-nba

    Using a fairly tame reference to the moon landing "hoax" theory by two basketball players during a podcast (prefaced by them saying something like "that's one of those things weed smokers come out with like...", so it's clear they were not being totally serious) to go into their usual diatribe about anyone that doesn't agree with them:

    It used to be that conspiracy theorists hewed to a type. They wore tinfoil hats, babbled incoherently to themselves and, by and large, were little more than a nuisance to the onlookers with the curiosity or the compassion to engage them. But in the current post-truth era, where crowdsourced information has replaced peer-reviewed research and confirmation bias stands in for intellectual curiosity, the truthers congregate online to double down on old conspiracy theories (like the Earth being flat) and breathe life into new ones (like Hillary Clinton being a lizard person).

    The irony of them championing Bellend Higgins but now bemoaning crodsourced information when it's done by anyone not in their little gang is obviously lost on the author!

    To be fair later on (much later on) they do mention some "conspiracies" that were later proved to be true (Tuskegee Syphillis experiments and the Flint Water scandal) but notice the examples of "bad" conspiracies are always the way out ones "Icke Lizards" and Flat Earth.

    This is definitely one of the battlegrounds of modern media; as you mentioned above the "fake news" tag is the new communist (although with the ongoing Russiagate circus the two are often interchangeable) used to poison whichever well the term is applied to. "Conspiracy Theory/ist" is another one, that has perhaps even more conditioning applied to it, given that it has been used for what, fifty or sixty years now?

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