Conspiracy | Contrapoints (video, 2:40 hours) – Back in 2016, Contrapoints got a reputation for “deradicalizing” people who fell down the alt-right pipeline.  But for people who adopt conspiratorial modes of thinking, there’s virtually no hope.  And conspiracism is frightfully common even in “ordinary” times, when there isn’t an establishment political party outright promoting it.

My instinctive reaction to conspiracism is to identify where people on “my” side seem to slide into it.  Which is not necessarily helpful, but at least I feel like I have more power over it.

For example, I think about leftists who say that Trump’s economic policies are so absurdly bad that he must know they are bad, and he’s trying to crash the economy on purpose.  Okay, but is that what the typical Trump fan believes?  Because Trump is basically his own biggest fan.  If the typical Fox-viewing person can believe absurd things about tariffs, Trump can very well do so too.  Oh, of course it’s plausible that Trump is not high on his own supply of lies, that’s hardly wild conjecture.  It’s fine if people believe that, it ultimately doesn’t matter whether Trump is nefariously incompetent or incompetently nefarious.  But I’d ask, what attracts some people to the more conspiratorial hypothesis.

Indiana Jones and the Objective Existence of God | Jacob Geller (video, 28 min) – I’ve never actually seen these movies (and tbh they always looked like trash, sorry nerds).  But Jacob Geller talks about how the Christian God (as well as Shiva) obviously exist within the Indiana Jones universe.  But Indiana Jones still puts on airs of being a rational skeptic.  I guess Indiana Jones’ rationality is just an aesthetic attribute that the story uses to place him into a certain character archetype.

Let’s Tidy Up: A Little to the Left | Errant Signal (video, 5 min) – On the subject of cozy games that inadvertently trigger people, this short video discusses how A Little to the Left can be an OCD simulator.  The video also directly contrasts the game to Unpacking!  Different triggers for different folks…

Two Americas, one bank branch, and $50,000 cash | Bits about Money – A while ago, there was a story of someone being scammed out of $50,000 (which I remember hearing from Rebecca Watson).  This journalist found a few details about the story suspicious, particularly the way the bank just let her withdraw a large wad of cash with minimal review.  So they spent some time investigating what really happened… and ended up confirming the story as likely true.  An interesting story about the intricacies of banking and investigative journalism.

NaNoWriMageddon: The Whimper | Life’s a Gas – Until recently, I didn’t realize that NaNoWriMo was an actual organization, and I certainly didn’t realize how dysfunctional it was.  This story feels right out of r/HobbyDrama.  (Actually I just checked, there’s even more of this stuff on r/HobbyDrama.)