The psychology of conspiracy theory believers

Conspiracy theories, by which I mean beliefs that lack any solid evidentiary foundation but are believed by a surprisingly large number of people who sustain them by postulating elaborate explanations that involve powerful people and organizations colluding to hide what they believe is ‘the truth’, have been around for a long time. The internet has enabled much greater awareness of such beliefs, in addition to allowing them to flourish.

Naturally, this has provoked curiosity about the phenomenon, such as what makes a particular theory catch hold of the imagination of some people, what kinds of people are drawn to them, what kind of dangers they pose, and how they might best be combated.

Not all conspiracy theories are pernicious and need to be countered. Some are mostly harmless and can be ignored. The belief that the moon landing was faked, for example, does not do much harm. Neither does the belief that the Earth is flat. The belief that the 9/11 attacks were an inside job also seems largely innocuous. This is because the people who are thought to. be engaged in a conspiracy to hide the truth are not clearly identifiable or are so big (‘the government’ or ‘the deep state’) that particular individuals and communities are not placed at risk.
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When does Elon Musk do any work?

Nick Robins-Early spends an entire day reading Elon Musk’s tweets just for that day. He says that reading just the ones that make it into the news do not do justice to how extreme and frenzied her really is.

Over the next 24 hours, Musk will post over 145 times about a range of obsessions, projects and grievances to his 195 million followers. He will share anti-immigrant content, election conspiracies and attacks against the media. He will exchange tweets with far-right politicians, conservative media influencers and sycophantic admirers. He will send a litany of one-word replies that say “yeah”, “interesting” or simply feature a cry-laughing emoji.

You have to read the article to see how weird Musk is.

This obsession with tweeting seems really unhealthy to me. It looks like an addiction. Even if Musk spends only a couple of minutes reading and reacting to tweets, that already amounts to about five hours.

Furthermore he has businesses to run. Surely they would benefit from him spending his time dealing with them? Or maybe not. Given his mercurial and impulsive nature, maybe the businesses and the people working in them are glad that he is not paying much attention to them and just letting them do their work

The source of the false Haitian rumor apologizes

I am not active on social media but do have an account on Nextdoor, that connects people living in a small geographical area and thus supposedly consists of one’s neighbors. In theory it helps people get to know their neighborhood by sharing information about it. I do not check the feeds that often but occasionally see posts where people report something that they ‘heard’ about and asking if anyone else has too. Some of these posts contain speculations that are bigoted or at least sail close to that line. Sometimes other people call them out on it but often it just disappears into the ether. Some posters seem to see themselves as small-time investigative journalists and deliver ‘scoops’ by being the first to relay some juicy morsel of information, often in the form of a rumor.

Apart from so-called ‘influencers’ who use social media to try to reach huge audiences as part of their business model, most social media users tend to use it largely to communicate with friends, family, and affinity groups of people who share similar interests. This can give a feeling of intimacy, that you are only talking to a small group, and thus one might be more inclined to spread baseless gossip, not realizing that your network is connected to the much larger internet and could, given the right conditions, explode your post into the general public consciousness, if it is picked up and relayed by people with much larger audiences.

That seems to be what happened with the ugly story about Haitians in Springfield, OH eating people’s cats and dogs. The person who first posted a rumor without any evidence on Facebook now regrets what she did.
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The puzzling allure of extreme diets

I was astonished to read of yet another new dietary fad that seems to have attracted adherents. They call themselves ‘carnivores’ and that label alone should give you some idea about what their diet consists of. I expected a variation of the high-protein, low-carbohydrate diets (such as Atkins) that were in vogue some decades back. But I was not quite prepared for how much more limited and extreme this diet was. It consists almost exclusively of beef, bacon, butter, and eggs. Just reading it made me feel queasy, even though I eat each of the items. It was the thought of eating almost only those four things that made me feel sick.

For some reason that I cannot quite fathom, there are people who are drawn to the idea that what most of us think is a good nutrition habit of eating balanced diets that avoid highly processed foods (food writer Michael Pollan memorably encapsulated the idea in just seven words: “Eat food. Mostly plants. Not too much.”) is a myth foisted upon us by government and scientists and the food industry, and that they have discovered an alternative healthy way of eating that only they know about and now wish to promote. There seems to be something appealing about seeing oneself as part of a small community of people who have special knowledge that the vast majority of people are unaware of. It seems to be even more appealing if the ideas are so extreme that ordinary people would never have thought of it.
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Hating on the Haitians

During the debate, creepy Donald Trump lied about many things but the only time that I actually slapped my forehead in astonishment was when he brought up the story about Haitian immigrants eating the pet cats and dogs of people in the small town of Springfield, Ohio. There are some wild things that he regales his followers at his rallies that are utterly preposterous (windmills causing cancer, children being given gender changing surgery in schools without their parents’ knowledge, talking of Hannibal Lecter as if he were a real person, being forced to choose between being electrocuted by the batteries in electric boats or being eaten by sharks) that I felt that even he would not bring up at the debate as being too nutty for anyone but his devoted cult.

I had heard about this Springfield rumor that had been debunked even before the debate and I placed it in the category as too extreme for prime time and could not believe that he would bring it up during the debate. But he did. Clearly the moderators had anticipated that he might do this and immediately fact-checked him, saying that the city manager had said that there was no credible evidence of this. But that did not stop weird JD Vance from doubling down and saying that his office had received calls from people asserting this. Since anyone can call and say anything, that is an extremely low bar for spreading such malicious and dangerous rumors that could well result in crazy people harming Haitians, not just in Springfield but across the country.
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The morning after the debate

The reviews are in and the general consensus supports my own immediate reaction last night which was that Kamal Harris cleaned creepy Donald Trump’s clock in the debate. At many points she was openly laughing at his nonsense.

Stephen Colbert gave his hot take soon after the debate ended and did a pretty good job at identifying the key points.

Jon Stewart also gave gave his hot take but it was not as good as Colbert’s.


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Harris clobbers creepy Trump in debate

As I said, these debates are all about optics and not substance and it was clear that Kamala Harris won hands down.

She appeared calm and confident and assured, smiling even when he made the most outrageous statements, while he looked angry all the time. For those seeing her closely for the first time, she looked, well, presidential. But most importantly, she controlled the debate, keeping him on the defensive by trolling him and he could not resist the bait, and ended up talking about his own vulnerabilities.

Perhaps the starkest difference came at the end in the closing remarks when she delivered a message of hope and uplift and unity, making her case about the future and comparing that with his message of gloom and divisiveness, ending by saying that we would not be going back to the past.

To add to a terrible night for him, after the debate Taylor Swift endorsed Harris, signing it “Childless Cat Lady”.

In her post announcing her support for Kamala Harris, Taylor Swift said that she had been spurred to act after the Trump campaign implied that she supported him, and also was not pleased with a certain remark made by his running mate, JD Vance.

“Recently I was made aware that AI of ‘me’ falsely endorsing Donald Trump’s presidential run was posted to his site. It really conjured up my fears around AI, and the dangers of spreading misinformation. It brought me to the conclusion that I need to be very transparent about my actual plans for this election as a voter. The simplest way to combat misinformation is with the truth,” Swift wrote.

She signed her post, in which she posed with a long-haired cat, “Childless Cat Lady”. That’s something Vance once said, and which is not going away

This will enrage him and he will likely respond (you know that he cannot ignore any slight) by saying that she is a terrible singer and that the crowds at his rallies are bigger than at her concerts.

You can watch the full debate.

Getting under creepy Trump’s skin in today’s debate

Given that nowadays campaigns can put vast amounts of policy proposals and details on the internet, debates are not the place to unveil new ones or discuss them in depth. At this stage of the election season, debates are unlikely to cause voters to switch allegiances. There is the persistent belief in the media that there are these genuinely undecided voters who look to the debates to help them make a choice. But such people are probably very few. Most ‘undecided’ voters are already leaning towards one candidate or another and the best one can do is to retain them.

The main goal of these debates is to energize supporters of your candidate and depress the emotions of those of your rival. The June 27th debate caused many Democrats to feel that they were going to lose with Joe Biden as their candidate, so in that sense creepy Donald Trump achieved that goal. The problem was that he was too successful in that Biden dropped out and was replaced by Kamala Harris who has completely turned that enthusiasm gap around. Creepy Trump cannot be blamed for not anticipating this possibility, given that it was unprecedented. I had long ago given up the idea that the Democratic nominee could be anyone other than Biden and had resigned myself to the possibility that, bar some kind of miracle, he would slowly drift into defeat in November. But such a miracle did occur.
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‘Sugar Daddies’ and ‘Sugar Babies’

We are living at a time when a wider range of human relationships is emerging from the shadows and becoming open. While they may not be considered acceptable by every segment of society, they have at least moved away from being criminalized . There are still areas, such as sex work, where there is still a wide range of reactions, from legalization to social disapproval to criminal prosecution.

Brynn Valentine writes about another kind of relationship that has emerged from the shadows and that is between what are known as ‘Sugar Daddies’ and ‘Sugar Babies’, archaic terminology that is an unfortunate carryover from a long-ago era when such relationships were seen as shameful and rightly belongs in the linguistic trash heap along with things like ‘kept woman’.
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Getting past the debate hype

Given the dramatic fallout from the first presidential debate on June 27th that resulted in Joe Biden dropping out, there his a great deal of media hyping about the one to be held tomorrow (Tuesday the 10th) at 9:00pm Eastern time. The usual expectations game is being played, with each side boosting expectations for the opponent so that anything other than a boffo performance can be portrayed as a loss.

I will watch it but do not expect anything dramatic to happen. Kamala Harris seems like someone who is disciplined and on message and is unlikely to get rattled. Creepy Donald Trump will be his usual self, constantly lying and making all manner of unfounded assertions. Harris has already preemptively said that she expects creepy Trump to lie a lot and I hope she says so again early and often during the debate. What I will be watching for is how unhinged creepy Trump’s attacks will be.
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