What Do You Say to a Roanoke Truther? - The Daily Beast - 0 views
-
“Just as with the physical world, where hurricanes, tornadoes, and other ‘acts of God’ just happen, the same is true of the social world,” he wrote. “Some people just do things. They assassinate world leaders, act on poorly thought out ideologies, and leave clues at the scene of the crime. Too strong a belief in the rationality of people in general, or of the world, will lead us to seek purposive explanations where none exists.”
-
He says conspiracy theorists rely on what he calls “errant data,” or random minutiae within a terror attack or major event that can—and maybe should—go unexplained in reality. Those pushing conspiracies, however, seize on that unexplained info and attempt to explain it in full.It is an effort to connect every dot on the map—every blade of grass on the Grassy Knoll—even if some dots have nothing to with the larger event at all
-
Crisis class theory is a weirdly hopeful, terribly reductionist coping mechanism, a way to explain a world that can be unjust and needlessly cruel—but wouldn’t be if the “bad guys” controlling it all were vanquished.“There is surely some psychological comfort in believing that a horrific event like a mass murder of schoolchildren never really happened at all—that it was all fake,” he writes.
- ...1 more annotation...
