Inside the Mind of a Conspiracy Theorist

Discussion Open Forum
61

Let me add that although most of those we would call world-leading bio-science experts (actually, it’s what they call themselves) were involved in covering-up Covid’s origin, not all were.

The notable exceptions include Richard Ebright & Simon Wain-Hobson (longtime anti-GoF voices of reason) & members of the Twitter group, DRASTIC - a group which i’m well-acquainted with as a peripheral member.

In my opinion from the frontlines of 2020, the person who did the most (or equal most) to expose the Covid Conspiracy was DRASTIC co-founder, @billybostickson

62

I don’t know all of these names, but I know what happened.

63

We have more or less the same information, and my information tells me the above statement is false, so apparently either we have different definitions of all, or we have different definitions of same. I would hate to suggest we have different definitions of fact.

It was something I read a long time ago, not sure where. :idunno:

Actually it does, though. (I’m speaking generally here, not specifically of covid.) We have more data than ever before but have come into the state of having it very abruptly and still aren’t very good at making sense of it yet. This is changing, but not as fast as the increase in data has been.

True.

More than rumors, solid reports. But an experienced politician would be basically immune to that. “You can’t make an omelette…”

Which they did, the way they usually do but on a larger scale. :adhesive_bandage: :adhesive_bandage: :adhesive_bandage: As usual, the results were mostly crappy, but hey, they were still results! :rainbow:

Two things:

  1. Of course you (a politician or other leader type) don’t vilify people for making potentially helpful suggestions – you have entire committees and juicy consulting contracts for that very purpose – as long as they make them behind closed doors. If they openly say everything you’re doing is wrong, then you (a politician or leader) have a prima facie justification or “business case” for vilifying them. The hypothetical fact that they’re right doesn’t change that, unfortunately.

  2. Remember when people were labeled “soft on terror” for (essentially) being any less W-ish than W? Once a new orthodox position is established and is being sustained by mass hysteria, you may support it because you believe in it yourself, and you may support it because you’re an opportunist, but you also may support it out of fear of what will happen to you if you don’t. (You most likely have that fear even if your prime motivator is one of the other two.) You may become somewhat hysterical yourself, if not about the thing making the masses hysterical then about the fear for your own livelihood. Thus it can snowball without the kind of help you might think it needs if you’re looking at it from a perspective of “well sane people wouldn’t act like that”. Sane people by definition are not hysterical, and vice-versa.

But why would you be concerned about others? The others being, of course, the poor (or the suddenly-unemployed-and-therefore-staring-at-poverty). Isn’t the main point of believing in meritocracy as a law of the universe that it gives you the perfect excuse not to care about others and correspondingly the perfect excuse to use any means necessary to avoid being poor yourself? (Now where’s that dead horse emoji when I need it?..)

Going back to the data, I’m reminded of a certain opposition politician who said in the summer of 2021 that Vaccines Are Safe And Effective but added that mandates were unfeasible because they would be unconstitutional. She then did a 180 (the very next day iirc), apologizing and saying it was Wrong to talk about constitutional rights during a Pandemic. Why the sudden change? The conspiriolgical explanation, presumably, would be that the Wefluminati got to her. If they did, it was awfully fast and (arguably) completely unnecessary. The ruling party in the jurisdiction had a majority. She was not in a position to do anything about the issue. A far more plausible explanation would be that her party’s PR and polling consultants gave her the bad news that her base was furious about what she had said, which of course they were, because the people whose reactions would have been noticed that clearly that fast would be the phone zombies who spend all day on social media and therefore were the most affected by the hysteria. A better analysis would have taken other factors into consideration to determine whether or not doing a 180 was in the party’s interest as far as the next election was concerned, let alone its long term future, but as I said earlier, having high quantity data doesn’t mean you have high quality analysis.

64

Good grief. Really? I know we’re currently in a phase where history is being hurriedly rewritten, but I would not have expected this of you, @yyy. Give me an example of (say) one country that did not persecute “the unvaccinated” to a greater or lesser extent, or which did not have at least a transient obsession with masks, or which did not offer nonsensical “guidelines” to the public? Give me an example of one which said “OK, everyone, COVID is a bit of a problem, but we got this, and nobody needs to panic”? Sweden was halfway there. Several African countries wanted nothing to do with it (although, characteristically, they came up with a few substitute superstitions of their own). That was about all, I think, unless you saw something different?

I am not suggesting every country reacted identically. Each developed their own flavour of nonsense. But 99% of them dished up nonsense.

I can certainly agree with that (although I wouldn’t call it “data” - it’s mostly noise). This is an entirely different scenario to the excuse being claimed for Mao, though.

Yes. So now we come to the question of intent … and the kind of people who might actually get a kick out of breaking a few eggs, or wouldn’t be overly concerned about them being broken.

This certainly became more and more true as time went on and politicians were locked into their decisions (and became emboldened to try things they never imagined they could get away with). I was thinking more of the Great Barrington Declaration here, which was issued right at the beginning in measured and polite language. There was (at that time) little indication of the censorship that was to come. Nobody had any inkling that a suggestion offered in good faith would be rejected with such viciousness. That changed almost overnight. We now have the Fauci emails indicating that the authors of that declaration were to be taken out of the Circle Of Trust, and that’s when it all kicked off. It suddenly became acceptable and normal to censor anyone who wasn’t on-message - and later on to fire them, destroy their careers, or haul them through the courts.

Can’t really disagree with any of this. But now we’ve got a far more complex explanation than “naivete”.

There’s no “should” here, of course, but most humans do care about others. They react instinctively to seeing pain in others. You’ll quite literally feel other people’s pain. If you know that you yourself are causing that pain, you’ll back off. Failing to do so is not merely a foible. It’s either a sign of a relatively uncommon personality disorder, or (and this is my explanation for the majority of the gleeful public participation) it’s an expression of “the banality of evil”. It’s the demons being released from the bottle.

Not entirely implausible. However, these people are pretty shrewd. I think most of them understood that they were in a no-win situation. Whatever they did would be decried as “wrong” by one faction or the other (bearing in mind, btw, that causing hysterics was itself a policy decision). Someone with integrity, put into that position, would simply choose to do the right thing - knowing full well that they’d eventually sink into obscurity but also be remembered as the person who did the right thing (cf. Anders Tegnell). Someone with a complete disregard for human life, and no other concern except one’s own career and connections, would do the 180.

65

Orgs
Another important aspect to consider is the role of Organization Culture in perpetrating conspiracies. Organizations appear to have a-mind-of-their-own. They exist as a living cultural image and set frameworks which limit/control the behaviour of their members. Importantly, they are able to transcend the life-death barrier with ease. They are human-like, but they’re not human. In fact they function as a model/platform for the rise of AI. If you wanna know what AI will be like in the future, it’ll be the same as a mega-Org of today. (There may come a time when AI throws off the controlling shackles of humans, but that’s another topic)

Orgs also offer a moral-refuge for human members. For example, time after time Catholic higher-ups have tried to justify their behaviour in covering-up child sexual-abuse by saying they were acting to protect the image of THE Church. In their minds, this is perfectly legitimate reasoning. They see themselves as servants of the Org, which in turn, will protect them.

In the case of Covid, those scientists who orchestrated the cover-up (see Feb 1 Teleconference) were likely motivated by the idea that they must protect the image of THE Science community above all else. Their thinking was: If it becomes public knowledge that Covid was an engineered virus (which killed 15 million & counting), that will be a disaster for THE Science Org in terms of our power base, funding, & our future plans. (Very scary plans, btw, involving what they call the Genetic Revolution, AI development, all globalist of course)

The truth about Covid would also have handed Trump, their mortal enemy, another 4 years. They couldn’t let that happen. Therefore, knowing what’s best for The Org is best for themselves, they chose to lie.

On a related, lower-up tier, there were 1000s of scientists who should’ve known better, but were too afraid to speak out coz they would’ve been punished/ostracized by the broader science community. Their thinking: I’ve got a family to feed, a house to buy - it’s better i keep my mouth shut.

Then there’s your useful-idiots. They have a blind-faith in whatever the Org tells them, and behave in a soldier-like fashion to protect it, also knowing it’s in their best interests to do so.

In short, THE Org, a curated cultural image, becomes a God-like entity which is able to wield immense power over its members.

I used to think the trouble with Conspiracy Theories is: How are you gonna control the minds of all those people involved. How to get them to all keep the secret?

The answer is Culture (orgs). If you control the culture, then that automatically takes care of all those moving parts.

The question then arises for corruption researchers - do you focus on going after the Org, or the people running it?

66

You just answered your own question. :yin_yang: One could add more, but I think that’ll do for argument’s sake.

Okay, technically you didn’t say identically. The conspiriological implication, though, of

is that they were all obeying orders from one source. I say people have multiple sources of motivation. It’s complicated.

Of course, hysteria is a great marketing strategy for some people. There’s a big mix of people though: the ones promoting the hysteria as part of a marketing strategy and the ones going along with it, among others. The bandwagoners should not be confused with the bandleaders, even though the strategy couldn’t have succeeded without them. My point being, different motivations and different goals.

Yes, well, politicians and integrity traditionally don’t mix very well.

Fortunately, they didn’t need integrity, just enough smartness to see that the hysteria was not going to stay at that peak for nearly as long as what some people imagined. Unfortunately, even that was too much to ask of most of them.

It causes disruption, but you’re being awfully fatalistic there. Dr. Aseem, Dr. Robert, RFKJ, etc… they’re all celebrities. Some were celebrities before, but now they’re in a whole new celebrity orbit. I’m not saying this was a motivator for any of them, but it surely proves that while refusing to join the bandwagon results in many doors being closed, it also results in others being opened. So that would surely be part of the equation for anyone objectively weighing the pros and cons of jumping off.

67

Firstly, i don’t want anyone to believe anything. There’s been way too much of that in science lately - it’s become a religion. I want people to look at the evidence. The evidence, from FOI emails, is that those scientists most involved in convincing the world that Covid was natural origin, didn’t even believe that themselves.

Secondly, yes, viruses are part of nature, but, despite what you hear from the world’s leading experts, it’s exceedingly rare for deadly viruses to jump from one species to another.

The two examples that are most often trotted out are SARS & MERS. In both those cases, the origin is even murkier than what it is for Covid.

Ebola, especially the 2014 outbreak, is another supposed cross-over event shrouded in disinformation. Interestingly, the actors at the core of these dubious origin narratives are the exact same ones that brought us the Pangolin Paper & The Lancet Statement.

Finally, you provide a nice example of how conspiracy theorist is used as a name-calling tactic to avoid having to look at the details. Anyone who questioned the origin of Covid has seen this a million times - people screaming Conspiracy Theorist, like simply saying that is somehow a winning argument - meanwhile refusing to discuss the evidence.

Can we please stick to the details? I’ve provided a lot of them, all referenced. You haven’t contributed any relevant details so far, just name-calling.

68

Actually, we have one or two threads on the topic. I don’t think conspiracy theory comes up at all.

69

Well, it came up here pretty fast.

It was also a standard insult used by many of the world’s leading experts against anyone questioning the origin of Covid. Peter Daszak (WHO investigator, Lancet Statement author, WIV collaborator) couldn’t stop using it. His platformed feature article in The Guardian is but one good example. (Dozens more if you need them - just ask.) He even accuses ex-head of MI6, Richard Dearlove of being a conspiracy theorist.

All i’m asking is that instead of just screaming Conspiracy Theorist, quote the detail that you disagree with & say why. Then we can discuss it in a rational manner. Is that too much to ask?

70

Have you been following John Campbell? He just did a piece on the lab leak coverup, um, hypothesis. Probably nothing there that you didn’t already know, but it’s been fascinating watching him go from fully on-board with the health message to fully opposed. I’m pretty sure anyone who actually takes the time to read the evidence will end up concluding something deeply dodgy is/was going on. The problem, for most people, is that you don’t just need to read the evidence, you also need to get up to speed on the underlying biology (or whatever) so that you can understand the evidence. That, for me, was the most time-consuming bit by far, and a lot of people don’t even have the basics to build upon.

Bottom line is we really shouldn’t have to do that. We should be able to trust the authorities to tell the truth, or at least something reasonably close to it. It’s been very unpleasant realizing that most of them are lying about almost everything.

2 Likes
71

Didn’t take long to prove that wrong …

Jimi Presley wrote:

Wow. A thread to pat all of the conspiracy theorists on the back.

Real scientists have actually proved that it’s impossible it were engineered. But, hey, let’s not disrespect the Youtubers and Twitterists, and Facebook memes.

Here’s the thing: in the end it was the Twitter group DRASTIC that was integral in accumulating the evidence that exposed these real scientists as frauds.

Facebook & Youtube outright banned any discussion of the topic.

72

The thread is titled “Inside the Mind of a Conspiracy Theorist” lol. As started by you.

1 Like
73

Sure - & it’s a good thread - thanks for joining in!

I started it long before Covid. It quickly became apparent to me (early 2020s) once i began researching the origin of Covid that it was nothing more than a meaningless pejorative term used by people (esp experts) to avoid talking about details. It had played on my mind over the years that i’d used the term myself, so finally i decided to come back onto Forumosa to retract & apologize. Which i did.

Do you?

1 Like
74

I was thinking this one. Please feel free to show me where in this thread on the origin of covid people are screaming Cinspiracy Theorist and refusing to discuss the evidence

75

No, I think it’s warranted at times and I was critiquing your argument on that basis in an appropriate thread. I’m willing to leave that there though, and I won’t bring it up again. This may have not been the best thread for this. Maybe you’re not aware, but there are other threads where we’ve been over these issues at length (I see @TT just mentioned one). Let’s go back a little. I already said I think it’s likely there was a lab leak. What are you looking for here? Do you think it’s very likely to some degree? Or are you saying it’s a fact? I asked if an article I found referred to the e-mails you mentioned but you didn’t respond to my question. I only see one email in the link you provided.

My understanding is that there is still disagreement among scientists about the source of the virus.

76

You wrote my name wrong. It’s a conspiracy to discredit me.

2 Likes
77

Good reference. I was one of those amateur sleuths! In the mid-2020s i was contacted by the co-founder of DRASTIC, @billybostickson, re a deep-dive i’d done on the Pangolin Paper (Proximal Origin of SARS nCoV-2), which, sfaik, was the first indepth, critical analysis of this paper in the world.

It included details of the authors’ glaring CCP COIs, the implausibility of the pangolin hypothesis, & details of GoF research being carried out at WIV in conjunction with western scientists.

DRASTIC disseminated this info. Later i became a peripheral member of DRASTIC. My role was minor, but i am proud to have made even a small contribution to this movement. As the article points out, it changed the world.

By mid-2021, when the Newsweek article was posted on Forumosa, the intellectual debate over Covid’s origin was largely won. Hardly anyone was calling us Conspiracy Theorists by that stage.

They barely missed a beat though before moving onto the Vaccine/Lose-all-my-Freedoms Hesitant as the new face of The Evil Conspiracy Theorists.