Big C said:
Unit2Sucks said:
RFK is obviously a moron but I think the world deserves to see him and Trump share some adderall and debate all of their crackpot ideas, perhaps with Alex Jones as the moderator (all proceeds going to Sandy Hook families, of course).
There are so many idiotic ideas that RFK has given air to including that chemicals in our water supply are turning kids gay and transgender. If I remember correctly, the RWNJs claim that there is no such thing as gay or trans and that it's all made up.
I assume Trump would ask RFK if he ever considered bleaching away the gay, which he believed would work with COVID as well.
I guess the big takeaway is that I've probably been unfair to GOPers. It turns out that there is just a large number of people who love dumb crazy politicians, and that if RFK had done a better job than Trump several years ago, all of those idiots would be democrats and RFK would be serving his second term. Instead, Trump took all the crazies to the GOP. I genuinely believe that if Trump were to croak or stroke out, his entire base would move to RFK or the next lunatic, regardless of party. The remaining GOP base of actual conservatives, not moron cultists, would have no chance in a free and fair election.
It says a lot when the GOP vote is going down among college-educated white males... and up among non-college white males.
Oh wait, it's because the GOP is the "people's party" now! Yeah, right...
A lot of it ties into their propensity to fall for dipshlt conspiracy theories. As any casual observer will see, the most vocal GOPers now don't just believe in 1 conspiracy theory they believe in numerous ones. That's a kinship they share with Trump. They pretend to back up their garbage with "science," but if you scratch below the surface it's either junk science or just cherry picking convenient points. They typically don't understand science, so they rely on vocal "experts" (who they can use to justify their biased views) and they don't bother to dig down deep enough to get to the real answer. As you can see on BI, they prefer to dig exactly deep enough to find support for their idiotic theories. We see the same thing in other areas like support for Putin's war where they cherry pick propaganda and that when there are conflicting data points, they choose based entirely on whether it fits their preconceived view, not because of credibility or anything else. When Texeira leaked data that showed, among other things, that Ukraine benefited from a 3 to 1 casualty ratio, they ignored that entirely in favor of obvious Russian photoshop jobs that flipped those numbers. We see this time and time again where they will take one person's view on one side of the casualties while ignoring the person's view on the other side. It's low-grade wartime propaganda and the same tactics they use to justify their conspiracy theories in climate change, etc.
Alex Jones did this by talking about frogs changing gender due to the presence of atrazine in large amounts but there is a big difference between frogs (amphibians where gender is determined after hatching) and humans. Further, the EWG
has measured atrazine in municipal water supplies and contamination tends to be in agricultural areas. According to the EWG, 1000x as many texans are subject to atrazine contamination than Californians. The most contaminated utilities are in Kansas.
None of that matters to these people because they desperately want to believe in conspiracies. This has been studied quite a bit by academics.
When you put it all together, it becomes obvious why white uneducated men have fallen for Trump and the new GOP. They've seen an erosion of privilege which is causing them to feel left behind.
Here are a couple of good reads. Any of this sound familiar?
Just a
few months ago from the American Psychological Association:
Quote:
People can be prone to believe in conspiracy theories due to a combination of personality traits and motivations, including relying strongly on their intuition, feeling a sense of antagonism and superiority toward others, and perceiving threats in their environment, according to research published by the American Psychological Association.
The results of the study paint a nuanced picture of what drives conspiracy theorists, according to lead author Shauna Bowes, a doctoral student in clinical psychology at Emory University.
"Conspiracy theorists are not all likely to be simple-minded, mentally unwell folksa portrait which is routinely painted in popular culture," said Bowes. "Instead, many turn to conspiracy theories to fulfill deprived motivational needs and make sense of distress and impairment."
...
The researchers found that overall, people were motivated to believe in conspiracy theories by a need to understand and feel safe in their environment and a need to feel like the community they identify with is superior to others.
Even though many conspiracy theories seem to provide clarity or a supposed secret truth about confusing events, a need for closure or a sense of control were not the strongest motivators to endorse conspiracy theories. Instead, the researchers found some evidence that people were more likely to believe specific conspiracy theories when they were motivated by social relationships. For instance, participants who perceived social threats were more likely to believe in events-based conspiracy theories, such as the theory that the U.S. government planned the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, rather than an abstract theory that, in general, governments plan to harm their citizens to retain power.
"These results largely map onto a recent theoretical framework advancing that social identity motives may give rise to being drawn to the content of a conspiracy theory, whereas people who are motivated by a desire to feel unique are more likely to believe in general conspiracy theories about how the world works," according to Bowes.
The researchers also found that people with certain personality traits, such as a sense of antagonism toward others and high levels of paranoia, were more prone to believe conspiracy theories. Those who strongly believed in conspiracy theories were also more likely to be insecure, paranoid, emotionally volatile, impulsive, suspicious, withdrawn, manipulative, egocentric and eccentric.
From Scientific American
a few years back:
Quote:
The mindset is surprisingly common, although thankfully it does not often lead to gunfire. More than a quarter of the American population believes there are conspiracies "behind many things in the world," according to a 2017 analysis of government survey data by University of Oxford and University of Liverpool researchers. The prevalence of conspiracy mongering may not be new, but today the theories are becoming more visible, says Viren Swami, a social psychologist at Anglia Ruskin University in England, who studies the phenomenon. For instance, when more than a dozen bombs were sent to prominent Democrats and Trump critics, as well as CNN, in October 2018, a number of high-profile conservatives quickly suggested that the explosives were really a "false flag," a fake attack orchestrated by Democrats to mobilize their supporters during the U.S. midterm elections.
...
One obvious reason for the current raised profile of this kind of thinking is that the last U.S. president was a vocal conspiracy theorist. Donald Trump has suggested, among other things, that the father of Senator Ted Cruz of Texas helped to assassinate President John F. Kennedy and that Democrats funded the same migrant caravan traveling from Honduras to the U.S. that worried the Pittsburgh synagogue shooter.
But there are other factors at play, too. New research suggests that events happening worldwide are nurturing underlying emotions that make people more willing to believe in conspiracies. Experiments have revealed that feelings of anxiety make people think more conspiratorially. Such feelings, along with a sense of disenfranchisement, currently grip many Americans, according to surveys. In such situations, a conspiracy theory can provide comfort by identifying a convenient scapegoat and thereby making the world seem more straightforward and controllable. "People can assume that if these bad guys weren't there, then everything would be fine," Lewandowsky says.
