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Feral Finster's avatar

It was obvious from the outset that the russiagate conspiracy theory was so absurd, so ludicrous, it would have gotten its proponents laughed out of The John Birch Society in 1962. For one thing, it required Putin both to have powers bordering on psychic mind control, and at the same time, no clue how to use his superpowers.

Something I wrote some years back:

*sigh* For most people most of the time, the fastest and surest way to wind up dead or seriously disadvantaged has been at the hands of our fellow humans. At the same time, "our group", whether by faith, family, tribe, regiment, whatever, are the people we can trust to have our back.

Therefore, whatever else happens, whatever we have to do, believe absurdities, blindly follow barking insane leaders, parrot obvious lies to our detriment, do or suffer terrible things, but please whatever you do, please don't kick us out of the group!

Those who have lived in the Third World and in developed countries should have a light come on about now.

What this also means is that when we are presented with incontrovertible proof that the group narrative is wrong or that the group leaders are mad or charlatans or worse, rather than change leaders or change beliefs or change groups, most people, most of the time will instead double down. Witness the behavior of cultists.

The process is called "cognitive dissonance" and it is abundantly documented. As alluded to earlier, there are entire religions organized around the principle.

Cognitive dissonance is not limited to stupid people. In fact, the intelligent are at least as prone, perhaps because they are better at rationalizing. In fact, much so-called "knowledge work" is basically learning symbol manipulation in order to rationalize something.

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raucus's avatar

Chris, I agree with everything you say and think, except that you still don't understand that the "climate emergency" was the most successful concoction and psyop created in the last 50 years. You remain hypnotized by this narrative and owe it to yourself to look to the science and scientists who have resisted and haven't been corrupted by this blind belief. Climate always changes, but it's not our doing and it's not an emergency that can't be handled in the normal course of our capabilities

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