Favorite conspiracy theories

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Cultural Marxism is a pretty hilarious one.

What is Cultural Marxism? I am familiar with the term but I don't know what it means.

As oppressed groups -- women, minorities, LGBTQ+ folks -- gain the tools of liberation, such as the Internet and civil rights protections, they will have an influence on culture.  The systems that were created to oppress them -- the patriarchy, the nuclear family, white supremacy -- will then recede.

There might be some truth in that theory. The soviet union used its spys to infiltrate and influence people in higher society in areas like the arts, politics and education, Watch this short video to find out more: https://youtu.be/Z1EA2ohrt5Q

There really is no truth to the claims whatsoever, outside of minor coincidence.

Various marginalized peoples being able to seek equality isn't going to destroy society, it isn't even a sign of an unhealthy society in the first place and the creeps who insist otherwise are a big part of what actually harms a society.

The political right is just seeking to refight the culture wars (after losing them the first time around) and they seek to do so with utter BS claims because if they were honest about what they stand for, most people would be repulsed.

Did you watch the video?

Yes.

Fair enough then.

If you are a relatively well informed citizen and you don't believe in some conspiracy theories,

Video Abstract Transcript - Who is a Conspiracy Theorist?
Are you a conspiracy theorist?
Most people would not readily admit that they are, but would perhaps sooner call
somebody else a conspiracy theorist.

In this paper, I look at different definitions and conceptualizations of the term conspiracy
theory and conspiracy theorist, starting with what I call the simple definition, commonly
found in the dictionary. it states that a conspiracy theory is a theory that explains an event
where a conspiracy is cited as a salient cause. And a conspiracy theorist is simply a person
who believes (or is committed) to such a theory in some sense.

By the simple definition then, the philosopher Charles Pigden argument that, it is enough
that you believe the nightly news or the history books to be a conspiracy theorist. And if you
don’t, presumably it is because you believe that somebody has conspired to fake them. So,
either way you are a conspiracy theorist.

But with such a conclusion we get a rather worrisome dilemma. On the one hand most
people don’t think they are conspiracy theories and on the other, we all are. I call this the
problem of self-identification. A second problem arises from the conclusion, namely that the
construct is essentially theoretically useless. It would be like defining a pyromaniac as
someone who has ever lit a fire, or intelligence in a way that makes everyone intelligent.
In my paper I suggest that these problems are currently causing confusion in the literature
and present us with a dilemma, the conspiracy definition dilemma. I present an analysis of
the literature and what are on my reconstruction the solutions on offer, and argue that
none is satisfactory. Either a) the solution will solve the problem of self-identification or b) it
will potentially provide a theoretical fruitful definition, but no account does both. Check out
my paper to find out how I come to this conclusion!

... The press couldn't resist the idea of a kook so divorced from common sense that he thinks someone could be both alive and dead. The study became a staple of pop-science pieces on conspiracy theories, and of pop-intellectual writing by figures such as Cass Sunstein. And when other experimenters followed up on the paper, they replicated its results.

"Journalists love it," declared Jan-Willem van Prooijen, a psychologist from VU Amsterdam, as he addressed the International Conspiracy Theory Symposium at the University of Miami this past weekend. "It's a cool finding. There's just one problem: It's not true."

Van Prooijen is not the first scholar to challenge this idea. Last year, for example, the philosopher Kurtis Hagen noted that the original study did not measure people's beliefs so much as the degree of credence they gave to different possibilities: Rather than simply endorsing or rejecting each theory, participants were asked to rate each story's plausibility on a seven-point scale, an approach that gave room to entertain the ideas as suspicions without embracing them as full-fledged beliefs. But van Prooijen was discussing a more fundamental problem. The whole phenomenon, he told the Miami audience, could just be a statistical artifact.

Most people, after all, don't believe that Diana was assassinated or that she faked her death. If you're just looking at the overall numbers, that huge correlation between the participants who disbelieve both stories could create the illusion of a correlation where participants believe both. So van Prooijen and four colleagues ran their own series of experiments, this time paying closer attention to who was endorsing and rejecting each yarn.

The results, which will soon appear in the journal Psychological Science, showed that people who endorsed one conspiracy story were generally less likely, not more likely, to endorse an apparently contradictory narrative. There were a few exceptions, but these involved questions where, on closer examination, the theories weren't necessarily contradictory after all. For example: After the first experiment showed people maintaining that pharmaceutical companies were both obstructing research to find a cancer cure and withholding a cure they already possessed, the authors realized that these could be reconciled if you believe Big Pharma is hiding a cure for one type of cancer and blocking research on another. Whatever else you might think of that belief system, it is not as irrational as the Schrödinger's Princess scenario.