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Does Believing in Big Conspiracies Cause Small Conspiracy Theories, or Do Small Conspiracy Theories Cause People to Believe in Big Conspiracies?
Or: Why the Fuck is Luka a Laker?
I’ve always thought that one of the primary philosophical values of athletics is that it is a direct connection to capital R reality, in a way that is otherwise possible to avoid for many people. When I was in law school was when I got really serious about weightlifting, for the same reason that a lot of my friends got very into drinking: 1L year is a hell of feeling unmoored from any evidence of how you are doing. Traditionally, as my school did things, you have no feedback until finals. You are working all day every day studying, but you only really ever get tested on it in a cold call, which more depends on your professor’s mood and style for how it goes than it does on how good you actually are. And you might only get cold called ten times a semester anyway across all your classes. You’re working constantly and you have no real idea how you’re doing. But, as Henry Rollins put it, The Iron Doesn’t Lie to You. You can lift the weight, or you can’t. So I got really into the Olympic lifts. The Snatch, the Clean and Jerk, the Clean and Press (I’m old school). The numbers went up, or they didn’t, every day in my notebook. And if they went up I could feel good about myself, regardless of the fact that I was sure I was going to fail CivPro (I didn’t). Lifting weights, or running, or biking, gives you instant feedback on where you stand. You have a number you can pin your ego to, a baseline reality. You can lie about it, you can cheat, but you’re only cheating yourself: you know you’re a fake. In law school I needed that anchor to reality to keep me sane, to keep me from getting lost in my anxieties about things that I could not have knowledge of or control over.
Competition of course, is the ultimate reality check. I’ll confess to having become a bit of a hermit in my workout habits over the years. I have a very extensive home gym setup, the only time I worked out socially was the occasional climbing trip. Switching to BJJ has gotten me obsessed with fitness in a way I haven’t been in years, in that every time I go to the gym I’m getting my ego crushed. I’m getting dominated, submitted, and that’s reality: there was nothing I could have done to stop it. But, the victories are as real as the defeats. I can feel myself improving, and when I get a minor win, it means nothing it’s just a casual roll in a suburban strip mall in Eastern Pennsylvania, no one gives a shit. But it’s real, it happened.
And I think that athletics are necessary for that reason: they provide a tie to reality. There’s a reason that the study of decision making in economics has come to be known as Game Theory: you create a circumscribed ruleset for competition and use it to model greater decision making. This has value both in personal practice of athletics, and in the greater world of spectator sports and athletics. Moneyball taught more people about statistical analysis and strategy than any textbook. Sports are the one real thing on TV, you watch it and something happens, or it doesn’t. Your team wins, your team loses. This is important in that it keeps people grounded, it tells people things about reality. It teaches kids growing up to accept defeat, that sometimes the breaks beat the boys, that sometimes bad things happen. Sport was so important to national and ethnic pride, to civil rights movements, over the years, because sporting success is an inevitable fact. Jesse Owens and Jackie Robinson and Jack Johnson were, and remain, so important because he went on the field and did it. When they went in against whites and won, the lie that no black man could do that was untenable. There was no denying that reality. Trans competitors in girls' sports has been such a controversy, not because anyone gives a damn about the purity of high school girl's track, it's because it is undeniable. Contact with reality. Black and white.
Unless, of course, the product on the field is fake. The ultimate crime against the public, as Fitzgerald put it:
Then sport becomes just another case of one’s emotions being manipulated by some power on high.
I bring all this up in reference to the recent blockbuster NBA trade that came out of nowhere over the weekend. In the middle of the night on Saturday, the Dallas Mavericks chose to trade Luka Doncic to the Los Angeles Lakers for Anthony Davis and a 2029 First Round Pick, plus some spare change going around. This trade is so off the wall that many people assumed that the reporter who first put it out had been hacked. It simply makes no sense by standard NBA strategy: normally a team will never part with a top-5 player in their prime like Luka under any circumstances. If they did choose to trade a guy like that, then the team would accept that their current project was torpedoed and sell everything for future value, young players and draft picks to build the next great team. The Mavericks did neither: they got older and worse switching from Luka to AD, without acquiring any high end draft capital to help them build in the future. They lost a potential all-time talent, a face of the franchise and the NBA, a player who had just lead them to the NBA Finals as a number one option last year; and in exchange they got a slightly worse player several years older. It makes no sense. Writers call it The Dumbest Move I’ve Ever Seen. The Lakers have a player who virtually guarantees them a competitive team for the next ten years, and for it they gave up an aging star who was a key piece on a championship team five years ago, but didn’t look likely to win one this year.
And inexplicably, Mav’s GM Nico Harrison didn’t try to shop his player around at all. The players involved heard at the same time everyone else did, from a twitter account they thought had been hacked. Luka bought a house in Dallas less than a month ago. Players around the league reacted with shock. Fans are apoplectic. Had Luka been shopped, it is likely that Dallas could have stocked their team with bright young players and future picks to build a juggernaut years from now. A package vastly better than AD and change. They chose this very specifically. Leading many fans to ask why?
Conspiracy theories popped up immediately. From the mundane, Luka is injured or Luka is about to be MeToo’d or Luka fucked the owner/GM’s wife. To the more baroque: the Mavs chose to make this trade at the behest of TPTB within the NBA, who wanted their marquee franchise in LA to get a fresh star with the LeBron era winding down. Send the best young player in the league, and certainly the best looking most photogenic and charismatic player in the top ten, to the traditional top franchise in the league. The Mavs perfidious new owners, the (((Adelsons))) went along with this because they want to move the team from Dallas (a small market I guess?) to Las Vegas, and they needed to destroy the franchise and its fanbase Major League style in order to do it.
And that made me wander: do conspiracy theories filter up or trickle down? Does one start with a conspiratorial worldview and paranoid style and jaded cynicism because Epstein Didn’t Kill Himself and then decide the NBA is probably fixed too; or does one start with thinking the NBA is fixed and it shakes your faith in everything else? I’ve noticed the conspiracy theorists I know tend to be into personal conspiracy theories too. The same guy that’s telling me the Marines just raided a FEMA data center in Iceland to get the files about the 2020 election will tell me that the mechanic slit the rubber on his CV boot so that the mechanic could charge him to fix it. I wander, if one polled /r/nba fans, what would the correlation be between believing that the Luka trade was fixed and believing in RussiaGate?
Now we reach another question where Sports is a low-stakes microcosm of life: assume that the uproar was so severe that it actually threatened the legitimacy of the league. That so many fans were so convinced that the Luka trade was fixed by the NBA, that it threatened to ruin the NBA’s ratings and destroy the fanbase. Assume also, that it isn’t true, that Nico Harrison really just thought he was that much smarter than everyone. You are the NBA commissioner. Do you exercise your power to rescind the trade, in order to preserve the appearance of fairness, or do you allow it to go through, knowing that it will create the appearance of unfairness?
I proudly claim to be a conspiracy theorist on this site and have done so for years but I don't really see any "small conspiracies" like the kind you're suggesting. For the record, I started believing in conspiracy theories as a child in the leadup to the Iraq war - I thought that Iraq didn't actually have any weapons of mass destruction, and that those reports were lies to allow the rich Americans in charge of the MIC to steal the oil from another Middle Eastern country. I believed that the government was monitoring all domestic communications - and then Mark Klein reported on it, which was also considered a conspiracy theory until Edward Snowden just released the details. I thought the lab-leak explanation for COVID was more likely despite being told it was a baseless conspiracy theory, and now it seems to be generally accepted knowledge that it was actually a lab leak. I went into the weeds on the Russiagate story (and I have a lot of posts on that particular conspiracy theory on here) and took the conspiracy theory angle again... and it was totally, completely correct. I'm on record stating on the old site that Joe Biden was mentally checked out and could only temporarily be made to perform for special events years before the news about his actual mental state broke.
It just seems nakedly obvious to me that conspiracy theories are a more accurate and truthful depiction of reality than mainstream media reporting and societal consensus. This doesn't really bleed out into my daily life in any noxious or odious way, either - the one time I thought that somebody was conspiring against me, I had another person they tried to conspire with directly tell me that they were doing so. If anything, I think having an accurate understanding of how people work and act, built up over experience interacting with them in the real world, directly leads to conspiracy theories because conspiracies are real and a natural outcome of human psychology. People start seeing conspiracies not because they're just having their brains get filled up with microplastics, but because we live in a world where conspiracies very obviously happen and have a lot of influence on the world.
...but that's like... not at all what the documents Edward Snowden released said?
Are you sure? What, exactly, was XKEYSCORE searching? What was PRISM collecting? Why did James Clapper lie to congress, and what was that lie about? As a bonus question, please also explain what LOVEINT is and how it could possibly become a problem in a system that rigorously enforced warrant requirements for accessing surveillance data.
I did most of this long long long ago at the old old old place and in other posts. But I'll reiterate some specifics:
Databases with information in them. This is like asking, "What are forks for?" and expecting that people are going to infer that caniballism is going on. It makes you sound really bizarre.
Data from specific selection terms for foreign intelligence targets. We had a very nice PCLOB report and everything on this. It detailed how it worked. Please educate yourself.
Because the question required a classified answer, but he was in a public forum, so he provided the correct, classified answer to them via a secure channel afterward.
That's two questions, but you're not really about accuracy, are you? Perhaps I'll leave this to you, because the first is so obvious that even AI slop would suffice (and you know it), while the latter is just you wanting to advertise some personal policy preference rather than having anything to do with the facts at hand. So, by all means, advocate away. Just don't think that anything you've said here changes what facts are actually in evidence.
Nice social shaming attempt, but in this case it is closer to asking "Why do you have those forks marked 'for long pig only'". But furthermore, if this was an exam, this answer would get zero points, akin to responding with "words" when asked what a certain book has written in it. Where did that information came from? What is that information? Does it contain domestic communications?
This also gets a loud incorrect buzzer - hell, even wikipedia explains this shit more clearly than your evasive non-answer. But thankfully, due to good people like Ed Snowden, we can just go read the internal documents about it. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa-data Maybe you just weren't educated about what the program actually does, but a part of the correct answer would be "Email, Video/voice chat, Photos, stored data, VOIP, file transfers, video conferencing, activity notifications, social networking details and special requests".
I'm sure that your alternative approach of asking someone accused of bad behavior if they did it and then just believing them in the face of contradictory evidence might be useful somewhere else though!
Behold, I am about to violate classification regulations and post classified content that cannot be posted in a public forum - you may wish to avert your eyes if you're a federal employee who isn't qualified to read this private, sensitive information:
"Yes."
That's all he would have had to say to avoid lying. He didn't provide a correct, classified answer to them in a secure channel afterward, and we know this because we can just ask Ron Wyden about it.
"After the NSA Director declined to correct these statements, I put the question to the Director of National Intelligence in March 2013. I wouldn’t have been doing my job if I hadn’t asked that question. My staff and I spent weeks preparing it, and I had my staff send him the question in advance so that he would be prepared to answer it.
Director Clapper famously gave an untrue answer to that question. So I had my intelligence staffer call his office afterward and ask them to correct the record. The Director’s office refused to correct the record. Regardless of what was going through the director’s head when he testified, failing to correct the record was a deliberate decision to lie to the American people about what their government was doing. And within a few months, of course, the truth came out."
Ok, sure - I'll answer! LOVEINT refers to NSA analysts using their domestic surveillance capability to spy on and monitor the communications of their loved ones and partners. Maybe 100% of all NSA employees are actually dating foreign nationals and legitimate surveillance targets, but I doubt it. The reason I bring up LOVEINT is that by virtue of the problem existing at all it shows that the warrant requirements aren't being applied and domestic communications are being collected - if the surveillance panopticon was functioning with the restrictions and rules that you are implying, it could never actually be a problem. But it is a problem, and the fact that it is means that the system is capable of abuse and is actively being abused.
Of course while LOVEINT is bad, the corrupt surveillance of the Trump campaign, including when he was President Elect, was far more serious - and incredibly convincing evidence that these systems need to be destroyed and everyone involved fired from the government and criminally prosecuted. Mind you, I'm not saying that SIGINT doesn't deserve to exist - but if your local police force has been completely infiltrated by the mafia and is helping criminals rather than stopping them, "Well we can't do anything about it because we need police" is not a convincing argument.
Which forks are those? You have a citation for those markings, right?
...for who? That answer will be precisely what I said. You get an even louder incorrect buzzer. Please educate yourself.
This is a lie. Note that when you quote the phrase
he means, "Correct the public record". Which means putting classified information in the public record. Which is illegal.
There are strategies put in place to discover these things. When discovered, those people get fired and prosecuted. Can you design a system that "functions with the restrictions and rules"... with absolutely zero possible failures? If you can, you can make a bundle of money, because everyone wants this. Just give it to us. We'll pay you an insane amount of money.
Then just tell us how to do it better! Make tons of money by telling us how to magically design these systems!
Perhaps. I've seen some serious suggestions for how to improve the systems that are in place. Do you have any? Or are you just bitching and lying about the facts that are in evidence?
The data included domestic communications from American citizens, and it comes from the companies listed in the slide. You're the one trying to claim that this data doesn't include domestic communications, and the reason you have so much trouble answering this question in an earnest way is that the answer destroys your position.
I'm going to trust Ron Wyden over an anonymous person on the internet when it comes to matters directly involving whether something was said to Ron Wyden or not. Do you have any evidence behind this claim?
Even if these strategies had a 100% success rate (which I highly doubt)... them getting caught and reprimanded does nothing to address the point that the fact they could actually do this is the problem! It's incredibly easy to design a system that doesn't fail in this way - you need to go to a court and apply for a search or wiretap warrant, then you can start collecting information on a target. If you actually enforce these requirements LOVEINT cannot happen outside cases where somebody is actively dating a legitimate surveillance target (in which case they should be forced to recuse themselves). Hell, some incredibly smart Americans actually came up with those requirements and put them into law hundreds of years ago.
No, the US government doesn't want this - nor would they pay me money for pointing out that they need to completely clean house in the intelligence community. A system which actually prevented abuse would prevent abuse, and it is abundantly clear that abuse was precisely what a lot of people in the US government wanted. There already WAS a system which functioned the way you're asking - the existing court system, where real judges in adversarial courts had to sign off on a warrant, not some rubber stamper that lets someone use opposition research they know is false to spy on presidential candidates. But that said, I'm not obligated to design a complete replacement for the government because I think that inescapable, warrantless surveillance is bad.
Yep. It's like if the gov't got a wiretap on Tony Soprano, and he called one of his kids' schoolteachers. One could say, "They're collecting the communications of schoolteachers!" But really, everyone knows that's bullshit. It's true, but it's bullshit. They're collecting Tony Soprano's communications.
Super ROFL to this. As shown above, I have literally no trouble answering this question. If Mike Flynn calls the Russian ambassador, yes, they collect Mike Flynn's call to the Russian ambassador.... because they collect all of the Russian ambassador's calls. Because he's a legit foreign intelligence target.
So you trust him when he says that he asked Clapper to correct the public record and that he did not, in fact, put classified information in the public record, right?
They do this for any targets that are in the US or are otherwise US Persons. The question is about foreign targets who are in foreign countries, but happen to have comms that transit the wires of US companies. People who have never had Fourth Amendment protections. Putin Lackey #6528, lives in Russia, but emails some people in Syria who have GMails. Maybe he even emails some US citizen schoolteachers. The question has always been, "What is the right process to collect on this guy?" Notice that we're worlds apart from some ridiculous claim that they're just monitoring all domestic comms. You've already admitted that the thing I said was false is actually false. We're literally just talking process now.
They got a warrant for that. From a judge. So, it seems like your solution would not prevent this problem. I have heard discussions of solutions that would prevent this problem, but your solution is not one of them. You are just not a serious person on this topic.
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I would only count that as half correct. Iraq didn't have (significant) weapons of mass destruction, but Americans, including the Democrats, genuinely believed that they did; it wasn't an excuse.
I'd also ask if you only believed in conspiracies that turned out to be correct. It's easy to cherry-pick the correct ones.
And there's the question of what counts as a conspiracy theory. "Yeah I believe in a 9/11 conspiracy theory. A bunch of Middle Eastern terrorists conspired to attack...." If you go by loose enough standards, everyone believes in conspiracy theories and plenty of conspiracy theories are correct. If "conspiracy theory" is to be meaningful, it has to mean more than "there were people in a conspiracy", and I wouldn't count any of those you got correct as conspiracy theories. I think 100proof above has a good start with pointing out that conspiracies are about how you can blame contradictory evidence on the conspiracy.
I don't believe for a single second that Dick Cheney earnestly and genuinely believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Maybe Colin Powell didn't know he was lying, but the intelligence agents who cooked up the fake evidence he used most definitely did. Maybe I just find it hard to accept that they genuinely believed that given that I saw through the scheme as a small child, but c'est la vie. I agree that the motivation of stealing oil/profiteering doesn't explain everything, but I'd give the credit to PNAC, A Clean Break or Oded Yinon for the rest.
If I go back and look at my conspiratorial beliefs that I don't think panned out... the biggest and most obvious one is that I thought the COVID vaccine would be significantly more harmful than it actually turned out to be. I thought that the BRICS would develop an alternative to SWIFT and the US financial system substantially faster than they actually did. I thought there was insider trading/advance knowledge of the 9/11 attacks, but I'm not sure that's been proven wrong yet (or what the non-conspiracy explanation for the dancing israelis is). I've been wrong about plenty of other things (like what the left wing government in Australia would actually do...), and I've made several claims on here that could pan out to be false in the end (like on nuclear power) but in my experience beliefs that get attacked as conspiracy theories tend to be more accurate than ones that don't.
I only listed beliefs that I was called a conspiracy theorist for advocating and stating at the time - hell, I can look up one of the listed beliefs on wikipedia right now and it is directly labelled a "right wing conspiracy theory" (specifically the Russiagate disambiguation page). It might be different now, but the exact same arguments were in fact deployed against those beliefs you said aren't conspiracy theories at the time. While the poll itself is seemingly gone now, have a look at this MotherJones article from 2013 - https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/04/bush-lying-about-wmds-conspiracy-theory/ Belief that the WMD lie was in fact a lie was considered a conspiracy theory by the mainstream even after the point at which we had evidence demonstrating that was the case!
My apologies if it feels like I'm attacking you for this, because you're not the same people who made those attacks in the past, but this is actually one of the reasons why I don't particularly like the term "conspiracy theory" when used as a pejorative - the category is very slippery and hard to really pin down. Your definition, while it might be more accurate, very clearly isn't the one being used by the rest of society, and I don't think there's any real reason to actually preserve or try to save it. What value do you get out of being able to label something a conspiracy theory? What is the term actually communicating beyond "I think this theory is dumb and wrong, and the person who believes it does so due to faulty reasoning"?
Wikipedia is biased to the left. I wouldn't go to Wikipedia for information about whether it's correct to call something a conspiracy theory.
There are a lot of things that have a real definition, but are also abused to attack political opponents. "Conspiracy theory" is one just like "Nazi". Would you suggest that because Trump and the president of Ukraine are called Nazis, but I would not call them that, "Nazi" is a useless term?
It communicates that it is a particular type of faulty reasoning.
I can find multiple reputable, mainstream outlets referring to it as a conspiracy theory. It is still considered a conspiracy theory by vast swathes of the population, and many of those other claims were considered conspiracy theories by both the right and the left wing of politics. The NSA surveillance, for instance, was derided as a conspiracy theory by both sides of politics, as was the claim that Iraq didn't have WMDs (Tony Blair was ostensibly on the left). The rubric I actually use is "was I consistently called a conspiracy theorist for advocating this belief, and were others who espoused it similarly accused" and wikipedia was simply an additional piece of evidence (hard to provide evidence of quotes from in-person discussions two decades ago).
I unironically do believe that nazi, like fascism, is largely a useless term in the modern day. It had a meaning, once, but now it is effectively just a snarl word and it isn't really possible to draw a consistent or useful meaning out of the word without context. In the last week alone I've seen Israelis get called Nazis who then turn around and call their opponents nazis for opposing them - the term no longer even necessarily implies antisemitism. You can still use the word in arguments, but if you do I feel like you should be obligated to let the reader know what you actually mean by it.
Ok, what type? Can you actually provide a consistent definition that covers all the conspiracy theories I laid out in my first post?
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I'd be interested to read them, would you mind sharing the links?
I actually went back and looked through my posts on here and on the old reddit site, and unfortunately a lot of the decent posts I was arguing against have since been deleted, making the conversations really annoying to read. I'd say that the most substantive post I made on the topic is the long one in this thread here https://www.themotte.org/post/842/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/184278?context=8#context
Ah. Yesterday when you said that you were correct in your assessment that Russiagate was a conspiracy, I took that to mean "Trump really did conspire with the Russians to pervert the course of the 2016 election". I see now that you meant the opposite - that Russiagate was a conspiracy on the part of the Clinton campaign to discredit Trump, which is my stance on it as well. Carry on!
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