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Joe Canimal's avatar

The real fallacy of conspiracy theorists (and their defining characteristic) is not that they are factually wrong, but rather that their relevance filter is broken; it's a defect of pragmatics (over-mentalization), not of logic or semantics as such. This defect is closely-related to narcissism, albeit externally focused and (generally) negatively-valenced (someone like Eckhart Tolle might be said to be a pronoiac, which is the same type of reasoning defect but with positive valence).

But "just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you" --- and as relevant, while I've been critical of people who presume that the System has it In For Them on Twitter, it's plain that the purplehaired apparats have a similar if oppositely-valenced misguided belief in the import of their activities as do many a bAsEd & reDpilled Twitter histrionic. One shouldn't try to read the Mind of a vast impersonal events or the forces of history, nor perhaps even of culture -- but one can always get a sense of what the KGB or similar monocultures are thinking based on their actions, if you take my meaning.

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Myopic Eeyore's avatar

Love the Dickinson quote re: Russiagate. Thanks for writing!

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