First, it's not just that some rich people are pedophiles. It's called a conspiracy theory for a reason - there's conspiring going on. The CEO of the Ritz knows that his hotels offer underage prostitutes. The personal concierge directs the CEO to club which is known to be "good for rich people." The club owner knows that the company they outsource to for renting table dancers on the weekends also has dancers doing some prostituting on the side. The other rich attendees of the club (who are not purchasing) can see that that girl is clearly not 21. There's more than just pedophilia going on here - a system of winks and nods whereby powerful people are offered the opportunity to engage in illegal behavior and make no moves against the powerful people who facilitate these opportunities.
The second thing is that you're missing the point around alignment. These people DON'T align themselves with each other. They frequent the same forums as each other (e.g. 8chan) and disagree with each other on those forums. It's only in the eyes of the media and in people influenced by the media that the various flavors of conspiracy people are actually aligned.
Edit: was thinking about this line.
> If you had a genuine interest in an issue that you wanted to raise in public awareness or do something to combat it, the route of the conspiracy theorist is an awfully dumb way to do it.
What is the right way to address e.g. the widespread availability of illegal prostitution in hotels owned by American companies in foreign countries? I saw a few news articles in the press exploring the phenomenon a few years back, but nothing changed. Am I supposed to found a non-profit? A newspaper? Do the investigation myself and publish it to LiveLeak? Write a letter to my congresswoman? I'm honestly not sure how to work that problem, other than just talking to other people about it.
And? Is the claim made more meaningful by these specifics?
> The second thing is that you're missing the point around alignment. These people DON'T align themselves with each other. They frequent the same forums as each other (e.g. 8chan) and disagree with each other on those forums. It's only in the eyes of the media and in people influenced by the media that the various flavors of conspiracy people are actually aligned.
People who regularly meet and discuss things are aligned on the part that counts. They might not be organized, but they're definitely aligned
Yes? It's a different claim. Somebody doing X and a culture where many people turn a blind eye to and enable X aren't the same thing.
> People who regularly meet and discuss things are aligned on the part that counts. They might not be organized, but they're definitely aligned
We're talking about forums on the internet. Are you an I "aligned" because we had this discussion here?
Also, please do respond to my edit. I'm still pretty clueless as to the better way to work the problem of powerful people turning a blind eye to and enabling lawbreaking by other powerful people other than just talking about it.
I don't think it makes a huge difference tbh.
> We're talking about forums on the internet. Are you an I "aligned" because we had this discussion here?
No. But this is a forum that generally frowns on and downvotes conspiracy theories. If you go to a forum that's primary function is discussing them, then I would say yes.
> Also, please do respond to my edit. I'm still pretty clueless as to the better way to work the problem of powerful people turning a blind eye to and enabling lawbreaking by other powerful people other than just talking about it.
>What is the right way to address e.g. the widespread availability of illegal prostitution in hotels owned by American companies in foreign countries? I saw a few news articles in the press exploring the phenomenon a few years back, but nothing changed. Am I supposed to found a non-profit? A newspaper? Do the investigation myself and publish it to LiveLeak? Write a letter to my congresswoman? I'm honestly not sure how to work that problem, other than just talking to other people about it.
Well given that your theory could be wrong, yeah, you should probably either do the investigation yourself, fund someone else to do the investigation, or find a different problem to solve that is within your power to affect. Raising awareness of something in the form of a conspiracy theory delegitamizes it.
For example, how legitamite anti human trafficking non-profits have had a harder time doing productive things due to conspiracy theory influence: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/qanons-obsession-with-s...
> If you had a genuine interest in an issue that you wanted to raise in public awareness or do something to combat it, the route of the conspiracy theorist is an awfully dumb way to do it.
I said:
> What is the right way to address e.g. the widespread availability of illegal prostitution in hotels owned by American companies in foreign countries?
And you said:
> find a different problem to solve that is within your power to affect.
You clearly haven't answered the question. "There are better ways to solve this problem." "What are the better ways to solve this problem?" "You should solve a different problem." This is not engaging in good faith - you've made assertions and then refused to back them up.
Fwiw, I read the 538 article a few weeks back. They get more phone calls and also more donations and complain about the extra phone calls. I'm fairly certain the funding is worth more than the phone calls cost. So QAnon has actually helped here, if not in the way they intended, or as effectively as they could have. Claiming that a cost of a few phone calls significantly outweighs extra donations is just silly - and seems like the sort of political head-in-the-sand fake news that partisans publish constantly.
> All the logic in your great wall of text is nullified and is more or less amounting to a reverse straw man. Implying that an outrageous claim has merit because a severely watered down version of it might be accurate.
If you think there may be some rich people who engage in with underage prostitutes, you are almost certainly correct. It's kind of dumb to make that a salient issue in your day to day if you don't have any specifics, but sure, it's probably still true somewhere. But let's say you, for whatever reason, still think its really important to make sure people ask the question, are there rich pedophiles.
It should be patently obvious that aligning yourself at all with stupider ideas, even if they share a similar vein, is a bad idea. It harms your credibility to defend QAnon and then qualify that you only mean your portion. If you want to have a discussion, all you need to do is say "pizza parlor stuff is dumb, QAnon is dumb, but there is some merit to rich pedophiles somewhere.
The weakness of conspiracy theorists is that they align themselves with other conspiracy theorists who offer some form of affirmation to their beliefs because they think a larger force is telling them lies. And maybe they are being told some lies. Because that's really all it is. You can adjust your level of craziness but the entire point of a conspiracy theory in-group is getting affirmation from others. If you had a genuine interest in an issue that you wanted to raise in public awareness or do something to combat it, the route of the conspiracy theorist is an awfully dumb way to do it. The spectrum is, at worst, dumb as rocks, and at best, unwise and lacking in self awareness.