Alternately, they can’t stand living in an objective reality where powerful people are systematically up to bad things and they’re helpless to do anything about it. Given the response to the comment you’re replying to, even the possibility that there might be any kind of conspiracies is displeasing to many.
As for the most boring explanation probably being true, well that would be a terrible heuristic to use for any of the hard sciences. I don’t see why it would be the case for the considerably more complex and chaotic social sciences.
> The World Economic Forum is just a bog-standard capitalist outfit.
That’s certainly what the prestige media will tell you! In any event I just tossed it out there as an example.
> Typically the "50s red scare" strain of anticommunism
You may want to pick another example, given that there were in fact communist sympathizers in the State Department at the time.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Eastern_Bloc_agents_in...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Americans_in_the_Venon...
To which you replied with a strawman:
> For example, if you think white people are being "replaced", then you'll look past the obvious explanation and into the fringes of the ink blots, and come back thinking that the WEF was created by the powerless to oppress the powerful with... power they don't have.
…in a very detailed comment trying to portray the WEF as not a cabal subverting democracy with oligarchical acts.
I think it’s interesting that your comment can be understood as what the GP was discussing in action.
I'm not sure how you got that from GP's comment, but they were saying the exact opposite about the WEF: it is just a way for greedy corporations to maximize profit by co-opting governments and international institutions to do their bidding. That's what they meant by "corporate free speech" and the Brussels effect.
Except we know that’s not true, eg, in the case of pushing DIE which has catastrophically reduced profits in Disney, WarnerMedia, and Netflix. And more broadly ESG scores, which have led to the ridiculous virtue signaling we see.
The “boring” explanation is that it’s a cabal by the people involved to implement their vision — not that there’s some magic corporation that’s always maximizing its value through its drone agents. That’s just as much a fiction as anything else.
To portray the WEF as “those greedy corporations!” minimizes the nature of what people there are doing by creating fictional entities who are the real actors.
For example, Bill Gates, the EU, and the MPAA all stepped in to tell President Biden to get lost when he proposed suspending COVID-19 vaccine patents. They worked tirelessly to water down and chip away at every WHO vaccine program that might have meant them either having to negotiate a rate or not enforce patents in certain countries. If this was just about pushing a liberal or left-ish agenda at the expense of profits, they would have just licensed the patents at zero cost to anyone in Africa with an mRNA printer[0], and then lobby the government to suspend patent protection so the laggards couldn't get a competitive advantage with a proprietary vaccine.
Things like ESG scores are offered because people don't want to invest in oil companies and investment brokers can make more money if they offer that option to people who would otherwise not have invested in the stock market. This is free-market capitalism working "as intended" - people see the long-term risks of bad environmental management and divest themselves from it.
I have no idea what "DIE" means or how it has catastrophically hurt Disney profits.
[0] (aggressively pirated grunge metal plays in the background)
You wouldn't steal a car. You wouldn't steal a handbag.
Downloading COVID-19 vaccines is stealing.
This is a belief in magical entities the same as you were denouncing.
> For example, Bill Gates, the EU, and the MPAA all stepped in to tell President Biden to get lost when he proposed suspending COVID-19 vaccine patents.
Yes — which is why it’s important to understand the particular benefits to Bill Gates, and other individuals involved.
> Things like ESG scores are offered because people don't want to invest in oil companies and investment brokers can make more money if they offer that option to people who would otherwise not have invested in the stock market.
Yes — that’s the pretense. But not the practice which a) uses captive funds to push agendas of insiders and b) is focused on pushing the destructive social agendas of insiders ahead of actual metrics.
> This is free-market capitalism working "as intended" - people see the long-term risks of bad environmental management and divest themselves from it.
Except that it’s not:
It’s insiders using grandma’s retirement money to push their personal political agendas, even when that loses money for grandma.
Again, look at media companies for that collapse — WarnerMedia, Netflix, Disney, etc.
What collapse? These are e some of the biggest and most profitable companies in the world. Netflix stock went down because the market foolishly expected that all of the subscribers Netflix gained in two years of extremely reduced social lives would not only stay subscribed, but were representative of how fast people would keep subscribing. When this obvious idiocy turned out to be false, the stock plummeted back to more realistic levels it had pre-pandemic.
By the way, I also tried to find out what you meant by DIE, and came up empty handed (though I'm sure searching for WEF DIE has put me on since watch lists somewhere).
The World Economic Forum is just a bog-standard capitalist outfit. Their more out-there views are not particularly divorced from the rentier capitalism of the New Gilded Age. To be unambiguous about it, that means a heady mix of international megacorporations, uncensored corporate speech[0], copyright maximalism, and the Brussels Effect[1]. The Occam's Razor explanation for the WEF is that greedy corporations that want to maximize profits are going to be greedy and profit-maximizing - in other words, it's the "capitalist agenda".
But if you have particular kinds of brainworms[2], you're going to ignore the greed that you don't want to talk about and start making up reasons for their actions wholly unrelated to what they actually think. For example, if you think white people are being "replaced", then you'll look past the obvious explanation and into the fringes of the ink blots, and come back thinking that the WEF was created by the powerless to oppress the powerful with... power they don't have.
In cases where conspiracies have actually tried to discredit defectors, it usually fails. In fact, it fails so hard that it becomes a meme, like "Russia denies" or "I did not have sexual relations[3] with that woman". Most actual conspiracies are just not that well thought out[4] enough for this to work, while the people writing the conspiracy theories are actually overthinking things.
What actually kills conspiracy theories is conflicting information - i.e. the conspiracy theory not actually lining up with reality. There will always be people who still buy it, though, because conspiracy theories that are not true always substitute veracity with narrative salience. In fact, sometimes being widely known to be false benefits the conspiracy theory, because now you can work the debunking of obvious lies into your conspiracy narrative and make it more salient than ever. And there's no actual conspiracy on the debunking side, either. You are not being smeared by the media because they're all in on trying to hide the truth - remember, coordination leaves evidence. You are being smeared by the media because you are on the side of narrative fiction.
[0] Sometimes complained about under the banner of "money is not speech"
[1] The process by which treaties agreed to by rich countries tie the hands of non-party countries by way of tolerance.
[2] Typically the "50s red scare" strain of anticommunism
[3] it's only sex if the balls are touching - Bill Clinton
[4] Reason being that being in a position of power gives you symptoms of brain damage. In order to implement a successful conspiracy you need power, and that power will blunt your reasoning over time.