Astounding to watch the mental gymnastics at play.

It’s like how Israeli lobbying orgs state that “claiming Zionist orgs control the media is antisemitism”, and then the solution is literally “we should use our contacts & supporters in the media to stop this kind of rhetoric”. Beautiful.

It's mostly about X conspiracy theory turned out to be true, so the Y conspiracy must be true! The fact that it even has to be a conspiracy theory that later gets validated is what annoys me, asking questions is okay, claiming conspiracy as fact is not.

Thinking that Israel potentially spies on the US government is not what anyone reasonable would call a conspiracy theory.

ask AI with internet access disabled aka: the aggregate of the entire internet. every single ai, chinese included will call it antisemitism.

What is and isn't considered a conspiracy theory changes very rapidly. There are a lot of things that today are considered common sense that 10 years ago would be considered a fringe conspiracy theory.

People were smeared regularly for suggesting this less than a decade ago. You are being tripped up by recency bias since mainstream media started reporting on it.

I hate that people will take “political blackmail is real” and jump to “the moon landing wasn’t real”

Do you blame them? If a global ring of elite pedophiles turned out to be true in spite of all the gaslighting and denial, then why couldn’t the moon landing also be a conspiracy?

Keep in mind that the elite class couldn’t give two shits what the peasant class thinks. In fact, having us believe in false conspiracies helps distract the masses from the true conspiracies :)

Why must all conspiracy theories be bucketed together as if it's a single entity and culture. Conspiracies are real and as old as time, and treating any analysis or discussion about them as part of a greater crackpot culture just acts as cover for real ones. In fact there is evidence that the CIA is behind some of the crackpot theories to muddy the water.

I've heard very few if any "conspiracy theorists" talk about sexual blackmail because it's boring. The appeal of a conspiracy is that it grabs people's attention. And there are certain types of attention whores who will spout theories about flat earth, or fake moon landing, because it gets them instant attention and engagement. This is what I think the GP meant, that s/he hates that these people were "right" about politicians being compromised.

"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."

Also, please don't use quotes to make it look like you're quoting someone when you aren't. That's an internet snark trope, and thus breaks the "Don't be snarky" guideline too.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html