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The guardian reports on a sobering event in Washington DC.
US police have arrested a man wielding an assault rifle who entered a pizza restaurant that was the target of fake news reports it was operating a child abuse ring led by Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and her top campaign aide.
[...] The suspect entered the restaurant and pointed a gun at a restaurant employee, who fled and notified authorities, police said. The man then discharged the weapon inside the restaurant. There were no injuries.
[...] [Police] said the suspect during an interview with investigators revealed that he came to the establishment to "self-investigate" Pizzagate, the police statement said. Pizzagate is a baseless conspiracy, which falsely claims Clinton and her campaign chief John Podesta were running a child sex ring from the restaurant's backrooms.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday December 06 2016, @10:24PM
Anthropology focuses on culture. Anthropologists abhor quantitative methods. Sociologists don't, and use the same approach and many of the tools that "real" scientists do, with the additional challenges that it's hard to get reproducibility when your subjects are self-aware, unpredictable beings, and when it's illegal and unethical to experiment on them in a way to satisfy true scientific rigor. Basically "real" scientists have it much easier.
But that's an aside.
Runaway's point still stands, I think, because people do conspire all the time, and because his examples were people who were working together to do something wrong. Believing that others do that makes it a "theory." But what I appreciate about how Runaway put it was how banal conspiracies can seem and how easy it can be to fall into one as a participant. You see one in real life, and you often can't bring yourself to believe it because that kind of thing only happens in movies, right? It doesn't help that the conspirators say it's "just business."
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @10:46PM
> But what I appreciate about how Runaway put it was how banal conspiracies can seem
That's because conspiracies and conspiracy theories are wholly different things.
What's the difference? Well, conspiracy theories are never banal, rarely simplistic and are so mutable as to be unfalsifiable. Ask a conspiracy theorist what it would take to convince them that their theory was false. If you even get an answer it will be something so unreasonable as to be impossible for all practical purposes.