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Hyperdupont's avatar

In this interview you discuss conspiracy theories and mentions several times QAnon but never a much bigger and consequential conspiracy theory believed by a larger share of the population and which was relentlessly pushed in literally thousands of articles by the New York Times, WaPo, The Atlantic... They even gave themselves Pulitzer prices for this farce. I note that Ross Douthat who is writing for the NYT had the courage to discuss "the paranoid center" "elite panic" and "the mainstreaming of conspiracy theories". People might not be very smart on average, but their lack of trust in the competence and honesty of elite institutions is completely reasonable.

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OldMillennialGuy's avatar

There are certainly racial slurs that sound nasty under most contexts and likely always will. However, we're starting to come full circle where most of the other offensive words in the past are now banal, and the banal words are now offensive. In some cases, words like "normal" and "regular" are more offensive to certain folks than if you outright wished famine and disease upon their family and descendants for eternity. I'll also add one more useful tool that Steven and/or Richard have probably mentioned in the past. The easiest way to identify the lowest common denominators of society is to gauge how fatalistic/superstitious/zero-sum their world views are. Forget about anything else; that type of thought pattern will extinguish the lamps of civilization faster than anything else.

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