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Jan 27, 2023 10:08:25   #
Bad Bob wrote:
https://www.yahoo.com/news/personal-free-religion-153026994.html


😍😍😍

You're absolutely right. People are fed up this relationship of the Republicans and the Evangelicals. The churches attendance is dropping. If you want to buy a church building no problem. As they try more and more to control us
they will find more and more resistance. This direction of late by them has only one outcome for them and that is
Irrelevance.
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Jan 27, 2023 06:10:38   #
It took Science to uncover that know it alls are naive enough to believe in Conspiracy theories.
Kind of odd if you think about it. Sort of a conundrum of opposites.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/why-people-buy-crackpot-conspiracy-111400366.html

Business Insider

Science has finally cracked the mystery of why so many people believe in conspiracy theories
Adam Rogers
Thu, January 26, 2023 at 6:14 AM EST

Man sitting cross-legged, using laptop underneath a very big brain filled with conspiracies theories, from the Illuminati,

People don't buy into conspiracy theories because of ignorance or social isolation. They do it because of a more prevalent personality quirk: overconfidence.Getty Images; iStock; Alyssa Powell/Insider
When it comes to the spread of cockamamie conspiracy theories, Twitter was a maximum viable product long before Elon Musk paid $44 billion for the keys. But as soon as he took the wheel, Musk removed many of the guardrails Twitter had put in place to keep the craziness in check. Anti-v**xers used an athlete's collapse during a game to revive claims that C****-** v*****es k**l people. (They don't.) Freelance journalists spun long threads purporting to show that Twitter secretly supported Democrats in 2020. (It didn't.) Musk himself insinuated that the attack on Nancy Pelosi's husband was carried out by a jealous boyfriend. (Nope.) Like a red thread connecting clippings on Twitter's giant whiteboard, conspiratorial ideation spread far and wide.

By some measures more than half of Americans believe at least one tale of a secret cabal influencing events. Some are more plausible than others; a few are even true. But most β€” from classics like the f**ed moon landing to new-school stuff like 5G cell towers causing C***D β€” defy science and logic. And while social-media platforms like Twitter and Meta may help deranged conspiracy theories metastasize, a fundamental question remains: Why does anyone fall for stuff like that?

Social scientists are closing in on some answers. The personality traits known as the "Dark Triad" β€” that's narcissism, psychopathy, and a tendency to see the world in black-or-white terms β€” play a part. So do political beliefs, particularly populism and a tolerance for political violence. Cognitive biases, like believing only evidence that confirms what you already think, also make people more vulnerable.

But according to new research, it isn't ignorance that makes people most likely to buy into conspiratorial thinking, or social isolation or mental illness. It's a far more prevalent and pesky personality quirk: overconfidence.

The more you think you're right all the time, a new study suggests, the more likely you are to buy conspiracy theories, regardless of the evidence. That'd be bad enough if it applied only to that one know-it-all cousin you see every Thanksgiving. But given how both politics and business reward a faith in one's own genius, the news is way worse. Some of the same people this hypothesis predicts will be most prone to conspiracy thinking also have the biggest megaphones β€” like an ex-president who believes he's never wrong, and a CEO who thinks that building expensive cars makes him some sort of visionary. It'd be better, or at least more reassuring, if conspiracy theories were fueled by dumb yahoos rather than self-centered monsters. Because arrogance, as history has repeatedly demonstrated, is a lot harder to stamp out than stupidity.

Have faith in yourself (but not too much)
A decade or so ago, when Gordon Pennycook was in graduate school and wanted to study conspir****t thinking, a small but powerful group of unelected people got together to stop him. It wasn't a conspiracy as such. It was just that back then, the people who approved studies and awarded grants didn't think that "epistemically suspect beliefs" β€” things science can easily disprove, like astrology or paranormal abilities β€” were deserving of serious scholarship. "It was always a kind of fringe thing," Pennycook says. He ended up looking into misinformation instead.

Still, the warning signs that conspiracy theories were a serious threat to the body politic go way back. A lot of present-day antisemitism can be traced back to a 19th-century forgery purporting to describe a secret meeting of a Jewish cabal known as the Elders of Zion (a forgery based in part on yet another antisemitic conspiracy theory from England in the 1100s and re-upped by the industrialist Henry Ford in the 1920s). In 1962, the historian Richard Hofstadter warned against what he called the "paranoid style" of America's radical right and its use of conspiracy fears to whip up support. Still, most scientists thought conspiracy theories weren't worth their time, the province of weirdos connecting JFK's death to lizard aliens.

Then the weirdos started gaining ground. Bill Clinton, they claimed, murdered Vince Foster. George W. Bush had advance knowledge of the September 11 attacks. Barack Obama wasn't born in the United States. Belief in baseless theories could lead to actual violence β€” burning cellphone towers because of that C***D thing, or attacking the Capitol because Hugo ChΓ‘vez r****d the US e******n. By the time of the J****** 6 i**********n, Pennycook had already switched to studying conspiracy.

It still isn't entirely clear whether more people believe conspiracy theories today. Maybe there are just more theories to believe. But researchers pretty much agree that crackpot ideas are playing a far more significant role in politics and culture, and they have a flurry of hypotheses about what's going on. People who believe in conspiracies tend to be more dogmatic, and unable to handle disagreement well. They also rate higher on those Dark Triad personality traits. They're not stark raving mad, just a tick more antisocial.

But at this point, there are just way too many believers in cuckoo theories running around for the explanation to be ignorance or mental illness. "Throughout most of the 1970s, 80% β€” that's eight zero β€” believed Kennedy was k**led by a conspiracy," says Joseph Uscinski, a political scientist at the University of Miami. "Would we say all of those people were stupid or had a serious psychological problem? Of course not."

Which brings us to the overconfidence thing. Pennycook and his collaborators had been looking at the ways intuition could lead people astray. They hypothesized that conspiratorial thinkers overindex for their own intuitive leaps β€” that they are, to put it bluntly, lazy. Most don't bother to "do their own research," and those who do believe only things that confirm their original conclusions.

"Open-minded thinking isn't just engaging in effortful thought," Pennycook observes. "It's doing so to evaluate evidence that's directed toward what's true or false β€” to actually question your intuitions." Pennycook wanted to know why someone wouldn't do that. Maybe it was simple overconfidence in their own judgment.

Sometimes, of course, people are justified in their confidence; after four decades in journalism, for example, I'm right to be confident in my ability to type fast. But then there's what's known as "dispositional" overconfidence β€” a person's sense that they are just practically perfect in every way. How could Pennycook's team tell the difference?

Their solution was pretty slick. They showed more than 1,000 people a set of six images blurred beyond recognition and then asked the subjects what the pictures were. Baseball player? Chimpanzee? Click the box. The researchers basically forced the subjects to guess. Then they asked them to self-assess how well they did on the test. People who thought they nailed it were the dispositional ones. "Sometimes you're right to be confident," Pennycook says. "In this case, there was no reason for people to be confident."

Sure enough, Pennycook found that overconfidence correlated significantly with belief in conspiracy theories. "This is something that's kind of fundamental," he says. "If you have an actual, underlying, generalized overconfidence, that will impact the way you evaluate things in the world."

The results aren't peer-reviewed yet; the paper is still a preprint. But they sure feel true (confirmation bias aside). From your blowhard cousin to Marjorie Taylor Greene, it seems as if every conspir****t shares one common trait: a supreme smugness in their own infallibility. That's how it sounds every time Donald Trump opens his mouth. And inside accounts of Elon Musk's management at Twitter suggest he may also be suffering from similar delusions.

"That's often what happens with these really wealthy, powerful people who sort of fail upwards," says Joe Vitriol, a psychologist at Lehigh University who has studied the way people overestimate their own expertise. "Musk is not operating in an environment in which he's accountable for the mistakes he makes, or in which others criticize the things he says or does."

An epidemic of overconfidence
Pennycook isn't the first researcher to propose a link between self-regard and epistemically suspect beliefs. Anyone who has attended a corporate meeting has experienced the Dunning-Kruger effect β€” the way those who know the least tend to assume they know the most. And studies by Vitriol and others have found a correlation between conspiracy thinking and the illusion of explanatory depth β€” when people who possess only a superficial understanding of how something works overestimate their knowledge of the details.

But what makes Pennycook's finding significant is the way it covers all the different flavors of conspir****ts. Maybe some people think their nominal expertise in one domain extends to expertise about everything. Maybe others actually believe the conspiracy theories they spread, or simply can't be bothered to check them out. Maybe they define "t***h" legalistically, as anything people can be convinced of, instead of something objectively veridical. Regardless, they trust their intuition, even though they shouldn't. Overconfidence could explain it all.

Pennycook's findings also suggest an explanation for why conspiracy theories have become so widely accepted. Supremely overconfident people are often the ones who get handed piles of money and a microphone. That doesn't just afford them the means to spread their baseless notions about Democrats running an international child sex-trafficking ring out of the basement of a pizza parlor, or Sandy Hook being a h**x. It also connects them to an audience that shares and admires their overweening arrogance. To many Americans, Pennycook suggests, the overconfidence of a Musk or a Trump isn't a bug. It's a feature.


To many Americans, new research suggests, the overconfidence of an Elon Musk or a Donald Trump isn't a bug. It's a feature.

It's not necessarily unreasonable to believe in dangerous conspiracies. The US government really did withhold medical treatment from Black men in the Tuskegee trial. Richard Nixon really did cover up an attempted burglary at The Watergate Hotel. Jeffrey Epstein really did force girls to have sex with his powerful friends. T***snational oil companies really did hide how much they knew about c*****e c****e.

So distinguishing between plausible and implausible conspiracies isn't easy. And we might be more likely to fall for the implausible ones if they're being spouted by people we trust. "The same thing is true for you," Pennycook tells me. "If you hear a scientist or a fellow journalist at a respected outlet, you say, 'This is someone I can trust.' And the reason you trust them is that they're at a respected outlet. But the problem is, people are not that discerning. Whether the person says something they agree with becomes the reason they trust them. Then, when the person says something they're not sure about, they tend to trust that, too."

The next step, or course, is to figure out how to fight the spread of conspiratorial nonsense. Pennycook is trying; he spent last year working at Google to curb misinformation; his frequent collaborator David Rand has worked with Facebook. They had some meetings with TikTok, too. That pop-up asking whether you want to read the article before sharing it? That was them.

And what about the bird site? "Twitter? Well, that's another thing altogether," Pennycook says. He and Rand worked on the crowdsource fact-check function called Community Notes. But now? "It's all in flux, thanks to Elon Musk."

But Pennycook's new study suggests that the problem of conspiracy theories runs far deeper β€” and may prove far more difficult to solve β€” than simply tweaking a social-media algorithm or two. "How are you going to fix overconfidence? The people who are overconfident don't think there's a problem to be fixed," he says. "I haven't come up with a solution for that yet."

Adam Rogers is a senior correspondent at Insider.

Read the original article on Business Insider
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Jan 26, 2023 18:00:06   #
Birdmam wrote:
I am a big Elon fan


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svj_6w0EUz4
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Jan 26, 2023 17:11:55   #
Big Kahuna wrote:
So with CRT, a White is damned if you do and damned if you don't. Sounds like a winning combination for the stupid who started the r****t CRT.


Except for you haven't looked at the course. If you had you wouldn't think that. You might find one class maybe two that you didn't like unless of course you don't think that African American writers should be recognized in a course designed for African American studies.
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Jan 26, 2023 15:25:18   #
American Vet wrote:
LOL

Well, that 's one flimsy excuse you can use to run from your indefensible, irrational tirade.

But I understand - the last time we had an exchange you got spanked pretty badly.


So, you agree that r****t Florida is just that. If its any consolation everyone else thinks the same thing.
I guess that this will make DeSantis P**********l race a waste of time.
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Jan 26, 2023 12:57:28   #
American Vet wrote:
ELWNJ is an acronym commonly used here on OPP.

Extreme Left Wing Nut Job

And another common tactic used by ELWNJs when they are cornered: β€œI haven’t the time to explain”.


You won't have to worry about talking to me then. I don't allow people to address
me like that.
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Jan 26, 2023 12:08:48   #
American Vet wrote:
Hmmmm.....So you throw around the term "African American".

Care to provide a definition of "African American"? You ELWNJs tend to have a 'fluctuating definition" to fit your narratives, so please clarify.


What in the hell is an ELWNJ?
If you can't take the time to communicate don't bother and also if you don't know what an African American is
I haven't time to explain it so if you want me to play don't act stupid.
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Jan 26, 2023 11:36:26   #
elledee wrote:
If nothing else untie the not in his pink panties


I love posting here.

I launch a thread and conservative heads explode. You might call this my happy place.

I really was hoping to get some stimulating conversation out of it, but guttural replies are ok
for reminding me that we were once apes which is another favorite subject of mine.

If you cared to look at the syllabus, you would find that its well written and the subject matter is the equal
and opposite of everything that exists in the Caucasian worldview but somehow that threatens conservatives here.

I am not sad for you. Time is passing you and your party by which is good for me.
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Jan 26, 2023 06:52:30   #
Here is the syllabus for the AP course that was banned in Florida.

Before you scream CRT and accuse the Democrats of moulding little Bobby and Cindy into Democrats you might want to look at the course yourself. There is nothing in this course that isn't in the world that young people are going to have to deal with. It's a well written course.

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23584340-ap-afam-syllabus-watermark
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Jan 1, 2023 10:37:58   #
AmericanEagle wrote:
Well if you think Republicans because they're Christians are against the United States then what the hell are the democrats considered since they are totally destroying the United States?
Truly I guess Dems are the party of Satan


Enjoy watching the Christian soldiers party, destroy the Union or at least turn everyone in their states into Democrats.
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Dec 31, 2022 13:52:15   #
Weswill wrote:
Here you go again. Equating the Republican party to Christianity. Most of the Republican Party does not spread the Gospel. They are mostly political rather than religious, even though some try and govern through their Christian beliefs. Most politicians do things that benefit themselves but not all and that is both partys. Sometimes a religious context may come from what they say but you are correct in that most policies are not Biblical messengers. So why try and link the two?? If Christuabs were so influential as you think then we would still have prayer in schools,bibles on sckools,able to say a prayer before football games and have the ten commandments be able to be place in public places. Yes there are some laws or interpretations of laws that somewhat have a Christian basis but not all as you seem to think.
Here you go again. Equating the Republican party t... (show quote)


Are you this dense? Who do you think pushed Christian Judges on the Court that ended Roe v Wade the way it was for nearly 50 yrs and why do you think they did this and who do you think they were pandering to?

The Republican party is in league with Christianity against the people of the United States.
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Dec 30, 2022 18:26:43   #
Weswill wrote:
No but Jesus did sat go tell the Gospel , baptizing in the name of the Lord. We are to present the Gospel to all we can and if you don't accept it then that is your choice. I am not forcing anything on you. We all have the ability of free choice. If what the Gospel says is contrary to your beliefs for wh**ever reason that is your choice. Just don't ridicule the messenger.


The Republican Party with their Religious Autocratic Theocracy is not the messenger. You have to understand the good news to be the messenger.
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Dec 30, 2022 11:17:47   #
Weswill wrote:
I have not said or tried to force anyone to believe and have faith in our Lord and Savior. All we do is present that opportunity to others and then it is between you and Christ.
The republican party and Christians are not the same. Eventhough some Republicans are Christians as well as hopefully some democrats.
I do not know about your comments about gerrymandering ,c***ting and ruling by forcing others to accept Christian beliefs have anything to do with Christians. All those things seem to be coming from the governing elite from both parties. Not Christians.
I do not know if you will admit it but did not the democrats break the law by illegally investigating Trump during his time on office with the Russian collusion and the 2 impeachment where Trump was found not to have done what they claim? What exactly are you saying that Trump and his supporters did that was illegal?
Who tried to o*******w our government? Trump was exercising his constitutional rights to legally object to the outcome of an e******n and you think he tried to over throw the government? The J** 6 protest and r**t has not been fully investigated yet as to who and what was going on with other actors other than the accusations that Trump planned it all.
Again I will say we Christians are not forcing our beliefs on anyone. You said that Jesus invited us to spread the word and that is what we are doing. If you do not agree with the word then that is your choice. If the word is not allining with your beliefs or choices of life style, don't curse the messenger. Accept the word or reject it. Your choice.
I have not said or tried to force anyone to believ... (show quote)



I am appalled by your basic lack of understanding or your attempt to get me to explain things that are as plain
as day and I have no intention of taking the bait.

You can do your own research, Google works really well.

Jesus didn't say to go forth and collect political clout and make people live the way you see fit.

Toodles.
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Dec 28, 2022 18:22:08   #
Weswill wrote:
My oh my! This a******n rights ruling sure has you messed up in the head. We Christians love all but we might not like what some people do. We are promoting the right for all to live, even those in the womb. That is what we are fighting for. You bring up when a fetus is a person. Well we would not be talking about when a fetus is a person if the egg was not fertilized by the sperm to start with. So a person's life begins at conception. You talk about women's rights. We are only saying the woman should exercise her rights before having sex to determine if she would accept a.pregnancy or not. Not after the fact.
If power is what we want what happened with prayer in the schools or the 10 commandments being able to be on display??
My oh my! This a******n rights ruling sure has you... (show quote)


Your statement doesn't begin to account for the things that Evangelical Christianity in league with the Republican Party has done to others. Your religious freedom should not include the right to c***t, gerrymander districts and rule with your beliefs over others for any reason and for this the Republican Party and the Church will pay a high price because like all brainwashed cultists they believe they are doing God's work and serve a higher cause.

Jesus invites his followers to spread the Good News but he doesn't say go c***t, gerrymander and seize power so you can have d******n over the masses.

Perhaps when Trump and his cohorts recieve Jail terms because what they did was illegal, you'll not blame Democrats for it when it was the law that they broke and they led you into believing it was all ok.

It's not only not ok, is morally wrong to force your beliefs on others and legally wrong to try and o*******w the government that all of our ancestors died to put in place.
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Dec 3, 2022 18:33:08   #
Big Kahuna wrote:
Wrong, the dinner was planned so that Trump could explain some of the benefits of Judaism and how to counteract anti-Semitic viewpoints. The corrupt media, as usual, painted a wrong picture of what took place.


Right, with an anti-semitist. Try again.
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