Earlier quoted context omitted.
>and in 2025 they are gaslighting me about ever having had those arguments at all This part is especially fascinating because I have heard of, and even had, remarkably similar experiences. The only real thing is the perpetual now. It's not even that they aren't curious or aware of what they said previously, they even emphatically deny their own words. I don't know if you remember when Ebola was a big news topic becau…
They have lost all ability to remember the past. Big head political pundits literally go on Fox News and blame a Democrat President for Epstein's death, and you have to tell them "Uh, no, Trump was president then, and it was his administration in control" and they have this insane double take look like they can't possibly remember that. Blaming Obama for the Hurricane Katrina response wasn't a fluke. My father is a g…
I also think there's a kind of fascinating meta question about how the nature of conspiracy theorizing itself response to challenges. I think fact checking is a perfectly legitimate institutional response to it and in a healthy culture it would be appreciated and valued and utilized and would play a role. But the conspiracy ecosystem writ large has had to think of a systematic response to the phenomenon of fact checking and like evolve its way out of vulnerability to it.
One is to dismiss correction for any number of reasons, another is to kind of cultivate a mindset and attitude of frenzied emotional subject shifting that kind of exists and sustains itself in a way that's detached from the habit of factual investigation. But I also think there are such things as like experimenting with principled philosophical stances like relativism or disputing baseline concepts like burden of proof or especially fascinating in the flat Earth corner of the internet are philosophical positions about the relativity of knowledge and extreme subjective and skeptical orientations towards the world and the possibility of data and knowledge.
So even though I actually personally believe in the importance and significance of isolating out and emphasizing specific clear and short criticisms such as conspiracy theorists can't remember the past. I do think they have processes to metabolize and respond to those criticisms and I'm fascinated to learn to what extent they might try to articulate a principle in defense of not remembering the past. Because surely some will give it the college try.