It’s been a long time since I’ve looked at a Siskind essay, but he’s really phoning it in. Only about 20 paragraphs, with a few images of graphs he pulled from outside. Where’s the effort? Where’s the multiple meandering sections to obfuscate just how neo-reactionary his thesis is? What happened to you, bro?

The original Economist story didn’t even claim to be about conspiracy theories in general. (Maybe the headline could be read that way, but news headlines are meant to be catchy and often aren’t even written by the authors of the story.) It’s not “cherry-picking” to look at right-wing conspiracy theories when you announce that your story is about QAnon.

Americans who believe in the conspiracy theories collectively packaged as “QAnon” have grown quiet in recent months. They gained international notoriety after a large group of believers were among those who stormed the US Capitol building during a violent riot on January 6th. But the precise cause of the movement’s appeal has yet to be pinned down. One prominent theory is that Americans who have no religious affiliation find themselves attracted to other causes, such as the Q craze. Another, posited by Ben Sasse, a Republican senator from Nebraska, is that modern strains of Christian evangelicalism which “run on dopey apocalypse-mongering” do not entirely satisfy all worshippers—and so they go on to find community and salvation in other groups, such as QAnon. Using The Economist’s polling with YouGov, an online pollster, we can test both of these theories.

but the economist weren’t asking whether left or right wing people believe in more conspiracies, all they wanted to know was whether it was less religious people or more religious people who believed in them, and they didn’t conclude anything about the left or right political preference of conspiracy theorists while they were answering that question

This doesn’t make any sense

Scott also forgets that this is about the US which is a profoundly weird country religion and conspiracy theory wise.

E: mega contrarian mode

The astrology question also asked ‘do you believe the position of the stars and planets influences peoples lives’, the answer to this is yes, the day night cycle of the earth and sun does influence peoples lives. (With questions like this there is going to be a lot of people giving the lizardmen constant answer)

To state the obvious wikipedia says “The Catechism of the Catholic Church maintains that divination, including predictive astrology, is incompatible with modern Catholic beliefs[34] such as free will:[4]”

Also astrology isn’t even a conspiracy theory or more “woo” than belief in the bible so wtf?

As for UFOs, if God’s only son was human, it would be strange to posit the existence of UFOs or any other human-like species.

As for Big Foot, I see no reason why he couldn’t be one of the species preserved by Noah on the arc. I’d argue Big Foot is perfectly compatable with the beliefs of churchgoers.

I particularly liked the “It’s not fair to talk about QAnon, illegal votes, and COVID microchips, because they’re right wing conspiracies!” stuff, with absolutely zero awknowledgement of the fact that most conspiracy theories are right wing so by ignoring them you’re not only selecting a biased sample, you’re refusing to engage with the underlying truth that most conspiracy theories are right wing and maybe that’s pertinent fucking information.

A lot of similarities here to his recent post Which party has gotten more extreme?, where he whines about studies that find right-wingers are more extreme while blatantly cherry-picking nonscientific surveys and internet quizzes that find left-wingers have gotten more extreme.

I just can’t deal with how smug this asshole is. God I wish he would fuck off.

Not to mention, this whole post is one long exercise in the ecological fallacy. Just annoying how these guys are so self-congratulatory in their own intelligence but keep missing out on the basic inferential stuff all of the time.

Are UFOs, Bigfoot and astrology even “conspiracy theories”? Certainly there are conspiracy theories around those (namely, “these are true and the government/Illuminati/etc is hiding the evidence”), but believing in the existence of intelligent life elsewhere in the universe isn’t really a conspiracy theory, especially when compared to actual conspiracy theories with actual real-world consequences such as QAnon.