I'm not saying Paul Pelosi was attacked by his gay, Democrat-voting lover in a tryst gone wrong. But the historically vital task of distinguishing truth from falsehood compels us to brainstorm ways in which the police and media might be covering up that fact if it did just happen to be true.

u/noactuallyitspoptart 1 points at 1667340801.000000

I know I put up something funny from over there the other day, but in my opinion THIS ONE leans towards “look at those right wing freaks” and not much else, and I’ve said before that pure outrage is not the vibe we aim for

You guys should have seen the reports though: “promoting hate”, “misinformation”, I mean come on read the room

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u/Otherwise-Anxiety-58 66 points at 1667247779.000000

I’m not saying the person who wrote that is a cannibal who eats babies, but isn’t it vital that we randomly speculate about it? What would happen if they did turn out to be a baby snatching cannibal?

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u/YourNetworkIsHaunted 16 points at 1667267640.000000

I mean someone on the internet who arguably has a history of making wild and unsubstantiated accusations or proclamations whenever the narrative turns away from him for more than an hour (until the end of this joke you do, shut up) said so on the internet, so clearly we have to take this very seriously.

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u/Soyweiser 51 points at 1667250253.000000

‘almost entirely based on conjecture’

That is the weakest way you can say ‘it is a lie’ possible. At least weasels are nice to look at.

Don’t think themotte ever found rightwing propaganda they didn’t instantly try to embrace, no matter how dumb and unbelievable it is.

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u/pleasetrimyourpubes 20 points at 1667253219.000000

Dragon-style arguments, belief in belief, Russell's Teapot, all are a symptom of a more malleable and easily convinced mind. Entire subgroups of people fall for trivially tested things without question. But this one in particular is just projection. They have so many of their guys getting caught with another dude in their bed that they had to go to this theory.

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u/Soyweiser 12 points at 1667259209.000000

Yeah with American conservatives it often seems to be, are you gay? Or a pedo? Not just the americans of course, iirc bolsanaro also admitted he likes them young.

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u/PeriLlwynog 3 points at 1667321994.000000

It’s (without loss of generality) the Southern Baptist Convention and Catholic Church Coverup syndrome in action.

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u/IHateReddit_9001 20 points at 1667260916.000000

Yeah but you see you have unfounded opinions, I have priors. We are not the same

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u/Soyweiser 5 points at 1667299235.000000

Ha jokes on you, I still can get insurance then.

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u/pusillanimouslist 4 points at 1667990495.000000

It’s kind of how I feel about the right wing going for the whole “they’re leaving out litter boxes for kids who identify as cats at school”: I’m begging you idiots to come up with at least some believable lies. Yeah, Paul Pelosi’s secret gay lover is the unshaven neckbeard with substance abuse issues and who is regularly homeless. Suuuure.

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u/Soyweiser 3 points at 1667999649.000000

O boy, have I got a story for you on the cat litter box front. While the whole furry/trans angle is bullshit. Some schools do have litterboxes for kids, for [the most american reason](https://nowthisnews.com/news/cat-litter-school-bathroom-conspiracy-theory). But yeah, that wasn't part of the conspiracy, and I think partially that the unbelievability is part of the point. Like it further alienates the true believers in this shit from their non believing environment (who do exist), and for the trolls it creates a 'lol, I dare you to try and debunk this obv bullshit which I don't believe in' moment. (of course in the far right, these ideas can still be combined in one person because these things are weird).

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u/giziti 2 points at 1667306233.000000

I like the "almost" qualifier.

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u/Soyweiser 2 points at 1667306982.000000

Yeah, my whole post could have just been replaced with: '"almost" ?' But brevity is not the soul of Rationalism.

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u/superiority 17 points at 1667254327.000000

One thing that occurred to me reading this post is that this might be a roundabout attempt to convince people that the “official story” is true.

That is, the poster (privately) predicts that more information will come out in the future that corroborates the claim that this Depape guy is a right-wing Pelosi-hater who broke in to attack Nancy Pelosi because he hates Democrats and he’s extremely cooked. The poster also predicts that his fellow rationalists will respond to this corroborating information by saying that it’s part of a police-media cover-up.

He wants to dissuade them from reaching this erroneous conclusion, so he invites them to say in advance what a police-media cover-up would look like. Once they’ve publicly committed to their own sets of predictions, it will be harder for them to frivolously make that claim. Thus they will be more likely to accept that new evidence as genuine.

This is the most charitable explanation I could think of for why someone would engage in this kind of conspiracy-curious talk. But even if that were the case, I would still find it very funny that anyone participated in a community where they had to act like that.

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u/YourNetworkIsHaunted 21 points at 1667267765.000000

Also it won't work. For all their claims about precommitment or whatever the broader rationalist community has a bad habit of failing to meaningfully "update their priors" outside of cases where their prior was "sure whatever it doesn't actually matter to me"

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u/Soyweiser 9 points at 1667320338.000000

If they were able to update their priors they would join sneerclub. ;)

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u/giziti 3 points at 1667306825.000000

>He wants to dissuade them from reaching this erroneous conclusion, so he invites them to say in advance what a police-media cover-up would look like. Once they've publicly committed to their own sets of predictions, it will be harder for them to frivolously make that claim. Thus they will be more likely to accept that new evidence as genuine. "I bet that this guy will confess immediately to cover it all up and the media will all fall for it and start saying people who question the official story are nuts."

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u/HersheleOstropoler 1 points at 1668384487.000000

I was going to say, coming from someplace that isn't The Motte or functionally equivalent thereto, this is somewhat sensible: "here is the evidence we would expect to see iff the gay lover story were true, so let's see if that's what turns up [and I'm pretty sure it won't]" From The Motte, it … isn't

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u/AprilSpektra 9 points at 1667247713.000000

I’m unclear, is this coming from one of the local sneer targets or is this just some rando?

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u/superiority 20 points at 1667247927.000000

Top comment latest Culture War Roundup.

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u/pleasetrimyourpubes 22 points at 1667253462.000000

Less than an hour after that post was made the DoJ released the warrant to charge the guy. He full on confessed on audio to his actions. And yet no one in that subthread has retracted anything or even replied. So stupid.

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u/Soyweiser 10 points at 1667302441.000000

And still (or I assume they do, they did ages ago) they hide behind 'we don't fight the culture war, we only discuss it'.

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u/giziti 5 points at 1667306285.000000

Sounds like the guy is in on the coverup. This only confirms our suspicions.

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u/rezakuchak 8 points at 1667286836.000000

Do you beat your wife? Well, obviously it’s an extraordinary claim, but lets just toy with it for the sake of argument…

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u/wholetyouinhere 7 points at 1667255447.000000

Sounds like somebody needs to adjust his priors!

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u/_Vomitorium 7 points at 1667271004.000000

Sure, there’s no reason to believe that the dart I tossed at my wheel of excuses happened to land on the truth, but what if it did?

If it didn’t? No worries, I’ve got another dart.

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u/sue_me_please 2 points at 1667609923.000000

So this is how they’re moving on from the waning relevance of the “Michelle Obama is actually a man” theory

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