COVID denialism, election denialism, and “The Great Reset” are high profile crank subjects. Being a conservative Christian doesn’t make you a crank; those things do.
From a purely logical viewpoint, it is a bit hilarious that you consider the objectively most outlandish of these beliefs to be the only non-cranky one. Although it is, admittedly, the most viable one socially.
I don't think truth/outlandishness is all that closely related to whether a particular belief is a crank-y one. For example: horoscopes are fake, but I don't think that people who believe in horoscopes are cranks, per se. Or unfalsifiable claims: plenty of people have crank and non-crank views about things that just don't adhere to proof/disproof.
To put it another way: a lot of religious (particularly Christian) views amount to metaphysical claims that we can't really falsify. That's maybe sufficient to make them "irrational" in a narrow analytical sense, but insufficient to label them as crank-ish.
Claims about covid and the election can't be (realistically) falsified by an individual either. You're just disagreeing on whether you should trust a study author / politician more than a priest.
I don't understand this point. I'm saying that whether or not a particular subject is a "crank" one is not closely related to either its truth value or whether that truth value is even ascertainable.
I haven't made an argument for why the ones I've listed are actually crank subjects; I consider those granted and I'm not particularly interested in justifying them.
The things you listed form a cluster of beliefs that gullible, uneducated, and often toxic people flock to, and that makes those positions quite unattractive even ignoring their respective merits, which are not great.
What I take issue with is the lack of symmetry. For every COVID denialist, you have a zero-COVID enthusiast. For every election denialist, you have an impending climate catastrophe doommonger. For every great reset conspiracy theorist, you have someone who believes we live in a meritocracy. Each of the latter positions is as merituous as their counterpart, but the former are treated with a disproportionate contempt.
I think symmetry in this case would amount to false balance. Why even bother to frame things this way? It's self evident to most people that crank views run the gamut of social and political backgrounds; like all things in life, we prioritize our discussion of them by their perceived impact(s) on our lives. COVID denialism has more of an impact on my life than an anti-nuclear crank does.
Respectfully, I think calling "The Great Reset" a 'crank subject' is itself a sign of conspiratorial thinking, or in the least, misleading/false information. I often see people label discussions of "The Great Reset" in this way, but that ignores the reality that the World Economic Forum literally branded their 2020 meeting as "Great Reset" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Reset). If the WEF isn't a familiar name, it's because you might have heard it previously referred to as "Davos", a meeting of many powerful and influential people.
When such a group meets to discuss society-wide changes and pushes their positions publicly, I don't think that's a "crank subject". That's simply a legitimate story that others may wish to discuss and raise concerns about. Critique about WEF/Davos isn't new - it has been described as an undemocratic forum previously, because it's a set of powerful people deciding how they want to shape the world outside of any national or international political process. This isn't conspiratorial thinking, it is literally the way the WEF is set up and operates. See the following paper for a critique, which mentions that WEF members downplay the importance of this forum and that their public exposure hides all that takes place privately: https://www.europarl.europa.eu/thinktank/en/document.html?re...
"Crank subjects" are not subjects that are themselves fundamentally outlandish or unreal: they're subjects picked up by cranks and integrated into conspiratorial worldviews. Davos is a real summit that happens every year; it's also a crank subject because cranks integrate it into their NWO and similar theories.
Your own Wikipedia link says this neatly:
> According to The New York Times,[1 1] the BBC, The Guardian, Le Devoir and Radio Canada, "baseless" conspiracy theories spread by American far-right groups linked to QAnon surged at the onset of the Great Reset forum and increased in fervor as leaders such as U.S. President Joe Biden and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau[1 2] incorporated ideas based on a "reset" in their speeches.[1 3]
> Davos is a real summit that happens every year; it's also a crank subject because cranks integrate it into their NWO and similar theories.
Well, I think they're only partly wrong: Of course Davos has always (since long before it was called the "WEF") felt like it's all about "the world order"... But it's made up of the rich and powerful -- so why would it want a new world order, when the old / current one is that the rich and powerful run the world?
I'm trying to understand what specifically makes a worldview conspiratorial for you. Are you disagreeing that the "Great Reset" involves implementing particular ideological views and political positions? Would you agree that people are allowed to disagree with those positions? And that those who disagree with those positions are allowed to call attention to powerful people pushing those positions? Personally I don't see any of those as being "cranky" or "conspiratorial" as much as just regular political engagement.
Regarding the quote from Wikipedia - I don't agree with how that portion of the article is written or sourced. It is debated on the Talk page, and is a reflection of a growing bias in Wikipedia (https://larrysanger.org/2020/05/wikipedia-is-badly-biased/). That section starts off by mentioning QAnon, then says Trump amplified QAnon, and never makes a connection between all of that and "Great Reset" (it's a sort of "guilt by association" argument). Additionally, it lists out a number of right-leaning TV personalities and claims they were pushing a conspiracy theory, but none of the source articles they reference show any false claim from those same people. From those sources, it looks like these people complained that the pandemic is being exploited as a political opportunity to introduce and push various left-leaning political positions. That seems not only very reasonable to me, but also easily provable.
From my perspective, I am seeing people take the very small number of people who are suggesting the pandemic was a planned crisis with certain political goals in mind, and using that to discredit others who are not claiming it was planned but just disagree with the political opportunism and the political goals.
Do you ever think about how crank "denialisms" are usually believed by small percentages of the population, but this time with COVID and the election it's nearly half? Isn't that strange?
> May opinion poll finds that 53% of Republicans believe Trump is the ‘true president’ compared with 3% of Democrats
> About one-quarter of adults falsely believe the 3 November election was tainted by illegal voting, including 56% of Republicans, according to the poll.
Actually, your second link doesn't say what you think it says. It says that people believe that Democrats believe that, not that Democrats believe that. Yes, it seems a weird thing to poll about.
Your fourth link is misleading. You've picked a link from a moment in time when Barr had released his summary of the Meuller report but Meuller's criticism of Barr's summary as being inaccurate had not been released.
The second link's poll includes a breakout of Democrats' beliefs in what Democrats believe, in addition to the overall figures. So 65% of Democrats agreed at the time that Democrats don't accept Trump as the legitimate president. I realize it's not the same exact question, but it is similar. There are also other polls that I didn't include that you can find with similar results.
As for the fourth link - I am not sure of the timing of that particular poll (I just pulled that from a search earlier), so I'll have to take your word on that. Thanks for pointing it out.
I'm not refuting it. I am pointing out that this is a pattern with much precedent, and is not restricted to Republicans or conservatives. A number of comments in this discussion seem to be ascribing belief in improbable scenarios to one political side. If anything, I would say that election denialism is a tit-for-tat game that is now reflecting back the same disbelief that was shown in prior elections. Furthermore, the GP comment suggested that half of the population holding a "crank denialism" is something new. My evidence shows it is clearly not something new.
Even just looking at excess deaths immediately shows the scale of the pandemic. Some weeks during December, there were 25,000 additional people per week dying compared to the typical year. What do you think was causing this if not Covid?
Over 680,000 additional deaths in 2020/early 2021.
Talk to a single doctor that was on the 'front lines' of this - a family member was signing 20 death certificates per week for people dying of horrible respiratory disease with positive Covid tests. One person at one hospital overwhelmed with the quantity of death. What was it if not Covid?
Agreed, I use euromomo to look at total mortality across Europe and it's difficult to deny that something was killing lots more people than usual last spring and winter (northern hemisphere).
However it can also be the case that COVID deaths (and hospitalizations as well) may be over-reported. We have recent reports that seem to be pointing strongly to this possibility.
So you think that "something was killing lots more people than usual" but that the few isolated cases of counties overcounting Covid deaths are systemic and that there was no reciprocal data issues?
What precisely do you think was killing all of those extra people who were showing up in ERs with respiratory distress?
Personally my guess is that COVID was, yes, responsible for the vast majority of those deaths.
But I also do think that those cases of overcounting are very likely NOT the only, isolated ones. The dynamics exposed (how hospitalizations were counted, the basic 'with' vs 'of' question), almost certainly apply more broadly.
So, apologies for attempting nuance, but I think COVID can at once be a) a massive pandemic (and tragic for millions), while also being b) somewhat overblown due to unrigorous metrics that in turn feed more sensationalism than otherwise warranted.
But that’s not really nuance in any classic sense —- you’re right to point out that there were numerous problems (as expected with a novel virus) in attributing deaths with any certainty to Covid so we did the best we could. And even with the “sensationalism” and “overcounting”, excess deaths surpassed actual Covid deaths by something like 15%.
Doesn’t that actually imply that there wasn’t enough sensationalism and that our methods, while attributing some non-Covid deaths to Covid, were actually missing many more Covid deaths?
I don’t get the leap from “we misattributed some non-Covid deaths to Covid” in an environment that had even more deaths that our supposed overcount as evidence that we overreacted.
So you're saying 'net net', you think the COVID mortality is undercounted? If I had to bet something valuable, I'd take the other side. That's just what seems most probable to me, based on the evidence I cited.
Another plausible explanation to excess mortality differences is that lockdowns and other measures caused people to engage in behaviors that increased mortality, from putting off necessary medical visits to exacerbated mental health due to social isolation or financial stress.
It isn't as crazy as you might think depending on how far you want to take it. My charitable interpretation of the comment you're replying to is that they believe COVID is real and does cause deaths, but that the number of deaths is not as high as what is claimed.
As an example of why that isn't "crazy", consider that recently a major Bay Area county in CA revised their COVID counts downward by 25% (https://www.foxnews.com/health/california-county-cuts-covid-...) because they had previously included deaths of anyone infected with the virus, regardless of whether the virus was a direct or contributing cause to the death. This is in a state that took the pandemic very seriously, had lots of governmental organization around it, and 'believes in science'.
People have been raising concerns about how deaths are counted throughout the pandemic, but they've largely been ignored, despite it being a legitimate line of questioning. They were always told "there are standards", which isn't really a convincing argument, given that there have been a non-zero number of proven instances of over-counting. You could argue that excess mortality is the metric we should look at, and that may be appropriate in some countries where such data collection is rigorous. But the way excess mortality is tracked is also inconsistent between different nations, and outright non-existent in most nations.
I remember last year when believing COVID may have come out of a lab made one a crank. It was only on certain news channels or specific papers. Of course, let's also assume there are no widespread liberal beliefs (the world is going to end in 12 years) that should label someone as a crank.
yeah, i know that's what it refers to, but it is a straw man. Nobody actually thinks the world is going to literally end in that short of a time frame, and the existence of claims vaguely like this still don't mean its a widely held belief.
Well, if it's not widely held, then it shouldn't be as widely said. Saying it when everybody knows it's not true just makes you look like a nut case who's lost touch with reality. People who make such claims do their cause more harm than good.
Conspiracy theorists were right about so many things last year like hydroxychloroquine and 5g. So we should totally trust them now that Biden and scientists have decided to look more closely into the lab-leak possibility.
