It’s wild.
I think there may be a factor of sample size; There’s something like 40 million Canadians, 40 million Australians, 60 million British, and 340 million Americans. So if you take a random sample of English speech on any topic, it’s statistically most likely to be from an American.
You forgot Russia, india & china
No I didn’t. India might be an asterisk.
I would say people in countries with poor or non-existent public education are more prone. The USA’s public education system was eviscerated in the 70’s I think.
I would say people in countries with poor or non-existent public education are more prone. The USA’s public education system was eviscerated in the 70’s I think.
As early as the 60s, but really the 80s. Through the 70s US had some of the best public education on the planet. The move to privatize education started in earnest under Reagan (in California, as governor), and then further under Reagan (and every president and congress to now).
Specifically:
• calling for an end to free tuition for state college and university students
• annually demanding 20 percent across-the-board cuts in higher education funding
• repeatedly slashing construction funds for state campuses
• engineering the firing of Clark Kerr, the highly respected president of the University of California
• declaring that the state “should not subsidize intellectual curiosity”
That last one hits hard. The state must subsidize intellectual curiosity. Intellectual curiosity gave us everything from electricity to modern governmental theory to the mathematics that would later turn out to allow wireless communications. Curiosity without a point is extremely valuable.
And it should be noted that even in late medieval Europe the state funded intellectual curiosity. The nobility were the state and many either were curious themselves or would patronize intellectuals
How the fuck do you come to the conclusion that you’re spending too much money on education
R E A G A N.
The Trump era began by ripping out the solar panels on the White House and tricking blue collars into voting against themselves.
It was, and is, fucking awful.
Educated people tend to lean liberal and conservatives hate open minded people.
It’s this. People with good educations will figure out that the Republicans are lying to them to take advantage of them. Republicans don’t want their pigeon/fools to think too hard about the lies they tell.
Look at Trump. Is he an obvious liar? Yes. But there are very “poorly educated” people who believe all the lies he says.
People in education tend to lean liberal. Conservatives don’t hate people but they do realize there’s such thing as being so open minded your brains spill out.
No, we just have a larger presence on the internet relative to our share of the global population, meaning our idiocy is noticed a lot more often.
Call it the Florida Man effect, it’s not that other states don’t also have crazies, it’s just that Florida’s are more well documented and publicized.
No, Americans are just as prone as the other anglo countries, there’s just more of them. If we start delving into other languages, then things immediately go downhill. For example, I speak Arabic and I would say that at least 80% believe in at least 1 batshit crazy conspiracy theory. Why? It’s because the vast majority of Arabs consume their information from Facebook and a good chunk of that information comes from state owned propaganda outlets. Just a 2 minute scroll on my father’s Facebook, I saw the following conspiracies:
Israel is created by the kufar to sin against allah
India is on the brink of becoming majority muslim
Incest, pedophilia, and zoophilia are common in the West because they don’t have islamic morals
Russia is fighting NATO and winning
Hamas is beating Israel so bad that Israel is on the brink of collapse
Eating Pork will slowly turn your heart inside out
America has vast tracts of arable land with people who have nothing to look at but fields and endless sky, and who get very little contact with other humans.
The Simple answer is No. Every country has its fair share of loud and dumb.
Australians seem to have a thing for conspiracy theories too.
Studies have found ( for example ) conspiracy thinking correlates with extremist political beliefs, especially right wing political beliefs, across countries. That linked study found the effect was strengthened by lack of political control.
So countries with more political extremists, especially far right wing in media platforms, leads to more popular conspiracy theories.
Yes.
Yes we are! It’s a result of all the subliminal messaging we receive from our kitchen appliances.
Yes. The lizard people engineered us that way.
You can read “The Paranoid Style In American Politics” from 1964 for some insight: https://harpers.org/archive/1964/11/the-paranoid-style-in-american-politics/
American politics has often been an arena for angry minds. In recent years we have seen angry minds at work mainly among extreme right-wingers, who have now demonstrated in the Goldwater movement how much political leverage can be got out of the animosities and passions of a small minority. But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind. In using the expression “paranoid style” I am not speaking in a clinical sense, but borrowing a clinical term for other purposes. I have neither the competence nor the desire to classify any figures of the past or present as certifiable lunatics. In fact, the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.
It’s written at a higher than 6th grade target, so it might be a challenge for anyone who’s not used to that. Please give it a good faith effort to read.
Thinking about it, the low literacy rate in the US might be an aggravating factor. Something like half of US adults cannot read at a 6th grade level. That’s going to hurt their ability to deal with complex topics.
No. An old colleague of mine is on LinkedIn non-stop posting crazy QAnon shit and RT headlines. Anti-vax more-or-less started in the UK with the Andrew Wakefield affair and it seems to be super-popular in Australia too. Conspiracy Theory kind of helps people rationalise the absolute chaotic mess of the world we live in by reducing it to simple narratives where a defined enemy is out to get us.
No, that’s just what they want you to think.
American culture, and I’m generalising, there are a million sub cultures obviously… Emphasises the individual. The American dream of you working hard to get some payoff, is an example. As such there is a lot of cultural pressure to not correct people when you are in conversation, it’s more polite and acceptable to play along. Their stupid ideas, their problem.
And that’s where Americans (again I’m generalising) are weakest here. Because stupid ideas are everybody’s problem. Because once people go off-the-deep-end there is no easy way of getting them back. And a large amount of people involved in conspiracy fantasy is legitimising it.
So no Americans are not more prone to conspiracy fantasy, but American culture does permit fast growth of ideas. MLMs are another example of this. You can use cultural taboos and cultural elements to sell bullshit.
