The problem isn't you, CTers - it's your dang brain

[Lance Payette]

Another of my highly unpopular (but I like 'em!) little essays on the epistemology of conspiracy belief. I did discover a new angle I hadn't previously explored. (Take heart, I am now in a walking boot and will soon be completely out of your hair.)

In my decades of debate with extremists on religion forums – with Flat Earthers, Young Earthers, Bible literalists, people who think they are going to be “raptured” off the toilet to meet Jesus in the air, possibly this afternoon – I long took the approach that “You don’t really believe this. No sane person could really believe this. You’re pretending. I don’t know exactly why you’re pretending, but you simply have to be.”

I finally had to admit I was wrong. I’m still not convinced that anyone, deep down at the most visceral level, actually believes these things. “Yes, I actually believe the earth is 6,500 years old!” But they have convinced themselves they believe these things, which may be functionally pretty much the same as actually believing them. The part of my brain that would quickly say "Lance, snap out of it, this is nuts!" never clicks in for some reason.

What is it? Is it a social thing, the fun of being part of a community of outsiders who irritate and befuddle normal people? No, just pretending would give you that – which is what I always wrongly assumed Flat Earthers were doing, just amusing themselves and us in a tongue-in-cheek way. How do you actually convince yourself the earth is flat or 6,500 years old? In the context of the JFKA, how do you convince yourself Lee Harvey Oswald was an innocent patsy and the mountain of evidence against him was all fabricated, faked, altered and planted?

Someone can sincerely believe the JFKA was a conspiracy of some sort without descending into irrationality, just as one can be a religious believer without thinking the earth is flat or 6,500 years old. But as we see here all the time, the descent into irrationality is prevalent.

To quote an article at the National Library of Medicine, “Conspiracy belief is correlated with lower levels of analytic thinking (Swami, Voracek, Stieger, Tran, & Furnham, 2014) and lower levels of education (Douglas, Sutton, Callan, Dawtry, & Harvey, 2016). It is also associated with the tendency to overestimate the likelihood of co-occurring events (Brotherton & French, 2014) and the tendency to perceive agency and intentionality where it does not exist (Douglas et al., 2016).” I have no doubt this is all true – but does it really explain believing obviously irrational things? (The article, “The Psychology of Conspiracy Theories,” is non-technical and well worth reading: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5724570/.)

When I have raised this issue within JFKA communities, the responses are always these:

1. Conspiracies have existed throughout history, bub. Yes, this is true – but they do not, never have and never will, look anything like the wilder JFKA theories. The JFKA conspiracies are the very antithesis of what actual conspiracies look like. I don't have to posit any basket of irrationalities to believe there was a Lincoln assassination conspiracy.

2. We are not like those other wackos, Flat Earthers and UFO believers and whatnot. We are serious researchers following the evidence wherever it leads. No, you aren’t. You are exactly like those other wackos. Your “epistemology, to use the term loosely, is exactly the same.

Could this be the answer (https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2025/06/conspiracy-theorists-unaware-their-beliefs-are-fringe):

"Overconfidence is a hallmark trait of people who believe in conspiracies, and they also significantly overestimate how much others agree with them, Cornell psychology researchers have found. The study indicates that belief in conspiracies may be less about a person’s needs and motivations and more about their failure to recognize that they might be wrong.

Conspiracy believers not only consistently overestimated their performance on numeracy and perception tests, revealing they tend to be less analytic in the way they think. They also are genuinely unaware that their beliefs are on the fringe, thinking themselves to be in the majority 93% of the time, according to the research. The work counters previous theories that people believe conspiracies essentially because they want to, out of narcissism or to appear unique."

The above article, from just a few months ago, summarizes research published earlier this year: “Overconfidently Conspiratorial: Conspiracy Believers are Dispositionally Overconfident and Massively Overestimate How Much Others Agree With Them,” https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/01461672251338358. The abstract explains, “Although conspiratorial claims were believed by a majority of participants only 12% of the time, believers thought themselves to be in the majority 93% of the time. This was evident even when asked to rate agreement among counter-partisans, indicating that conspiracists are genuinely unaware that their beliefs are on the fringe.”

Could that be the answer: People who believe irrational things think they’re normal, that most other people agree with them? No, I don’t think so. It would, however, explain why JFKA CTers love polls: “81% of Americans agree with us!” (Well, not really. The supposed agreement is only in the broadest sense, by uninformed people who have been fed a steady diet of media coverage and agree only at the very general level of, “Yeah, with all the noise, I guess there must’ve been some sort of conspiracy.”)

This, I believe, is closer to the real answer: CTers' brains are wired differently. It’s essentially physical: ”Scientists have found that the human brain's natural tendency to seek patterns—an evolutionary tool for survival—can go into overdrive, leading to ‘illusory pattern perception,’ where people perceive connections where none exist. This was evident in experiments where conspiracy believers were more likely to see order in random data, such as chaotic artwork or sequences of coin tosses.” The article, “Connecting the dots: Illusory pattern perception predicts belief in conspiracies and the supernatural,” is well worth downloading and reading: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/ejsp.2331.

The conclusion: “The answer that emerges from our data is that irrational beliefs are associated with a distortion of an otherwise normal and functional cognitive process, namely, pattern perception.”

And it’s not just overactive pattern recognition. Umpteen studies have shown that those prone to conspiracy thinking actually process information differently. For example, “A new brain imaging study published in Scientific Reports provides evidence that conspiracy beliefs are linked to distinct patterns of brain activity when people evaluate information. The research indicates that people who score high on conspiracy belief scales tend to engage different cognitive systems when reading conspiracy-related statements compared to factual ones. These individuals relied more heavily on regions associated with subjective value and belief uncertainty.” https://www.psypost.org/people-who-believe-in-conspiracy-theories-process-information-differently-at-the-neural-level/.

Or this: “Neurally, a double dissociation emerged: high conspiracy believers exhibited increased activation in the ventromedial and dorsomedial prefrontal cortices—regions implicated in value-based decision-making and belief uncertainty—when evaluating conspiracy-related content. In contrast, low conspiracy believers showed greater activation in the hippocampus and precuneus, areas associated with episodic and semantic memory retrieval.” “Neural correlates of conspiracy beliefs during information evaluation,” https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-03723-z. See also “Wired for Belief: The Neuroscience of Conspiracy Theory,” https://www.luc.edu/neuroscienceandsociety/hottopics/essays/archive/wiredforbelieftheneuroscienceofconspiracytheory.shtml.

In short, when I think “How can anyone believe that nonsense?” and one of the resident CTers thinks “Why can’t he see this, it’s so obvious?”, the disconnect is undoubtedly due to a variety of psychological and social factors but may be explainable largely in terms of “different wiring.” Most of us, I guess, are just lucky and got the non-CT wiring. Others, and you know who they are, are badly in need of an electrician.

[Tom Graves]

[...]

You have a typo of omission in your seventh sentence.

[Michael T. Griffith]

Another of my highly unpopular (but I like 'em!) little essays on the epistemology of conspiracy belief. I did discover a new angle I hadn't previously explored. (Take heart, I am now in a walking boot and will soon be completely out of your hair.)

In my decades of debate with extremists on religion forums – with Flat Earthers, Young Earthers, Bible literalists, people who think they are going to be “raptured” off the toilet to meet Jesus in the air, possibly this afternoon – I long took the approach that “You don’t really believe this. No sane person could really believe this. You’re pretending. I don’t exactly why you’re pretending, but you simply have to be.”

I finally had to admit I was wrong. I’m still not convinced that anyone, deep down at the most visceral level, actually believes these things. “Yes, I actually believe the earth is 6,500 years old!” But they have convinced themselves they believe these things, which may be functionally pretty much the same as actually believing them. The part of my brain that would quickly say "Lance, snap out of it, this is nuts!" never clicks in for some reason.

What is it? Is it a social thing, the fun of being part of a community of outsiders who irritate and befuddle normal people? No, just pretending would give you that – which is what I always wrongly assumed Flat Earthers were doing, just amusing themselves and us in a tongue-in-cheek way. How do you actually convince yourself the earth is flat or 6,500 years old? In the context of the JFKA, how do you convince yourself Lee Harvey Oswald was an innocent patsy and the mountain of evidence against him was all fabricated, faked, altered and planted?

Someone can sincerely believe the JFKA was a conspiracy of some sort without descending into irrationality, just as one can be a religious believer without thinking the earth is flat or 6,500 years old. But as we see here all the time, the descent into irrationality is prevalent.

To quote an article at the National Library of Medicine, “Conspiracy belief is correlated with lower levels of analytic thinking (Swami, Voracek, Stieger, Tran, & Furnham, 2014) and lower levels of education (Douglas, Sutton, Callan, Dawtry, & Harvey, 2016). It is also associated with the tendency to overestimate the likelihood of co-occurring events (Brotherton & French, 2014) and the tendency to perceive agency and intentionality where it does not exist (Douglas et al., 2016).” I have no doubt this is all true – but does it really explain believing obviously irrational things? (The article, “The Psychology of Conspiracy Theories,” is non-technical and well worth reading: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5724570/.)

When I have raised this issue within JFKA communities, the responses are always these:

1. Conspiracies have existed throughout history, bub. Yes, this is true – but they do not, never have and never will, look anything like the wilder JFKA theories. The JFKA conspiracies are the very antithesis of what actual conspiracies look like. I don't have to posit any basket of irrationalities to believe there was a Lincoln assassination conspiracy.

2. We are not like those other wackos, Flat Earthers and UFO believers and whatnot. We are serious researchers following the evidence wherever it leads. No, you aren’t. You are exactly like those other wackos. Your “epistemology, to use the term loosely, is exactly the same.

Could this be the answer (https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2025/06/conspiracy-theorists-unaware-their-beliefs-are-fringe):

"Overconfidence is a hallmark trait of people who believe in conspiracies, and they also significantly overestimate how much others agree with them, Cornell psychology researchers have found. The study indicates that belief in conspiracies may be less about a person’s needs and motivations and more about their failure to recognize that they might be wrong.

Conspiracy believers not only consistently overestimated their performance on numeracy and perception tests, revealing they tend to be less analytic in the way they think. They also are genuinely unaware that their beliefs are on the fringe, thinking themselves to be in the majority 93% of the time, according to the research. The work counters previous theories that people believe conspiracies essentially because they want to, out of narcissism or to appear unique."

The above article, from just a few months ago, summarizes research published earlier this year: “Overconfidently Conspiratorial: Conspiracy Believers are Dispositionally Overconfident and Massively Overestimate How Much Others Agree With Them,” https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/01461672251338358. The abstract explains, “Although conspiratorial claims were believed by a majority of participants only 12% of the time, believers thought themselves to be in the majority 93% of the time. This was evident even when asked to rate agreement among counter-partisans, indicating that conspiracists are genuinely unaware that their beliefs are on the fringe.”

Could that be the answer: People who believe irrational things think they’re normal, that most other people agree with them? No, I don’t think so. It would, however, explain why JFKA CTers love polls: “81% of Americans agree with us!” (Well, not really. The supposed agreement is only in the broadest sense, by uninformed people who have been fed a steady diet of media coverage and agree only at the very general level of, “Yeah, with all the noise, I guess there must’ve been some sort of conspiracy.”)

This, I believe, is closer to the real answer: CTers' brains are wired differently. It’s essentially physical: ”Scientists have found that the human brain's natural tendency to seek patterns—an evolutionary tool for survival—can go into overdrive, leading to ‘illusory pattern perception,’ where people perceive connections where none exist. This was evident in experiments where conspiracy believers were more likely to see order in random data, such as chaotic artwork or sequences of coin tosses.” The article, “Connecting the dots: Illusory pattern perception predicts belief in conspiracies and the supernatural,” is well worth downloading and reading: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/ejsp.2331.

The conclusion: “The answer that emerges from our data is that irrational beliefs are associated with a distortion of an otherwise normal and functional cognitive process, namely, pattern perception.”

And it’s not just overactive pattern recognition. Umpteen studies have shown the those prone to conspiracy thinking actually process information differently. For example, “A new brain imaging study published in Scientific Reports provides evidence that conspiracy beliefs are linked to distinct patterns of brain activity when people evaluate information. The research indicates that people who score high on conspiracy belief scales tend to engage different cognitive systems when reading conspiracy-related statements compared to factual ones. These individuals relied more heavily on regions associated with subjective value and belief uncertainty.” https://www.psypost.org/people-who-believe-in-conspiracy-theories-process-information-differently-at-the-neural-level/.

Or this: “Neurally, a double dissociation emerged: high conspiracy believers exhibited increased activation in the ventromedial and dorsomedial prefrontal cortices—regions implicated in value-based decision-making and belief uncertainty—when evaluating conspiracy-related content. In contrast, low conspiracy believers showed greater activation in the hippocampus and precuneus, areas associated with episodic and semantic memory retrieval.” “Neural correlates of conspiracy beliefs during information evaluation,” https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-03723-z. See also “Wired for Belief: The Neuroscience of Conspiracy Theory,” https://www.luc.edu/neuroscienceandsociety/hottopics/essays/archive/wiredforbelieftheneuroscienceofconspiracytheory.shtml.

In short, when I think “How can anyone believe that nonsense?” and one of the resident CTers thinks “Why can’t he see this, it’s so obvious?”, the disconnect is undoubtedly due to a variety of psychological and social factors but may be explainable largely in terms of “different wiring.” Most of us, I guess, are just lucky and got the non-CT wiring. Others, and you know who they are, are badly in need of an electrician.

Oh boy. . . .  Just a timely reminder that YOU AND YOUR FELLOW WC BELIEVERS belong to a minority that constitutes only 1/4 of the 1/3 of the Western world when it comes to JFK case. 2/3 to 3/4 of the people in the Western world reject your version of the shooting.

I might add that the percentage of people who agree with your view of the JFK case is not very much higher than the percentage of people who believe that some government officials knew in advance that 9/11 was going to happen and let it happen, and who have expressed doubt about the Moon landings. Wow, what great company you guys are keeping.

Finally, I would remind you that the last government investigation into the JFK assassination, the 1977-1979 HSCA investigation, concluded there was a conspiracy, that there were two gunmen, that one of the gunmen fired from the grassy knoll, that the Warren Commission failed to adequately investigate evidence of conspiracy, that Jack Ruby had significant Mafia ties, that Ruby lied about why he shot Oswald, that Ruby lied about how he entered the police basement to shoot Oswald, that someone was rearranging boxes in the sniper's window within 2 minutes after the shooting at a time when Oswald could not have been there, that JFK was first hit by a shot that was fired when the sixth-floor gunman's view of JFK would have been obstructed by the intervening oak tree, that Silvia Odio's account was credible, and that the Mafia had the motive, the means, and the opportunity to kill JFK--among other findings.

[Lance Payette]

Thank you, Exhibit A. If folks like Michael didn't exist, I'd have to invent them.

Let's see, there are 8,200,000,000 people on earth. Michael's polling indicates 6,150,000,000 of them reject the LN narrative. Well, that is pretty impressive, I must admit. When polled, I would've thought 7.9 billion or so would have answered "Who the eff was JFK?" but Michael has done the polling and I must defer to his statistics. Just to doublecheck, I did a quick but statistically significant telephone poll of some 947 residents of Lower Ooga Booga (population 951, unless Shirley had her baby) and got the anticipated response. After I explained who JFK was, some 812 did indeed reject the LN narrative.

To be strictly accurate here, I am not a "WC believer," nor do I have "fellow" believers. I am JFKA iconoclast who, until presented with compelling evidence to the contrary, provisionally believes the LN narrative is fundamentally correct while finding Lee Harvey a sympathetic figure in many respects. (This is true: While I was a student at the University of Arizona in 1968, two years after Charles Whitman had killed 14 people from his perch in the clock tower at the University of Texas, I was voted by my peers in Apache Dorm as "the dorm resident most likely to go up in a tower and shoot people." I was deeply flattered.)

And thanks to punctilious Tom as well for noting the typo of omission. It shows he's reading carefully, as he should.

[Tom Graves]

You and your fellow believers belong to a minority that constitutes only 1/4 of the 1/3 of the Western world when it comes to JFK case. 2/3 to 3/4 of the people in the Western world reject your version of the shooting.

Dear Comrade Griffith,

You're absolutely right for once, and it shows that your beloved(?) KGB* has been very effective in zombifying oodles and gobs of gullible people (I used to be one, myself) virtually since Day One through the works of fellow travelers (or worse) like Joachim Joesten, Thomas G. Buchanan, Mark Lane, Oliver Stone, Jefferson Morley, and James DiEugenio, et al. ad nauseam.

*Today's SVR and FSB

-- Tom

[Tom Graves]

Thank you, Exhibit A. If folks like Michael didn't exist, I'd have to invent them.

Let's see, there are 8,200,000,000 people on earth. Michael's polling indicates 6,150,000,000 of them reject the LN narrative. Well, that is pretty impressive, I must admit. When polled, I would've thought 7.9 billion or so would have answered "Who the eff was JFK?" but Michael has done the polling and I must defer to his statistics. Just to doublecheck, I did a quick but statistically significant telephone poll of some 947 residents of Lower Ooga Booga (population 951, unless Shirley had her baby) and got the anticipated response. After I explained who JFK was, some 812 did indeed reject the LN narrative.

To be strictly accurate here, I am not a "WC believer," nor do I have "fellow" believers. I am JFKA iconoclast who, until presented with compelling evidence to the contrary, provisionally believes the LN narrative is fundamentally correct while finding Lee Harvey a sympathetic figure in many respects. (This is true: While I was a student at the University of Arizona in 1968, two years after Charles Whitman had killed 14 people from his perch in the clock tower at the University of Texas, I was voted by my peers in Apache Dorm as "the dorm resident most likely to go up in a tower and shoot people." I was deeply flattered.)

And thanks to punctilious Tom as well for noting the typo of omission. It shows he's reading carefully, as he should.

He said "of the Western world" and he's right (for the reasons I mention in my post).

[Jarrett Smith]

Another of my highly unpopular (but I like 'em!) little essays on the epistemology of conspiracy belief. I did discover a new angle I hadn't previously explored. (Take heart, I am now in a walking boot and will soon be completely out of your hair.)

In my decades of debate with extremists on religion forums – with Flat Earthers, Young Earthers, Bible literalists, people who think they are going to be “raptured” off the toilet to meet Jesus in the air, possibly this afternoon – I long took the approach that “You don’t really believe this. No sane person could really believe this. You’re pretending. I don’t know exactly why you’re pretending, but you simply have to be.”

I'm a Christian who believes in the rapture of the Church, and sane. 

I finally had to admit I was wrong. I’m still not convinced that anyone, deep down at the most visceral level, actually believes these things. “Yes, I actually believe the earth is 6,500 years old!” But they have convinced themselves they believe these things, which may be functionally pretty much the same as actually believing them. The part of my brain that would quickly say "Lance, snap out of it, this is nuts!" never clicks in for some reason.

What is it? Is it a social thing, the fun of being part of a community of outsiders who irritate and befuddle normal people? No, just pretending would give you that – which is what I always wrongly assumed Flat Earthers were doing, just amusing themselves and us in a tongue-in-cheek way. How do you actually convince yourself the earth is flat or 6,500 years old? In the context of the JFKA, how do you convince yourself Lee Harvey Oswald was an innocent patsy and the mountain of evidence against him was all fabricated, faked, altered and planted?

I believe in a conspiracy that involved Oswald. I may be in the minority, but he was no "patsy".

Someone can sincerely believe the JFKA was a conspiracy of some sort without descending into irrationality, just as one can be a religious believer without thinking the earth is flat or 6,500 years old. But as we see here all the time, the descent into irrationality is prevalent.

To quote an article at the National Library of Medicine, “Conspiracy belief is correlated with lower levels of analytic thinking (Swami, Voracek, Stieger, Tran, & Furnham, 2014) and lower levels of education (Douglas, Sutton, Callan, Dawtry, & Harvey, 2016). It is also associated with the tendency to overestimate the likelihood of co-occurring events (Brotherton & French, 2014) and the tendency to perceive agency and intentionality where it does not exist (Douglas et al., 2016).” I have no doubt this is all true – but does it really explain believing obviously irrational things? (The article, “The Psychology of Conspiracy Theories,” is non-technical and well worth reading: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5724570/.)

When I have raised this issue within JFKA communities, the responses are always these:

1. Conspiracies have existed throughout history, bub. Yes, this is true – but they do not, never have and never will, look anything like the wilder JFKA theories. The JFKA conspiracies are the very antithesis of what actual conspiracies look like. I don't have to posit any basket of irrationalities to believe there was a Lincoln assassination conspiracy.

2. We are not like those other wackos, Flat Earthers and UFO believers and whatnot. We are serious researchers following the evidence wherever it leads. No, you aren’t. You are exactly like those other wackos. Your “epistemology, to use the term loosely, is exactly the same.

Could this be the answer (https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2025/06/conspiracy-theorists-unaware-their-beliefs-are-fringe):

"Overconfidence is a hallmark trait of people who believe in conspiracies, and they also significantly overestimate how much others agree with them, Cornell psychology researchers have found. The study indicates that belief in conspiracies may be less about a person’s needs and motivations and more about their failure to recognize that they might be wrong.

Conspiracy believers not only consistently overestimated their performance on numeracy and perception tests, revealing they tend to be less analytic in the way they think. They also are genuinely unaware that their beliefs are on the fringe, thinking themselves to be in the majority 93% of the time, according to the research. The work counters previous theories that people believe conspiracies essentially because they want to, out of narcissism or to appear unique."

The above article, from just a few months ago, summarizes research published earlier this year: “Overconfidently Conspiratorial: Conspiracy Believers are Dispositionally Overconfident and Massively Overestimate How Much Others Agree With Them,” https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/01461672251338358. The abstract explains, “Although conspiratorial claims were believed by a majority of participants only 12% of the time, believers thought themselves to be in the majority 93% of the time. This was evident even when asked to rate agreement among counter-partisans, indicating that conspiracists are genuinely unaware that their beliefs are on the fringe.”

Could that be the answer: People who believe irrational things think they’re normal, that most other people agree with them? No, I don’t think so. It would, however, explain why JFKA CTers love polls: “81% of Americans agree with us!” (Well, not really. The supposed agreement is only in the broadest sense, by uninformed people who have been fed a steady diet of media coverage and agree only at the very general level of, “Yeah, with all the noise, I guess there must’ve been some sort of conspiracy.”)

This, I believe, is closer to the real answer: CTers' brains are wired differently. It’s essentially physical: ”Scientists have found that the human brain's natural tendency to seek patterns—an evolutionary tool for survival—can go into overdrive, leading to ‘illusory pattern perception,’ where people perceive connections where none exist. This was evident in experiments where conspiracy believers were more likely to see order in random data, such as chaotic artwork or sequences of coin tosses.” The article, “Connecting the dots: Illusory pattern perception predicts belief in conspiracies and the supernatural,” is well worth downloading and reading: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/ejsp.2331.

The conclusion: “The answer that emerges from our data is that irrational beliefs are associated with a distortion of an otherwise normal and functional cognitive process, namely, pattern perception.”

And it’s not just overactive pattern recognition. Umpteen studies have shown the those prone to conspiracy thinking actually process information differently. For example, “A new brain imaging study published in Scientific Reports provides evidence that conspiracy beliefs are linked to distinct patterns of brain activity when people evaluate information. The research indicates that people who score high on conspiracy belief scales tend to engage different cognitive systems when reading conspiracy-related statements compared to factual ones. These individuals relied more heavily on regions associated with subjective value and belief uncertainty.” https://www.psypost.org/people-who-believe-in-conspiracy-theories-process-information-differently-at-the-neural-level/.

Or this: “Neurally, a double dissociation emerged: high conspiracy believers exhibited increased activation in the ventromedial and dorsomedial prefrontal cortices—regions implicated in value-based decision-making and belief uncertainty—when evaluating conspiracy-related content. In contrast, low conspiracy believers showed greater activation in the hippocampus and precuneus, areas associated with episodic and semantic memory retrieval.” “Neural correlates of conspiracy beliefs during information evaluation,” https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-03723-z. See also “Wired for Belief: The Neuroscience of Conspiracy Theory,” https://www.luc.edu/neuroscienceandsociety/hottopics/essays/archive/wiredforbelieftheneuroscienceofconspiracytheory.shtml.

In short, when I think “How can anyone believe that nonsense?” and one of the resident CTers thinks “Why can’t he see this, it’s so obvious?”, the disconnect is undoubtedly due to a variety of psychological and social factors but may be explainable largely in terms of “different wiring.” Most of us, I guess, are just lucky and got the non-CT wiring. Others, and you know who they are, are badly in need of an electrician.

Hey, there are LN's who actually believe Jack Ruby was this nice guy who Killed Oswald to protect Jackie. It goes both ways.

[Lance Payette]

He said "of the Western world" and he's right (for the reasons I mention in my post).

Ah, indeed he did. "Western world" is kind of an imprecise term, but the always-reliable AI tells me there are about 1,200,000,000 people in the Western world. This means only 900,000,000 reject the LN narrative, which is much better. Since Lower Ooga Booga is in Upper Eurasia, I called back the residents and apologized for having bothered them (Shirley says hi to all). This means, according to my polling, that of the remaining 7,000,000,000 in the non-Western world, some 5.8 billion are firm WC believers and the rest are Muslim jihadists who don't believe anything that isn't in the Quran. I'm having just a teensy-weensy bit of difficulty following how the KGB is responsible for the Western world statistics, but I'll take your word for it since I feel sure your brain is better wired than mine for that sort of thing.