trenton

I have recently had some insights about the nuances often overlooked by broad demographic categories. I found myself growing skeptical of historical narratives and political narratives because broad categories such as whites, blacks, Asians, Christians, Jews, Muslims, Men, Women, and other categories are often used in ways that obscure the complexities within these demographics and all of their variations which lead to wildly different outcomes. For example, throughout history "white" was inconsistently defined with some groups now considered white needing more time to be moved to that category. Similarly, it doesn't really explain much to describe warfare in parts of Africa as "black on black" violence because within those groups, they do not use these racial categories and instead use different subcategories which are often lumped together under "blackness." The same pattern of lost nuanced likely applies to many other demographic categories, and it is important to map out some of these subcategories in order to combat stereotypes and broad generalizations which often unfairly target underprivileged groups perceived as privileged. In this case, I will be exploring German Americans, particular in the region of Ohio and Kentucky. Other surrounding States may be relevant as Germans settled in this region after immigration throughout the 1800's. This subcategory of the white population is adjacent to Appalachian white's who are also relatively underprivileged and who later mixed with this population in this region as a consequence of the decline of the coal industry which this group depended on. This subcategory of whites is sometimes referred to as the "white underclass" or the downwardly mobile working class whites. J.D. Vance wrote about this phenomenon, possibly because of his background with a mother who was a heroin addict and who I met at a recovery center. The relative absence of white privilege in this community might cause offense if they are lumped together with the broader category of whiteness, as there are legitimate sociological complications which resulted in the absence of privilege, complicating life and survival for this group. This group faces intergenerational trauma and instability linked to deindustrialization and Prohibition targeting German communities in the aftermath of WWI as part of a misplaced racist/nationalist outrage at German culture which was well known for breweries. The outcome is that this group has higher rates of substance abuse, criminal activity, and family fragmentation. The sociological patterns map perfectly onto my direct experience within this category. Firstly, during Prohibition, Ohio and Kentucky had especially high levels of organized crime. The attack on German culture which previously operated well with breweries were systematically undermined, eliminating legal options for revenue that were previously there. Some families which entered the system of organized crime never stopped even after Prohibition ended. The new culture that was created was now a criminal subculture involving gangs, drugs, violence, and in some cases sex trafficking. This phenomenon is criminalization creating criminal subcultures and the criminalization feedback loop. By criminalizing German communities, it created the circumstances which seemingly justified the policy despite the policy creating the circumstances in the first place. The pattern is even starker in black communities in which there was sustained criminalization on various fronts that reinforced each other. It is therefore, not surprising that there are criminal subcultures within black communities such as gangs or dirty rap music as blackness was ruthlessly criminalized. The perception of certain groups being more prone to criminality creates a circular, self-reinforcing system which never actually solves the underlying cause of crime without changing the structure which created it regardless of which specific group is targeted. This likely applies to some Russian subcultures as well in the aftermath of the invasion of Ukraine, leading to displaced outraged at unrelated Russian businesses and communities. Aside from the criminal lineage creating intergenerational instability, this group has a deteriorated religious thread. Nominally, the ancestry is considered some form of Christian, in my case Catholic, but there is limited practice such as church attendance. This is commonly accompanied by skepticism toward religious claims such as claims of Jesus being born from a virgin or Jesus walking on water or rising from the dead. The outcome is that similar to other religious trends, this community has a rise of non-affiliates. Many of these people have an inherited spiritual language from Christian ancestors, but are not necessarily atheists either. This non-religious group was mentioned in Ken Wilber's "The religion of Tomorrow" as the younger generation is no longer confident in ancient spiritual frameworks such as the Bible. It creates an existential no man's land, which partially drove me to Actualized.org. The existential void mixed with family loyalty, family dysfunction, and economic instability creates the conditions that lead to high rates of families like mine. The opioid epidemic hits this area particularly hard while incarceration of family members destabilizes the group further. In the particular case of male children, absent fathers commonly create the conditions of problems with intimacy, relationships, and sexuality as a consequence of gang involvement like in my case. There are also higher rates of depression and substance abuse in adulthood as a consequence of childhood trauma, thus repeating the cycle linked to unstable families linked to Prohibition. Educational and employment disruptions are common as a consequence of depression, resulting in underachievement relative to work potential as in my case. This is important because I have discovered that the "break the cycle" narrative used by my family was incomplete. They told me to be good and stay out of crime, but this is an incomplete framework for breaking the cycle. Me being good isn't enough because I still am repeating the cycle in my own way due to depression undermining my stability. The increased likelihood of poverty therefore creates an intergenerational pattern statistically more likely to lead to crime. Therefore, I am not actually out of the cycle yet and I am still perpetuating it. In order to not perpetuate the cycle, I will be required to find stable employment and the completion of higher education in spite of depression, family scapegoating, isolation, C-PTSD and the collapse of meaning and purpose, and so forth. In my case I became the family scapegoat partially due to truth-telling in an environment which punished truth as it threatened the entire family system. Autism under these conditions creates a rare psychological profile which doesn't map cleanly onto existing models. Therefore, independent research is required to build an appropriate map, often with original work. I believe the maps I am building are much more helpful for me compared to the other models I saw because I don't seem to match more well-known profiles. In my case, epistemology is my survival strategy because truth informs appropriate action while mapping out self-knowledge. Chess is also something that plays into how my mind functions as I try to systematize various patterns. So it seems that if I am not playing chess, then I start analyzing all of this instead. The specific phenomenon I analyze are often trauma adjacent because I hope the knowledge can help protect me from future harm. This in turn sometimes requires various fields of study to overlap, creating a rare perspective that is difficult to communicate due to the models required being original. The outcome is that my family makes numerous incorrect assumptions about me, making communication impossible with them. I am currently trying to map out suicidology profiles. This is extremely complex, but also extremely practical due to how accurate it could be. The problem is that suicidology feels so accurate to my experience that it is hard for me to look that directly at the truth without feeling emotionally overwhelmed. I hope this knowledge can serve to stabilize me long term by mapping out the specific psychological pattern that creates this instability, but the process itself is intellectually demanding and emotionally heavy. Unfortunately, the mental health system isn't good enough for people like me. What do you think of this relative absence of privilege in German American communities linked to the intergenerational trauma caused by Prohibition as displaced backlash from WWI?

When comparing humans to animals, I believe the way human institutions are structured likely contributes to maladaptive behavior on individual levels due to the belief that these structures are necessary for the collective good. For example, cases of animals sexually abusing juveniles of their kind is significantly less common in the wild compared to when animals are institutionalized. Putting animals in captivity tends to disrupt their natural attachments, contributing to various maladaptive behaviors. Likewise, human structures are likely unhealthy for individual humans in a variety of ways that might lead to maladaptive behaviors including suicide. The starkest example would be something like a death camp. While in a death camp, the survivors often held onto their bonds with loved ones as a form of meaning, knowing they would not face the darkness alone. I haven't read much about suicidal behaviors in animals, but I believe it is significantly less common compared to humans. Humans seem to have a cognitive layer which makes them more likely to lose the will to live compared to animals, including ideologies that glorify things like suicide bombings as a political tool. In such situations "survival" has changed from protecting the body to living on in the memory of others through infamy. The human self seems to take on many different identities compared to animals, therefore in some contexts depending on how the self is defined, suicide might be seen as acceptable from that point of view.

Maybe the question I need to ask is the following. If someone has lost the will to live or is consumed by meaningless suffering which offers no hope of a better future, then what exactly is needed to re-establish a will to live? What exactly was lost that led to a person losing this will to live, and how can it be countered? The fear of death doesn't seem to be universal as some come to welcome death given specific grievances. This can lead to suicide. What exactly was taken away such that the will to live is now gone and what is needed to restore it? This applies also to situations where the person is alone with nobody to help them as well.

I think it would help the situation of research for prevention were not as guarded. There are programs to help men understand what leads to sexual offenses and how to inhibit these behaviors. However, the restricted nature of this knowledge prevents men from having the knowledge that could be used to accurately self reflect and develop stronger inhibitions against these behaviors. One of the common problems is the attachment disruption. In this case men are often vulnerable to peer pressure leading to opportunistic offenders. Personally, I have many inhibitions against sexual violence, but my core vulnerability is social isolation and attachment disruption caused by family abuse and childhood sexual abuse. This can create the OCD profile of heterosexual shame and the fear of becoming a predator. I have so far done the best I could to educate myself and prevent offenses. If other men did this kind of research and self reflection, then it would likely help prevent offenses as is the case for Stop It Now. The stigma around this topic of predatory inclinations prevents people from seeking help. Other cultures have better protections in place to prevent sexual violence. Currently, I need social connection, but my ability to find these connections has been undermined by my family. Sometimes men in such a position find belonging among anti social actors such as sex traffickers who glorify prostitution and sexual assault. In my case I did not cater to peer pressure, but I also wasn't believed when I tried to report sex trafficking. Initially I objected to the behavior, but later fell silent due to fear of retaliation. By the time I spoke I wasn't believed.

@Rafael Thundercat I read the slide show I found in the link. A lot of it matches what I was thinking. I have a lot of the same information, but I draw a different conclusion from what you did in regard to hatred. In this post, the author describes a limited circle of concern. The men are not concerned about the woman, but rather what other men think about them. In that sense, they do not act out due to a hatred of women, but rather from a complete disregard or lack of caring or love for women. This actually helps my point of view make even more sense because it explains even more why men view women as objects. They are instruments for male status rather than something hated. This is an absence of love for women. I do remember feeling love for a women even when others disapproved. My love led to a sense of defiance and protectiveness of her. In that case my circle of concern was prioritized to the woman rather than the audience watching me. There is also a difference in men's attitudes toward women depending on the culture which the author seems to imply based on how men should speak to each other. I maintain that women are not hated in this context, but rather they are not cared for due to the circle of concern making them a means to an end rather than an end in themselves.

@Rafael Thundercat I understand that this behavior is truly outrageous, but I can explain the criminology behind it. First of all, this profile is likely sadistic. They take sexual pleasure in the suffering of their victims or their inability to consent. This behavior is not necessarily just directed at women without their knowledge, but it is also directed at children and animals. It is the love of power and domination which drives the behavior rather than hatred for a person. Hatred for women is typically in cases such as grievance offenders. They might be mad at a woman for cheating for example. This offender often operates under the entitlement worldview in which women are held as objects for him to control. Sadistic offenders operate from wanting the joy of causing suffering rather than acting off of hatred for women as in the case of a murder rape. In the case of drug facilitated sexual assault or DFSA, this profile probably operates under the entitlement worldview as well in which he sees women as less than or as objects. At the same time, this woman didn't really do anything to lead to an actual or even perceived grievance which would constitute hatred. In this case, it seems to be not only an absence of empathy, but also wanting a sense of status from a community of rapists in which this behavior is glorified. Such communities also glorify child sexual abuse and animal sexual abuse. The goal of this profile seems to be using the trophy such as a recording to seek validation from rapists. The inverse moral hierarchy such groups operate under is that the more outrageous the behavior they can get away with, the more they use it as a mark of status. This in a sense has nothing to do with hatred of women, but rather using them as objects to achieve this goal of power and domination. Anybody could be a target, including other men in cases such as prison rape.

@Rafael Thundercat Much of this knowledge comes from direct experience with organized crime. I witnessed these operations because my father was responsible with his gang and he forced my participation. I made a thread with a lot of my analysis on criminology. You should be able to access some of this research through reading books on psychopathy, but there are several profiles that will need to be pieced together. There are still specific things I don't have access to. Here is a thread where I give much of this information. It includes a document in which I describe child sex trafficking. I witnessed frame up scenarios as well in which evidence was manipulated to target victims. I was nearly destroyed by falsified evidence and manufactured circumstances.

Given my research on perpetrator psychology, this doesn't surprise me. I myself have done a lot of research on criminology. There is restricted research especially around aspects of sexual predators such as these. I only accessed the information relevant to prevention and even that has information that is more restricted than it should be. It is well known that organized criminals try to access this research to offend more effectively. Something like this is inevitable given the environment we live in. Child sex traffickers for example would be especially interested in getting a hold of this knowledge. Given that they already are spreading this information, it makes it even more important that the research be less restricted around prevention and protection.

@gettoefl I have a question about forgive them as they know not what they do. Sometimes it appears that they do know what they do. For example, the sadistic pleasure in degrading me feels hard to ignore. They seem happy to cause me suffering and keep me beneath them. This makes me confused about forgive them as they know not what they do. When there is apparent ill will and intentional harm, I find it much more difficult to forgive them. I feel a burning hatred and deep contempt for those who harmed me. Their degradation is unacceptable and intolerable. I understand that part, but I am lost on the forgiveness piece. I can't seem to let go of this resentment I hold toward people who degraded me, seemingly on purpose with sadistic pleasure.

I have been reading about people who survived extreme circumstances. I am currently reading Man's search for meaning by Viktor Frankl. I have found some valuable lessons in how to manage one's relationship with suffering. I started exploring difficult situations like these partially because I noticed discrepancies in how moral philosophy is taught in western countries. I noticed that if applied consistently, then most people would fall in line with Nazis and remain passive during a genocide. I therefore began challenging the moral frameworks with extreme scenarios that do not match western assumptions about love, meaning, purpose, morality, and existence. This included love in the darkest moments possible. I have found many interesting psychological insights that overlap with many areas of life including my relationship with death and human connection. Some of it made me cry due to imagery of a parent holding their dying child while singing a lullaby about how precious the child is regardless of circumstances. I found that these lessons in love and resilience are relevant for me when I navigate darkness largely alone. I have found secular frameworks that offer equivalent benefits to religion without requiring faith in a supernatural entity or Savior. Love is something that cannot be taken away even in death as the being lives forever in your mind and heart along with the warmth they gave when alive. It is something that gives a person the will to live even when all else is lost. This relates to an abusive situation I try to navigate with my family. I'm looking for psychological tools to prepare myself to potentially become split from an abusive family forever and find new meaning outside of the narratives they imposed on me. It is something I face largely alone and sometimes it contributes mental health problems by undermining my will to live. Much of my research focused on perpetrator psychology as in my previous thread, but the deeper problem is how perpetrators have impacted my relationship with meaning, life, purpose, love, and so forth. So what is the will to live? Personally, when my family was cruel to me, I felt my reality fall apart along with my identity. The identity crisis never fully resolved. Part of me knew that my family was feeding me lies as they had no real moral philosophy. I sought to ground myself in truth, believing that the truth is what I live for. If I reject truth, then I reject myself, making self love in a sense impossible if I must be erased and live a lie such as a false identity. I came to spirituality partially because of seeking the true self. Learning was a method of seeking truth while using epistemology as a survival strategy. It seems that the will to live is not merely a cost benefit analysis based on the pros and cons of staying alive. The consequentialist philosophy which western education is biased toward might guide someone toward this kind of assumption. There seems to be something prior to any rational or irrational cognitive layer that can be bypassed through love and without needing to argue with the content of the mind such as the exact right answer when struggling to find the words for experience. I seem to be leaning toward a detached, arational relationship with the mind, seeing that rationality or irrationality can be bypassed toward a deeper and more present being. The will to live does not seem to merely be hope that things will get better. It seems to be a core self that refuses to be erased. Is this ego survival? Or is it something different? Why does it refuse to be erased? It seems to desire unconditional love, both offering and receiving. Maybe it is the work of some spiritual force, or maybe it is the structure of human survival, or maybe it is both. I don't really know what the will to live is or why it operates in this way. It is like a creative force seeking expression no matter the content of experience. A relevant thread of this inquiry may be what is will. As for the will to live, what is it at it's core? It seems to be a creative force of love seeking truth to know itself. This seems to be at the heart of my will to live and why I haven't killed myself. What do you think?

I don't know if actualized has made this connection or not yet, but I want to make it explicit. There are considerable overlaps between grand conspiracy theories and cult behavior. I say "grand" because my position is that small local conspiracies are regular whereas coordinated intergalactic conspiracies by lizard people lack sufficient proof. Those who have contemplated this probably already noticed. A cult is in a sense a major conspiracy that is often relatively organized such that it hides abuse even when it is against a large number of people and is severe. It often includes sex trafficking, labor trafficking, and forms of coercion that make people afraid to leave. They extract people for money and can trap their children in a fate so undesirable that a mother can't stand to watch her children become pawns in the scheme, forcing her to leave them behind along with her husband. The way the cult maintains itself is essentially through conspiracy theories. Any outside information is claimed to be manufactured by those in power to discredit the organization that threatens them. The government for example, is claimed to be covering up child sex traffickers and pedophiles and that they are inventing lies about the cult to attack their legitimacy them. By controlling the media, they make everybody thinks the group is terrible while they are fighting against this dangerous evil. Meanwhile, the cult is basically where the conspiracy theory should be applied as they exploit lots of people in an organized manner. The cult is the very thing it claims to fight against in its conspiracy theories. I witnessed this when I visited the church of scientology. I started asking a lot of questions about how the ideology is structured, what they believe, why, and so forth. I seem to have gotten a lot of surface level answers without much depth. They didn't mention the psychiatry until much later. I told them that I had done some research on scientology. I said that there were several past scandals that the church was responsible for. There is a lengthy list of controversies here. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientology_controversies When I told them about things of this nature, they told me that they never heard of it. They maintained that those in power were oppressing them by spreading lies and manipulating the media. These were reports from multiple countries, not just one government. This would require a grand conspiracy to fake. I saw some inconsistencies in terms of how they addressed other religions. On one hand they maintained that they welcomed all religions and appear to have embraced some form of subjectivism, but at the same time they have a symbol clearly based on the cross. My grandma seems to have been concerned about how Jesus was depicted as an ancient spiritual teacher rather than literally God. She wanted to maintain that Jesus was God, meanwhile I was skeptical that the church would take a stance on Jesus in this way if they were supposedly open to all religions while embracing some form of spiritual subjectivism. I sensed some kind of contradiction in that they wanted to claim freedom from ideological influence while having an ideological agenda in the conclusions being drawn. There was a meeting about past lives after having drinks and snacks. There were a few videos that I didn't find very convincing. To me it seemed like a few rare isolated incidents or coincidences in which a person meets someone and claims to know them. You can let me know what you think about past lives, but I'm not sure about it. We played some kind of memory game in which we pretended to be acting out past lives. People seemed to find the whole thing funny. I had a ton of questions, but there wasn't enough time to answer them. Once the meeting was over, we were given papers to discuss what we intended to work on. I told them about my situation and it immediately closed doors. I told them about PTSD from child abuse and psychiatric complications such as hospitalizations linked to depression treatments. Apparently for my situation past lives wouldn't help and people who took medicine arouse suspicion from the group. They didn't tell me why though. They then tried to sell me a book even though scientology doesn't apply to me. It did not add up. Maybe cults are bothered by people who ask a lot of questions and seek the truth. The sales pitch seemed second nature to them as they still want you to buy something. From this experience, maybe we can say a problem with conspiracy theories is that they can be used by people with ulterior motives to disengage critical thinking and allow them to insert a narrative in which counter evidence is easily dismissed. It seems to be a very reliable method for producing close mindedness. At the same time, I have also witnessed frame up situations in which a victim was framed by falsified evidence or a set up by organized criminals. For some reason these conspiracies are taken much less seriously including in a court of law. There is no sufficient investigation, but it does happen frequently. This would be close mindedness in the opposite direction when a court refused to recognize the evidence as compromised and manipulated. Identity theft is a simple and common example of people imprisoned due to a conspiracy by organized criminals. It looks like the problem is that conspiracy theories if used a certain way, create a closed loop with an unfalsifiable position. Courts don't seem to want to allow people to make unfalsifiable positions even if the consequence is that innocent people are routinely jailed due to frame ups. This is why I along with many people I met simply don't believe the propaganda of "innocent until proven guilty." The trial is more like a formality rather than a genuine inquiry into the truth of the situation. I remember that there is supposedly a distinction between a conspiracy and a conspiracy theory. I'm not sure what the distinction would be. If someone would like to clarify this, then that might help. I seem to be split from actualized on the point that conspiracies happen constantly on smaller scales, but grand conspiracy theories seem to be what is actually being criticized as they feed cult dynamics such as in the case of trump supporters crying "fake news."

@zurew Thank you for your input. The way I approach it, I don't even look at ridiculous conspiracy theorists that talk about things like lizard people or things of that nature. I think attacking the category "conspiracy theory" logically doesn't make sense. Conspiratorial thinking is justified in some smaller contexts aside from a global scheme with extreme organization. I think it would be fair to say that we should not make drastic claims which outpace the evidence. This is the core argument that applies to most false conspiracy theories that make up elaborate stories. There is probably better language we can use to describe what is being criticized if "conspiracy theory" is technically the wrong category to be attacking. Instead we should probably attack the category of "elaborate delusional conspiratorial thinking with no basis in reality and without sufficient evidence." Aside from this category, maybe "conspiracy theory" as a category is fine within narrow or smaller contexts with strong evidence such as a church hiding a sex scandal.

I have an update regarding monster narratives. I have been reading about the psychology behind the Holocaust. I have some interesting findings regarding the bystanders, the rescuers, the revolutionaries, and the perpetrators, and I have mapped out their thought processes in an interesting way that explains the dynamic. Some of this deserves its own thread, but I did find the moral philosophies of bystanders, rescuers, and revolutionaries fascinating. It is important to understand them because statistically speaking we are most likely to be bystanders in the event of a genocide due to consequentialist reasoning rather than deontological reasoning of rescuers or the combination of both which leads to the conclusion of a just revolution. I found it eerie that my revolutionary reasoning happened to somewhat align Hamas' reasoning for destroying Israel as they do have legitimate grievances, but they did target civilians which made it worse. One of my findings was that the need for belonging which drives people to gangs, terrorists, and organized criminals is a psychological need that can scale all the way up to genocide. Similar to how psychological profiles can be conditioned to become desensitized to child sexual abuse, they can also be conditioned to become desensitized to mass murder. Part of the cause is that group belonging includes racism, religious extremism, and nationalism. Interestingly, I found that the ideological content could be almost anything. The core reason for going along with atrocities in all forms including genocides includes belonging to a group regardless of the philosophical justifications they have. The pattern persists across gangs, religions, and genocidal governments. This is why rational arguments cannot change such people as rational justifications are not required to meet the belonging need. On some level, I have also deconstructed the hero narrative. Heroes often have psychological vulnerabilities that mirror perpetrators in subtle ways, but they do exist. It has given me some clues for recovery such as in the case of grievance offenders specifically. People with severe trauma also look for symbolic way to compensate their pain. This can lead to displacement analogous to offenders who displace their rage on a different target. however, for trauma survivors symbolic victories over other cases by protecting other victims while important, will not resolve the underlying trauma that often drives hysteria and moral panic around child sexual abuse as the most vocal advocates are those who were abused. If I can find a way that grievance offenders can be treated, then it likely mirrors trauma survivors in some ways because they both seek out symbolic victories that are ultimately rooted in another target. It is a form of displacement as a psychological defense mechanism.

@Carl-Richard Okay, thanks for clearing that up. I actually have a ton of conspiracy theories and they are all very specific and calibrated to the evidence. There are plenty of conspiracy theories that explain criminal cases, institutional cover ups, and government corruption. Firstly, conspiracy theories are very relevant to law enforcement for prosecutors, judges, defense attorneys, and police investigations. This includes all kinds of frame up scenarios and set ups perpetrated by criminals with the intent to frame their victims while avoiding accountability by manipulating the evidence such that it misleads investigators. I have witnessed this personally multiple times. This includes cases of police corruption such as accepting bribes from drug traffickers, falsified evidence such as police officers planting drugs during traffic stops, the suppression of exculpatory evidence by the prosecution because they prioritize winning a case at the expense of truth, various cases in which people were set up and tricked into appearing to commit crimes by a third party of criminals who deceived them, gang activities in various contexts, institutional cover ups for financial fraud or child sexual abuse, my experience with an attempt to frame me for kidnapping, my experience with witnessing specific gang activities due to my father's involvement, various cases of insider trading among government officials, businesses engaging in calculated law breaking to ensure that they profit even after being sued, and so on. The conspiracy theory in cases like these are part of the investigative process rather than necessarily definitive conclusions. For example, if you go to a school in which a teacher was reported by five or more students for inappropriate touching, but then the school rather than reporting him to the authorities instead moves him to another location, then this is a common cover up to protect the institution's reputation. It is a similar method to church scandals in which priests are moved rather than prosecuted. A reasonable inference an investigator would make is that multiple reports from several witnesses describing similar behavior is likely indicative of an institutional cover up. My biggest concern about discrediting conspiracy theories is that when people are victims of frame ups, they are often not believed. The justice system handles these situations poorly and the investigations are often not done in a sufficient manner to secure the necessary exculpatory evidence. The lone victim of the frame up is often the only one with the knowledge of how the frame up works. The general population typically has a poor understanding of frame ups by organized criminals such as cases of identity theft, sex trafficking, or kidnapping among other examples. There are actually many possible frame up scenarios that challenge the current evidentiary standards including digital frame ups where the law is still very much behind technology. The gaps in the legal system and its evidentiary standards is what allows organized criminals to exploit the gaps to frame innocent people while avoiding consequences. Complete investigations are often expensive and time consuming, making truth seeking structurally difficult to seek in frame up scenarios as the defendant must become the prosecutor of organized criminals who manipulated the evidence to make him seem guilty. By this standard, "conspiracy theorist" includes FBI agents investigating a criminal network that they suspect has committed serious offenses but haven't yet received confirmation beyond the circumstantial evidence which appears to implicate the bad actors. "Conspiracy theory" includes investigators making hypotheses as to what the organized criminals may have done to aid in discovery. I think the problem with discrediting "conspiratorial thinking" generally is that it doesn't seem to account for cases of reasonable inference based on documented patterns and corroborating evidence. If I am going to say there is an epistemic problem with conspiracy theories, then the actual criticism should be that they are often made without sufficient evidence which would make the claims more grounded. By this logic, the problem isn't simply conspiratorial thinking because there are different epistemic standards that can be used when making conspiracy theories and engaging in conspiratorial thinking. We should probably say that wild speculation without evidence is the problem rather than just conspiracy theorists making conspiracy theories, otherwise we end up with a bunch of people saying, "sometimes conspiracy theories are true, therefore there is validity to making conspiracy theories in certain contexts." There are however types of conspiracies and frame ups that the general population typically has no understanding of, leaving the victims of criminal conspiracies and frame ups vulnerable to being accused of making "wild stories" when in reality they are telling the truth. Many stories of legitimate conspiracies are often dismissed due to seeming crazy, which in of itself is an epistemic failure. This seems to be the real reason why I find this subject triggering and I felt the need to post in this thread.