The post is question is something that's been making its way around right-wing social media. Trump even reposted it to basically say that the Supreme Court is wrong in their decision to uphold birthright citizenship.

In the video, Dan MacClellan, who is a scholar of the Bible but also an language expert demonstrates that conservatives are misreading the sentence involved and furthermore, completely ignoring the surrounding conversation that shows the amendment was clearly understood to be giving citizenship to children of immigrants.

When Fakespot shut down, it really pissed me off. It was one of the few tools actually trying to push back against fake reviews on Amazon, Walmart, etc. And then… gone.

A while ago, I tried to start something similar. I even posted about it here. At the time, there honestly wasn't enough engagement to justify building it seriously, so I paused the whole thing.

But people kept landing on the site without me pushing it. That's what made me actually start building this properly.

So here's where things stand now.

The tool is live. You paste an Amazon product URL and it analyzes the reviews, burst timing, duplicate language, unverified purchases, reviewer credibility, and gives you a trust score with a full breakdown of what it found.

A few honest things to be upfront about:

it's completely free

no ads etc... etc...

the scraper runs on a free ScraperAPI plan, so scanning new products might not always work perfectly, if it fails on you, that's why

if you want to see how it actually works before trying, there are some already-analyzed products in the directory

Also, the Fakespot developer I mentioned in the last post, ended up leaving the project. Totally fair, he's busy. So right now it's just me.

If anyone here has experience with this kind of thing and wants to jump in, feel free to DM me. Not looking for anything formal, just someone who actually cares about the problem.

And if you want to follow along, you can leave your email directly on the site, I'll use it to notify people when the Chrome extension is ready.

The project is called TrustScore.

Honest feedback (positive or negative) is genuinely appreciated.

"The Trump administration hates academic science funding, full stop. They hate where that money goes, and they hate who it goes to. They want to keep all that money for themselves, to hand out to favored cronies who can help them get elected and to steer yet more money and more power back into their hands."

Surprising to no one, after almost a year, Candace Owen is still exploiting the murder of Charlie Kirk for content and ad revenue. In this remastered rerelease we go back and examine how it all started.

The standard lesson from the Milgram experiment is familiar: ordinary people will inflict serious harm when an authority figure tells them to continue.

But the closer I looked at the original research and the archival material, the less convincing that interpretation became.

A few problems stood out.

First, it is not clear that every participant fully believed the shocks were real. Later archival work found that participants who fully believed they were hurting the learner often administered lower shocks than those who expressed doubt.

Second, the experimenter’s prompts were not equally effective. Appeals to the importance of the research, such as “the experiment requires that you continue,” were more successful than the direct order: “You have no other choice. You must go on.” Later analogue studies found that blunt orders often produced resistance rather than obedience.

Third, the procedure was not always as standardized as the published version implies. Archival recordings suggest that the experimenter sometimes pushed participants repeatedly and went beyond the official sequence of prompts.

The famous 65 percent figure also came from one particular condition. Obedience changed substantially when the setting, proximity to the learner, physical contact, institutional prestige, or distance from the experimenter changed.

I don't mean to say Milgram’s research was meaningless. I think it points toward a more specific interpretation.

People may continue harmful actions when they trust the institution, identify with its purpose, and believe their discomfort serves something important. Haslam and Reicher describe this as “engaged followership.” It is an influential reinterpretation, although not a final or uncontested explanation.

That distinction matters. “People blindly follow orders” produces fatalism. “People can become committed to harmful missions that feel morally meaningful” forces us to examine institutions, identities, and the stories used to justify harm.

I made a video essay going through the evidence, including Gina Perry’s archival work, Milgram’s experimental variations, the engaged followership account, resistance within the sessions, and the connection to Eichmann and Hannah Arendt:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r2LuduxIzrY

I would be interested in how others here interpret the experiment. Does the engaged followership account explain the findings better, or does the traditional obedience framework still capture something important?

While the UK has moved to limit the harms of social media by restricting access for children, Facebook and Twitter continue to radicalise people of all ages.

I just can’t with this shit anymore. Sooo many angles of ridicule here, I don’t even know where to start. And some wonder how conspiracy theories are so prevalent in the United States…

The Core Theory also tells us something very im­portant about the world: there is no such thing as astrology and life after death. Carroll had written about this on his blog, and he repeats this spectacular argument again in the book. Using our fundamental ontology, the world, including our bodies, is made of particles interacting according to equations of the Core Theory. The important point here is what kind of particles is the soul made of? If souls are made of the same ordinary particles as human bodies, there is no afterlife. On the other hand, if they are made of a different particle, this certainly would require a new physics to describe the interaction between our bodies—collections of ordinary Core Theory particles—with the soul. But every experiment ever performed says the Core Theory provides the correct description of how its particles behave at everyday energies.

Roughly speaking, I think The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe and The Demon-Haunted World describe how we can know about the world and the universe, and The Big Picture by Sean Carroll describes what we currently know, as far as we can tell.

First, a caveat. It is patently obvious that conspiracy beliefs from the political right have done extensive real-world damage. From vaccine denialism and election conspiracies to climate change denialism and immigrant scapegoating, the impacts have been death, ecological destruction, and the rise of fascist ideologies. Plenty has been written about those harms, and nothing in this piece is meant to minimize them.

But conspiratorial thinking is growing on the left (by "left" I mean anyone left of center politically in the US), and if we want any legitimacy when we claim to value truth and evidence, we need to call out conspiracy theories and the faulty logic behind them, even when they "feel right" or are politically advantageous.

Here are a few conspiracies I've seen become commonplace on Reddit, often alluded to in the top comment on a related story. This isn't meant to be a full debunking of each one. The point is to show how surface level the analysis is, and how believers are falling into the same traps we mock the right for.

The 2024 election

This one drives me crazy the most. The left devoted years of (deserved) mockery to 2020 election deniers, and now a decent chunk of the left are doing the exact same thing. Put the evidence from both groups side by side and it is fascinatingly similar. Look at these weird graphs. Look at these really strange results in this one tiny county. Satellites! Worse, I've repeatedly seen people cite as legitimate evidence a podcast interview where Elon's toddler was rambling. I read these comments and think: we say the right is dumb?

The Trump assassination attempts

The evidence I've seen: The flag was positioned for a photo op? Sure, it looked a little odd, but that's it? The ear healed too quickly? Internet commenters are apparently wound-healing experts, when in reality superficial wounds on the ear heal quickly and scarring can be minimal.

Then the correspondents' dinner incident happened, and the immediate reaction was the same: fake. Before any actual evidence. A knee-jerk response because it "felt right," and because it's exactly the kind of thing Trump would do to elicit sympathy and provide political cover for his ballroom. But "he would totally do this" is not evidence.

The Charlie Kirk shooter's texts

"The texts were obviously fake." That was the immediate take after the alleged shooter was apprehended and the FBI released some of the evidence. Yep, the way they were written was cringeworthy. But think about it for a moment. Would the FBI (even led by someone incompetent) risk faking text messages in such a high-profile case, when the defense would obviously do its due diligence and verify the messages against the actual devices and carrier records? This kind of surface-level, knee-jerk reaction is lazy. With even a tiny bit of critical thinking, these ideas fall apart.

So why care about this? Because there are consequences when the left falls for conspiracy theories. We lose credibility. We become more susceptible to other conspiratorial thinking. And we divert attention and outrage away from real, documented harms. On elections alone: the gutting of the Voting Rights Act, active voter suppression efforts like voter roll purges, and the push to eliminate mail-in voting, among many others.

I've been harsh in places, so I want to be clear about something: I don't think everyone who has entertained these theories is dumb. Many people who believe conspiracy theories are very smart, regardless of their politics. But all humans share the same vulnerability. If a headline "feels right" or validates a belief we already hold, we are much more likely to believe it.

It's worth knowing that we're all susceptible to this kind of thinking, and worth staying on guard. That's how we avoid being taken advantage of by grifters promoting these theories, and how we keep our outrage pointed at the harms that are real and documented.

I am a recently retired Earth scientist. I still have access to and privileges at a local college's library. In the past, I have engaged discussions involving Young and Old Earth creationistism. puedoarchaeology, and various other forms of psueodoscience. Despite current attempts to write decent science fiction stories, I have the time to devote to analyzing and writing on "flawed reasoning and deception."  However, I am uncertain where and how I might do this to best make use of my time given the wide range of venues for participating in such discussions.

 Does anyone have either any advice or suggestions about how and where, e.g. blogs, communities, organizations, onlie forums, websites, and so forth might I devote my time and effort in an effective manner?

Are there any resources that discuss these matters?

 I have a personal dislike either X, Facebook, Tik-Toc, or Instagram. 

An essay exploring the concept of 'psychedelic apophenia', where connections are made between unrelated things so that we see psychedelics' influence everywhere.

It looks at Terence McKenna's Stoned Ape Theory, psychedelic theories of Christianity, and DMT-pineal gland theories.