Jay Tse

“A major theme of this book is that none of us, thinking alone, is rational enough to consistently come to sound conclusions: rationality emerges from a community of reasoners who spot each other’s fallacies.”
― Steven Pinker, Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters

“it’s especially hard to change a conspiracy theorist’s mind, because their theories are “self-sealing,” in that even absence of evidence for the theory becomes evidence for the theory. That is, the reason there’s no proof of the conspiracy, the thinking goes, is because the conspirators did such a good job of covering it up.”
― Jillian Peterson, The Violence Project: How to Stop a Mass Shooting Epidemic

“Populism is a common term for the parties and movements that carry forth this illiberal evolution of democratic politics. While populism is not inherently authoritarian, many strongmen past and present have used populist rhetoric that defines their nations as bound by faith, race, and ethnicity rather than legal rights. For authoritarians, only some people are “the people,” regardless of their birthplace or citizenship status, and only the leader, above and beyond any institution, embodies that group. This is why, in strongman states, attacking the leader is seen as attacking the nation itself, and why critics are labeled “enemies of the people” or terrorists.10”
― Ruth Ben-Ghiat, Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present

“One of the peculiar realities of conspiracism is that people who believe in conspiracy theories rarely ever believe just one; most conspiracy theories are interconnected by the nature of their afactual grounding, and often this forms a web of theories that lead to radicalization. This is why anti-vaxxers’ conspiracies coalesced so seamlessly with far-right extremist movements in COVID denialism, and moreover why that commingling became a global phenomenon.”
― David Neiwert, The Age of Insurrection: The Radical Right's Assault on American Democracy