[ulfbert_inc]

>Wearing one signals to others that you’re unhinged, have a deep distrust of the government, or that you’re really worried about aliens.

>have a deep distrust of the government

sure Gizmodo, being distrustful of a massive power entity is a lunacy /s

[zamadatix]

Deep distrust in this context is more like "lizard people are running the government as a tool to control us" where the entity secretly exists for a nefarious purpose rather than the stated one and there can be no level of trust with anything from it as a result. It's not the same as general distrust which would be more like "I don't trust all politicians inherently have our best interests at heart or that they will never abuse their power" where you don't blindly take everything at face value but you also don't blindly dismiss everything as outright untrustworthy either.

[aodonnell2536]

No, I don’t believe it is. There’s much wiggle room between the two scenarios you painted.

Of course one can have a deep distrust of the government without believing it’s run by lizard people from another planet.

[rootusrootus]

Lunacy is seeing “deep state” conspiracies everywhere. That’s not healthy skepticism.

[pessimizer]

Unless you're talking about any of America's current enemies list, where not seeing state conspiracies everywhere is not healthy skepticism.

The real question is when will they start treating skepticism as a medical condition, and how can I invest now in the drugs that will be advertised to treat it?

[roenxi]

That is getting in to citation needed territory. The state in most countries controls between 30 and 60% of the GDP. It is a prime target for corruption and anyone who likes money or abusing power will be drawn to it like a magnet. Pretty much all of the major powers are spying on almost literally everything that happens on the internet and we know that reasonably stable societies can go full Nazi in less than 20 years which is a legitimately terrifying combination.

An entity with that level of power and reach deserves extreme scepticism. As we discovered through the noble sacrifice of a lot of Chinese and Russians the people in bureaucracies are quite comfortable with accidentally causing millions of needless deaths through sheer administrative efficiency in implementing bad policies.

The problem with deep state conspiracies isn't the level of scepticism, it is that the theories don't protect the people who hold them. Knowing that a bureaucrat is willing to disarm you then starve you to death ... does not help that much when the army or secret police gets involved.