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Notes -
Very naive. And it depends what you consider "nothing". You can base huge lies on tiny amounts of real evidence. Repeat it often enough, with punishments for nonconformity, people will adopt them.
I misspoke. That was a poor way of phrasing it.
I agree that people do make things up sometimes, although I'd note that an intentional lie as an attack against a designated enemy is different from "scapegoating".
It's mainly in the context of inter-ethnic conflicts that I'm particularly suspicious of the idea of "scapegoating", because the contemporary intelligentsia is structurally incapable of acknowledging that such conflicts might be grounded in genuine concerns (unless it's the concerns of a party who has already been given a privileged position in the oppression stack). Sometimes, group A doesn't like group B because group B really just did something to piss them off. But acknowledging this, instead of blaming it on misrecognition, irrational fear, and the nebulous force of racism, opens the door to justifying racism, in their minds. So there's a tendency to engage in motivated reasoning on this issue.
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