From a skeptic’s view, have all conspiracies been debunked? I’m talking about things like:
JFK/floride/NWO/Superhighway/HIV/Roswell/moon landing/Philadelphia Experiment/MKULTRA/Radioactive pink snow in Minnesota causing cancer/plutonium experiments on retarded children/ psychic driving etc.
Do skeptics in general, and yourself specifically, if you’re a skeptic in the tradition of Amazing Randi, give any credence to any of this?
p.s. I forgot to include the hollow earth theory/Nazis on the moon
I think that at some point a conspiracy theory that isn’t debunked becomes mainstream. The theory that the Nixon administration was involved in the Watergate break-in was a conspiracy theory at one point. But it was eventually proven correct.
Yeah, not all conspiracy theories are false just because they are labeled “conspiracy theories”. The CIA really has pulled some wild and wacky stuff over the years including the Iran - Contra affair. On the OP’s list, Only the JFK assassination has any real hope of having any real conspiracy elements in it. However, it isn’t that hard to put together a list of conspiracies that turned out to be real as well.
I wonder actually if any of them are debunkable, for several reasons:
They tend to adapt to fit around any objection or contrary evidence
Of any given CT, it can be said “Of course there’s no evidence to support it - it’s all been suppressed!”
The argument of any given debunker can be waved away on the grounds that he/she has just bought into the lies, has been brainwashed, or is an active part of the conspiracy.
In an ideal world, none of that would matter, because the facts would speak for themselves and both sides of the argument would debate honestly until they reached an approximation of the truth. We don’t live in that ideal world.
Only the real ones. Think about it: if a theory is just some random train of thought the definition for the theory will change even if new evidence appears. You can always say that the alien ship is not in area 51 but in another place, stuff like that.
But if you made a conspiracy and wanted to keep it a secret, wouldn’t you pull the evidence against the conspiracy to make sure nobody would believe in it?
Therefore, if t’s ever proven that a conspiracy is false, that’s because it’s real. Take that, Warren Commission.
We’ve argued about this before and it comes down to how you define conspiracy theory.
Obviously, there always are secrets. Secrets always involve more than one person, so by the RICO standard they are conspiracies. So the question becomes, when does a secret/conspiracy turn into a conspiracy theory?
For me, the only sensible definition of a conspiracy theory is something that an official investigation has denounced but a minority of the population continues to insist is a cover-up. That takes care of secrets that the government is hiding but that nobody is talking about. Sure the CIA helped overthrow governments and conducted illegal drug tests. Until they were exposed, however, there was no public talk about them. They were simply a secret that eventually got out.
Most of the items in the OPs list are not like that. JFK’s assassination isn’t that much different from Lincoln’s or Garfield’s or McKinley’s. People don’t want to believe that an individual or small group can do that kind of damage. They’re more comforted in believing that it would take a huge conspiracy to bust up their world image like that.
That helps explain why they believe the government has huge amazing abilities to conduct enormous events in total secret. The government is so big that they can no longer comprehend what it can and cannot do. Why not accuse them of 9/11 or nuclear tests or anything else that would help them understand the whys of the world.
By my definition, no conspiracy theory has ever been shown to be true. Conspiracies, yes. Conspiracy theories, no. It’s not even a subtle distinction.
Another reason why people believe in conspiracy theories is that they’re more interesting than the truth. A conspiracy involves secret meetings and fiendish plans and maybe even passwords and countersigns. Much more dramatic than “some nutcase took a gun and shot him.”
Actually, I think that what makes good conspiracy theory is that there’s always at least part of them that’s essentially unfalsifiable, because ‘the evidence disappeared’ or because someone ‘died under mysterious circumstances’. As a result, no matter how much convincing evidence you pile up to debunk a conspiracy theory, a little doubt always continues to linger.
There’s a Peanuts cartoon where Lucy announces that she has come up with the perfect theory. Charlie Brown asks her what it is. She says her theory is that Beethoven would have gone on to write even greater music if he had not gone deaf. CB asks what’s so perfect about that theory? Lucy says ‘It can never be proved one way or the other’.
A conspiracy theory can run forever so long as there is no way of definitively testing it or settling it one way or the other. This is great for the proponents of the theory, and for anyone trying to make some money out of it by writing books or getting paid to take part in a TV documentary.
The last thing a conspiracy theorist wants is any definitive proof. Note that even proof they are right isn’t as much use to them as a theory that can’t be proved either way. Controversy, debate, dispute and argument are what keeps the theory alive and what generate money. ‘Yeah, turned out he was right’ doesn’t have the same money-making potential and doesn’t lend itself to cheap sensationalist documentaries with ‘Could it be…?’ type voiceovers and eerie music.
Pretty much, it’s now conceded that Lee Harvey Oswald was the “lone assassin”. But there are still questions about any support he may have gotten or his motivation, and the Warren Comm pretty well swept them under the rug.
Similar with James Earl Ray, who almost definately pulled the trigger, but there seems to have been people behind him.
The Air Force 1st claimed Roswell was “weather balloons”, but it now appears to have been Project Mogul. So, the AF lied, originally.
As a previous poster mentioned, the CIA has done a lot od really awful things (mostly in a totally incompetent fashion), so I have no problem believing the worst about them. It is an agency that was run by a borderline psychopath (JJ Angleton), and employed some seriously mentally ill types. Take the Bay of Pigs" debacle-who could defend this?
Indeed – there are numerous examples of real conspiracies in history. But conspiracy theorists, such as the Nazis or the John Birch Society (which still exists, believe it or not), posit vast, powerful conspiracies continuing over generations and causing significant events. It’s an instance of the “devil theory in politics” – the idea that anything bad that happens, whatever its apparent causes, is really caused by the machinations of a nefarious They – Jews, Communists, capitalists, intellectuals, whatever. A good book on the subject is Conspiracy: How the Paranoid Style Fluorishes and Where It Comes From, by Daniel Pipes.
If by “in the tradition of Amazing Randi” you mean do I weigh the available verifiable evidence, pay close scrutiny to claims that seem to defy logic and science, and try not to make decisions based on how popular the topic is to the masses, then yes.
If you mean something else, then say it outright.