Grandfathers. Buncha crazy old coots.
Wow, here we go again :rolleyes:. Just because you want to believe something doesn’t make it true. There is absolutely zero credible evidence for any 9/11 conspiracy theory unless you’re being pedantic and referring to 19 pissed off religious extremists as a conspiracy.
Chiming in to say I learned of the Tuskegee experiments in a public-health class I took at the U of Hawaii. (We were covering ethics and informed consent.) It was emphasized how shocking it was to everyone when news of it was widely reported in the 1970s. I believe it was indeed a case of no one really noticed or cared before that, rather than a straight cover-up.
Well yeah, who wouldn’t trust an article written by “citizen journalist Dani Veracity”?
One might be even a bit more skeptical of naturalnews.com if one knew that among the myriad “conspiracies” it alleges is promotion of the vaccine against human papillomavirus infection (HPV). The chief wack-a-loon who runs this site (“Health Ranger” Mike Adams) has claimed that not only does HPV not cause cervical cancer, the government knows this and approved the vaccine anyway. Antivax lunacy is but a small part of the major crazy that is naturalnews.com.
Anything I read on that site (provided I didn’t burst out laughing at the absurdity of it all) I would want to cross-check with reputable sources to eliiminate the slants, half-truths and outright lies.
Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri formed a well funded terrorist organization with Saudi oil money and ISI backing in Afghanistan to help bring down the Soviet Union, and then after that was successful they turned that support on the United States of America and flew several planes into buildings that symbolized it’s military and economic might?
How’s that one?
Funny, I never heard that. Is it recent?
Anyhoo, that’s a “conspiracy” in the sense of a criminal conspiracy, which is actually pretty banal. Crimes being planned at clandestine meetings, while law enforcement remains clueless or at best slightly aware of what’s going on, until the event itself. Then it becomes a matter of the crooks keeping their mouths shut while the heat is on, and some of the small fry might get picked up and decide to testify, or not, and the big fish get caught, or not, and life goes on.
I gather the sexier conspiracies are ones that don’t involve full-time criminals/terrorists, but people who hold down government jobs by day but are secretly part of undergound societies that reach into every agency and can accomplish events that nobody fully understands or ever could fully understand, unless they were in on it all along, and everyone is a suspect.
I’m aware of how whackaloon naturalnews is, but it did seem to be a good list of messed up incidents.
The linked article is supposed to show us the “dark secret” of conventional medicine which we are to presume has been covered up. The sheer size of the list is a common alt med tactic intended to overwhelm skeptics - except when you look at all the individual items and the “documentation” supplied with many of them, cracks appear.
For instance, one horror they’re reporting on is the discovery in a double blind study in 1937 that a placebo worked better than an experimental heart medication, thus leading to further explanation of the placebo effect. Oh…my…God - the Placebo Effect!! Won’t someone think of the children! (this is sourly amusing given that the vast majority of alternative treatments work on the basis of the placebo effect, if they work at all).
Here’s another element of the “dark secret”:
“Stanford University conducts the Stanford Prison Experiment on a group of college students in order to learn the psychology of prison life. Some students are given the role as prison guards, while the others are given the role of prisoners. After only six days, the proposed two-week study has to end because of its psychological effects on the participants. The “guards” had begun to act sadistic, while the “prisoners” started to show signs of depression and severe psychological stress (University of New Hampshire).”
This is a classic psychological study that’s a part of standard curricula, and sheds some interesting light on human behavior. Not exactly a shameful episode from the Conventional Medicine Conspiracy.
A source for many of the items on the list is someone named Goliszek, whose contributions include the following:
*"An article entitled “Viral Infections in Man Associated with Acquired Immunological Deficiency States” appears in Federation Proceedings. Dr. MacArthur and Fort Detrick’s Special Operations Division have, at this point, been conducting mycoplasma research to create a synthetic immunosuppressive agent for about one year, again suggesting that this research may have produced HIV "(Goliszek). *
The “suggested” link to HIV exists only in the minds of the conspiracy-obsessed.
There are items on the list that are true. The degree of irrelevancy, lack of context, resort to half-truths and innuendo that pervade many of the ones I’ve had a chance to read, make it vital for anyone who wants the truth to go to reliable sources, and not depend on naturalnews.com.
Actually it’s not considered a legitimate study. It was never submitted for peer review and there is a lot to suggest it was rigged.
Good point on the Viral Infections one. I didn’t notice it. That said, if you can find a better list of extremely dubious medical experiments from the 1930s to the 1990s, it’d be helpful. I couldn’t.
That’s picking nits too finely in my opinion.
As the Saudi Government was involved I think it qualifies. If you label Salafist global conspiracies as ‘just criminals’ then the word has lost all meaning IMV. They have support everywhere across the Sunni world, and that includes governments.
There seems to be some confusion over connotation and denotation here… sure, by denotation “conspiracy” has meaning and “theory” has a meaning. But the connotation of a “conspiracy theory” is totally different.
It not only alleges a conspiracy but, in general, a massive, far reaching utterly secret conspiracy with no leaks and, just as important, the CT cannot prove that this conspiracy exists nor disprove the standard version of events.
http://www.hiddenmysteries.org/conspiracy/index.html You guys are pikers when it comes to conspiracies. These guya are pros. Some I am sure you never thought of, like contrails.
Only some people use it that way. A lot of people yes, but only some.
That is an idiosyncratic meaning that utterly strips the term of any value whatsoever. It’s only a conspiracy theory if it’s not true, uh what? Unfortunately this has made purchase and is eating away at the brains of even smart people.
Yep, that’s linguistic evolution for ya.
No, it doesn’t. Instead, mentally shift the phrase to “conspiracy bullshit” or “paranoiac guessing games” or “sinister fiction.” Or what have you. It’s got plenty of meaning in that it differentiates “sinister fiction” from conspiracies which actually exist. Its semantic value is distinct and stable enough to be useful delineating it from other concepts.
“The OSP stovepiped intel in order to hype their pre-determined conclusions” = a conspiracy that’s factual
“Jews put flouride in the water supply so as to engage in mind control, also they beam in subliminal messages through the fillings in your teeth.” =CT.
Correct. Just like, say, “false testimony” is only “false testimony” if it’s not true. There are plenty of words/phrases in the English language which have a connotation or denotation that is sufficiently narrow as to exclude a range of objects/subjects/topics.
Zombie linguistics invades, munches brains, threatens millions.
Film at 11.
And that is one of the major splits between the conspiracy crowd and the anti-conspiracy crowd.
But it doesn’t differentiate it from conspiracies that actually exist and that’s the problem. It claims that ALL conspiracy theories are bullshit by equating conspiracy theory with ‘conspiracy bullshit’. It’s as anti-intellectual as the self-serving theories that are explained away by having the lack of proof be evidence of Manichean cleverness rather than just a lack of proof. There are conspiracies every day and many of them involve the government. They aren’t discovered until they are discovered.
Tuskegee, MKUltra, Project Echelon and Gladio are all conspiracies that genuinely have existed, that have involved the government or multiple governments and gone unknown for quite some time. For a time no one believed the conspiracy theory that Jews were being cooked to death in ovens by the German government in Eastern Europe, but it just so happened to be true.
Poor example because the word ‘false’ means ‘not true’, whereas neither conspiracy or theory means’ not true’.
EDIT: Now if you’ll excuse me I must go and stop an Amarrian conspiracy to invade Gallente space.
Who or what is ISI, and do we know that the Saudi government was involved (meaning foreknowledge, at minimum) in 9/11? That would be big news to me.
ISI is the Pakistani spy agency. They helped create the Taliban, not Al Qaida. And the Saudi government as an institution doesn’t support Al Qaida, you’d get yourself beheaded if the King’s goons found out you were helping them.
A lowly blip in the data, but here in France we had the “tainted blood scandal”. Essentially, while the world found out about AIDS in 1981, our public blood banks knowingly gave VIH-laced blood transfusions to haemophiliacs until 1984-5. Not for some evil medical experiment mind you, just because they’d found out that between 40 and 60% of their stock was tainted, and the remainder couldn’t cover everyone.
The government and health orgs knew about it, knew the clean blood supply wasn’t enough for the demand, but refused to import clean blood from the US, or to instigate screening procedures for blood donors. They also knew heating the blood would render the virus inactive, but didn’t for some separate medical reason (I can’t recall the specifics). There were rumors floating about, but back then they were dismissed as paranoid “AIDS scare” stories.
The whole thing blew open in 1991 thanks to some fine journalist work, and the trial only began in 1999. A 10-15 year coverup ain’t bad.
As a side note, the Social Affairs minister’s plea during the subsequent trial was wonderful : she said she was “responsible, but not guilty”. Neat, huh ?
Now, but history is a twisty path. I’m not even talking about stuff that isn’t a matter of record here. Osama bin Laden got started with help from the Saudi Government. Hell he was RAISED by the Saudi Government. Saying they helped create the Taliban but not Al Qaeda is a meaningless statement. They didn’t do either, and they did both. They funded the Mujahideen in Afghanistan, giving material aid to many Jihadi entities. Not all Saudi money went through the ISI.
I am not arguing that the Saudi government planned an executed 9/11. It’s pretty twisted logic to even think I inferred such a thing, but that’s the thing about conspiracy theories, they are twisty paths. This is why FinnAgain’s (admittedly mainstream) view of the term conspiracy theory is whoafully lacking in substance and in fact is pernicious in its effect toward true critical thought. The one part of his view on it that of course has no bearing at all is the idea that a conspiracy theory necessarily involves the government.
Conspiracy is the act of normal politics by normal means.
There once was a conspiracy to kick the British colonialists out of Palestine in order to make room for a Jewish homeland. It wasn’t carried out by the government, that is of course until the conspiracy BECAME the government.