[nitpick] A lack of true and complete (or accurate) information will encourage doubt and denial of various forms, but a full blown CT is something else altogether. For instance, I find it quite believable that jealously guarded ‘turf’ and inter-agency rivalry and bigotry prevented our intelligence services from properly identifying and preventing the patterns behind 9/11. I do not, however, believe that the Mossad, carrying out the will of an international conspiracy of evil Jews, controlled the US government and got them to destroy the Twin Towers in order to create a casus belli for a series of wars against Israel’s enemies.
There’s distrust and skepticism, and then there’s a CT. [/nitpick]
Oh, I’m not trying to say religion = CT, just that they both serve a basic human need to believe that life isn’t random. Usually, coming to terms to the randomness of life requires seeing two German Shepherds fighting over a human femur.
Finn Said: Your argument is risibly failing. You just provided your own cite for the fact that there was a massive CT perpetrated by McCarthy, with government approval and backing… as an attempt to debunk the fact that there was a massive CT perpetrated by McCarthy, with government approval and backing.
Well, a conspiracy is not a conspiracy theory, is it? Or are criminal convictions for conspiracy actually CTs? If person says “government officials conspired to…etc.” and then FOIA proves that it happened, there is no remaining element of “theory”, which is very obvious. For instance in the JFK instance, the official position of the government is that there was probably a conspiracy. So is the investigating committee composed of CTers?
About my points
perception of government and corporate transparency and benevolence is at an all-time low leaving room for people to speculate wildly
government and corporate uptake of public dollars in the last several years is greater than at all previous times combined
Fin politely said:
C-c-c-c-c-c-ombo breaker!
I mean, cite?
A very balanced view. And you mention next that while they are factors, the government and corps can’t be the SOLE cause of the outbreak of CTs, and I fully agree especially in the sense that CTs would spring up without them doing conspiracy-like or secret things. I regard the upsurge in CTs as potentially very, very bad news for everyone. If the trend continues they will be in the majority. So it would be good to understand how to decrease their popularity. When a CT is levelled at a gov’t body, as far as I know the only way to make it go away is to open up the books. Another, and much better, way to put if would have been that gov’t and corps have the SOLE key to assuaging the phenomenon, transparency. But then again in the minds of CT people, FOIA requests seem to fuel the fire:
They would argue something to the effect of “every time we are allowed to get at the information our worst fears are confirmed” type of thing. Nobody denies that, for instance, corporations often pollute or don’t advise of health risks and sort of thing in order to increase their profits, and when that comes out, as it routinely does, it throws gas on the whole CT effect, because all such convictions actually do turn out to have been conspiracies. So corps too, like governments, might hold the solution, but they can’t come out with the truth (which probably does not involve space aliens) or they will be arrested for something slightly more mundane. Same with governments: secrecy is deemed necessary to cover endemic crimes, so the records are sealed and again the CT effect is huge as the public seems to invent a narrative that is likely more sinister than whatever crime was behind the original desire for secrecy.
Obviously things like Iran/Contra, etc., too would have been vigorously called CT’s before they were merely called truths. “What, you think the govt is importing drugs and giving weapons to kidnappers?” kind of thing. Yet it turned out to be true. Perhaps from this perspective increased transparency would be a very bad thing. Perhaps it would wipe out our institutions.
On a last note, for Finn, I’m not sure if you know much about causality or how to prove it, but it generally requires a control group, for one, and at least one layer of blindness separating the experimenter from the subject(s). So if you can find me another Earth with transparent govts and corps, I can help you out with that. Proving causality in even what would seem to be the most trivial things, like “does this food cause cancer”, can be very challenging. Often times hundreds of studies have to be surveyed to get the “answer” and there are often low confidence values even then, especially with non-causal cofactors. It has led to countless reversals of policy re: what is healthy. One thing I could do to help determine causality would be to find something a bit like a control group by trying to get cross-cultural view and correlating it to the transparency of the institutions of each culture. But oddly, as transparency has increased (from opaque to semi-opaque) the thousands of emerging scandals small and large have caused mayhem, so perhaps I would end up prove the opposite of my own thesis in so doing. Perhaps the present trend will worsen unless we can actually get rid of the FOIA altogether for the public good. That or make it absolute so that govt and corps couldn’t amass things to hide in the first place.
Anyone want to discuss it from the point of view of memes spreading a la Susan Blackmore? I don’t have time but I have faith (:)) that other folks here can do the debate justice.
You have made a number of mistakes and some glaring failures to grok.
The CT was not that McCarthy led with hunts. That’d be beyond absurd, as it’s a matter of public record. The CT was that there were commies under the beds who’d take over the nation if we weren’t intensely vigilant. That you seem not to understand is… strange.
Obviously, if a government body endorses a CT, then those who endorse it are CTers, this is a tautology.
You seem to be using an incorrect and/or idiosyncratic definition of CT. It doesn’t mean “non-government endorsed idea”. It means a wild and inaccurate gloss which purports to explain complex phenomena with simplistic actions of shadowy/secretive/covert agents, whose actions (and often very existence) has no actual proof, at all. They most often rely on the conspirators being Genius Fools and/or a willful misinterpretation/ignorance of available information (e.g. JFK CTers and 9/11 Troofers). The hallmark of a really mindfucked CT is that all counter evidence just goes to prove how much power the Conspiracy has.
4.Yet again, just to drive this point home, the ruling power/government endorsing a CT has nothing, at all, to do with it being a CT. This, in large part. eviscerates the nonsense-premise of your OP. During the Black Death when official agents of government/the Church said that Jews spread the plague, it was still a CT even when they endorsed it. When the US government endorsed the popular view that there were commies all over the place aiming to take down society, it was a CT. When the US government endorsed the view that JFK was murdered by an evil conspiracy, it’s, yep, still a CT. This goes for every single CT that ever was or ever will be; the people who endorse or refute a CT has nothing to do with whether or not it is a CT.
Bait and switch. Your original claim was about perceptions of “benevolence and transparency”. You’ve evidently provided me with Google Vomit.
Your first cite does not address benevolence, and only addresses the public’s perception that the government will do what is right. The two are vastly different as a bumbling but benevolent government can be trusted to mean well but not be able to accomplish what is right. Nor did you provide the raw data of the poll itself, just a shabby link to the results, as such there is no way to analyze the sample size, format of questions, etc…
Your second cite actually explicitly contradicts your claim and says:
It goes on to show that 1997 actually showed a level of trust in government substantially higher than in 1980 and 1994.
Your third cite also doesn’t say what you’re claiming, as the question was not as to the benevolence and transparency of the government, but how much trust and confidence people have in it. Moreover, your own cite clearly shows that the American people overwhelming trust the executive and judicial branches and even the legislative branch is pretty damn close to 50%.
For obvious reasons, I’m not going to waste time with the rest of your cites.
Well, except one more, as you are still using a fallacy that I’ve pointed out at least once and I really do want to drive home the point that those reading along should make sure to check your cites rather than your claims about them.
1.Yet again, correlation does not imply causation.
2. You just provided a survey localized in southern New Jersey of only 348 respondents. Thereby committing the fallacies of Hasty Generalization and Biased Sample.
3. You are not being at all accurate. The (shitty) study, itself, says that CT beliefs were correlated “with anomia, lack of interpersonal trust, and insecurity about employment.” It specifrically states
Hardly your blanket gloss of “economic anxiety”. And of course, correlation does not imply causation.
**
As already pointed out to you, several times, the government did just that with 9/11 and it’s one of the most popular CT’s in the entire world. **
Which reminds me, please retract your earlier fiction that the US government somehow withheld information about 9/11.
:rolleyes:
Suffice it to say you’ve conflated the mechanics of proof and falsification and have mistaken double blind laboratory experiments for the sum total of epistemology.
And I agree with the point that Defero is once again not looking carefully at what his sources say. Indeed, that was a classic Google expectoration.
I’m beginning to conclude, based also on his posts on the climate thread, that he is most likely attempting to make the [del]world[/del] dope safe for conspiracy theorists.
Kind of the conclusion I came too early in the thread. It’s good that the OP has finally come out in the open, though it’s even more obvious in the climate change thread GIGO is referring too…
Rather than strange responses to our posts, or claims that we’re ‘religious’ (he don’t know us very well, do he?), or that he’s a scientist and knows a lot of scientists and boy do we need to be taught proper epistemology… I’d like to see the thesis of the OP supported rather than tangential comments used for a variety of the Mexican Hat Dance.
lol…no, he doesn’t know most of us too well if he is claiming we are ‘religious’. His responses seemed off to me, but then so did the OP. It SEEMED like a somewhat clever attempt to justify CT’s…something that a CTer would try to do to preemptively poison the well.
Which is seemingly what he tried to pull on GIGO in the climate thread. That was REALLY off the deep end, IMHO and FWIW.
As for his claim to be a scientist, well…I’ll just say I’m militantly skeptical about that, but I suppose it could be true. He COULD be a scientist who is studying mass psychology of posting provocative OPs on certain scientifically oriented message boards in order to study the mating patterns of flatworms in null g…
That comes BTW not from the Warren Commission but from the United States House Select Committee on Assassinations, they based most of that “provable a conspiracy” say so on a Dictabelt recording alleged to be from a stuck transmitter on a police motorcycle in Dealey Plaza during the assassination. Unfortunately later investigations showed that that the sound recordings on the Dictabelt could not have come from Dealey Plaza, the sounds alleged to be gunshots occurred about a minute after the assassination.
So no, that what you said is not official, the current position of the government is that there is no good evidence for a conspiracy, but that does not stop the CTs from continuing to beat this item even to this day.
I am not trying to “hijack” the thread, but some polls, when combined with other polls, amaze me! I don’t agree with Mr. Sheen but surely those who do blame cynics like Cheney, not naive do-gooding liberals. How can Cheney et al get more than 17% of the vote?
Similarly, Americans who believe in UFOs and Americans who believe in Genesis sum to more than 100% (if we believe polls). Aren’t the theories incompatible? (Or are extraterrestrials the descendants of Cain? :smack: )
I think it might have been better not to state this as an absolute. A vacuum of reliable official information may cause conspiracy theories to flourish, and a flourishing conspiracy may be the result of an information vacuum, but as FinnAgain pointed out, there are counterexamples that demonstrate this cannot be considered a strict principle.
Seriously, it’d be cool to see a clear and cogent statement by the OP as to exactly what his argument is, is not, what its implications are, are not, and what he expects out of a debate on his premises. Also, a pony.
No no no, if the secret files were opened on horses, the ugly truth about horses would be so very ugly that we’d slaughter them all. Not that I’m supporting the anti-horse conspiracy theorists, of course. I’m just askin’ some questions over here.
His responses seemed off to me, but then so did the OP. It SEEMED like a somewhat clever attempt to justify CT’s…something that a CTer would try to do to preemptively poison the well.
