Nice one! 
Touche. Nicely done.
But doesn’t that just demonstrate that truth lies in the middle between me and the other posters? :dubious:
Can you provide an example of a conspiracy theory that was ever shown to be correct?
There are conspiracies, of course. They are simple, straightforward backstage maneuvers. Iran-Contra: we wanted to get some money to a so we laundered the money through b. That’s it. No big deal. Come out right away because so many people knew about it that finding out about it was trivial. Conspiracies are not the same thing as conspiracy theories.
All I want is a counterexample. One true conspiracy theory that was ever not wrong.
As I think about this, I’m inclined to divide conspiracy theories into two groups:[ul]
[li]Those taking exception to an official explanation of a significant event[/li][li]Those that question that an event actually happened, or assert that a non-event did happen (e.g., Roswell, N.M. aliens)[/li][/ul]
The first would include things like the Kennedy assassination where a significant factor in skepticism seems to be an active distrust of “the establishment”.
The second would include the lunar landing hoax notion. I have difficulty imagining a “rational” psychological motive behind such a belief, which must be why I’m inclined to think that the folks behind the moon hoax stuff know better and are just intentionally yanking people’s chains.
But of course, there are folks who blur the lines. Mark Lane (of JFK conspiracy fame) appears to be someone who both distrusts the powers that be and deliberately plays fast-and-loose with the facts.
Another stray thought: Alex’s diehard efforts at Hegelian synthesis reminds me of another factor with some conspiracy theorists - a stubborn adherence to a presupposition, no matter how much evidence can be marshalled against the thesis. Lee Oswald was a patsy; no way anyone could fly an airliner into a low-slung building like the Pentagon; etc. For these people, gut feelings are apparently more credible than facts.
The ones that you describe here could be considered semi-rational depending on the details. I don’t automatically declare that the Kennedy assassination theorists are insane and I leave myself open to the idea that Oswald may have been guided by other people. They may be misguided and probably completely wrong but there is hope that they come around. I can almost imagine how many moon landing conspiracy theorists came to think the way that they do. They are just bad at science and susceptible to confusing ideas planted by other people.
However, many 9/11 conspiracy theorists are so incredibly illogical to boggle the mind and make me think that something else has gone horribly wrong with human logic. We know that four planes took off and four planes didn’t return. The crew and passengers had friends and family that lost them forever were devastated . We also have four crash sites. However, strong conspiracy speculation exists that no plane hit the Pentagon and that the World Trade Center towers were rigged with explosives planted by the U.S. government and covered up by airliner impacts. That is definitely within the realm of bat-shit insane yet we have had many people come onto this board and inquire whether a plane actually hit the Pentagon demanding additional proof even though an airliner disappeared in the exact same area. They almost never try to account for the planes and, instead, skip straight to minutia regarding impact holes and other engineering things they never had a hope of understanding at all.
I have no idea how someone can just skip over the most obvious and apparent details like four planes taking off and never returning and move straight into a complicated physics analysis without realizing that something is logically amiss.
I don’t see any difference between the 9/11 lunacy you describe and the Moon Hoaxers. It seems to be identical to me.
Faking the moon launch requires the same disregard of the number of people who would have to be involved and who would reveal secrets and the same disregard of simple engineering facts, like that everyone with a ham radio and the proper gear could track the signals all the way to the moon. Leaping over those to tiny details revealed by the photographs is exactly the same psychology as leaping over missing planes to go to details of falling structural components.
The Kennedy assassination is similar as well. A guy with a rifle and a grudge takes advantage of an opportunity that literally comes to his front doorstep. Anything beyond that requires such prodigies of advance knowledge and timing and multiple people involved that the only reason to credit it is that it would make for more satisfying fiction.
Simple solutions are rarely fun or interesting. Complicated plots working out with clockwork precision are emotionally involving. Fiction writers in all media have been exploiting this understanding for centuries.
We are probably splitting hairs. I know the moon hoax people are off their rocker but I am more sympathetic because many people are just horrible at science and think the whole thing could have been done on a movie set to scare the Russians.
I can’t put up with missing planes swapped with missiles however.
We are allies in this so don’t take this too strongly The U.S. alone has engaged in activities that are perfectly fitting for any nutty conspiracy theory. The CIA has and probably still engages in some weird shit. I gave a supporting example of Iran-Contra already. For somebody that has never heard of any of it, those CIA activities would make anyone sound like a loon if they started talking about them at a dinner table. CIA involvement in Latin American stretches back at least 50 years and the cast of characters is very strange.
I went to a top rated Latin American Studies University (Tulane) and we were taught all about the CIA and co-dealings with the United Fruit Company (now Chiquita Banana) as well as how Tulane became endowed by funds from some of these activities. A lot of strange things were funneled through the port of New Orleans and we even had a residence hall funded by such efforts.
My point is that most of America didn’t make any note of this but there had to be people that did. Just because it didn’t make the network news in Minnesota doesn’t mean that there weren’t people talking about CIA activities across Latin America and even within people across the U.S. itself. Speculation had to run high among some people.
That would make at least one conspiracy theory true among some part of the population across two continents.
No, no, a thousand times no.
Covert actions by an organization devoted to covert actions may be conspiracies, although that is an extremely loose interpretation of the word.
However, do you really think that the people at the receiving end didn’t know pretty much exactly who was doing what to them? When everybody at that end is saying, well, the CIA is behind it, it ain’t exactly a secret. Sure it doesn’t make the evening news until many years later, but that’s totally irrelevant to the point.
And the fact that it all does make the evening news eventually, and that it is taught in colleges, and that there are books detailing the “conspiracies,” and that people admit exactly what they did, and that it’s all sordid and tawdry and stupid in the clear light of history is the precise opposite of the way conspiracy theories work themselves out.
Nothing the CIA is known or suspected of doing in Latin America or elsewhere is an element of a conspiracy theory. It’s like talking about the “secret bombing” of Cambodia during Nam. It was a secret in the U.S., but they knew there were bombs falling, and they knew who was behind it. Secrets are not conspiracies which are not conspiracy theories. If we’re going to talk about the subject, let’s please use precision or you’ll be able to make a case for anything.
The CIA recently released a laundry list of dirty deeds, including feeding LSD to people without their knowledge or consent. Nearly every item on that list is a conspiracy theory that some smartass at some point refused to even admit was plausible.
Satisfied? Or are we just going to skulk away to raise silly objections to my posts in a different thread?
As for the talk about “There are conspiracies, of course. They are simple, straightforward backstage maneuvers.” Sure, some conspiracy theories are needlessly elaborate. Some aren’t. E.g., Ronald Reagan suffered an attempted assassination by George Bush’s seedy acquaitance because Vice President Bush wanted to be President. That’s an easy one-liner. And many confirmed scandals were far from simple. You call Iran-Contra simple? Anyway, it’s always easy to sum up the jist of a scandal. Iran-contra was just money laundering. People wanted to kill Kennedy because it was in their interests. ‘Complexity’ is way too subtle a criterion.
Exapno Mapcase, your firm rejection of conspiracy theories is exactly what i’m talking about. Others on this thread are like “yeah, really bad stuff does go down, etc.”, but you’re hard-set in an irrational way, exactly like die-hard theorists. I really don’t see why some people are assuming that you have to be crazy or stupid to be stubborn.
Exapno, it’s an extremely fine line whether enough people make a noise that it makes it into the history books, or if they don’t. It’s easy to say, for example, that what saved Bush re John Hickney was the press’s inaction. Any more recent conspiracies about the other Bush (e.g., he lied to create a war with Iraq to channel hundreds of billions to buddy defense contractors and to raise the price of oil) can be said to have been decided the same way.
Well, I just want to make sure everybody understands exactly what we are saying.
You are apparently saying that anything done covertly is a conspiracy theory. You are apparently saying that anything that happens you don’t like is a conspiracy theory. You are apparently saying that George Bush got John Hinckley [note spelling] to assassinate Reagan, which is a conspiracy theory I’ve never heard of to this second.
And yet the very first hit I find on Google has classic conspiracy theory logic right in the first paragraph:
And I’m saying the opposite. Oswald shot Kennedy because he was a nut with a grievance. Astronauts landed on the moon. Planes were piloted into buildings by hijackers. John Hinckley was a lone nutcase with no connection to George Bush.
You don’t have to be crazy or stupid to be stubborn. You’re crazy or stupid based on the facts.
I’m perfectly happy to leave all this lying here in the open and let anyone reading it decide between us.
Geeze, I’ve seen plenty of NASA photos that include notes like “False color” or more detailed explanations of what’s going on with the colors. And if they are including color wheels in the photographs, that’s about the most incompetent way of “bending the truth” or “lying” about color that I can imagine…it’d be like including a yardstick in a photo of an object supposed to be hundreds of miles long.
That Discovery article contains some pretty good explanations of what they are doing and why - there’s no lying or truth-bending that I can see there. Did you read what the imaging technician for the Viking program said?
Best resumé of the Kennedy assassination ever!
So the Earth is actually square ! Well that would certainly explain this ‘cornered’ feeling I’ve been getting lately…
As well as the paranoia angle that’s already been mentioned - conspiracy theories can be a way to avoid an unacceptable truth and seem to satisfy some people’s sense of order. With the JFK shooting, I think a big part of it is the disproportionality of the power of ‘the lone nut’, and the power of the US pres, so we need to create a proportional power for the killer. This doesn’t need to be paranoia, just normal irrationality in the service of feeling ok. When somebody dies, there’s often this feeling of incomprehension and outrage - ‘He was just doing what he always does, and suddenly he’s gone. There has to be a reason ! There has to be a bad guy !’ When the victim’s a public figure you get the same phenomenon on a massive level.
There are also plenty of situations where the official truth doesn’t make sense (or where there’s an obvious missing variable), and even the most rational mind starts to look at alternatives. I believe that examining some of the wilder CTs can help elucidate the facts - as per Alex Dubinsky. And yes - sometimes the crazy theories turn out to be very close to the facts (such as they are) - a look at cold war Europe will easily bear this out. Nazis secretly influencing governments, false-flag ops, fake mass-graves, hidden mass graves etc. All of this was whispered in bars by wild-haired drunks with tape on their glasses, before making the back pages of the press.
Um… did you read past the foot notes of the images?
What about conspiracy theories among the black community? You know, like how the CIA invented AIDS and/or crack to keep the blacks down, how some designers like Tommy Hilfiger or Liz Claiborne have said they don’t want blacks buying their stuff, how certain clothes, clothes, or other items popular among blacks are actually owned by the KKK . . . where did this come from? Is it the same phenomenon, related, or completely different?
Just one guess, but I think most people who tout conspiracy theories are subject to a feeling of powerlessness. By asserting that one “knows” the truth, one has some element of control over a scary world. :shrug:
Re NASA apologists… see how easy it is to take marginally relevant information and convince yourself that it’s a great explanation for what you’d like to believe? Sure, the cameras take pictures in multiple non-standard frequencies and converting that to RGB is a process. It is a process that NASA purposely fudges, because it wants mars to be the Red Planet, not the Earth-toned Planet With a Blue Sky. The fact that it doesn’t hide the color wheels and sometimes appends footnotes means it’s not trying to stage some sort of ‘perfect lie’. But it doesn’t need to. You just need people who don’t want to look or dwell on the clues. Bush didn’t need to pay off the whole CIA to invent WMDs. Staging a profound, wide-reaching conspiracy is so much simpler than that. He just needed rank-and-file who wouldn’t care too much to question the half-truths, until there was so much momentum that even naysayers couldn’t find a good grip.
Re: John Hinckley. John Hinckley was Chairman and President of Vanderbilt Energy Corporation (an oil company in Colorado). His son, John Hinckley, Jr, shot Reagan. It is in proving, using verifiable facts, the connection between the two oil magnates, Hinckley and Bush, that conspiracy theories have to rely on long-winded explanations (eg, this so-and-so’s son was at this so-and-so’s wedding of this so-and-so’s brother). Conspiracy theorists are stuck between a rock and a hard place. People like you don’t want to listen if they say “Look, these two people ran big oil companies, lived near each other in Texas, and are known to be friends,” and when the theorists launch into “Well, look at these minutae of the two families’ encounters” you suddenly plug fingers in your ears and scream BOO NEEDLESSLY COMPLEX.
Anyway, complexity is an incredibly deceptive criterion, as are many others that are branded about by people who don’t want to treat issues with subtlety and don’t want to buy into unsubtle hypotheses either. (And that goes equally well for CT as it does for anti-CT) Like I said, you don’t need wild explanations for why people are stubborn!
To everybody who wondered about the psychology of conspiracy theorists, I suggest you just listen closely. You’ll learn a lot.
I have already learned a lot. I never knew there was a connection between color wheels, NASA, the CIA, earth tones, an oil company in Colorado, street addresses in Texas, and the philosopher Hegel.
Now I do. That is why I paid money to join this board.