I know a guy who is the CFO of a Little Pharma, and he told me they’d love to put out something like a cure for cancer, even if they couldn’t make a dime on it. The awards and publicity would have investors lining up with bushel-baskets of cash. And since they only had a handful of niche drugs on the market, it wouldn’t hurt their sales at all. And there are thousands of such companies.
Remember, Pharma is competitive as fuck. GlaxoSmithKline would love to put out something that killed Pfizer’s business.
Japan was out minding it’s own business when in the 1930s both Nationalist China and the United States deliberately goaded it into war so they could take it over, but brave Japanese Patriots instead struck back and almost won against the two great powers until dirty tricks such as the atomic bomb won the evil alliance the war and they finally got the takeover they wanted.
Surprisingly I’ve seen normal Americans claim this.
Hell, using that theory I’d argue that Texas, South Carolina, SoCal and even my native Chicago are different countries. And don’t get me started on those yinzers.
How about the theory that AIDS was engineered by white people to wipe out African Americans. This actually got enough press that Phill Donahue did a show on it.
Anyone who was around during the whole Anita Bryant brouhaha heard her say that. And when she lost some profitable performance gigs after spouting her mouth off, she blamed the gays in entertainment for blacklisting her.
Yeah defense of Japanese war ambitions of WW2 is bizarre especially when you see people use it to disparage the Chinese as well. I have no idea why people do it besides a knee-jerk reaction to simply always take the side of the “lesser” in any conflict.
To answer the OP, I tend to roll my eyes at the sillier ones that defy basic observation or logic, or require a vast amount of ordinary people to keep a secret, like contrails, flat Earth, and 9/11.
However, even as a long term skeptic, I’m not sure how healthy it is to dismiss even the silliest of conspiracies out of hand, for the following reasons:
Truth can be stranger than fiction - there are a number of “conspiracies” (I think we can agree that colloquial usage more broadly includes malfeasance of less strictly defined sorts) that are well documented, for example Crazy Conspiracy Theories That Turned Out to Be True | Reader's Digest
While “government” as a whole is not coordinated or competent enough to carry out system wide conspiracies, there are ample examples of secret bad doing and collusion within specific departments, and where corporations are concerned…
Some of the more ridiculous stuff is put out there as disinformation to muddle the waters, which begs the question of what the true story is that needs to be confused. It is likely much more mundane, but still eyebrow raising.
Even ridiculous theories can have plausible cousins - in the zest to ridicule the exaggerated conspiracy version, we may accidentally ignore lesser, but still important mundane incompetence and greed issues - for example, while it’s a Good Thing to point out that ignorant fear of vaccines and GMOs based purely on scary untrue ideas about them can be harmful, it’s also a mistake to fight so hard against the scaremongers that we give these industries a blank check and free pass, and ignore normal, justified oversight of potential incompetence and corporate greed for which the FDA was created for good reason. Just because an exagerrated theory is ridiculous does not mean that an exaggeration in the opposite direction is not equally as ridiculous. Ocaam’s razor is sharp for all extremes. And even something as stupid as contrails can make people ignore real concerns such as botched pesticide spraying.
Even above board, supremely educated rational people don’t always agree on what they consider to be obvious
Virtually all of these “conspiracies” involve malfeasance uncovered by professional investigators or journalists, not Internet conspiracy buffs. None of the biggies people post about have panned out.
False flag conspiracy theories are silly too.
You’d have a good point if (for example) pro-vaccine advocates were enthusiastic supporters of everything Big Pharma does. But I’ve never encountered such a person. On the other hand many antivaxers urge us to distrust vaccines because, y’know, Big Pharma Bad.
Presumably they wouldn’t turn down insulin if diabetic or refuse antibiotics for an overwhelming infection, but you never know.
That myth survived for decades with a strong following despite the fact that, for a long time before his death, Elvis was a fat, drugged out, and pretty much a dissipated human being.
This seems like a trivial True Scotsman argument - if you define a conspiracy as something that hasn’t been proven, or hasn’t been discovered entirely by “buffs” all you have is a meaningless truism. Some of those examples are big deals, and others are things bordering on paranoiac or science fiction fantasy tropes.
There are plenty of documented false flag operations. It’s reasonable to be skeptical about allegations, especially wide reaching ones, but it’s not reasonable to dismiss them as an overall phnomenon. But I wasn’t referring to them anyway, there are plenty of documented misinformation and propaganda campaigns of different sorts.
You’re kind of proving my point here, by attacking the proponents of a theory as evidence for the soundness of the theory itself. While it’s a normal thing to doubt what someone says based on their credentials, it’s still a logical fallacy to use it as an argument. Which is still a relatively harmless thing if it is an issue for which say, a bar bet is being made or other cases where the burden of proof is on the nut, and the only consequence is bragging rights.
But when there is a legitimate topic of interest with genuine consequences, and people use the fact that extremists have a specific theory about that topic which is not credible to dismiss the whole broad topic of discussion which includes other issues of reasonable concern, that’s a serious problem, and one that is easy to take advantage of.
In particular, I’ve been noticing a growing trend of blind faith in science which is very disturbing. Yes, true science, properly conducted, is a very powerful method of investigating reality and truth. But it has many pitfalls, notably that it involves fallible and occasionally bad acting humans, that academic scientists are in a whole different category from commercial ones and even they are subject to fallibility and bad acting, and that science can only tell us about the very specific questions it asks. Science as a philosophy is a very different thing then Science TM the brand.
The only one one you list was people thought was a conspiracy and later turned out top be true was bad booze. Yes, they poisoned the grain alcohol during Prohibition.
If you can’t cite a single instance of an actual conspiracy uncovered by conspiracy buffs, that isn’t a powerful argument for taking them seriously.
What loony conspiracy theory has been demonstrated to be part of a government or corporate “false flag” operation designed to “muddy the waters”? I submit that it would be hard for such entities to exceed the craziness already exhibited by “genuine” conspiracy theorists.
This reminds me - can you explain how scoffing at chemtrail proponents blinds us to risks of pesticide overuse, as you earlier suggested? That was a doozy.
Yes, it’s much better to exhibit blind faith in paranoia and magic. :dubious:
