I’ve never heard this one before. Do you have a cite so I can read about it?
To be fair the Dupont and 3M ARE accused of covering up information that a very widespread product is harmful, this has been, and still is in various courts.
I’ll put up a link from a left leaning source - to be honest I don’t think it quite fits CT territory
As for other corporations attempting to hide the harm from tehir products - look at big tobacco, they did it for generations, then you can add in Turner & Newall for asbestos - fully backed up by an impressive array of co-defendents in civil claims.
Monsanto have been noted in many legal actions and have also had to pay out in some claims - to the idea of Monsanto covering up inconvenient data is not exactly stunningly surprising
We also have Volkswagon who actively designed a systm in their cars to decieve consumers and regulators about emissions - and we kno that excess car emissions are harmful.
We could also look at lead in petrol - this was defended for a couple of generations.
So the idea of a large corporation trying to hide the fact its products are harmful is not CT in the slightest - in some cases it may be an overreach and exagerration.
I would not even cite these as especially left wing either.
Yeah, that’s kind of what I mean. There’s a long, illustrious, storied history of corporations hiding unflattering scientific findings from the public. When someone proposes that yet another corporation is hiding unflattering research, that’s a far cry from being an “exceptionally weird left wing conspiracy theory,” unless the supposed findings are themselves exceptionally weird.
So, if someone proposes that Ford is hiding their discovery of a car engine that runs on distilled water, sure, that’s weird. If someone proposes that Monsanto is hiding their discovery that BT-producing crops can spread their genes to wild relatives, that may be wrong, but it’s hardly weird.
I have a couple of friends*, a couple, that are hardcore conspiracy theorists and have been for awhile.
They are, to all outward appearances, left leaning — they are hippies, they teach yoga and reiki and espouse all sorts of new age spiritual philosophies. They claim to be above politics.
They have strong anti-governmental leanings and did a lot of bitching about the taxes and regulations that were strangling their “wellness” business. But I only knew this because I was close with them, most of their neighbors and customers and casual friends just assumed they were standard NYC issue liberals, like everyone else in their cohort.
I think that most of the old school conspiracy theorists, pre 9/11, were outside of the standard political spectrum, it’s hard to be Democrat or Republican when you believe they’re all shape-shifting lizards from another dimension.
But I believe that conspiratorial thinking is fundamentally a mental disorder, one without bright line borders. I think it is possible for someone to have cognition patterns that make them susceptible to conspiratorial thinking, and exposure to a theory that aligns with their political or cultural beliefs, can pull them over the edge.
After 9/11 that happened to some liberals, a little bit. The 9/11 truther movement , in addition to playing into the broader conspiratorial worldview, had a specific appeal to susceptible people that were skeptical of the Bush/Cheney administration.
When Obama took office, susceptible conservatives started to fall victim to conspiratorial thought patterns. Then right wing media jumped in and started feeding the paranoia by casting shade on the Obama Administration’s motives for everything, dogwhistling to the Birther conspiracies and generally fostering distrust in the government and “main stream media”.
Gradually, conspiracy theories started to pull strongly to the right and conspiracy theorists, who had always had an unhealthy level of distrust in the government, began to lean heavily conservative. They were pretty solidly conservative by 2016, when Trump confederates and Russian disinformation operatives began to weaponize that shit, which was very effective.
*Not friends anymore. The last straw was when one of them decided she was literally channeling the spirit goddess of the Universe, or something. And the reason she knows she is channeling the wisdom of the Universe is sometimes when she’s talking the stuff she says is just so damn brilliant that it couldn’t be coming from a mere human being. Oh, and it took her a lot of courage and bravery to come out to her friends about her spirit friend making her the smartest and wisest person ever, so if you question this, you are just a negative hater.
The most passive aggressive thing ever, I am so done.
The movie Fire Birds with Nicholas Cage had the full cooperation of the Army. They used Army Apache and Kiowa helicopters. They used Army pilots to fly them. Most of it was filmed on Fort Hood with the Apache Training Brigade at Hood Army Airfield. Army personnel were used as extras including some friends of mine. It didn’t stop the movie from being wrong about almost every aspect of the military and Army Aviation. The criteria for cooperation is if the military looks bad not if it’s 100% accurate or a good movie.
My understanding is that they didn’t try to kill King directly. They threatened to release incriminating evidence of him having extramarital affairs if he didn’t commit suicide.
Oh, now, that reminds me of What the Bleep Do We Know, a really stupid fucking movie that panders to the worst of the woo, and which I had a few lefty friends recommend way back when, and even had a college professor show to us. I don’t know if ti’s blatantly conspiratorial, can’t remember it well enough; but boy were those claims super stupid.
Around the same time I reconnected with a high school friend on Facebook. She kept posting links to Natural News, until I blocked her. There were definitely some crazeballs sugar-conspiracy things going on there.
Still not Q-Anon-crazy, though.
I’ve never seen this, got any cites? What I have seen was that tacking the Iraq part on was about oil, which is … not CT territory at all.
Nurse! Brain bleach, stat!
“No War for Oil!” by Ken Silverstein in The American Prospect (July 19, 2002) has a critical discussion of such claims. An article mentioned by Silverstein, “Pipeline politics taint U.S. war” from the Chicago Tribune (March 18, 2002) is also still available online. So is George Monbiot’s piece “America’s pipe dream: A pro-western regime in Kabul should give the US an Afghan route for Caspian oil” in The Guardian (October 23, 2001). Right here on the SDMB, we had the thread “It's a war for oil, Tony Benn tells protesters” from November 2001; and Tony Benn’s article “Tackle terror at its roots” (also from The Guardian, November 11, 2001) is also still accessible. From Benn’s article in The Guardian:
Thanks
Not exactly weird, but many of the voter fraud put forth in 2020 were also put out by people on the left in 2004
The difference of course is that back in 2004, Kerry conceded election night and actually argued against such theories.
“We know this was an emotional election, and the losing side is very upset,” said Daniel Hoffheimer, the lead lawyer for the Kerry campaign in Ohio. But, he said, “I have not seen anything to indicate intentional fraud or tampering.”
I remember the idea that Afghanistan was taken just to give the United States a forward base to invade Iran next which was the goal the whole time.
And how’s that pipline doing? Should be done any day now, eh? And that invasion of Iran went so well.
I always wonder if these conspiracy people ever look back and realize how wrong they were?
NaturalNews and its Fearless Leader, the Health Deranger post stuff that’s every bit as insane as QAnon’s output. Lately they’ve been flogging the idea that the military should/will stage a takeover to counter the rigged election and the false flag invasion of the Capitol. There’s a strong self-serving element to their looniness, as the site sells prepper-type supplies so followers can survive the impending Left-Wing Holocaust (beliefs on the site are best described as extreme right-wing to the point of intersection with crazies of the extreme left wing).
As for it not being weird to suspect corporations of doing Evil things, that may be true up to a certain point. A lot of people riffing on this subject don’t use their brains to see how dumb their conspiracies are. For instance, why would Big Pharma conspire to hide evidence of vaccination harms? Exposing them and causing a ban on vaccines would ensure greatly increased drug company profits, since millions of new cases of vaccine-preventable diseases every year in the U.S. alone would mean many billions in additional sales of antibiotics and other drugs to treat the sick. Similarly, it would be in Pharma’s best financial interest to spur fearmongering about anti-Covid measures including vaccines. The longer the pandemic goes on, the more money they make.
But the conspiracy freaks (on the subject of Covid-19, a majority appear to be far right and/or libertarian) can’t or won’t wrap their teeny little brains around this logic.
If corporations functioned as smooth Supervillain machines, that’d be true. My experience, though, is that (some) corporations are like a caricature of the movie Brazil, in their self-serving internal bureaucratic infighting. It’s not weird at all (although it’s certainly incorrect) to imagine that the assistant head director of the vaccine branch office would cover up a study that was unflattering to her department, even if it’d make more money for the corporation overall, since revealing that research might get her fired by the head director of the vaccine branch office.
That said, I didn’t realize NaturalNews was right-wing. I kinda assumed they were the crazy left. Live and learn!
The 5G thing gets very weird around here. I guess it’s mostly leftwing people although like the anti-vaxxers, it’s more technophobes than left wing people as such.
It hits the height of weirdness when, in my neighbourhood, every time a nice tree is to be chopped down, the 5G nuts claim it is secretly actually being chopped down so it doesn’t block 5G signals. In one facebook conversation I had, when I pointed out that it was an established fact that the tree was being removed to allow changes - at that time visibly under construction - to an intersection, they claimed the changes to the intersection were only a pretext to allow removal of the trees to permit 5G.
Surely these count as left-wing conspiracy theories: “Police are racist”, “All Cops Are Bastards”, “It’s dangerous to be black in America”.
- Sometimes true.
- Not true
- True.
I brought this up on SDMB before but I remember there was a weird conspiracy theory I saw pop up on left wing message boards like DailyKOS in the mid-00s that apparently some right wing group blew up a car bomb in the parking lot of a high school football game intending to blow up the viewing stands on the other side to kill a bunch of people but the bomb malfunctioned and only blew up the car it was in.
The conspiracy is that the Bush adminstration at the time covered it all up to prevent a domestic terrorism news story to dominate the headlines since they wanted to only promote stories about foreign terrorism to justify the War on Terror.