Not really.
The belief that some event was caused by a group acting in concert, although the legal definition of “conspiracy”, is exactly what a “conspiracy theory” is not.
That 19 Saudis trained and funded by Al-Qaeda did the 9/11 attacks as a pre-planned group effort is both a conspiracy and the truth. It’s not a CT. Not even a little bit.
Given that there is no firm definition of “conspiracy theory,” this is probably better suited to IMHO than GQ.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
IMO it’s pretty simple to parse these out.
Do the purported explanations contain a large element of cynicism and/or paranoia about the world at large? If so, it’s a CT.
Do the purported explanations become more outlandish and convoluted as more information comes out through normal channels? If so, it’s a CT.
Do the purported explanations involve space aliens, time travel, or an Illuminati-style secret all-powerful group? If so, it’s a CT.
I think you enter conspiracy theory when you begin arguing that somebody is actively working to conceal the truth of your theory.
If you think that UFO’s are real and aliens abduct people, that’s a fringe theory. But if you think the government knows that alien abductions are real and is covering up the evidence, then it’s a conspiracy theory.
Yes, but I was distinguishing between different types of CTs. Not all CTs relate to governments, after all. Consider the “Big Pharma concealing the cure for cancer” CT.
You could believe that this shooting involved more than one person, and that the other people got away before the cops arrived on scene. I’ve seen CTists suggesting that this was an Antifa or ISIS organized attack, which fits the classic CT definition, but doesn’t require the police or government to be complicit, just incompetent.
I suspect we mostly agree and are sorta talking past one another.
I agree completely that government complicity isn’t a requirement for a CT. The whole point of the CT label is that the proponents’ “theory”, such as it is, is not much in touch with reality and posits an implausible conspiracy behind the events we all know about from press reports.
The point being that CT is a term of art. A theory about a group act (a conspiracy strictly defined) is not an upper-case “Conspiracy Theory” until and unless it adds the element of disconnect from most folks’ idea of reality.
In the first hour of confused news reports could somebody reasonably informed reasonably believe the LV shooting was multiple ISIS sympathizers? Sure. Not a CT. A week later could somebody reasonably informed reasonably believe the LV shooting was multiple ISIS sympathizers? Nope. Anyone so believing is by definition a CTer believing in a by-definition CT.
At least as I understand and use the term.
Nowadays, I think conspiracy theories are less “there was a conspiracy to carry out this action” and more “there is a conspiracy by mainstream entities (government or media) to hide the truth/spread a false narrative about this action.”
Well, after all, it IS really a fad slang name for things. Not a carefully crafted label, established by an authorized panel of democratically elected experts of some kind.
And it’s mainly a pejorative label, “awarded” by opponents to whatever the “theory” is. It gets applied to more than just wild notions, too. Before the term “fake news” became a recent fad, plenty of people would declare that REAL concerns were “conspiracy theories” as a way of denigrating them, and repudiating them without actually responding to them otherwise.
It’s reached the point where ideas are referred to as Conspiracies even when there’s only one person or group being referred to in the “theory.”
And by the way, there have been plenty of times when it turned out that the Conspiracy Theory WAS right on the money about PART of the story.
Examples:
part of the J F Kennedy assassination CT, was that the Warren Commission and others conspired to cover up Oswald’s connections to Russia and to Cuba. That DID prove to be true, even though the reason why it was true, wasn’t what the more eager CT people wanted it to be.
Part of the Area 51 canon, was that the government lied about weather balloons crashing into the desert, and that was finally revealed to be right.
Since "Conspiracy Theory " IS primarily an insult label, the people applying it don’t wait for debunking. They slap it on because they don’t like the idea, or because they don’t like the people espousing the idea.
Theories become conspiracy theories after enough loons pile nonfactual claims and inane speculation high enough on the Internet.
Worth noting again that (unlike in the case of actual conspiracies), there’s an extreme dearth of conspiracies surrounding major events that have been proven to be correct by obsessed amateurs writing books and posting online.
A lot of conspiracy theories follow a certain logical fallacy, for which I can’t come up with a name: Basically, take a real-life event, point out how improbable it is, then say it couldn’t have happened the way it did, even though it did.
An analogy would be this: “How could that elderly lady in Florida have won the lottery jackpot? The odds of winning the jackpot are one in 150 million! Are you seriously suggesting that she defeated one-in-150-million odds to win?” Ignoring, of course, the fact that she did win, and that someone *has *to win.
It’s an inverted Texas Sharpshooter. The assertion that no matter where the other person hit, they must have been aiming at that, even if a hit literally anywhere would have produced the desired results.
‘conspiracy’ is a pretty easy definition to grasp - it’s planning, by two or more people, a criminal act.
Exactly. As said upthread by several posters.
But when/how does an opinion about an event rise to the level of a capital-C Conspiracy capital-T Theory? *That *is the question.
Something becomes a conspiracy theory when the weight of evidence against the idea becomes overwhelming and the evidence used to support it becomes increasingly strained and implausible.
I’d set it at the same kind of level public prosecutors use to take a case forward; that there is a case to answer. It doesn’t in any way presume guilt, just that it is worthy of further investigation.
One of my Facebook friends linked to a “just asking questions” article. The author pointed out (correctly) that ejected brass is hot. Then he went on to ask “Why don’t the pictures of the hotel room show large quantities of brass lying around?” and “Why don’t the pictures show burn marks in the carpet from the hot brass?”
I pointed out that, among other things, the leaked pictures might not have been the only ones taken. This is one of the fairly rare chances for logical people to jump on this stuff and proactively try to keep such idiocy from gaining wide-spread currency.
Ejected brass is high temperature. But has lots of surface area and not much heat content. As such it cools quickly. It also tends to bounce around a bit after landing, imparting a bit of heat at each bounce point. Hotel carpet is also carefully chosen with a busy pattern that hides small stains or defects.
Add all that up and it’s unsurprising that even a picture taken where a bunch of brass landed might show no obvious burn marks. Doubly so when the pic we’re all seeing came off a public website where it was massively compressed to save bandwidth.
It’s exactly this sort of ignorant “focus on one factor while ignoring or not knowing enough to consider 99 other relevant factors” thinking that’s one common sign of a CT.
In addition to that, the carpet is probably fire-resistant. These big hotels all remember the MGM Grand fire, and do not want to be the next one to go up like that.
Actually, it’s not. At all. Me and my brother were out firing his 7.5mm rifle, and my .44 mag carbine, and we caught the brass as it came out of the rifles. No burns. Not even very hot. Anyone saying “it should have burned the carpet” is totally full of shit.
Another example of a “conspiracy theory” that’s actually in-flux as we speak is the “CIA knowingly sold crack in the streets in the 1980’s to raise funds”. Gary Webb who wrote multiple articles about it was widely ostracized in the press and claimed there was a conspiracy by the corporate media to silence him at the governments request. Eventually he committed suicide because of him basically getting blacklisted from the newspaper industry. Anti-government activists (both left and right wing) latched onto the story pretty quickly but it was never really seen as legitimate. Multiple government investigations by different administrations have said that the CIA had no direct involvement with it, but every few years or so we get some more evidence that Webb may have been right all along.