It was not a “general” response in your repeated use of “children” to identify adherents of CTs and, since SFPand one or two others have identified themselves as placing some credence in some CTs, it was an attack on them.
I think this thread has done an incredibly good job in demonstrating exactly why ‘we’ reject CTs and CTers on this board. It’s been pretty much a classic example of a CT and a CTer who, in the face of both sarcasm and actual facts continues to cling stubbornly to a ridiculous CT that has zero factual evidence and, to be honest, doesn’t even make any sort of logical sense at all. Yet he continues to cling to it regardless. Why? Well, gods know why. I sure don’t. But as to why ‘we’ reject them, I’d say THAT question has been thoroughly answered here…they are rejected like pretty much anything that has zero factual (or even logical) basis is generally rejected on this board. Plus, honestly, ‘we’ simply love to debunk wild shit like this…it’s like crack cocaine to most of the board members, myself included (though, sadly, I wasn’t able to really get into the spirit of debunkery on the silly ‘flight 93 was shot down’ thingy).
So that this question need never be asked again, we should really make this thread a sticky. 
Not only has it been entertaining, it’s got some good examples of the debunkers art…plus, some decent sarcasm and even a bit of wit here and there.
-XT
I wouldn’t say Stink Fish Pot is clinging to the theory. He’s holding the door open just a little. 
I think it shows that among many Popular Mechanics is, well, unpopular nowadays. 
Well, if that’s the case (benefit of the doubt for a fellow 'doper and all that), I urge him to watch 9/11, Fact or Fiction on History (and Discovery and a couple other channels as well), as they go over the OPs ‘example’ during part of the show (they actually have the lady who was the air traffic controller watching that area during the event and who actually asked the ‘mysterious white plane’ to turn around and over fly the area…and they have the sound clip as well of the event where the pilot of the ‘mysterious white plane’ says something like ‘all I see is smoke’ from the crash site. They also go into an interview with the FAA official who lead the investigation of the crash site and a lot of other things about flight 93…as well as the 9/11 Truther idiots making the claims, who got to put in their 2 cents, which were highly over priced).
We all have our little blind spots and subjects where we cling stubbornly to some pet idea or theory that flies in the face of reason, logic or facts, so I sympathize, somewhat, with the OP (my own pet peeve is 9/11 Truthers, and the OPs pet theory is part of that tissue of lies, so my sympathy here is pretty thin at this point for this particular CT). He DID ask why ‘we’ ‘flat out reject CT’s’ however…and I think he’s had it explained to him in pretty vivid detail at this point.
-XT
I wonder if Conspiracy Theories tickle the neurons in the same spot Religion does for some people. If the human need for faith is being fufilled here - for stories about powers greater than ourselves, barely fathomable in their superhuman forms. Omniscient and omnipotent - except (or because) we create them in our own minds.
Is that too Jungian for current fashion?
I suspect it’s the idea that they know more than you and everybody else, and were you not so naive you’d be as smart as they are.
Religion is different because it depends entirely on faith, whereas a conspiracy theory is invariably about something that can be demonstrably disproven. It’s funny that a CT is always a handful of people against the world and its mountains of evidence. You’d think that they might take their cues from that fact.
And he gets offended when people complain about the draft.
I disagree. Many religious beliefs can be demonstrably dis-proven as well. The efficacy of faith healing, the safety of handling snakes, the 6,000 year old earth, and the feasibility of Noah’s Ark. The “us against the world” mentality is part and parcel of religion as well. Just see how persecuted Christians are when they can’t have teacher led prayer in school.
I haven’t read the thread yet, but my view of conspiracies is that they are darned hard to pull off.
I worked for a large and relatively happy company. My department serviced the needs of many other departments across the company so I led or participated in a fairly large number of projects and meetings generally intended to improve how things were done.
Obviously the basic goal of every person on every project and in every meeting was to promote the success of the company. So a high level of cooperation would be a given. Right?
If you’ve ever been in an organization you know the answer. And it certainly wasn’t 100% cooperation 100% of the time. And yet, the goals were legal, laudatory and in the best long term interests of each person involved.
If normal business people have trouble “conspiring” for the benefit of their companies, how much more difficult is a criminal conspiracy?
Of course successful criminal conspiracies happen, but I think as a rule of thumb they will involve small numbers of individuals and short term and obvious goals.
“Vast conspiracies” are the things of imagination. It’s just human nature that some participant will get PO’d at something or other and blow the whistle.
You see, I find the bolded part to be the key to understanding how conspiracies are possible. What I think is missing in your fine elaboration — and the example you used is filled with it - is the question of hierarchy and power. Yes, there were as you say “hundreds of people” who were aware, who read it; heck, I’m sure there were people who were genuinely shocked. What made this conspiracy successful (regardless of what we know today) is the hierarchy and power where people who may have grasped it but felt or knew that “higher-ups” were on it and for various reasons (either they believed that higher-ups simply knew something they don’t or they knew “their place” so did not want to stir the pot) did not blow a whistle.
Another example is the set of propaganda events designed to create mass conditions for US invasion of Iraq culminating in a famous Collin Powell presentation to the UN. There were literally hundreds of people in on it, you could argue Collin really “believed” what he was presenting. I’m sure there were people on the Internet at that time (2003) who were howling conspiracy but nobody was paying attention one way or another.
So, one wonders, what is that ingredient that makes Collin Powell word legitimate and true and the other silly and false - hierarchy and power that is perceived when Collin Powell speaks. Most people, in fact, predominant number of people, receive that information on the basis of hierarchy and power and not on the merits of the information itself. In other words, what makes information true is not what is said but who is saying it.
All this talk about reach of the conspiracy where hundreds or thousands of people had to be in on it and that’s what makes so difficult. Prime example - Suez Crisis that started as three guys talking how to take Suez back from Egyptians. You think that a British paratrooper landing at Suez knew or cared about the fact that it was a criminal conspiracy that leads to war?
Yet, all these events, happened as a pure conspiracies that people were pointing at but nothing prevented them (nor anyone was punished or found criminally responsible) and my only explanation is hierarchy and power.
So, when I read a thread like this all I see is unquestionable respect and, at moments, apparatchik-like dogmatism to hierarchy and power.
I really think it’s just the appeal of narratives, but in this case, the genre of this particular narrative (the thriller), doesn’t generalize as easily when combined with fantasy. If you’re going to combine the two, you need to have a much larger proportion of fantasy–like The Matrix, or the X-Files–for it to told hold in a larger popular consciousness.
As Shodan points out above, our society doesn’t allow public events into its consciousness unless it can fit them into some kind of movie or TV narrative genre that’s easily accessible. If effect, we’re not interested in news, but entertainment.
This becomes very clear, for example, when something happens that violates the narrative formula, and then everyone goes crazy. For example, the Casey Anthony trial violated the movie narrative formula, because the bad guy got away with it–and so everyone freaked out, as this very message board demonstrated. We wanted to get our money back from the box office.
Have any well known CT’s actually been demonstrated to be correct?
I haven’t seen anything to challenge my view of the death of Kennedy (or both), Princess Di or Elvis- I mean there are a zillion Ct’s and I don’t know of one that has turned out to be correct.
And now, we are supposed to believe that Amelia Earhart survived on a tropical island after the crash. They can’t find the aircraft, bodies, radios but they have found a jar of freckle cream (This is a very marginal CT).
How is Amelia Earhart a CT? People are looking in the area where she disappeared and they have found physical evidence which could be from her.
Compare this to the government wired the WTC with explosives.
Maybe that is why I used the term “marginal”?
There is a CT that she was captured by the Japanese - sort of similar theory to Korean Flight 007.
It’s not a CT. It’s lots of CTs.
A central theme to Earhart conspiracy theories is that the gummint is covering up its knowledge of what happened to her.
Which just confirms – at least for me – that the issue of conspiracy is not its seeming implausibility, or complexity of managing large number of people who may be in on it.
No, it is a question of hierarchy and power that prevents one from obtaining the evidence.
Similar goes for USS Liberty. Some collusion for “smoking gun” intelligence was around for Iraqi war.
Demonstrated conspiracies are all around you.
Newcomer, I can’t accept this for a minute.
You state:
"No, it is a question of hierarchy and power that prevents one from obtaining the evidence. "
Do you honestly believe there was a cover up about the JFK murder? How can any democratic government hide anything eventually?
The Liberty- well that is a very sensitive issue on these boards. I doubt there are many people who consider McNamara knew more then he let on. But that is more of a cover up than a conspiracy theory.
Cicero,
I don’t have an opinion on JFK conspiracy or any other for that matter.
What I’m talking about is a habitually ignored question of hierarchy and power that permeates many of the conspiracies; especially those that were proven right.
In 1956 people were writing about a criminal conspiracy of France, UK and Israel to instigate a war in sovereign nation of Egypt. It was ignored, probably laughed out at some Lord’s club or whatever. I’m arguing that the main reason that leaked information about the Suez Crisis and the ensuing war was ignored and “official denial” accepted as Gospel is the notion of executive hierarchy and power of the State.
As for the people’s propensity for conspiracies in general I subscribe to the idea that most people would rather to be “told” what happened than to “choose” among versions (no matter how complicated or implausible). The same view claims that in the last 100 years it was the “State that was the source of most of human nightmares”.
However, it seems that today, people wholly believe that their enemy is a “home-grown terrorist” (term worthy of “1984”) totally forgetting that value of that term has been cultivated, promoted and delivered by the State itself.