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Panda Bear posted:Real inconsistencies and evidence of conspiracies surrounding 9/11 and the USS Cole bombings Government officials of sufficient rank getting inexplicably promoted despite high-profile failures isn't evidence of conspiracy, it's par for the course. Hell, it's the same in private industry too, just look at some of those fuckup CEOs that destroy everything they touch but still end up getting hired over and over. Connections and being on good terms with the bigshots matter far more than performance ever will. On the other hand, what separates "crazy nutjob" conspiracies like trutherism from "probably legit" conspiracy theories like that one US ship that was "accidentally" bombed by Israel way back when?
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Sep 16, 2013 18:46
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gradenko_2000 posted:Anyone have any good sources to share about birther-ism? I think it pretty much also qualifies as a conspiracy theory considering the massive amount of mental gymnastics one has to go through to convince oneself that they're after Obama's birth records because there's legit shadowy stuff about that guy and nope, it's not about anything else, honest. It's not even mental gymnastics - it's just a simple matter of believing what they want to believe and assuming that any official paperwork or witness statements that contradict this are fakes cooked up by bribed authorities. It's not too different from Syria denialism - people don't trust what the government says, so it doesn't matter what evidence the government produces because they won't believe it, especially in the face of "well, it's awful convenient for the government, isn't it, that reminds me of that other time they faked evidence". The only part that even takes the slightest mental leap is the sheer extensiveness of it - the idea that literally every relevant authority figure is in on it, as well as everyone else in the world except for their favorite talk radio host and a few people desperate for fringe notoriety. But it doesn't really matter, because they can say "but, Iraq!" and forget the difference in the standard of evidence as well as the fact that evidence is coming from non-governmental sources too. The problem with conspiracy theories is that conspiracy theorists can point to the ones that turned out to be true (NSA backdoors, for example). Main Paineframe fucked around with this message at 22:58 on Sep 22, 2013 |
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Sep 22, 2013 22:56
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twistedmentat posted:Thing is, False Flag attacks that are verified as that are not on the scale of "guy shoots a bunch of kids to get gun control enacted" but more just making up poo poo up that never happened. The Gulf of Tonkin is the best example, as there is no primary evidence it actually occured. Well, MKULTRA is a pretty good example of why I'm worried about dismissing conspiracy theories out of hand: there was no evidence or primary sources on MKULTRA until it was revealed by the government. In 1973, claiming that the government was giving people LSD and other drugs as part of mind control experiments would have been insane crazyland conspiracy theory stuff...despite the fact that, at the time, MKULTRA was being brought to a close after twenty years of experiments and the CIA was busily destroying all records of its existence. The only reason we know about it at all is was because some of the records had been misfiled and thus survived the attempt to shred everything; thanks to the fact that most of the evidence was destroyed, though, it's hard to confidently say "so and so never happened in MKULTRA". It's a goldmine for ridiculous conspiracy theories, yes, but it's kind of hard to blame the conspiracy theorists - given the deliberate destruction of evidence and the highly illegal nature of the experiments, it's a goldmine for crazy anti-government speculation. That doesn't just go for American conspiracy theories, either. The "NGO doctors giving free vaccinations are actually American spies giving fake vaccines" conspiracy theory seen in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan, for example, got a huge boost when the CIA actually did employ a doctor to do just that when during the search for bin Laden. That doesn't mean that any other doctors in the area are working with the CIA, but can it be completely ruled out? The line between conspiracy and reality isn't always as clear as one would like.
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Sep 23, 2013 06:30
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kiresays posted:The thing is that it wasn't a conspiracy theory. I don't have any trouble believing that our government, or someone else's government has done some seriously horrible poo poo that we don't know about, much like MKULTRA. I think the idea that "if the CIA hadn't misfiled those documents, we wouldn't even know that MKULTRA had ever existed" unnerves a lot of people. The idea that an organization can cover up a project like that for twenty years and almost managed to erase all evidence that it had ever happened really sets off people's paranoia - it creates a perception that another similarly large and similarly evil program could have been completely covered up to such an extent that evidence of it hasn't been discovered yet and potentially could never be discovered. From an outside perspective, "poo poo that never happened" is indistinguishable from "poo poo that's been completely covered up", and there's been plenty of accusations that appeared to be the former but were revealed by a leak to have been the latter. The only difference between "conspiracy" and "not conspiracy" isn't whether there's evidence, it's whether any evidence has been found. Most conspiracy theories are crazy paranoid talk, but it's hard to knock the basic paranoia behind them; the only real problem is where they let it lead them.
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Sep 23, 2013 17:49
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Sir Tonk posted:http://www.mindetox.com/mother_executed_for_wrong_turn.html Really, it's perfectly reasonable right until after "we will probably never know why she did it". Hell, even the rest of that sentence would be pretty sensible if not for the use of words like "brainwashing" and "fantasy", since all it's really saying is "maybe the cops will plant some evidence to justify what would otherwise be a bad shoot" (a thing that does happen). Hell, even the crazy rant the page goes on afterward only seems crazy because the writer is writing like a crazy person does; aside from some fairly basic misunderstandings about the purpose and function of US government debt, it's got a pretty good grip on reality. The only part that really departs from the real world is when he suggests that Lincoln was actually assassinated for creating fiat money
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Oct 5, 2013 16:19
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computer parts posted:The reason I don't believe it is it falls under the supposedly Fascist ideal of "believing the enemy (i.e. CIA) is simultaneously incompetent and all powerful". The CIA isn't a single entity, it's a large constantly-changing organization with quite a few members. It's perfectly possible for it to be incompetent and all-powerful at the same time - for example, the CIA leadership and MKULTRA project members managed to keep a lid on the program for decades, but it was ultimately revealed when some fuckup clerk accidentally misfiled some of the super-secret documents and no one noticed when the order-to-shred was given out.
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Oct 6, 2013 02:54
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