Sigh.....I just don't get it:

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/25/us/25tucson.html?_r=2&partner=rss&emc=rss

Even by the standard of conspiracy theories, this one is a hoot. Evidently there are some people who believe the whole Gabrielle Giffords, Judge Roll, and seven other people shooting never happened. There are some here on this community that believe that belief in a conspiracy means that you automatically have more knowledge than the rest of us as to what "really" happened. This despite that most conspiracies attest to well-covered events that have received detailed coverage down to the millisecond, and despite any great amount of proof for them. And now, here's another example of a conspiracy theory in its baby-steps stage. Like the Deathers they are disputing things well-known and seen in real-time. Like conspiracy theories in general they create a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

My opinion is that this is 1) complete and utter lunacy, and 2) illustrative of the mindset of the conspiracy theorist. I can't fathom why someone would believe this, but they do. Your thoughts?

-Edited for clarity-

Comments

[ddstory.livejournal.com]

There are some here on this community that believe that
You're trying to take a jab at particular people here, aren't you. Is that the hidden purpose of this post (to become a bit conspiratorial here)?

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Actually, I'm not trying to take a jab at anyone. I'm just making a post that references the latest conspiracy theory to come down the pike. If I were making a jab at someone, I'd be a lot more long-winded and detailed than I am here.

[htpcl.livejournal.com]

You mean like this? http://talk-politics.livejournal.com/1019748.html?thread=80493668#t80493668

[udoswald.livejournal.com]

Evidently there are some people who believe the whole Gabrielle Giffords, Judge Roll, and seven other people shooting happened.

Did you mean "shooting didn't happen"?

Whoops:

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Yes, I did mean that. Thanks.

[404.livejournal.com]

Ok, so in the last decade we have had: the Truthers, the Birthers, the Deathers, and now the Shooters?

Man, these conspiracy nuts are getting desperate, what is the angle for this one? Why would the HomeSec gain in this conspiracy?

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

GIFT, I think.

[malakh-abaddon.livejournal.com]

Oh yes, I can see this. I mean seriously look at what the government can achieve by faking the whole affair. I know this is a way for those evil communist liberals in Washington DC to take away my guns, thus forcing me into slavery in the new world order. I mean they (the aliens) already have implanted chips into peoples heads so they can track us using our satellites, and the old trick of using aluminum foil hats do not work anymore because of the gamma ray generators that they installed in the Hubble telescope. Obama is not Kenyan or Irish, he is reptilian, an alien sent to brainwash the people of the world, so nobody can resist their conquest of the Earth. 9-11 was a political attack against the reptilians which run everything by the Greys. If it even happened, I have credible sources from some no-name/acronym government agency, that 9-11 was the catalyst for the reptilians attack against the greys. I mean the humans are fighting wars for alien races now. Bigfoot assassinated Kennedy, Jimmy Hoffa rules the world, and god is a 40 something balding fat man who masquerades as a hot 18 something barely legal girl. And to top it all off, we are merely zeros and ones in some random computer program, THE MATRIX IS REAL PEOPLE.


Okay, I feel so much better now. Now we will return you to your normal daily broadcast. I hope you all enjoy this random bit of insanity.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

Of course!

It all makes sense now...

[policraticus.livejournal.com]

Meanwhile, among the sophisticated and nuanced:

http://www.euronews.net/2011/05/18/majority-of-french-think-dsk-was-set-up/\

People like to believe there is an answer that doesn't point to a world ruled in part by chaos.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

If the 404 error in that was intentional that was brilliant. ;-).

I think that this is the logical reason behind the existence of those theories, to be sure.

"easy" explanations for hard questions

[russj.livejournal.com]

Some people just like to have an easy answer to hard questions.

It may be comforting to some people to believe that some "powerful cabal" controls the world economy, or that a "secret society" really picks the next president.

Then they can feel that someone is in charge, instead of the collective sum of millions of little individual choices.

[telemann.livejournal.com]

The Psychopath Test: A Journey Through the Madness Industry (http://www.amazon.com/Psychopath-Test-Journey-Through-Industry/dp/1594488010) indicates that 1 in 100 people are psychopaths, and a majority of them are NOT behind bars or in a mental hospital. I don't know if there is any clinical connection with conspiracy believers and psychosis, but after reading some of the linked article, I wonder ;)

[anfalicious.livejournal.com]

Isn't there a strong correlation between CEOs and psychopaths?

[hardblue.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but you probably also believe in the moon landing, pfft.

And the holocaust...

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

... too.

The problem is one of knowledge

[montecristo.livejournal.com]

The probability of keeping a conspiracy secret decreases exponentially with the number of persons party to it. On the other hand, there are quite a few other factors to consider as well. What exactly are the parameters of a conspiracy? Is the whole complex of sub-events composing some larger event supposed to be the product of conspiratorial fabrication or only small parts of it? How big was the event in question? What is covered up? Who has a motive to keep certain information secret? Are whole organizations involved in perpetrating and keeping the conspiracy secret or just a couple of people in one or two cooperating organizations? How complex would the plan have to be to pull off the conspiracy? Could a perceived conspiracy really be the result of information, possibly embarassing information or incriminating evidence, being lost in the chaos of events playing out? The problem with "conspiracy theories," per se, is that they are often constructed from extremely tennuous evidence, but that does not mean that everything about a given event is simple and known, or that nobody in a position to do so hasn't been motivated to conceal certain details which may have added a certain nuance or complexity to the event.

It is just as much a species of ignorance to dismiss conspiracy out of hand as it is to embrace it. After all, conspiracy, per se, is quite common. People conspire to do things all the time. Anyone who has planned a surprise party has participated in a conspiracy. Some suprise parties are quite large, involving a large number of persons and quite a great deal of complex planning. Suppose fifty people plan a large surprise party for "Joe." Even long after the party, Joe, and nearly everyone else involved in the party, save for one or two conspiring individuals, may not know, for example, who arranged the delivery of the giant cake or hired the stripper to jump out of it. People are charged with conspiracy to commit crimes all the time. Most damning, and the big driver inspiring the temptation to theorize conspiracy is that almost everyone over the age of ten knows that people in positions of power are very motivated to commit crimes and to cover them up, and they often have considerable resources available to them to accomplish it. Lastly, conspiracy theories make for intriguing drama and have potential entertainment value or even propaganda value. That makes conspiracy theorizing tempting, but conversely, it doesn't mean that all conspiracy theorizing is outrageous and obviously false.

Re: The problem is one of knowledge

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Looking at actual conspiracies.....I'll use seven examples.

1) An oldie but a goodie, the Gunpowder Plot: An attempt to kill the monarch and Parliament of the Kingdom of England in the belief this would (somehow) work in the favor of English Catholics. The result was a massive backfiring and the execution of all the conspirators.

2) Gabriel Prosser in 1800s Virginia sought to orchestrate a massed slave revolt. Someone betrayed the conspiracy and it touched off a wave of proscriptions in Virgina.

3) John Brown, a fanatical and hardline anti-slavery activist sought to orchestrate a massed slave revolt with weapons from the arsenal and armory at Harper's Ferry. It was a propaganda farce that turned the fail sundae into a win pie.

4) The Black Hand, a group of officers within Serbia's military orchestrated the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. The result was the onset of WWI, the near-destruction of the Serbian state, and the purge of the entire Black Hand in exile in Corfu.

5) Kaiser Wilhelm II devoted great effort to propping up a Russian exile named V. I. Ulyanov, who worked tirelessly to undermine Imperial Russia's war effort. The result was the rise of a Russian extremist movement called the Bolsheviks, the formation of the first of the new ideological states, the Soviet Union, and nothing remotely in the favor of the Germans.

6) The Beer Hall Putsch, launched by a little-known Bavarian fascist movement associated with wartime heroes of the deposed Hohenzollern dynasty was a farce that turned into a propaganda coup for the former propaganda boss of that movement who would become its Leader, one Adolf Hitler. The conspiracy failed and so he rose legitimately, within as opposed to without the system.

7) The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments, something generally known now and which is now known to have spread elsewhere in the New World.

All of these were bumbling, incompetently-led, and failed. Conspiracies are the stuff of thriller novels.

The problem is one of knowledge Pt 2

[montecristo.livejournal.com]

I'm probably not going to argue any of these, one way or another, especially if someone has a chip on their shoulder and is eager to assume that I believe one way or another on a particular question as a pretext for righteously dishing out disdain, so don't bother if you want a comment from me on that basis. I put these out there just for consideration. Consider some things which could conceivably be "conspiratorial:"

1. Did a person or persons within the FBI participate in the assassination of Martin Luther King?


2. How about the JFK assassination? People scoff at all sorts of wild ideas, some of them outrageously straining of credibility, about what happened with the John Kennedy assassinations but there are all sorts of suspicious "loose ends" and behaviors exposed in any examination of the events and people surrounding it. Are we to presume that every last jot and tittle of possibly incriminating evidence has been examined and documented and available to the general public? Preposterous.


3. Who "misplaced" the door of the Branch Davidian compound after the Waco incident?


4. Was building seven of the World Trade Center Complex intentionally demolished, possibly for insurance purposes? (I'm personally highly skeptical of this family of theories, but I'm not going to claim that I have 100 percent certainty to the contrary).


5. What insider in the Nixon Whitehouse pointed investigators to the proper evidential needles in the gigantic haystack of Nixon's phone recordings? It is essayist Gary North's contention that "Deep Throat never had what it took to unseat Richard Nixon. Neither did Woodward and Bernstein. One man did. He remains anonymous." (http://www.lewrockwell.com/north/north383.html)


6. In the Sofitel, where Dominique Strauss-Kahn is accused of attempting to rape one of the staff maids, neither the maid herself nor people in the hotel management called the police for well over an hour after the event happened. Why they would be reluctant to call is not a mystery. Tony hotels do not want to be associated with infamous crimes where people are victimized. It makes for a bad reputation and puts off potential guests. Eventually though, a decision was made. Someone high enough up to make the decision and have it stick decided to alert the authorities after an hour had passed since the crime. Who was that? Nobody seems to know. Was there the possibility that people in the hotel management were thinking of covering up the incident? Did someone outside the hotel management become aware of the incident and "encourage" its reporting? Who knows? Note: Regardless of the answers to the preceding questions, this doesn't make DSK innocent, nor does it even, in and of itself, constitute evidence that he was "set up," but it is an interesting factoid, a dog that didn't bark, that our supposedly famously dilligent "watchdog" media has failed to notice or about which it has failed to even be curious.

Re: The problem is one of knowledge Pt 2

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

1) Unlikely. King was a non-violent activist, he was anti-Vietnam, but they didn't exactly gun down the hardcore Mao fanboy New Leftists, which would have been the case were the government actually putting hits on people.

2) People have conflated JFK's Administration with LBJ. The real JFK was a hardcore Cold Warrior who made his bones with fearmongering over a missile gap he knew was not existent, and who had almost bungled the world into a general nuclear exchange. A hardcore Communist would have had every reason to kill that womanizing son of a political boss.

3) Jesus, that one hasn't shown up in ages. O.o

4) No, it was affected by heat and stress and was expected to fall sooner than it actually did.

5) I think it's safe to say Mark Felt really was Deep Throat.

6) Honestly, given some of the raunchy things politicos get up to, DSK being guilty of rape would not surprise me. Him being tried and given a full sentence would.

[devil-ad-vocate.livejournal.com]

Appropriate response to conspiracy nuts who pester people:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mGY24EjWR2c&feature=related

[the-rukh.livejournal.com]

DISCLAIMER: This is just pure snarky trolling, don't take this as an honest belief

Well, conservatives are more likely to be religious, so it makes sense that they'd believe other things despite all evidence to the contrary.

[mahnmut.livejournal.com]

Truths are best told in jest, no?

[paedraggaidin.livejournal.com]

Conspiracy theory = convenient refuge for people whose already shaky grasp of reality cannot accommodate an explanation they just don't like.

I have a theory...

[brockulfsen.livejournal.com]

Actually several.

1/ There really are conspiracies. Some of them are large and nasty. Some are Government sponsored.

2/ These real conspiracies sometimes interact, getting in each others' way, forming alliances, sometimes sharing key personnel. The world doesn't make sense and sometimes that is because somewhere there are madmen playing god.

Which brings us to

5/ Many Americans are blind to the nature of the American Capitalist System, which is effectively a bucket of conspiracies.

4/ There are a lot of crazy people who spew their madness into the world. Disturbingly sometimes they are right.

5/ Some crazy conspiracies are promoted to discredit conspiracy theorists and classes of theory.

6/ Many Conspiracy Theories are displacement of other fears.

Finally Occam's Razor is your friend.

Re: I have a theory...

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

1) And most of them are clumsily planned and tend to work badly. You can ask John Wilkes Booth, Guy Fawkes, Gavrilo Princip, Brutus, Sejanus, Denmark Vesey, Gabriel Prosser, von Stauffenberg, and Kaiser Wilhelm II how conspiracies they orchestrated worked out for them.

2) As a rule very few of them are in a position to make those conspiracies work.

5) Er.....how is this so, precisely? US capitalism seems too bumbling and incompetent and dependent on corporate welfare to be a conspiracy.

4) Not really, I don't think that this is the case.

5) No. Just no. Conspiracy theorists and their believers aren't capable of that kind of thought, and no government would play with that kind of Greek fire.

6) True, but that's because the real conspiracies don't work half as well as the supervillain wannabes seen in the tropes applied to conspiracy theories.

[malasadas.livejournal.com]

Three real "intellectual" tools of conspiracy theorists that separate them from whistleblowers of REAL conspiracies:

1) Conspiracy theorists treat the lack of evidence of an active conspiracy as actual evidence. The nefarious forces at work manage to cover their tracks so well that when you see nothing, something must be there.

2) Conspiracy theorists treat anything that cannot readily or easily be explained by widely accepted explanations as proof that the entire explanation is flawed. Often, the accepted explanation does explain it but it is complex and technical and therefore not easily understood. To the conspiracy theorist, an explanation that is less than 100% perfect is an opening to dismiss everything.

3) Conspiracy theorists substitute expert knowledfe with what seems intuitively obvious to them. Hence, so much of the 911 Truther attacks on actual engineering studies because it "doesn't make sense". The trouble is that it DOES make sense but requires expertise. Conspiracy theorists, who have comforted themselves with the conceit their anti-mainstream stance grants them extraordinary insight readily dismiss expertise in favor of intuition.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

A good summary, and also a succint one. IAWTC.

[root-fu.livejournal.com]

I would contend, if you believe in healthcare reform without evidence -- you're a believer in a healthcare reform conspiracy theory. 200+ posts in my HCR thread, and not a single person can explain how HC reform is intended to improve healthcare or make it more affordable. Yet, I do know the vast majority of those in this community -- practically everyone except me and possibly brucestein and a few others, supported it.

Given such, how can you criticize others for believing in theories without evidence. And, how can you pretend that failures of that type have nothing to do with you when you're guilty of the same?

[mylaptopisevil.livejournal.com]

a single person can explain how HC reform is intended to improve healthcare or make it more affordable.

HCR's primary goal was making healthcare more accessible. The fact that a single payer plan without any motivation for stock holder profit would also be more affordable is more of a tangential bonus.

[jlc20thmaine.livejournal.com]

You can get people to believe in anything. The Truthers, Birthers, Deathers, Warmers, Shooters, JFKers, ... all show that there truly is a sucker born every minute. With enough pseudo-science and a fast talking front man people will just fall in line. There is no self-thought anymore.

[dwer.livejournal.com]

but... why? What would be the point of hoaxing it?

[jlc20thmaine.livejournal.com]

What's the point of any conspiracy?