(04-14-2019, 11:04 PM)Eric the Green Wrote: I agree very much with brower's two opening posts. Conspiracy theories now feed the distrust of the government, and people believe in them because they want to blame the government or a secret cabal for everything, in order to foment opposition to same. Most if not all of them have little relation to reality, and feed the trends of today toward the irrational and vulnerablity to demagogues.
Just to make clear -- the first is an essay off the web, and the second is my analysis.
Quote:I've looked into a number of these. The granddaddy of modern conspiracy theory is the ones surrounding the JFK assassination. The evidence is open and shut that Oswald killed Kennedy acting alone, and there's no evidence that he was part of a conspiracy. The facts are well known, and today he would be convicted in a court of law by a jury in a matter of minutes. His fingerprints were found on the gun proven to be his, and on the boxes he used for his assassin's den. The bullets found in JFK's skull and in his car, and the shell casings found at you know where, were proven to come from that gun also found there. And so on and on. But there are mysterious aspects surrounding the case that feed the theories. The Mafia and others probably conspired to kill JFK, at least as far as the talking stage, and maybe even failed attempts. Suspicious deaths happened afterwards. And at least at first, the autopsy was inadequate. And so on. But none of these things change the basic facts about the case.
I suspect that one area of investigation would have been a plot by the KGB against President Kennedy as revenge for his handling of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Such, if so, would have had to be suppressed were there to be no World War III that would have involved nuclear weapons obliterating cities from Tokyo to Tokyo by way of San Francisco, Chicago, New York, Montreal, Madrid, Munich, Prague, Warsaw, Leningrad, Moscow, Kiev, Beijing, Shanghai, Pyongyang, and Seoul. Much was left out. Was Oswald serving the Soviet Union?
Need we know now?
Quote:More recently, the other big one surrounds the 9-11 attacks. So far I am satisfied that the heat of the impacts melted the connections of the floors where it happened to the warped walls, and that when they fell, the upper floors collapsed on them and the buildings pancaked. The notions of small amounts of thermite metals found at the scene that supposedly indicate a bomb are explained by the composition of the building. And so on. I would have loved it if Bush could have been blamed for this, and this would have brought down his presidency. But why persist with this theory now that he's out of office? Is there really a secret cabal doing all these things?
...or that at high-enough temperatures typical of a jet-fuel fire, steel loses its tensile strength and hence its ability to bear loads, hence collapsing even if it does not melt. All the explosions? There was much water enclosed in rigid containers from toilet reservoirs to drain pipes to soft drink bottles and cans. Add to this, there are good reasons to not dispose of spray cans with compressed propellants in fires. Water going from room temperature or ice-water temperatures to a sudden boil is itself explosive. Add to this there were plenty of stories in which an owner tried to commit an insurance fraud -- nope, the insurance companies were satisfied with the official explanations as definitive. Incompetence and dereliction of duty are very different from conspiracy, even if as devastating in effect.
Fact: the fuel-burning components of jet engines do not use steel that would disintegrate at such temperatures. They use superalloys with refractory metals such as tungsten, molybdenum, niobium, tantalum, and ceramics and ceramic-metal mixes. Steel is an excellent structural material at temperatures up to about the temperature of ordinary house fires; above those it wilts, as happened in the Twin Towers.
Quote:Chemtrails and geo-engineering is another big one, promoted mainly by a guy in Shasta County CA named Dane Wigington. But when you examine this, the supposed increase in chemtrails is explained by planes using more water in their exhaust to reduce pollution. But believers say that the contrails we see are made of aluminum and barium deliberately being used on us to reduce the population. But there's no evidence that these metals are falling on the ground all over the country, or that people are spraying them from planes. The theorists have expanded the fact that such spraying is being considered as an answer to global warming, to a supposed fact that it is actually being done for about 30 years now. And they actually blame global warming on the supposed spraying.
Yes. First of all, aluminum powder combusts with great heat to form aluminum oxide, a nearly-inert substance except in strong acids or alkalies, so it is hard to see what effects such could have. Barium salts are toxic, but they are also heavy. The airlines operate on razor-thin margins both for profit and for weight, so I can't imagine them dumping any chemicals other than exhausts from the sky.
So where is the toxicological evidence? No, Wigington probably can't even spell 'toxicology'.
Quote:Other theorists go way beyond reality to say that the UN through "agenda 21" is spreading disease and abusing children in order to reduce the population in the name of environmentalism. But Agenda 21 has no power to do any of this.
Contraceptives and abortion would be far more effective. A paradoxical way to reduce population growth is to get teenage girls to stay in school so that they do not marry at age twelve and start popping out babies for a lack of anything better to do in life. But such is as much a question of the quality of life, and countries near the middle in economic results (the biggest two such countries are China and Mexico) and almost everything richer, and even such poor countries as India and Indonesia are doing such.
Overpopulation creates mass poverty and the risk of famines and catastrophic wars. There may be an effect, but it is gtod social policy to raise ages of marriage above adolescence and to promote formal education.
Zero population growth is still a good idea for maintaining the dignity of labor, preventing urban sprawl, reducing pollution, and protecting natural resources while keeping the world livable.
Quote:This is only the tip of the iceberg of today's conspiracy theory jungle. I don't even have to mention the harm anti-vaxxers have done. It behooves us to do our own research, and look at the facts before believing this stuff. I used to believe in a lot of these, but now I see no point in using fantasies to discredit an oligarchic power structure that needs nothing more than its own actual misdeeds to discredit it.
And then one goes to the most egregious conspiracies that have racist connotations. Modern antisemitism as shown in Protocols and Nazi bilge is racist. It often contradicts, and any time I see contradictions I see a proposition (Jews are both destructive Bolsheviks and the most rapacious of plutocrats and as such they are the same thing or in concert)that one must reject promptly.
The problem with any conspiracy is that someone eventually 'rats' on it. Establishment figures typically find means other than conspiracies to achieve legitimate objectives. Public relations and lobbying, loathsome as their objectives might be, are not conspiracies. The usual conspiracy is by losers whose plot disintegrates after the fact after the police start grilling 'persons of interest'. Oh, so you are living very well with your no-account boyfriend after your husband died under suspicious circumstances and you collected on a life-insurance policy? You have made some strange cash withdrawals from your bank account... and some no-account loser with connections to you and your boyfriend has bought an expensive car, clothes, and electronics. Double Indemnity, anyone?
I do not attribute to conspiracy the damage that stupidity, laziness, and incompetence can't explain. Stupidity, laziness, and incompetence can all have devastating effects without complex explanations.
...We can blame the educational system all that we want, but:
1. The people who believe this stuff typically have not been in a learning institute except as 'defensive driving' to set aside a traffic ticket.
2. Vulnerability to conspiracies seems to increase with age, which means distance from K-12 education.
3. K-12 education teaches formal logic only in a course called geometry, the course that most defines who goes to college and who doesn't. Other than geometry, the course that teach formal logic are all college-level. Even at that, it is possible to graduate from college without learning formal logic.
4. Many people now confuse news with entertainment, and are unable to detect propaganda. Note what I said about reading Nineteen Eighty Four. But that at the least is for sharp high-school kids of the sort who took or are taking geometry and are headed to college.
5. There really are people with messed-up lives who would rather cast blame upon distant people than solve such a problem as drug use, alcoholism, or lacking a high-school diploma -- or not giving up on rural Appalachia and heading off to Cincinnati, Columbus, Pittsburgh, Charlotte, or Atlanta to get a crappy job. Sure, American capitalism and its political flunkies circa 2020 impose a raw deal on us all, and I don;t need Thomas Piketty to confirm that. (He confirms it, but he isn't easy reading).
So how am I not a conspiracy theorist? It's simple: the economic elites are cheating us all. They are using dumbed-down entertainment as the opiate of the masses; the promises of a better world through high technology ignore the harm of monopolized, centralized, bureaucratic organizations whose internal elites excel at denying opportunity to people other than themselves. Our democratic institutions seem to have their predication upon most people being artisans, traders, and yeoman farmers and not as employees of monopolistic behemoths that control the opportunity for anyone not in the elite. Amoral and immoral people with great power have always used power to enrich and indulge themselves and immiserate everyone else.
No President ever needed a long talk with Billy Graham or even Jerry Falwell than does Donald Trump. Neither Graham nor Falwell is available.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.