ashton wrote:Our minds are built to perceive order. We're inherently uncomfortable with the idea that things are arbitrary. People are religious because they're more comfortable with the notion that everything happens for a reason and God has a plan than they are with the fact that things are arbitrary. People would rather believe that the government (or the Jews or corporations or whoever) planned everything than accept the true randomness of the world.

It's the same reason that some people believe that sports outcomes are never the result of happenstance. When you watch games you see how arbitrary the outcome sometimes is. Yet, after the fact, people say that it was inevitable. Team A won the championship because their ownership was committed to building a winning team. Their players wanted it. Their star players are winners. Team B lost because they lack all those things.

hey watchit - yer horning in on my act (& doing a clearer job of it)

Philly the Kid wrote:I stated two main reasons for why I and many others may believe that the world is full of deception and corruption and lies. No one here yet, has refuted those statements......

....Are conspiracies going on? ....


....Conspiracy exists on small levels as well as large. A DA decides to make a statement and conspires to treat a defendant differently than others in the same boat. It can be that small. It can be as large as JFK, 911, or invading Iraq.

I was not aware that the question put was "do people conspire?", which does not seem all that controversial. There are numerous reasons why they do, and people have been identifying & embroidering on some of those.

Oh, and is no one else surprised that this thing has gone 5 pages & no reference to Eric Hoffer yet?

PTK claims to have me on ignore now so who knows if he'll read this (perhaps it's a conspiracy to trick me?).

However, half the things he talks about in his most recent post aren't really conspiracies and certainly aren't conspiracy theories. This is the problem with the Kid. He's constantly conflating separate and often unrelated issues, diverging from the actual topic and usually every post ends up in a condescending diatribe against "those of us" who "feed at the trough of the mainstream media". That's the thing that really pisses people off about PTK. Other than that he's an amusing kook and I will miss RESPONDING IN ALL CAPS

I have a conspiracy theory about conspiracy theories--they exist to keep people from seeing what's right in front of their faces. Rather than actually doing something about the influence of corporate lobbyists who make it possible to do bad things legally and Wall Street zillionaires who really do manipulate markets for their personal gain and lots of other stuff done openly and legally, conspiracy theorists waste time and energy looking for some hidden dark force, whether its black helicopters, the trilateral commission, or some other secret group. This makes it much easier for people to do whatever they want, openly, legally. Because the truth is out there.

By the way, there's something interesting about Chertoff cousins--Michael Chertoff became Sec. of Homeland Security in Feb, 2005. The Popular Mechanics article came out in Mar, 2005. Given magazine publishing schedules, that's a pretty amazing job there.

I think Richard Hatch should not have won Survivor One and the real winner was that military guy.

The temptation, looking at it purely from an american POV, is to suggest that the conspiracy arises when people can't wrap their heads round a brutally simple answer. You take three examples - jfk, moon landings and 9/11 - they're all head exploding events (no, really) outwith most people's experience in the US (or, well, anyone in the case of the moon landing). I think conspiracy theories around 9/11 have less purchase in europe, because most people can wrap their heads round the idea that a terrorist might plan to perpetrate such an act. Sure, the order of fatalities and the scale is massive, but it's not an outlandish concept when you've grown up in the 70s and the 80s and terrorist acts were a regular feature of the news. But some people find it easier to construct an elaborate argument than to properly comprehend what really happened.

That's linked to the point ashton and smooth make, I guess, which is the urge to explain the apparently arbitrary in rational terms. I think that's amplified in this day and age when we're told that a) we live in a rational universe where we can explain everything and b)you only need sufficient information to explain it - training/professionalism counts for little. everyone thinks they can make sense of this stuff since it seems like most information is immediately to hand.

That kind of reasoning leads you to even kookier places when you start dealing with the world of security forces and govt intelligence. In the UK and Ireland, there's a big hush anytime you come up to the 50 years rule on releasing previously classified govt documents for public use, especially when it relates to key events like bloody sunday in Derry, or the loyalist bombings in dublin. I think that although some of this information is genuinely useful, you have to approach it assuming that it will never be the totality of the information. a lot of the stuff which went down in the 70s and the 80s is always going to be murky at best, because it was never that well documented. Paperwork may show that MI5 had a fully-trained up mole in a loyalist organisation like the UVF, and may well have been fully aware that in maintining his cover, he was going to have to assist them in planning a series of bombings in Dublin. Does that mean MI5 instigated it solely to bomb irish people and affect the standing of the irish govt? who the fuck is going to write that down? You're just not going to find out, and verifying any sources becomes increasingly difficult when you're only dealing with peoples memories, not clear paper trails. You only get to infer so much.

And of course, when you have little or no transparency with said security services, it gets worse again - conspiracy is the only source of explanation. By all accounts, there is never going to be a clear indication of exactly what went wrong at beslan to result in so many hostages killed. There are numerous theories - that it was in putin's interest to let it happen, that the terrorists were determined to kill come what may, that multiple security forces just botched the job in their hurry to deal authoritatively with the situation. No one is going to fess up to anything, so any coherent account of what actually happened just isn't going to come out. You're left fishing at bits and pieces of verifiable truth, like the fact that anna politkovskaya definitely was poisoned before she could get to the school and start her stated aim of negotiating with the terrorists. No way of discerning the intentions of those responsible.

the Kid is right in this regard - when you read about Iran Contra, or tobacco companies withholding evidence regarding the effects of smoking, it's very hard not to theorise even wilder stuff. Where I disagree with him most profoundly is his assertion that the world is a scarier place than I dare imagine. One of my earliest memories of television is watching bits of wood floating on a lake, all that remained of lord mountbatten after he was blown up by the ira. Two of the most terrifying images I came across as a teenager came from widely publicised and verified accounts of things which did happen - napolean's retreat from russia and the horrors experienced by his soldiers; and the account of calley ordering some of his men to fire their m16s continually into a trench full of 100 odd people until there were bits of skin and bone flying into the air. there's fuck all nastiness in this world that we haven't thought of before and that we're all to willing to think of and try out again.

This reminds me that I want to read The Men Who Stare at Goats, soon to be a major motion picture starring George Clooney and Jeff Bridges

Wiz, I think you're talking about government secrets, which truly exist, and in keeping things secret, we are left with little else than our imagination. But if we're speculating and we're honest with ourselves, then we know we are speculating, which is different from a full blown conspiracy theory.

Conspiracy theories, by contrast, have a curious double effect--on the one hand, as some suggest here, they help maintain a kind of ego defense--I'm better than others because I don't swallow the mainstream media manipulations. But they are also a powerful force for inaction. The discourage the kind of patient, tedious, grass roots work it would take to really do something about corporate influence.

Consider one of PtK's favorite villains--agri-business. Agri-business uses its considerable political clout to influence policy, and when we're talking about food policy, there's no rival to the power and influence of Agri-business. One of their own is now chair of the Senate Ag committee, and as I pointed out up thread, lobbyists openly cheered her selection. Defenders of small farmers, organic food, as well as libertarians/small government conservatives will criticize the Ag bills that come out of that committee, but none of them are likely to do much about it. Not because of secret dark forces, but because such political organizing is hard.

I've read dozens of mainstream article going on about how new finance regulations aren't going to really prevent the kind of abuses that got us into the financial crisis in the first place. Again, the reason is obvious, open, and legal--the financial industry has real clout. Doing something about that would be hard. Believing in conspiracy theories justify doing nothing.

Definitional gap, as I said before.

Combinations of power, which is most of what we're talking about here, aren't "conspiracy theories": they're documented fact. What Paul is talking about, be it agri-business or the MIC or the financial industry (and remember, Durbin earlier this year stated, on the record I believe, that the banks "own" Congress) is classic Iron Triangle polisci theory. The revolving door between "public service" and private accumulation is equally well known and well traveled through.

PtK, impressed with his own astounding insight as ever, thinks that pointing any of this out is a bold strike against the mainstream media, soulless capitalists, quisling accommodationist pseudo-lefty pussies like myself, etc. I'll go as far as conceding that it demonstrates basic reading comprehension, but there's no more to be granted.

"Conspiracy theories" have to touch upon either unknown motivations for known actions and facts ("the Kennedy brothers were killed by a consortium of dry cleaning manufacturers and Big Soda; Teddy survived to a ripe old age because he never owned an iron and drank five Cokes a day, some with rum") or some unknown fact ("Barack Obama really wasn't born in this country--or on this planet; he's from a small moon in the Rigel system, like the last four presidents before him").

You're just enabling the status quo

Woody wrote:You're just enabling the status quo

you're just enabling the stuffparty

Area 51 / Roswell was in fact a government conspiracy!!!

Really. Exceot it wasn't aliens/UFO's, it was the U-2 spyplane program (which was under development at the time). And not as much as they created the "conspiracy", more like enabled it, allowed it to unfold and maintain an air of mystery as a means to keep things like the ejector seat flight suit experiments secret. So they essentially conspired to keep their mouths shut.

Phan In Phlorida wrote:Area 51 / Roswell was in fact a government conspiracy!!!

Really. Exceot it wasn't aliens/UFO's, it was the U-2 spyplane program (which was under development at the time). And not as much as they created the "conspiracy", more like enabled it, allowed it to unfold and maintain an air of mystery as a means to keep things like the ejector seat flight suit experiments secret. So they essentially conspired to keep their mouths shut.

Ah ha! Evidence of my conspiracy conspiracy.

The problem is, once you have one conspiracy that actually proves correct, everyone then starts to doubt the validity/truth of everything. Watergate did happen, therefore every future President is obviously hiding something/breaking the rules.

People will believe what they want to believe about everything. Whether its politics, entertainment, or Bobby Abreu's fear of outfield walls.

I do find conspiracy theories really interesting, not because I believe in them, but because of the lengths people go to in order to "uncover the truth"....its kind of like the car wreck that you know you shouldn't stare at. You just can't help yourself.

People are corrupt in every country of the world, in every industry of the world. Its human nature. Just go with it.

Heidi Hamels was behind Hank Baskett getting cut from the Eagles. She doesn't think Philadelphia is big enough for two not exactly celebrity sports figure wives.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/25/healt ... 8th&emc=th


I can't get this link to work unless I copy and paste it? Article on 24th about corruption in congress to get something through the FDA that the FDA was going to deny. This kind of thing is common in my opinion and is why I'm so cynical and suspicious of trusting the "powers that be".

Philly the Kid wrote:I can't get this link to work unless I copy and paste it?

I've noticed this before. Seems phpBB is errantly converting question marks to periods in html tags. Perhaps a bug in the latest version of phpBB, as I don't remember this being an issue until lately.

TenuredVulture wrote:KISS was really the Beatles--that's why they wore make up.

IS TRUE