Conspiracy Theories

by: Chris Bowers

Wed Sep 23, 2009 at 16:30


According to PPP, 35% of the country thinks either that President Obama was not born in America (23%), and / or that George W. Bush had something to do with the 9/11 attacks (14%).  My favorite line in their press release is "a very troubled 2% of the population buys into both of those conspiracy theories." Ha!

On the bipartisan front, 25% of Democrats think that Bush was involved in the 9/11 attacks, while 42% of Republicans think that Obama was not born in the United States. While the relatively high number of Democrats who think Bush was involved in 9/11 does not really surprise me, it is something of a relief that a smaller percentage of Democrats hold that position than Republicans who believe Obama wasn't born in America.

I'm glad PPP did this poll, but I think they missed a chance to poll the actual Democratic equivalent of the "birther" conspiracy theories: that Bush stole the 2004 election. Those two conspiracies are equivalent because they deny the legitimacy of the President. Thinking that Bush was involved in 9/11 is more like thinking that Obama has a secret plan to indoctrinate American children with Islamo-socialism.

My guess is that belief in the stolen 2004 elections is more widespread among Democrats than Bush having foreknowledge of the 9/11 attacks. It certainly seems extremely widespread within the comment sections of the progressive blogosphere. I have never been kosher with that theory, and actually find it pretty irritating. This is both because I tend to find all conspiracy theories irritating, and because of the whining complaints about "a-list" bloggers like me being involved in a supplemental conspiracy to suppress evidence of 2004 theft (mainly because we are cowards who want to be taken seriously, or something). And I'm pretty sure that even writing this will result in a bunch of posts about how naïve and uninformed I am about the 2004 elections.

One thing I will say in defense of people who subscribe to all of these conspiracy theories is that such "radical" beliefs are to be expected when our political and economic system continues to fail such an enormous percentage of the country. Over the last 33 years, the bottom 90% of America has received less than a 10% of the growth in real income, and less than 25% of the total increase in our national wealth, even as the cost of education, health care, transportation, food and housing have all soared. When the system is failing people, they will inevitably turn to alternative ideas and conceptualizations for the cause our problems, no matter unsubstantiated those ideas may be. After all, why should you believe the official explanation for anything, when the people offering those official explanations have just been ripping you off for decades on end?

Chris Bowers :: Conspiracy Theories

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Conspiracy Theories | 57 comments
I find conspiracy theories generally pretty irritating, too. However, (4.00 / 6)
what occurred right out there in the open in 2004- the vast purging of voter roles- is sufficiently problematic in its own right. Which, ultimately, is what's often so irritating about conspiracy theories- they themselves serve to distract from what is palpably true and deserves sustained attention.

Though I do loves me some Pynchon...

Pynchon? Good author. But I prefer James Tiptree, Jr. (0.00 / 0)
hehe
[ Parent ]
agreed on all counts (4.00 / 1)
1. Pynchon is great

2. There IS lots of voter supression. Far less fraud, though. And the claims about one can often distract from the other.

My feeling is that that there are so many serious problems right out in the open,conspiracy tjreories often serve to distract from problems rather than expopse them.

[ Parent ]
Related? (4.00 / 1)
One way to suppress voter turnout is convince one side that their vote doesn't matter.  While I'm not exactly suggesting a conspiracy to promote conspiracies, I suspect Republican at least understand this concept and act accordingly.
[ Parent ]
Voter suppression is serious, and was decisive (4.00 / 3)
in Florida 2000, and also vis a vis the reported vote count - regardless of how accurate the reported count was or wasn't - in Ohio in 2004.

However, the difficulty with comparing the likelihood of voter suppression versus the likelihood of fraud is that, AFAIK, voter suppression cannot be concealed; people know whether they got to vote or not.  Fraud may or may not necessarily come out, and with increasingly centralized, electronic administration of elections, it takes fewer people to commit fraud than it used to. The Brennan Center Task Force on Voting System Security estimated that an attack on a close statewide election could be manipulated by only several individuals if either 1) voting devices  offered no voter-verified paper record; or 2) voting devices had voter-verified paper records but there was no routine process for checking them against the electronic tally.

http://www.brennancenter.org/c...


[ Parent ]
Of course., Bush didn't steal the 2004 election! (4.00 / 2)
He's too dumb for this. Karl Rove, Walden O'Dell and some others handled this.
:-|
"I tend to find all conspiracy theories irritating" Totally understandable! (4.00 / 4)
Yup, you're so right, Chris, Watergate, Iran/Contra, the "evidence" for Iraqi WMDs, this was irritating as hell!
:D
Those Aren't Conspiracy Theories (4.00 / 2)
They're conspiracies, period.

Real conspiracies have a considerable body of evidence one can point to, the people involved aren't omnipotent, and you don't have to repeatedly make outlandish assertions to reject more plausible explanations of the occurrences you're discussing.

Consparicism is a mindset that's fundamentally flawed because it's not truly open to discomfirmation, and it projects its inadequacies onto thoughtful critics.

Of course, one big problem with this mindset is that it can sometimes attach itself to actual conspiracies.  Call it the "framing a guilty man" syndrome.  A classic example of this was the way that conspiracist Michael Rupert launched his career by injecting himself into the aftermath of Gary Webb's "Dark Alliance" series.

Such people can be so distracting that it's tempting to suspect them of being covert agent. But, of course, if you buy into that too easily, you just become another one them, just a slightly different version.

Can I have my copy of the Illuminatus Trilogy back now?

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
Hmm,maybe the irony got lost in translation... (0.00 / 0)
"Those Aren't Conspiracy Theories. They're conspiracies, period."
Ok, ok, Paul, next time I'll use irony tags!
:-)

And What do you mean, you want YOUR Iluminati novels back? I lend MY books to a hacker I knew about 20 years ago, and who vanished (with the books, damn). Strangely, he had the same family name as the guy who was the real person behind the main actor in the movie "23" (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0126765/)! And that famous hacker was allegly killed himself under mysterious circumstances (burnt!?). The guy I knew lived in the same city. Could have been his brother. What do you think, strange coincidences, right? A conspiracy, anyone???
:D

[ Parent ]
No (0.00 / 0)
Irony intentionally ignored.  Sometimes respecting literary tropes is less important than making a crucial point.

23? 42? What's the diff?

(19, of course!)

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
Hmm. Is there a secret message in that ole pop song? (0.00 / 0)
Have to google this asap!
:D
[ Parent ]
Conspiracy theories have evidence to... (4.00 / 1)
... and plenty of it. Its just that you don't accept the legitimacy of the evidence offered. The same goes for the argument about disconfirmation: just because the people you label as conspiracy theorists don't accept your arguments doesn't necessarily mean they aren't open to disconfirmation. In fact, they disprove each other's arguments all the time, and regularly offer new theories in place of the disproved ones.

We're really talking epistemology here. Without an argument about what constitutes legitimate evidence you (we) are just going to keep going in circles on this, and in the end it will boil down to "that's a conspiracy because I don't like the arguments they are making and the evidence they are using."

[ Parent ]
Other thing to note... (4.00 / 1)
Is that the reason so many people buy into Bush stealing the election in 2004 is because he did just that in 2000 (or, at the very least, the Supreme Court did).  There's not really any reason for people to believe that Obama wasn't born in the US...

TPM posted a good e-mail basically saying that people do start buying into conspiracy theories after traumatic events, such as 9/11 (hence the Truthers).  But no such event occurred with Obama, except, perhaps, that he is the first black President.

economy (0.00 / 0)
The traumatic event with Obama is the economic downturn,  Of course it was started, even caused, by Bush.  Nonetheless, a lot of people will blame the incumbent.
[ Parent ]
2000 was stolen (0.00 / 0)
But given the controversy over it, that is hardly a conspiracy theory.

I do think that many of the people who believe 2004 was also stolen based that belief on the reality of a stolen election in 2000.

[ Parent ]
Well, I Believe The 2004 Election Was Stolen BECAUSE The 2000 Election Was Stolen (0.00 / 0)
No grand conspiracy needed, either.

Since Bush wasn't legitimately President, he wasn't even legitimately the RNC nominee in 2004.  Much less the winner of the election.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
Well, he won a bunch of primaries throughout 2004. (0.00 / 0)
So he was their legitimate nominee.

If the idea is that once poisoned (2000), always poisoned (2004), then that makes sense.  The nomination sortof distracts from that point though.

[ Parent ]
He Only Won (0.00 / 0)
because he was running as the "incumbent."

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3
[ Parent ]
Comparison (0.00 / 0)
Well, almost half of the adult population in the U.S. doesn't know how long it takes Earth to orbit the Sun.  I doubt it is that much better elsewhere.  The fact is, most people just live their lives, focus on what is important to them and pick up a lot of bad information along the way.

This is one reason I tend to not trust public opinion polls.  Change the wording a bit and large percentages give a different answer.  Most people just have quasi-informed quasi-beliefs about stuff that doesn't directly effect their lives -- near as they can tell, at least.

I'm Sorry Mark (4.00 / 1)
But you've picked up a lot of bad information along the way about polling.  There are, indeed, some very big, and distressingly common pitfalls.  But there is also a substantial body of serious scholarly research and analysis.

I am with 100% on the point that people focus on their own lives, and that which they can possibly do something about.  But people still do have priorities and values that show a remarkable degree of constancy over time, particularly if you look at public opinion in the aggregate.  Even poorly worded questions can provide valuable information, if the questions are repeated often enough, and can be compared with similar, but better-worded questions.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
Interpretation (0.00 / 0)
First, these thoughts and observation about polling are fully my own -- I didn't pick them up from some random blog or rant.

But people still do have priorities and values that show a remarkable degree of constancy over time, particularly if you look at public opinion in the aggregate.  Even poorly worded questions can provide valuable information, if the questions are repeated often enough, and can be compared with similar, but better-worded questions.

I don't dispute any of that.  On one level I'd take it a bit deeper, even.  If one wording results in a 40/60 split and another wording gets the reverse 60/40 split, there is a ton of information in understanding why that wording difference matters.

What I dispute is when someone takes one set of wording and then uses it to prove everyone agrees with them while ignoring the other set.  I've seen actual instances of that many times.  Because I've seen that often enough, I now default to assuming there is a corresponding "opposite poll" for almost everything.  While that is obviously incorrect in every case, it is my default starting assumption.  We saw that recently when the word "choice" radically improved peoples opinion of the public option.

Another issue is intensity.  While some polls measure intensity, many do not.  It is hard to tell what is a superficial answer and what is a deeply held belief.  That makes it hard to tell how seriously to take any specific poll.

Also, people often take sides unrelated to what is being polled.  We saw that a lot in the Democratic primary and the general election, where opinion moved to match that of the preferred candidate.

So perhaps my wording was a bit sloppy when I said "I tend to not trust public opinion polls."  It would have been more accurate to say I tend to not trust how people use and interpret public opinion polls.  When you say polls should be looked at in aggregate you are making the same point I am, just from the other direction.

[ Parent ]
Strategic Interpretation (4.00 / 1)
One reason I refer to the General Social Survey so often is that it's regarded as the gold standard.  Many questions have been polled biannually or better since the 1970s or early 80s, and you can do cross-tabs to run all sorts of comparisons.

If you use these sorts of questions (the GSS has the most of them in one place, but there are other), you get a good baseline, and then you're in a better position to look at more fragmentary data, with the single question poll being the most fragmentary of all.  So while it's prudent to be suspicious of over-interpretation, there is a reference frame available that can help you do better than just assuming that any poll result has an opposite number.

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
I'm not quite sure (4.00 / 2)
what's the point of arguing this. It seems to do nothing but claim that Bush was legitimate. Why break a lance for that? More "bipartisanship"?

Bush wasn't legitimate to me whether he stole the 04 election or not, although there does seem to be plenty of smoke there. Anyway, he definitely stole the 00 election, which automatically tarnishes the 04.

But on the other hand enough people did vote for him to get him close enough to steal at least one and maybe both. So either way it's the tyranny of a slight majority of voters.

Anyway, conspiracy theories are always irrelevant because the moral truth remains the same. Although I don't think the Bush admin carried out 9/11, they did take full moral ownership of it immediately, using it as the pretext to carry out pre-existing plans to gut civil liberties, invade Iraq, and step up the general looting of the country while demonizing any dissent toward any policy as being treasonous and pro-terrorist.

So given those facts, even if someone could prove to me that they also perpetrated 9/11, that couldn't render them any more culpable in my eyes. So it's moot. Same with "technically" stealing an election. Even if he really did squeak out a "win", he had zero mandate to try to govern as he did. That right there makes him illegitimate, a classical tyrant.    

http://attempter.wordpress.com

I think the takeaway from 2004... (4.00 / 5)
...is that we would not really know if a number of the states saw vote-count manipulation that made the difference.  Too many states used DRE voting machines with no voter-verifiable paper record at all (that includes indigo-blue New Jersey), or did not conduct post-election sample hand counts ("tabulation audits").

The jump many made to conspiracy theories about the 2004 election is heartbreaking, but understandable given these circumstances. It's heartbreaking because it has given the issue of verifiable elections a real case of cooties, and has probably complicated efforts to discuss truly grave threats to computer voting systems. But it's understandable because of the facts in the paragraph above. Not to mention the fact that in Ohio, the only state where there was a recount in 2004, the random selection of a 3% sample of precincts for hand counting was rigged in Cuyahoga County (Cleveland). Truly:

http://electionupdates.caltech...

http://www.salon.com/politics/...

I tend to buy the line that the Cuyahoga election workers were trying only to avoid a full hand recount triggered by discrepancies, but all in all the facts don't do much for voter confidence...

Bottom line is that there is a serious problem with voting systems, and it sucks to have truly close elections that are not verifiable, like the Governor's race in Virgina (and in New Jersey, but I am not sure that one is "close" at this time).

Some background material:

http://www.sciencefriday.com/p...

http://www.sos.state.oh.us/SOS...

http://www.brennancenter.org/c...

 

Here's a piece on the machines used widely in VA (0.00 / 0)
http://abqordia.blogspot.com/2...

These machines are used a large number of VA counties and cities. The legislature has banned the future purchase of new direct-recording electronic voting machines, but they don't have the money to replace them.

[ Parent ]
Where's the refutation? (0.00 / 0)
Why is it that no one has challenged your facts regarding the 2004 vote counts in Ohio?


[ Parent ]
Also, I wonder how question is phrased... (4.00 / 3)
And how people interpreted "Bush having something to do with 9/11"... How many of those people just thought of the memo "Bin Laden determined to strike US" while Bush was on his month long vacation and said, yeah... he's responsible.

I certainly don't think that Bush "planned" it or "allowed" it to happen on purpose, that's obviously ridiculous.  But I do think it's actually quite likely his administration completely dropped the ball and that maybe 9/11 could've been prevented.

Two clicks away (0.00 / 0)
Not to be mean, but the answer to your question was only two clicks away.

Q4 Do you think President Bush intentionally
allowed the 9/11 attacks to take place because
he wanted the United States to go to war in the
Middle East? If yes, press 1. If no, press 2. If
you're not sure, press 3.

       Yes .... 14%
        No .... 78%
Not Sure ....  8%


[ Parent ]
Ha! I always feel comfortable being in a minority with my opinion! (0.00 / 0)
Vox populi, vox, uh, ravioli. And 8 out of 100 ain't bad.
:D
[ Parent ]
Sorry... (0.00 / 0)
Was too lazy to look it up, but wanted to put my point out there regardless. =)

Looking at the question now I would obviously give a "No" response to that, but in some ways it actually represents what I was saying.  It also, if interpreted wrongly, could actually lead the person to believe that "Bush intentionally allowed the 9/11 attacks", leaving the question to the responder "Was the reason he intentionally allowed it so that he could go to war in the Middle East?"  If you're given the premise that Bush intentionally allowed it, then why else would he have done it?

[ Parent ]
OK. But you know what I find irritating? Extremely irritating? (0.00 / 0)
That a guy becomes president of the US, no matter how, swears an oath to protect the nation, is briefed on 8/6 2001 with highly disturbing information about terrorists engaging in very strange actions in the US, and then decides to do ... NOTHING! I mean, come on, this isn't a question of higher or lower IQ. Really, take any good guy, a patriotic American, a devoted Christian, whose only weakness is that he isn't the brightest bulb in the chandellier, and put him into this situation! Don't you think there's a 99.999% chance that this guy would say somethig like "Folks, follow up on this! I don't really understand this, but we have to know what's behind this. This sounds like national security is at risk! Involve everybody you need, CIA, FBI, NSA, doesn't matter, but I want this riddle to be solved!"

But Bush didn't react in this way. Not even remotely. Shall we really believe he wasn't concerned at all? Sorry, but this doesn't make ANY sense to me!

[ Parent ]
Laziness and an apparent underestimation of terrorism... (0.00 / 0)
There's plenty of documentation behind this... the Bush admin just didn't care about terrorism before 9/11... I don't know if they didn't believe it or didn't understand the danger of it or were more focused on Iraq (probably a bit of all 3), but there's a lot of evidence pointing to the entire admin basically just throwing out or putting on the back-burner everything Clinton was doing on the counter-terrorism front (just ask Richard Clarke).  
[ Parent ]
"Planned"? No! "Allowed"? Well, uh, hmm, you know, maybe? (4.00 / 1)
Don't forget how desperately he wanted to be a wartime president! Is it too much to assume that after hearing the terrorism briefing he ,maybe at least subconciously thought "wthere's my chance! Why not leave it to the Lord to decide?"???
[ Parent ]
History is replete with conspiracies. (4.00 / 2)
Read Dante.
shortcuts (0.00 / 0)
When the system is failing people, they will inevitably turn to alternative ideas and conceptualizations for the cause our problems, no matter unsubstantiated those ideas may be

I think the reason some people are prone to become conspiracy theorists is that it provides a shortcut to whatever legitimacy argument they want to make. You start with the truthiness of knowing that Bush / Obama is not a legitimate president from the nerve endings in your gut and then construct the conspiracy to reinforce the starting point and also use as a shortcut to get your like-minded friends to reach the same "conclusion".

One thing I found amusing was hearing right leaning wingnuts describe the entire left as fawning for Obama as the savior of the country. Sirota and others have written accurately about Dear Leaderism, but that has always been a significant minority of the left rather than the dominant viewpoint of regular folks (maybe it was more prevalent among the media class). But it cracks me up to hear conservatives whine about the very same process that was used so often by the right during the Bush years - Bush is the Good Man who is the Commander In Chief and will Defeat Evil because he was chosen by God, etc. When they paint a picture of the left blindly following Obama it's almost like they're pissed that some of us would use their script.  

"I think the economic logic behind dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest wage country is impeccable and we should face up to that."
-Lawrence Summers

Yeah, how bout those 2 other (0.00 / 0)
widely held conspiracies theories, that the government lied us into war and that both parties kept shoveling billions to banks that ruined the economy...

Like you suggest, conspiracy theories are an attempt to make sense of our fucked up country, driven by pain and hopelessness.

Insanity begets insanity Cockburn has a good piece about this:

People start to go collectively crazy when they know that all the exits from our present state into the world of constructive reason are locked. Just think - a president elected on a huge wave of popular hope, unable to twist a single arm in his own party, unlikely even to pass financial reform amidst the greatest wave of public hatred of Wall Street since the 1930s, trying to pass off as health "reform" a gift to the insurance industry of 30 million new customers, to be required by law to pony up insurance premiums and then be cheated. Doesn't that make you crazy, too?

http://www.creators.com/opinio...

That's the whole point (0.00 / 0)
those two things aren't conspiracy theories, they are actual things that have happened.  Stuff like the 9/11 Truth thing or the '2004 was stolen' distracts from THAT.  
[ Parent ]
"Conspiracy theory" (4.00 / 6)
is a pejorative term used to sequester and suppress upsetting or dangerous political thought without having to do the uncomfortable work of debating it. This is reflected in the dismissive tone of the PPP survey -- a poll which seems to peg the "9/11 Truth" numbers on the low end of similar polls, perhaps because of the narrowing "to go to war in the Middle East" question of intent and/or the omission of the "passive foreknowledge" position.

Most attacks on "conspiracy theories" rely heavily on appeals to authority (e.g. pronouncements from the intelligence community and derivative media narratives) that sidestep the urgent work of thorough, transparent scrutiny of power. When it comes to 9/11, the nation deserves to have an investigation that's not a blue-ribon panel -- a truth commission, a grand jury or independent prosecutor -- with full subpoena power to drag all relevant records and testimony into the light of day, and to give full public hearing to all sides.

http://www.funnyordie.com/jame...

Bullshit! (0.00 / 0)
The problem with conspiricism is intellectual laziness & unwillingness to take criticism seriously.  The fact that authoritarian followers may dismiss you thoughtlessly doesn't prove that you are right.  It merely serves to distract from the serious criticisms you can't answer.

But the bottom line that really irks me most is the conspiracist delusion that only the conspiracist is in the know, and truly opposed to the powers that be.  This is such a load of crap.

The 9/11 Truthers are a perfect example of this, since their fairy tale blames everything on BushCo & lets the whole rest of America's imperialist history off the hook.  It's the perfect fairy tale for those who want to maintain their naive faith in everything American, except for putting a black hat on BushCo.

Radical?  You've got to be kidding!

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3

[ Parent ]
Straw man (4.00 / 1)
Apparently, you were responding to someone else's argument that you must have heard somewhere else. None of your criticisms address anything I said, nor does any of your name-calling describe the way I think.

http://www.funnyordie.com/jame...
[ Parent ]
I support mm views in this. You're fighting some other conspirationalist. (4.00 / 2)
Really, I don't see any of your arguments against certain behaviour that may be typical for SOME conspiracy nerds actually evident in the comment you criticize. Sry, Paul, but simply bringing up your own prejudices, and projecting them unfairly on a commenter is neither a reasonable nor an acceptable way to discuss issues!

I'll put this in the drawer: 'Occasional outbursts by Rosenberg, totally missing the target'.

[ Parent ]
Conspiracy Theories are like a warm blanket (0.00 / 0)
When the events in the real world reveal that randomness and chaos are still relevant, even in our number and probability obsessed world, its very comforting to imagine that someone, somewhere is in control and causing these events to occur according to an agenda that can only be understood by research and indoctrination.

That said, I could see a guy like Dik Chainy getting it in his head that if the administration would just let one, minor, terrorist attack proceed they might be able to use the resulting crises to push ahead on the neo-con agendas that he has been pushing for his entire career.

It could be that they did not recognize, or understand the scope of the plan, and looked back to the 1993 WTC bombing as a fairly minor sacrifice for the greater good of securing the ME for the growing American Empire.

"It sounds wrong...
     ...but its right."

You mean, 'it sounds right, but it's wrong'? (0.00 / 0)
Hehe!
[ Parent ]
Paragraph 1, 2,3, or all of them? (0.00 / 0)
I stand fully behind 1 and 2.

3 is where we dip into conspiracy, yet it is almost as plausible as Saddam Hussein still holding functional WMD in 2003, after a decade of embargos on spare parts and the materiel needed to keep such weapon systems in working order. No?


"It sounds wrong...
     ...but its right."

[ Parent ]
Consider John Edwards, (4.00 / 7)
was what he did conspiratorial?

Was he a member of a conspiracy?

Think of how one of your "good guys" was able to lie to your face AND call mock the accusations of others as "wild".

What about Cheney and the shotgun blast to the face, did they not conspire to conceal the truth, then try to stage manage the truth once known?

Wall Street? Goldman Sachs and the computer trading scandal?

In the world of some (I'm not going to call anybody out by name, because they more-or-less get it on most other things) all that shit was the result of random muscle twitching, not the quotidian conspiratorial bent of the human race.

I watch coworkers, relatives, etc. conspire against each other ALL THE F___ING TIME!

Conspiracy is the human status quo.

PS We don't ascertain truth via polls.

Ditto (4.00 / 1)
GM streetcar scandal and the Business Plot.

http://www.funnyordie.com/jame...
[ Parent ]
Adam Smith on modern American crony capitalism (4.00 / 5)
"People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."

con·spire
 verb
   from latin com + spirare
     "of the same spirit"

transitive verb : plot, contrive

intransitive verb 1 : to join in a secret agreement to do an unlawful or wrongful act or an act which becomes unlawful as a result of the secret agreement

A conspiracy theory? Postulating that some wrong was done in secret.

In the world-view of some, that never happens, or is impossible.

In reality, it happens all the time.

Apropos conspiracy: What about the Baucus/Phrma deal??? (0.00 / 0)
Just read about htis when checking Atrios' recent postings. He linked to a story at FDL. And a Google news search showed it's all over the papers since more than 10 hours. Well, I can't remember reading about this here, and only now (some minutes ago) has a QH popped up. Folks, aren't we maybe a bit too far behind the curve today???
I find irrational debunkerism to be much more annoying than reasonable conspiracy theories (4.00 / 2)
The JFK "conspiracy theory" has so much evidence for it, you could, as Gary Null says, "drive a truck through it". Indeed, the House Select Committe on Assassinations stated their own (implicit) JFK conspiracy theory (wikipedia):

The Committee further concluded that it was probable that:

* four shots were fired
* the third shot came from a second assassin located on the grassy knoll, but missed.

Oh, those wacky conspiracy theorists in the US House of Representatives! When will they ever come to their senses?

Regarding vote fraud, 2004:
The Gun is Smoking:
2004 Ohio Precinct-level Exit Poll Data Show Virtually Irrefutable Evidence of Vote Miscount Six Percent of Ohio's polled precincts Show Virtually Impossible Vote Counts, and Over 40% Show Improbable Vote Counts, Given Their Exit Poll Results. The Patterns Of Ohio's Discrepancies Are Consistent With Outcome-Altering Vote Miscounts.:

In an October 31st paper, NEDA mathematically proved that ESI's and Mitofsky's analyses were incorrect because many counterexamples exist to its basic premise.15 In other words, NEDA proved mathematically that ESI's and Mitofsky's analysis of Ohio's and national exit poll data is of no analytical value and no conclusions about the presence or absence of vote fraud can be drawn from them.16

Regarding the MLK assassination, we're all aware, aren't we, that

According to a Memphis jury's verdict on December 8, 1999, in the wrongful death lawsuit of the King family versus Loyd Jowers "and other unknown co-conspirators," Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated by a conspiracy that included agencies of his own government. Almost 32 years after King's murder at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 4, 1968, a court extended the circle of responsibility for the assassination beyond the late scapegoat James Earl Ray to the United States government.

This was a civil trial (where the standards of evidence are lower than a criminal trial), but as Jim Douglass notes,

Because of the government's "sovereign immunity," it is not possible to put a U.S. intelligence agency in the dock of a U.S. criminal court. Such a step would require authorization by the federal government, which is not likely to indict itself.

If you didn't know this, don't feel too bad. If you want to know why you don't know about this, at least at one level, google around for William Pepper's comments about his interaction with the media that were in the vicinity, but refused to set foot inside the courthouse.

Funny, that.

435 Dem Primaries 2012
Coffee Party Usa
TheRealNews.Com

Flawed Dictabelt Analysis (0.00 / 0)
The HSCA relied on what is now considered to be a hugely flawed analysis of a recording of an officer's stuck-open mic.  See the NAS report from 1982, or the History Channel's excellent special on the event.
[ Parent ]
HSCA (4.00 / 2)
considered a far, far wider array of evidence than did the Warren Commission blue ribbon panel. Their report covers and is based on a lot more than the dictabelt recording, though that is still credible evidence corroborated by nearly all eyewitnesses, video evidence, forensic evidence, etc. Worth studying.

http://www.funnyordie.com/jame...
[ Parent ]
'The Garrison Tapes' video shows people running and pointing towards the grassy knoll (0.00 / 0)
I'm not a JFK conspiracy scholar, so I can't vouch for everything in this program. Even so, I thought it was very solid, and of course it's hard to argue with video. Also, FWIW, the real life Garrison came across (to me) as more intelligent than Kevin Costner's Garrison in the JFK film.

435 Dem Primaries 2012
Coffee Party Usa
TheRealNews.Com
[ Parent ]
Three incidents spring to mind (0.00 / 0)
that were once only to be believed by the wild-eyed conspiracy theorists that have subsequently been shown to be true. These are just off the top of my head.

1) That the US government would dose unsuspecting, unadvised, nonconsenting, American citizens with LSD and observe the effects from a distance. These victims were never told what happened.

2) That particular medical "professionals" within the US military would knowingly withold useful treatment of debilating diseases from people who were in service to their nation. It happened in Tuskeegee.

3) That Howard Hughes was actually trying to recover a sunken Soviet submarine, intact, while ostensibly experimenting with novel sea-floor mining techniques.

Not that such proves any other conspiracy theories are true, but it certianly makes one stop and reconsider why someone might try and use "conspiracy" as means to label ideas, or narratives as "too wacky to be believed".


"It sounds wrong...
     ...but its right."

[ Parent ]
Conspiracy (4.00 / 2)
Ohio's votes decided the 2004 election . The votes were shunted from the Ohio seretaty f states office through a third party's computer in chatanooga tenn.
From Democracy now ,
AMY GOODMAN: What do you mean, "electronically shaved"? I mean, you've got all these precincts all over Ohio. They're counting up their votes. What does he have to do with this?

MARK CRISPIN MILLER: Well, specifically, there's a computer architecture setup called "Man in the Middle," which involves shunting the election returns from, you know, the state in question-in this case, Ohio-shunting them to a separate computer elsewhere. All of the election returns in Ohio in 2004 went from the Secretary of State's website-this is Ken Blackwell-to a separate computer in a basement in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which was under the control of another private company called SMARTech.

So we have now two private companies: GovTech Solutions, which is Connell's company, SMARTech, which is run by a guy named [Jeff] Averbeck. And the company-the third private company that managed the voting tabulators in Ohio was called Triad. All three of these companies worked closely together on election night in Ohio in 2004. It turns out that the state's own IT person was sent home at 9:00 p.m. They said, "Go ahead. Go home. We'll take care of this."  

Conspiracy (4.00 / 4)
From Democracy Now Dec. 22, 2008.

AMY GOODMAN: A top Republican internet strategist who was set to testify in a case alleging election tampering in 2004 in Ohio has died in a plane crash. Mike Connell was the chief IT consultant to Karl Rove and created websites for the Bush and McCain electoral campaigns. He also set up the official Ohio state election website reporting the 2004 presidential election returns.

Connell was reportedly an experienced pilot. He died instantly Friday night when his private plane crashed in a residential neighborhood near Akron, Ohio.

Oh and Paul Wellstone says hello .

I find equating "birthers" with the people who question the 2004 election results (4.00 / 1)
extremely irritating. Categorically, I see the equivalence -- but substantively there is none. As stated above/below (?) there is viable evidence to question those results.

The people who believe the president was born in Kenya are ridiculous. The newspaper birth announcements should be evidence enough that the idea is ludicrous. Unless one subscribes to The Manchurian Candidate theory, and then well, ludicrous ideas are to be expected.

I'll be the first to admit that reading conspiracy theories definitely helps to pass the time at work. But what always gets me is that the theorists, particularly the Illuminati crowd, choose to suspend responsibility through paranoia and accept everything as a fait accompli. Not only that, but in general, what a way to live: to believe that everything is evil and that everything is determined by some group of perverted (and some of the stories are worse than any porn I've ever seen), geriatric, wealthy dudes who have mind-controlled slaves doing their murderous, depraved bidding. Who wants to live that way? (I mean Bob Hope and the Jackson brothers. WTF?) But I digress...

What I am trying to say is that I put the birthers in that category, well, that and the racist/stupid/ignorant category; whereas acknowledging the dubiousness of the 2004 election results, I believe is credible. And I do not consider myself a "conspiracy theorist," I consider myself to be questioning my government on a valid issue -- just like all of you do here, everyday.

2004 election (0.00 / 0)
All of the voting machines used in 2004 were from companies owned by partasin repubs. All of these companies, and the elected repubs (in unison as usual) fought, and fight to retain impossible to verify results. The exit poles (used worldwide to check official totals within known % of error) did NOT match the machine count within the error percentage in Ohio (and New Mexico?)...... From my point of view, anyone that doesn't suspect foul play is either lieing to themselves (i.e. republicans) or is hopelessly naive.

Government by organized money is no better than government by organized mob..... FDR
Conspiracy Theories | 57 comments





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