On 5 April 2014 23:30, Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.com> wrote: > On Sat, Apr 5, 2014 at 11:47 AM, LizR <lizj...@gmail.com> wrote: > >> That doesn't narrow it down too much. >> > > Je m'accuse. I was one of them. > > My point was that conspiracy theories, in the sense of power elites > secretly cooperating to further their own interests against the interests > of the majority are not, unfortunately, unusual events in History. We know > of countless examples of this happening in the past. I think it requires > some magical thinking to assume that this type of behaviour is absent from > our own times. > > I further pointed out that broadly discrediting any hypothesis that some > elites might be conspiring against the common good, in broad strokes, seems > to benefit precisely the ones in power. Furthermore, thanks to Snowden, we > now have strong evidence of a large-scale conspiracy by western governments > that I would not believe one year ago. In this case I'm referring to the > secret implementation of global and total surveillance, with our tax money, > by the people we elected, to spy on us, infringing on constitutions. > > I can't help but notice the very common rhetorical trick of using the > nutty conspiracy theories (UFOs, the Illuminati, fake moon landing, etc.) > to discredit the much more mundane and reasonable suspicions of elites > abusing their power. The paper you cite in this thread uses that trick too. > > This broad denial of the existence of conspiracies is silly, if you think > about it. The official explanation for 9/11 is a conspiracy theory: some > religious arab fundamentalists conspired to create a global network of > terrorist cells with the objective of attacking western civilisation. They > hijacked planes and sent them into buildings and so on. If you don't > believe in this explanation, you are then forced to believe in some other > conspiracy. > > Of course conspiracies exist. The current denial of this quite obvious > fact feels Orwellian, to be honest. > > OK, it seems likely that conspiracies exist, however it seems unlikely that the IPCC is part of one of them (I've lost track of whether you're claiming this or not, so please let me know) because the ruling interests are in favour of business as usual - i.e. there is almost certainly a conspiracy to discredit the science. The fact that they will use the idea of conspiracy theories to do this is indeed Orwellian, not to mention ironic.
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