On 4/5/2014 4:13 PM, Telmo Menezes wrote:
On Sun, Apr 6, 2014 at 1:01 AM, meekerdb <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:On 4/5/2014 12:40 PM, LizR wrote:On 5 April 2014 23:30, Telmo Menezes <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: On Sat, Apr 5, 2014 at 11:47 AM, LizR <[email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>> 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. How does the paper use this trick?I think Telmo makes conspiracies ubiquitous by calling any kind of cooperative effort which is not publicized a "conspiracy" - like Eisenhower's conspiracy to invade France. Legally a conspiracy is planning and preparation by two or more people to commit a crime. So most of what rich and powerful people do to keep themselves rich and powerful at the expense of others is not legally a conspiracy because there's no crime - the rich and powerful use laws, not break them. But in common parlance a conspiracy *theory* refers to some group doing something nefarious while pretending to do something benign, and especially something contrary to their stated goals, e.g. Catholic clergy conspiring to abuse children. Or prohibition,
That makes my point. Prohibition wasn't illegal, it was a law and it was promoted and passed by people who had openly advocated it for years - and for some good reasons. But you want to call it a conspiracy just because you disagree with it. You might as well call the civil rights act of 1963 a conspiracy.
or the implementation of anti-constitutional total surveillance,
It's not clear that collecting records of who calls overseas is unconstitutional; no court has ruled it such.
or starting wars under false pretences,
Yes, the the Iraq war was very bad - but was it a conspiracy. It wasn't secret, the neo-cons in the the Bush administration had advocated military overthrow of Sadam Hussein for years. The even had a website, Plan for a New American Century, which hosted scholarly(?) papers about the mideast and why the U.S. should make Lybia, Syria, Iraq, and Iran into western style democracies.
or using government agencies like the IRS to harass political opponents, or trying to silence journalists.
That's an invented charge. The IRS was just doing it's job screening organizations that claimed 501c status, which forbids *any* political activity.
We have compelling evidence that governments have been engaging in all of these types of conspiracy very recently, and they mach your definition.
No they don't. They match Telmo doesn't like them. I don't like some of them too, but that doesn't make the conspiracies and they certainly aren't conspiracy *theories* because they don't explain some event in terms of secret activities.
So my point is that it is not reasonable to dismiss the possibility of a conspiracy by government actors just on the grounds of it being a "conspiracy theory".
I don't dismiss the possibility. But "possibility" is a very weak standard. Possibilities tend to be at the bottom of lists by probability. It's possible that MH370 was electronic hijacked by hackers taking control of a an uninterruptible autopilot in the 777 - something I read just the other day - but it's very unlikely.
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