The Man Who Is Thursday offers "The Steve Sailer Rule of Conspiracies:"
Over the past couple years, Steve Sailer's writings on conspiracy theories (see below) have intrigued me. Like most educated Westerners I don't think much of conspiracy theorizing, but the examples Steve has given got me thinking. ...
More interesting though are some of Steve's other examples: the Mafia, the 90s Russian oligarchs, the Donmeh, the diamond business. What these all have in common is that they all involve closely knit ethnic groups or people with close family ties. To be precise, actual conspiracies tend to be found only among family members or, what amounts to the same thing, closely knit, endogamous ethnic groups. Therefore, in honour of Steve's abiding interest in family, I give your the Steve Sailer Rule of Conspiracies. So far as I know, Steve hasn't spelled this out explicitly, but I'll do it for him:
Click here to find out what Thursday proposes.
When you get back, I want to raise a related issue: the declining value of covert conspiracies relative to overt conspiracies.
Say we were sitting around in a dorm room in 1978 and I told you that each winter the world's richest men gather in an obscure village high in the Alps to discuss how to impose economic policies in their self-interest on the nations of the world.
You'd say I had seen too many paranoia thrillers like Three Days of the Condor, Parallax View, and Winter Kills. Surely, if this conspiracy existed, enterprising journalists like Woodward and Bernstein would expose it.
Then, I'd say, no, you don't understand: the rich guys invite Woodward and Bernstein to the meetings (well, maybe not Bernstein, he's not really important enough anymore). Journalists all compete with each other to be big enough celebrities to get invited to this meeting, where they and the rich guys can all bask under the TV lights in their mutually-reinforcing celebrityhood.
The secret is that there is no secret. In fact, everybody invited immediately notifies his publicist to spread the word that he's going.
And, you'd say, that's crazy! A conspiracy in plain view? Who ever heard of such a thing?
My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer
Steve linky no work.
ReplyDeleteConspiracy theories are signs of kooks who can't deal with reality and invent stuff to cover reality: Germany kicked France's behind because they moved beyond Napoleon, so it was all "Jews" like Dreyfuss, or JFK is assassinated by a hard-core Communist and it's a CIA conspiracy. The flip side of conspiracy theories is that they indulge in ugly bigotry aimed at usually politically excluded middlemen (mostly Jews in Europe, Chinese in SE Asia). Instead of actually addressing real problems.
Conspiracy theories are huge flag that something is wrong in a society.
You have the phrase "the Steve" appended to the end of the link.
ReplyDelete"A conspiracy in plain view?"
ReplyDeleteYou mean like Wealthy nations creating laws and regulations that effectively prevent Africans from exporting their cheap bananas and other produce?
Sure it is reported in the NYT, but nobody cares.
This thing with Bill Clinton & the Uranium is about as tawdry as it gets.
ReplyDeleteIt may yet supplant the New Square scandal as the sleaziest, scummiest, most foul thing that Clinton has ever done.
1/ Davos obsure? Isn't that where Thomas Mann wrote 'The Magic Mountain' based on the sanitarium that was based there?
ReplyDelete2/ Hasn't Carl Bernstein been on CNN as a political analyst?
Thanks, I've now fixed the links.
ReplyDeleteConspiracy theories are huge flag that something is wrong in a society.
ReplyDeleteIndeed. The society that's most obsessed (by a large margin) with conspiracy theories is the Jewish community. Look at any Israeli or Jewish newspaper or message board and you'll find a consensus opinion that "the Arabs" or "the Muslims" are out to get them. It's pretty sick, frankly.
As Henry Kissinger said, Just because you are paranoid, it doesn't mean that nobody's out to get you.
ReplyDeleteI find it extremely funny that Americans of all people should disbelieve in conspiracy theories when the USA itself owes its very existence as an independent country to a conspiracy.
ReplyDeleteTowards the end of the 18 nth century, a clique of landowners, businessmen and/or freemasons sat together and decided to go it alone and break free from the metropolis. They were a tiny group acting in agreement with less than one third of the population, while the remaining colonials were either indifferent or loyal to the crown.
If that doesn't qualify as a conspiracy, I don't know what does.
As you see, conspiracies are not necessarily family affairs.
Conspiracy theories are signs of kooks who can't deal with reality and invent stuff to cover reality...
ReplyDeleteI mean, everyone knows that reality is perfectly straightforward and that politics and business are run for the benefit of everyone. Everyone except kooks like me. A conspiracy theorist is someone who's winning an argument with a neo-con.
The flip side of conspiracy theories is that they indulge in ugly bigotry aimed at usually politically excluded middlemen (mostly Jews in Europe, Chinese in SE Asia). Instead of actually addressing real problems.
"Politically excluded" is an odd way of describing Jews in Europe. I'd assume you were Evil Neo-Con, but if you were, you'd also have claimed that Jews were politically excluded in America.
Anonymous : The society that's most obsessed (by a large margin) with conspiracy theories is the Jewish community. Look at any Israeli or Jewish newspaper or message board and you'll find a consensus opinion that "the Arabs" or "the Muslims" are out to get them. It's pretty sick, frankly.
ReplyDeleteI can't tell whether you're being facetious/sarcastic, but, in fairness to the Israelis, the Muslims ARE out to get them.
Proofreader: Towards the end of the 18 nth century, a clique of landowners, businessmen and/or freemasons sat together and decided to go it alone and break free from the metropolis. They were a tiny group acting in agreement with less than one third of the population, while the remaining colonials were either indifferent or loyal to the crown. If that doesn't qualify as a conspiracy, I don't know what does.
ReplyDeleteThat's something to keep in mind - both for good & for ill - over the course of the next several decades, as we enter into demographic collapse and societal chaos.
It doesn't take all that many people to radically alter the course of history: cf Washington, Franklin, Hamilton, Madison, et al -vs- Lenin, Trotsky, Kamenev, Stalin, et al.
What often strikes me is that a lot of things that happen *seem* to be the result of a conspiracy, and there's often something that dimly resembles a conspiracy behind 'em, but technically it isn't a conspiracy. So I wind up thinking things like, "Well, it might as well have been a conspiracy." The MSM, for instance, isn't technically a conspiracy, but there is an awful lot of groupthink and self-interest going on, to the point where their actions sometimes feel like the actions of a consciously organized conspiracy.
ReplyDeleteHmm, I'm remiding myself of Intelligent Design ... That something appears to be the result of conscious design doesn't mean that there is in fact a conscious guiding-consciousness-type organism behind it.
But of course sometimes there *is* a guiding-consciousness-type organism behind events. And sometimes it's, as you point out, powerful people selforganizing and meeting in Davos to "set agendas" for the rest of us. And sometimes it's just random. How to know? How to tell? And are these distinctions important?
ReplyDeleteProofreader: The frequently repeated claim that only a third of colonial Americans supported the Revolution, while one third were opposed and one third were indifferent, is a misunderstanding of a comment John Adams made about American attitudes toward the French Revolution. Most historians today agree that the bulk of the ordinary people supported the Revolution, particularly in the New England and Virginia, perhaps a bit less so in the Middle Colonies and the Deep South. In fact, there were times when popular protest outran the leaders' desire to control it. Later, there was a decent-sized Continental Army without any draft to force its existence.
ReplyDeleteThe truth is actually something close to the reverse of what you say: Most of the leaders of the Revolution, and many of the common-folk supporters of it as well, believed that there was a conspiracy between British ministers like Bute, Grenville, and Townsend, and American colonial officials like Thomas Hutchinson to subvert American liberties and take power for themselves. Loyalists, in return, had a conspiratorial view of the Revolution similar to yours. I don't think either side was very correct, however.
At Volokh they're discussing/mocking belief in conspiracy theories.
ReplyDeleteIn the UK there's a show on Radio Four called "Thinking Allowed". It's devoted to the social sciences. A researcher (sorry - can't remember his name) told two comparable groups a story, with two different endings:
ReplyDeleteAn imaginary Latin American country is having its first free election after 25 years of dictatorship. The army's preferred candidate is neck-and-neck with the opposition candidate, who has many enemies. The final count is in progress, and it's now certain the opposition candidate will win. Just as he walks to the podium to address his supporters a shot rings out.
Group A is told:
The shot wounds him in the shoulder. The gunman is overpowered. Half an hour later, his arm in a sling, the opposition leader is sworn in as president.
Group B is told:
The shot pierces his heart and kills him. The gunman is overpowered. Half an hour later there are tanks on the street and marshall law is declared.
The researcher discovered that most people in Group A accept a "lone gunman" theory, while most people in Group B believe there has to be a high level conspiracy. It seems that people instinctively believe that big effects have to have big causes. Lady Di can't die just because her chauffeur is drunk - there has to be a high level conspiracy involving the House of Windsor and MI5. So conspiracy theories are - partly - a protest against randomness.
There's a lot of chance in world affairs. Gavrilo Princip was part of a conspiracy to murder Franz Ferdinand in 1914. He'd already given up when the Archduke's driver took a wrong turn and gave him a second chance. One round of Princip's pistol started a chain of events which killed around 40 million people.
To James Kabala: whether or not the Revolution had substantial popular support does not alter the fact that a small party of landowners and merchants - the so-called "fathers of the revolution"-, freemasons in their majority and in cahoots with foreign powers (namely France and Spain) conspired to overthrow the legitimate rule of the British Crown over the colonies.
ReplyDeleteHad they failed, Washington and the rest would have been hanged for treason.
An interesting angle on this is John Robb's "networked tribes," in a race (pun) to the bottom (of primary loyalties)
ReplyDeletehttp://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/
http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/globalguerrillas/2004/10/guerrilla_entre.html
Politically excluded means Jews in Continental Europe (particularly Russia and Eastern Europe), Chinese diaspora in Malaysia and Indonesia, Indian middlemen traders in East Africa.
ReplyDeleteIn all cases the societies had severe problems resulting from bad adjustments to modernity, social change driven by technology and trade, and poor cultural attitudes that created poverty instead of wealth, often based on a tribal system of social life.
Jews in England were highly assimilated and could and did serve in the highest levels of Government. In the US, Jews were mostly assimilated also and created and ran the movie industry and comic books. Jews in France and Germany had mixed results, in Italy they did not take part in much of the political elite but most survived even WWII. Primo Levi's sisters and mother for example were unmolested in their apartment. Russia's Tsars and Communists used "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" and other anti-semitic as distractions from the self-evident failure to develop economically and socially the way say East African tyrants used Indian middlemen to explain economic and social failure after independence or Suharto/Sukarno used Chinese middlemen as the root cause of economic and social failure.
In no case was there an honest examination of the evils of tribalism (small, kin-based trust networks as Steve's pointed out), failure to develop nationalism that spans those networks and creates large trust networks, honest or at least minimally corrupt and efficient government, rule of law not kin, state monopoly of force, public safety, and more.
Conspiracy theories ARE a big red flag something is wrong, that obvious and "fixable" (through difficult struggle) flaws in a society are beyond discussion.
There is no particular "Conspiracy" around Davos, rather the natural tendency of an elite to fix things so they and their descendants will run things forever. Honest and open discussion and overt political action to counter-act that tendency is the only way to "fix" it and will require the work of decades not a moment. Most things worth doing are hard and take a long time -- conspiracy theories also appeal to a "magic fix" i.e. "expose the bad guys" and everything is rainbows and unicorns.
I will add, look at the Muslim world. How does the existence of the State of Israel relate to the poor condition of the people of Morocco, Algeria, Iran, Yemen, and Sudan. Israel is not anywhere near those nations, has nothing to do with them, is not at war nor even threatening them with war (except in perhaps response to Iran's repeated threat to wipe them out).
ReplyDeleteThe existence of Israel is used as a conspiracy theory scapegoat to avoid discussing why these nations have so many social failures. Algeria for example has oil and gas, is close to it's natural customers, Europe, has many educated people who can build oil and gas extraction and refining facilities, as well as manufacturing ala South Korea or Taiwan with cheap and semi-skilled labor, but is mired in eternal conflict between the Islamists and the military-backed government.
If Israel were to vanish off the face of the earth tomorrow, Algeria would have no material change in it's conditions.
John Ray wants to know whether McCain's heroism during Vietnam has been greatly exaggerated.
ReplyDeleteIt could be, as Ray says, disinformation. Who knows?
micheal said:
ReplyDelete"The MSM, for instance, isn't technically a conspiracy, but there is an awful lot of groupthink and self-interest going on, to the point where their actions sometimes feel like the actions of a consciously organized conspiracy."
I agree with michael on this point; in fact, I tend to think of these as "unconscious conspiracies".
i think one of the questions hainging over this issue is what, exactly, a conspiracy is. A few tycoons or generals or well-bribed politicans in a smokey room, plotting out the course of events for the next 50 years? I don't put much stock in that kind of conspiracy; not that people wouldn't do it if it worked. It's just that events are too fluid and complex for it to usually work, at least in the way that it's intended.
But I do think people get drawn into a prevailing perspective or course of action, and there are people who are quite clever and adept at seeing to it that certain points of view and courses of action prevail.
I remember a comment that some anonymous government official made about the Iraq effort. He said that the people who scared him weren't the cynical operatives who knew that all the rhetoric about democracy and freedom was pure propaganda. What worried him were the people who had started out believing that this was all just rhetoric, but who had, over the course of several months, slowly bought into it.
i don't know if this qualifies as a conspiracy, but it's a phenomenon worth studying. Wasn't it Karl Kraus who asked, "How do wars begin? Diplomats tell lies to journalists, then believe what they read in the newspapers."
Conspiracy Theories! I don't subscribe to 'em myself.
ReplyDeleteConspiracy theories are exactly what THEY want you to believe.
I agree with the points made by Michael and Georgesdeletour.
ReplyDeleteSometimes, common interests dictate common actions, even without coordination. I don't believe everyone in the MSM* sits down with their decoder ring each morning to decrypt their orders for the day.
But they all read the text books in J-school, and heard much the same lectures from much the same professors. They all have seen the same movies about crusading journalists, and all think they perceive the same exalted truth that most of us proles don't. So it isn't surprising that so many of them would highlight the same quotes, craft the same sort of headlines, and spike the same sort of stories (or more often, simply never report on them at all).
And some people seem to assume that great events need great actors. It is conceivable to many that a boring, paranoid, self-important nebbish like Oswald - the sort of guy one meets in the common room of a college dorm (and you remind yourself never to get in a conversation with him again) - could kill a President. But a loser like Oswald is just as capable of killing some notable as anyone else is. And - as a loser - he feels greater compulsion to do so. And it worked for him. He wanted fame, and he got it - more than anyone else in his station in life achieved.
The fact that most conspiracy theories are looney, should not however blind one to the fact that conspiracies (by some definition) do indeed happen. As Steve pointed out, the ones that are right out in the open seem to have the greatest effect.
I don't know what all those billionaires, prime ministers, ex-Presidents, rock stars, and celebrity journalists discuss at Davos. But I very much doubt that MY interests are being represented. I'm sure they think they are doing good. I'm still not impressed. The likely outcomes for me are higher taxes, fewer liberties, and yet more erosion of my country's sovereignty. I would vote against any politician who ever accepted an invitation to attend Davos.
At Volokh they're discussing/mocking belief in conspiracy theories.
ReplyDeleteTheir point of reference is 9/11/01. Of course, the implausible conspiracy theory they accept is exempted from their own mocking.
But more to the point, we all know that one party -- the national government -- had the motive and opportunity to pull off the 9/11/01attacks. We all know that other parties also had a motive, but we have no way of knowing that anyone else had the *opportunity*. The official account of 9/11/01 was promulgated by the prime suspect. Can we know that the national government arranged or allowed the attacks to happen? Probably not. But do we have any reason to believe any other explanation? Absolutely not.
I think a lot of conspiracy theory explanations have a bit of the "brilliant penny" scam built into them.
ReplyDeleteHistorical outcomes are so incredibly random that even very smart people with lots of power and years of study can't reliably control or even predict them. So we often have:
a. Some conspiracy of people trying to accomplish something
b. Some big event that happens, broadly similar to the conspiracy's goals
And that looks like evidence of the power of that conspiracy, until you realize that there are small conspiracies of weirdos, wackos, rich people, political fringe types, policemen, etc., all the time. Most of them don't accomplish a damned thing, or have the opposite of their hoped-for effect. We mostly forget about those guys.
Every now and then, through spectacular luck, their plans work, but often not remotely in the way they would have expected. It's like watching stock market analysts occasionally have wonderful winning streaks by pure luck.
As an example, look at the 9/11 attack. Apparently, OBL and company didn't know it would be nearly as effective as it was, didn't realize it would bring down both towers. They were nearly caught by people made suspicious by their flight training ("I don't need know how to land.") They had FBI agents trying to bring them in for questioning, apparently blocked by internal politics. And OBL and company couldn't possibly know what the internal US poltical effect would be, because again, there were so many variables.
A good way to see this is to look at amazingly effective conspiracies that failed sooner or later.
A very successful conspiracy-like group (not in secret) wanted to move US policy in a more interventionist direction, invade Iraq, Iran, Syria, impose democracies, and watch the Arab dictatorships fall. They managed to get the whole country to invade Iraq, got us to the bring of war with Iran, got their own folks put in charge of the war and occupation and grand strategic planning. Does it currently look like that group of people has things under control? Or ever did, really?
At any moment, there are tens of thousands of small groups working in obscurity for some goal--banning hard liquor, getting polyamorous marriages legal recognition, convincing the country to support a manned mission to Mars. Some small subset of those goals will be achieved, probably as much in spite of the actions of those groups as because of them. Probably nobody can say which ones, twenty years from now, will have succeeded. But those will be the small groups or conspiracies or whatever people will think of, when they imagine small groups quietly plotting the future of the world. Even the very wealthy and powerful people at Davos, or the WTO, or the next greenhouse effect global summit, or the Republican party convention, have very little ability to really turn most things the direction they prefer.
There's a difference between a campaign or advocacy group and a conspiracy. The NAACP is not a conspiracy.
ReplyDeleteI've been debating on a different blog with a poster who believes the 7/7 London tube bombings were not carried out by four UK Muslim men, but by MI5. The forensic evidence is good, we can place the four men at the crime scene, and two of them filmed "martyrdom" videos subsequently broadcast by Al Jazeera. To be fair to my opponent, there are some anomalies. But there are always anomalies. Physicists conducting controlled scientific experiments in quarantined lab conditions find anomalies all the time. Nature is mysterious, and we still don't understand most of it. But he answers each of my objections by swelling his conspiracy to bigger and bigger dimensions. I think the martyrdom videos are pretty decisive - broadcast around the world, seen by many people who knew the men personally. He insists - on no evidence - that MI5 has the technology to make lifelike synthespian avatars of the men which can fool next of kin.
Conspiracy theories sound radical - "don't you see, nothing is as it seems". But most of them actually teach people that they're totally powerless - which finally makes for passivity. I like the South Park 9/11 conspiracy episode. It has the Bush government secretly controlling the "9/11 truth" movement, because they want people to believe they're sinister, terrifying and all-powerful, when the truth is they're bungling, inept and incompetent.
Conspiracy theories are signs of kooks who can't deal with reality and invent stuff to cover reality
ReplyDeleteRight. I mean, the idea that people conspire - i.e., that they meet and plan things in secret - is so utterly insane it's hard to imagine that anyone could believe that it's even possible, let alone that such a thing might be widespread.
Actually Americans will fall for virtually any conspiracy theory, if Muslims are said to be the conspirators. Osama bin Laden and 19 Muslims conspired to commit 9/11 with no outside help, "al-Qaeda" and its alleged thousands of members are constantly conspiring to kill Americans, Saddam was conspiring to build nuclear weapons to give to terrorists, Iran is conspiring to build nuclear weapons to give to terrorists, and so on.
ReplyDeleteI have no citation for this, but I think I've read that the more powerless a person feels about the outcomes in his or her life, the more inclined that person is to believe in conspiracies that run everything, or at least, everything they dislike.
ReplyDeleteThe conspiracy mentality is, in part, a way of shifting blame, or responsibility. People from the Middle East are famously drawn to conspiracy theories, and famously inclined to rely on "Inshallah" rather than intiative.
Of course, in their defense, I think conspiracies do play a large role in Middle Eastern affairs. Societies with barely the pretense of an open press, or an impartial judiciary, and with high levels of familial ties, tend to make conspiracies a lot easier to pull of, which I believe is one of the points you originally made.
In no case was there an honest examination of the evils of tribalism...
ReplyDeleteHas there ever been an honest examination by Jews of their own tribalism? Communism and neo-conservatism being two obvious examples.
(small, kin-based trust networks as Steve's pointed out), failure to develop nationalism that spans those networks and creates large trust networks, honest or at least minimally corrupt and efficient government, rule of law not kin, state monopoly of force, public safety, and more.
These are not things anyone but northern European whites has ever achieved successfully. The Jewish "conspiracy" behind mass immigration, multi-culturalism etc means that their achievements are now being destroyed.
Conspiracy theories ARE a big red flag something is wrong, that obvious and "fixable" (through difficult struggle) flaws in a society are beyond discussion.
But "conspiracy theory" is used precisely to put certain things beyond discussion. So is "antisemitism." You yourself are an example of what you're preaching against.
"Conspiracy theories are huge flag that something is wrong in a society."
ReplyDelete'Deep state plot' grips Turkey
It is a story that has set Turkey abuzz with rumour and speculation. At its heart is an ultra-nationalist gang known as Ergenekon, exposed when 33 of its alleged members were seized in a police raid in late January. The claims widely reported in the Turkish press ever since read like a thriller. They allege the gang was plotting to bring down the government. It is claimed their plan was to assassinate a string of Turkish intellectuals, including Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk, fomenting chaos and provoking a military intervention in 2009.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/7225889.stm
Ben Tillman: You casually accuse people of murder without evidence, or even making a show of evidence, and then (unless you have some of secret pseudo-Batman life) you apparently live your life as if the world is normal. If I believed the U.S. government was run by men who were as evil as Hitler or Stalin (and the 9/11 attacks, although smaller in scale, may have been even more dastardly than actions of those two), I sure as heck wouldn't be wasting my time commenting on blogs. I would either flee or fight.
ReplyDeleteOddly enough, I can think of at least one well-known (at least to historians) American poltician who was complicit in a massacre and boasted about openly in later years, even on the Senate floor. You'll pardon me if I don't take lessons in geopolitics or morality from someone whose pseudonym honors that murderer.
People often forget the biggest and most consequential conspiracy theory of recent times. It went something like this:
ReplyDeleteThere is this guy named Saddam and he is in league with this guy named Osama. Saddam is producing all WMD's and working on getting a nuclear weapon. Saddam will give these weapons to his friend and ally Osama. Then, before we know it there will be mushroom clouds over American cities.
This conspiracy theory has led to the death of thousands of Americans, over 100,000 Iraqi's and million of refugees.
georgesdelatour writes, "I like the South Park 9/11 conspiracy episode. It has the Bush government secretly controlling the "9/11 truth" movement."
Bush certainly does not control the 9/11 Truth Movement. He might like to, but it is not well enough organized to be controlled by anyone.
You continue, "Nature is mysterious, and we still don't understand most of it..."
Yes, but we do understand gravity pretty good. It is obvious that WTC1,2 and 7 were destroyed via explosive charges.
Ben Tillman: You casually accuse people of murder without evidence....
ReplyDeleteJames Kabala, you can't read.
tanabear
ReplyDeleteIt is far from obvious that explosive charges caused the 9/11 collapse. Dr Keith Seffen of the Engineering department of Cambridge University recently undertook a detailed mathematical study of the collapse. You can read a summary here:
http://www.admin.cam.ac.uk/news/press/dpp/2007091001
michael: What often strikes me is that a lot of things that happen *seem* to be the result of a conspiracy, and there's often something that dimly resembles a conspiracy behind 'em, but technically it isn't a conspiracy. So I wind up thinking things like, "Well, it might as well have been a conspiracy."
ReplyDeleteWell said. The smear "campaign" against Ron Paul on New Hampshire primary day is a good example of that. By looking at the sequence of blog posts that day you can see the "shock" of the "horrible" newsletters, as excerpted by Jamie Kirchick, spreading quickly around the beltway libertarian crowd on New Hampshire primary day. It's groupthink in overly self-referencing social networks -- a "conspiracy" in the loose metaphorical sense of "breathing together."
For outsiders not familiar with the actual social networks and their cultural attitudes, the most accurate way to make sense of such phenomena is to attribute them to conspiracies.
Pitchfork Ben: All right; how's this instead?
ReplyDeleteYou tiptoe right up to the edge of accusing Bush et al. of murder, but never actually do it. You use words like "implausible" and "no reason to believe" to describe the conventionally accepted scenario, but fail to provide any supporting evidence for this claim. You decline to openly embrace a "Bush did it" scenario so that when challenged, you can say "You can't read" instead of responding to the substance of the criticism. Is that better?
Reader (and others): There is a difference between most conspiracies and the conspiracies embraced by conspiracy theorists. Obviously any plot consisting of two or more persons is technically a conspiracy. Many crimes, and certainly most of the great crimes of history, do indeed fall into this category. The theories of "conspiracy theorists" usually rely on the claim that dozens if not hundreds of people were involved in an intricate conspiracy that could have been ruined by the slightest miscue, yet not one person messed up before the deed was done or spilled the beans after it. Conspiracies of this type are perhaps not impossible, but are much more implausible than conspiracies of a small group.
In the 9/11 scenario, conspiracy theorists rarely show concern for standard rules of evidence. They treat official statements that oppose their theory as lies, yet if a stray statement (like the famous "pull it") can be twisted to support their theory, suddenly it becomes the magic slip of the tongue that proves their theory. They use phrases like "basic physics" or "obvious to all," yet when actual physicists disagree with them, they ignore it or accuse the physicists of being government toadies. They start with the premise that the accepted story cannot be true, not just might not be true, and that anyone whom their suspicion lights on is guilty until proved innocent. They fail to answer such basic questions as, "If Bush can mastermind the 9/11 attacks, why can't he mastermind the planting of fake WMD in Iraq?" And, like you and Pitchfork Ben, they treat the accusation that we are living under a Hitler-level government as a hobby instead of something whose only just outcomes would be abandonment of the U.S. or revolution to rescue it.
How many of the big events of the 20th Century were the result of conspiracies? Certainly the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was a classic conspiracy organized by the head of Serbian military intelligence without telling his bosses. Certainly the Bolshevik Revolution was the result of cafe conspirators getting lucky. The Jewish Holocaust was carried out by a government, but set in motion using classic conspiratorial methods, leaving almost no written trace at the highest levels.
ReplyDeleteMost Third World history consisted of coups started by conspiracies of junior officers and the like.
georgesdelatour writes, "It is far from obvious that explosive charges caused the 9/11 collapse."
ReplyDeleteActually, it is very obvious. The paper by Dr. Keith Seffen seems to go back to the pancake collapse hypothesis. This was the FEMA explanation. NIST dropped the pancake collapse explanation and came up with the 'pile-driver' effect. There is no evidence of pancaking and there is no evidence of a pile-driver. A pancake collapse presupposes truss failure and the pile-driver effect presupposes column failure. Why can't they come up with a consistent explanation? Of course, NIST does not even model the collapse. Why not?
James Kabala writes, "In the 9/11 scenario, conspiracy theorists rarely show concern for standard rules of evidence."
We show great concern for evidence. Why was almost all the steel from the towers destroyed? Why did the NORAD general's lie to the 9/11 Commission? Why doesn't the FBI list Osama for being wanted in the 9/11 attacks? Why hasn't NIST released their report on WTC7? Why did Bush oppose the creation of an indepedent commission? etc...
james writes, "They start with the premise that the accepted story cannot be true."
This is not the case. Almost all members of the 9/11 Truth Movement believed the government's story at first. We changed our mind based on the evidence. People that believe the official story start with the premise that the claims of the 9/11 Truth Movement are false.
James writes, "If Bush can mastermind the 9/11 attacks, why can't he mastermind the planting of fake WMD in Iraq?"
This is because WMD's have to be produced somewhere. People who believed that Saddam had WMD never told us where these weapons were being produced. If we planted weapons but there were no factories for producing them, then it would be obvious that they were planted. Bush could stated that we found them, but never produced the actual evidence. However, this might have blown up in their face, so they decided against it.
Steve
ReplyDeleteYou make a good point. I'm not denying the existence of conspiracies. But I think a lot of history is also explained by "banana skin" theories rather than conspiracy theories. The conspirators against Franz Ferdinand got lucky on the day, after initially bungling things. The Bolsheviks took advantage of the wartime collapse of Russia, and were, of course, also helped by the Kaiser, who had his own reasons for helping them.
I'm not an expert on US political history, but two conspiracies we all know definitely happened are Watergate and Iran-Contra. Both involve very small groups of people. Even with small, seemingly closed groups, things don't stay secret for very long. Iran-Contra is the more interesting of the two, because it reveals a US government publicly hostile to Iran secretly selling it weapons. And that shows us that our politicians sometimes pursue opposite policies in private to the ones they say they're pursuing in public - which isn't so shocking is it?
Here's an example of a conspiracy theory getting out of hand - the "moon landings were faked" theory. The Wikipedia article is a pretty decent summary:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Moon_Landing_hoax_accusations
As soon as you think about it, the minimum number of people who have to be "in on the conspiracy" starts running into the hundreds, even the thousands. At the time, the US was in a race with the USSR. If America had cheated, the Soviets would have known, and would have revealed the hoax.
Tanabear
Feel free to contact Dr Seffen here and explain what you think are the flaws in his mathematical modeling of the collapse:
http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/~kas14/
Final commment:
ReplyDelete"Why doesn't the FBI list Osama for being wanted in the 9/11 attacks?"
The reason is that he has been formally indicted for the emabassy attacks, but not for the 9/11 attacks. Whitey Bulger on the same list is vaguely accused of "numerous murders;" does that mean some of the specific murders he is accused of are fakes?
http://www.fbi.gov/wanted/topten/fugitives/laden.htm
http://www.fbi.gov/wanted/topten/fugitives/bulger.htm
The Washington Post has an interesting article on the subject here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/27/AR2006082700687.html
You can, of course, choose not to believe an "establishment newspaper." (Although at least it isn't owned by the Hearst Corporation, as Popular Mechanics is, a fact some truthers have used to explain away their report on the physics of 9/11.)
This is a textbook example of the "slip of the tongue that reveals all" mindset I discussed above. If the FBI is controlled by monsters and liars who are in on the conspiracy, why wouldn't they lie and say on the Most Wanted list that Bin Laden was responsible for 9/11? They have no compunctions about mass murder, but they would never dare lie on the Most Wanted list?
Unrelated P.S. I'm surprised that I've never seen it mentioned before how tall Bin Laden is. I had no idea that he was "6'4" to 6'6"."
ReplyDeleteIf the FBI is controlled by monsters and liars who are in on the conspiracy, why wouldn't they lie and say on the Most Wanted list that Bin Laden was responsible for 9/11? They have no compunctions about mass murder, but they would never dare lie on the Most Wanted list?
If the FBI were completely and thoroughly controlled by monsters, and if every FBI employee were a monster, then it would presumably synchronize all of its actions.
The more likely case is that a small number of "monsters" can control an organization mostly consisting of ordinary people who might even "blow the whistle" on "monstrous" actions.
Thus a "monster"-dominated organization can conduct "monstrosities" on behalf of the "monster" faction but cannot control every official act of the organization.
If I understand the story correctly, Alex Jones claims that a U.S.A. president ordered the destruction of the U.S.S. Liberty, but had trouble getting that order carried out -- in part because the U.S.S. Liberty itself was crewed by ordinary folks, not "monsters."
I have no citation for this, but I think I've read that the more powerless a person feels about the outcomes in his or her life, the more inclined that person is to believe in conspiracies that run everything, or at least, everything they dislike.
ReplyDeleteThe conspiracy mentality is, in part, a way of shifting blame, or responsibility. People from the Middle East are famously drawn to conspiracy theories, and famously inclined to rely on "Inshallah" rather than intiative.
Of course, in their defense, I think conspiracies do play a large role in Middle Eastern affairs. Societies with barely the pretense of an open press, or an impartial judiciary, and with high levels of familial ties, tend to make conspiracies a lot easier to pull of, which I believe is one of the points you originally made.
I have no citation for this, but I think it's plausible that the more powerful a person feels about the outcomes in his or her life, the more inclined that person is to disbelieve conspiracy theories.
Conspiraphobia is, in part, a way of denying reality, or responsibility. People of the country club classes (and wannabees) are famously repulsed by conspiracy theories, and famously inclined to reject unpopular ideas and deny taboo facts rather than face them.
Of course, in their defense, they're just status jockeys afraid of being knocked off their steeds by more politically correct riders, and conspiracy theories are admittedly harder to swallow for radical individualists in politically correct, semi-transparent societies.
No hatred of the country club classes here, just a bit of flavor for effect; no point pulling punches in an ad hominem attack.