Are you a Conspiracy Theorist?

[trish]

One issue that my my my raises here is the accessibility of proof. Can anyone go to Moon and see the footsteps left by the Apollo 11 astronauts? In theory, Yes. In practice, No. The Apollo 11 team did, however, leave an array of mirrors on the Moon. Anyone with a sufficiently powerful laser and the means to aim, can get the location of those mirrors and bounce a laser beam of the array. Divide the duration of the round trip by the speed of light and you’ll obtain the distance from the laser on the Earth’s surface to the mirror array on the Lunar surface. Can anyone do that? In theory, Yes. In practice...well...No...but a hell of a lot more people can do that than can actually go see the footsteps. Just about every observatory in world inside and outside the iron curtain did just that experiment in 1969 when the mirrors were first put in place. It’s a popular class project or undergraduate thesis for many astronomy majors. The independence of these hundreds of individual verifications lends a significant ‘certainty’ to the claim that we landed a spacecraft on the Lunar surface in 1969 and placed there an array of mirrors that wasn’t there before. When conspiracy theorists are confronted with this they often retort the craft wasn’t occupied by human beings, but piloted by robots. They maintain robots placed the mirrors, not living, breathing astronauts. This in 1969, when a roomba would’ve have wowed the entire robotics community as a significant advance. A conspiracy theorist will cling to any straw of self-deception in his or her attempt to keep belief (or disbelief) afloat.

Sometimes, the accessibility of proof is merely a matter of honesty (in the form of self-integrity) and effort. Take the proof that there is no procedure for trisecting any given angle using the classical Greek rules of construction with straight-edge and compass. It’s not a trivial proof. It takes a year or two of preparation for the average interested student to follow (i.e. verify the correctness of each step of the proof) and completely comprehend the argument. Of course you don’t have to be a tuition paying student at a college or university. You could be an interested amateur. You don’t need to be an expert. You don’t need a lot of money. Just some free time, determination and intellectual honesty. In this sense, mathematical proof is accessible to everybody. It might then come as a surprise to learn that every year mathematicians get emails from self-deluded amateurs convinced that they’ve squared a circle or trisected an angle with straight-edge and compass or proved the axioms of arithmetic are consistent. The delusion of having done what the experts say is impossible is just too tempting for some people to resist, even when “impossible” means “mathematically impossible.”

Conspiracy theorists are expert wannabes. They wannabe regarded as knowing something few other people know. They wanna dominate the conversation. Rather than meet criticism honestly, the conspiracy theorist will attack the character of the critics, assigning to them dark motives cloaked in the secrecy of governments, agencies, religions and bizarre non-existent organizations. The motive of the conspiracy theorist is simple: he wants to be regarded as the expert... no...he wants to be regarded as smarter than the experts. These most gullible persons want to be regarded as rare wise ones, people who can't be fooled, the opposite of gullible, a gnostics, in possession of secret knowledge. They are swallowed up by their hyper-gullibility, fooling themselves into thinking they are what they are not. I agree with bronofan: the tendency to subscribe to conspiracy theories, at least to the point where unreal fantasies dominate your world view, is a sort of mental illness.

[trish]

Edit: Oops! Multiply by half the speed of light, not divide. (Just woke up in the middle of the night and knew I had to correct this. Now I can go back to sleep. Night.)

[martin48]

My experience is that when "strange" things happen it's either a conspiracy or a cock-up. My money is always on "cock-up".

Here's ten points to test such theories

1.Proof of the conspiracy supposedly emerges from a pattern of “connecting the dots” between events that need not be causally connected. When no evidence supports these connections except the allegation of the conspiracy, or when the evidence fits equally well to other causal connections - or to randomness - the conspiracy theory is likely false.

2.The agents behind the pattern of the conspiracy would need superhuman power to pull it off. Most of the time in most circumstances, people are not nearly so powerful as we think they are.

3.The conspiracy is complex and its successful completion demands a large number of elements.

4.The conspiracy involves large numbers of people who would all need to keep silent about their secrets.

5.The conspiracy encompasses some grandiose ambition for control over a nation, economy or political system. If it suggests world domination, it’s probably false.

6.The conspiracy theory ratchets up from small events that might be true to much larger events that have much lower probabilities of being true.

7.The conspiracy theory assigns portentous and sinister meanings to what are most likely random and insignificant events.

8.The theory tends to commingle facts and speculations without distinguishing between the two and without assigning degrees of probability or of factuality.

9.The theorist is extremely and indiscriminately suspicious of any and all government agencies or private organizations.

10.The conspiracy theorist refuses to consider alternative explanations, rejecting all disconfirming evidence for his theory and blatantly seeking only confirmatory evidence.

[Dahlia Babe Ailhad]

youtube.com/watch?v=NIDX18Xl16s

Good morning everybody,

Here she is in a video of her naked corpse.

They named her, Mona Lisa. She looked like she could have been quite a pleasant being to be around.

Everything can't be fake just because it's a new discovery. Hamans have NOT seen it all. We only think we have seen it all because of Hollywood's science fiction movies.

Me? I believe this is a real corpse.

Meet Mona Lisa
youtube.com/watch?v=lAKNlP7reus
youtube.com/watch?v=XqR8zDGIwMo

Babe
xoxo

[Dahlia Babe Ailhad]

...Hamans have NOT seen it all...

Humans.



Sorry, i think my eyes were half-closed when i typed that.
I woke up at 5am, prepared my breakfast which took an hour,washed a few dishes, sat down and ate my breakfast, and here i am typing. Now, i am eating half of an antelope...ooops...i mean, half a cantaloupe.

[Jericho]

The rich and powerful disseminate conspiracy theories amongst the masses to occupy our minds and distract us from the real truth.
But that could just be a conspiracy!

[martin48]

Another conspiracy debunked?

[trish]

...Everything can't be fake just because it's a new discovery. H[u]mans have NOT seen it all. We only think we have seen it all because of Hollywood's science fiction movies....

I very much agree. Everything can’t be fake (not unless you believe the conspiracy where we are all trapped within a virtual reality known as The Matrix and ruled by machines).
The Apollo 11 Moon landing: not a fake.
The supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way: not a fake.
The discovery that energy has inertial mass: not a fake.
The germ theory of communicable disease: not a fake.
Fossil discover of the Giant Spinosaurus in China: not a fake.
All exciting stuff when you think about it. Every bit as alluring as aliens autopsies in area 51 with the added benefit of being true and also approachable by anyone who genuinely wants to study and contribute to our growing knowledge, rather than sit in their armchair in front of the History Channel and be wowed by mind rotting brain candy.

Certainly we haven’t seen it all. I don’t anyone who thinks they have. My colleagues are intense and hopeful that they will make the next big discovery that advances their particular field.

Human knowledge is never certain. That’s why those who truly seek knowledge are the biggest critics of claims to knowledge, including their own claims. It’s why professional journals are peer reviewed. One of the reasons Socrates was brought to trial in Athens is he relentlessly poked holes in everybody’s pet theories and made them look like fools. A testable theory that has survived the preliminary tests, has explanatory power and makes further testable predictions may merit further development. Evaluation of a claim’s veracity rarely comes down to “should you believe it or not.” It’s more about how reliable the consequences of the claim are, and in what domains of application is the reliability weakest and strongest. Have you noticed that conspiracy theories are rarely about the conspiracy? They’re about hibernating aliens, civilizations thriving beneath the Earth’s mantle, ancient astronauts etc. The conspiracy is added to circumvent the criteria that knowledge seekers normally apply to knowledge claims. Because the evidence that would support the claim (if it exists) is in the custody of conspirators. The conspirator’s cloak of secrecy renders the claim untestable. How convenient!

The Apollo 20 Mona Lisa Conspiracy was “revealed” in a series of YouTube videos on the internet (the most reliable source of information in the known world). The first was posted on April Fools Day in 2007. Four months later a person who claims to be the William Rutledge interviewed in the YouTube series says he and a handful of friends made and faked those videos on a lark. So now we have three conspiracy theories 1) the claim that Apollo 20 found a hibernating alien and the government and all the scores of personnel involved in a mission of that magnitude are keeping it under wraps, and 2) the conspiracy by a handful of pranksters (including a William Rutledge) to invent and propagate an April Fool’s Day hoax via the internet, or 3) the conspiracy, on the part of NASA, to control leaks about the Apollo 20 mission by inventing the April Fool’s Day cover story and posting it on the internet.

Oh, what a tangled web we weave: When first we practise to deceive! ___Wm. Shakespeare

[Dahlia Babe Ailhad]

Hi martin48,

That was an interesting video you had posted.

I have one, too, from the 1980s.

First of all, the Ho Ho Ho Santa Claus and we all know today was actually invented by the Coca Cola company.

But what about the religious holiday called, Christmas.

See this informative video.

youtube.com/watch?v=wzzL6JcMnfk

Babe,
xoxo

[Dahlia Babe Ailhad]

Hi trish,

You never cease to amaze me. You're really smart. You make me think too hard - but that's okay.

Conspiracies are not always about what you've so eloquently pointed out, though, i think.

I agree with there are many conspiracies about HOW all the conspiracies are just there to make us talk so much about until nobody wants to hear about it anymore.
Example: All the hidden symbolism of the Illuminati in music videos and live performances of today's biggest pop stars. They do it so much that every kid starts doing the same moves in front of the mirror with the "hairbrush microphone". It all becomes part of the culture and people know not the real meanings of what they are doing. So in that sense, they (the Illuminati) are really brainwashing us abut telling us that it's "just a show" and "it's not real".
Think of a mafioso convincing you he's just a honest and legit businessman denying any affiliation with any organized crime syndicates.
Meanwhile, all the shady characters coming and going, all the secrecy, all the "cloak and dagger" behaviour, all grown men kissing the guy's ring. This tells another story which leads us to know that the guy lied to you to protect his real interests.

Think of all the high-tech alien movies hollywood puts out. They desensitize the world until the whole topic of "i believe in aliens" makes other people raise their eye-brows at the person saying that, as if they are nuts or very gullible.
Even people who claim to have been abducted by aliens are afraid to say so because of the public opinion. It's too bad most of society has been/is being educated about such things by a such misleading and very manipulative medium - television and the movie business.
Nowadays, even the press is controlled, and Mr D. Rockefeller has even tipped his hat to them, openly, in thanks, for all those years of secrecy that has allowed their Empire to rise up all around us, and now, it's possibly too late to stop the big wheels from crushing us in time. They own the police and even your USA Constitution. Police state and FEMA camps are becoming more and more real, and yet, they deny it all to the citizens. Going as far as rolling their eyes at us or even mentioning how crazy it seems. My mom would con me by telling me all the candies were gone even when i told her that i saw her hand in the bag.

This video sums the media just right. Only thing wrong with this old clip is that nowadays, the newspapers are owned by the same people who now own most of the major television networks and most radio stations.
I try not to rely on any thing that is from the media - i prefer to rely on LOL youtube for the truth, and from there, i try to figure what is real and what is fake.
It's hard, though, because as you've said, there is always one person saying that clip is a hoax, and they even go out of their way to debunk it - even falsely.

youtube.com/watch?v=HFvT_qEZJf8

There is just too much to post on the topic as it's been going on for so long, and we are only now getting wind of it all, thanks to the internet, and we are called paranoid if we talk too passionately about it all. People would rather watch The Simpsons than hear about "that crap" again.

It's been designed to dumb us all down to the point where we just agree with it all because it's so widespread and causes us to believe that if the TV is making fun of it, it can't really be happening. Personally, i can't watch TV for too long.

Geez. I need lunch, now.

Babe,
xoxo