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 LordofHats wrote:

simonr1978 wrote:

 Ketara wrote:
I should hope we're rewriting history these days; it would be somewhat pointless to just stick to writing things that have already been (often badly) written.

I can only agree with Ketara here. I don't see anything wrong with re-assessing, re-examining and if necessary re-writing history. If new information comes to light or just a fresh interpretation presents itself, why not take another look? It might upset some people or contradict widely accepted views, but is that necessarily a bad thing (Provided it's done properly, of course)?

Any educated historian can tell you history is in a constant state of being rewritten otherwise there'd be no point to it. Every new paper, study, and book is a revision of previous works. It's not like historians are paid to write "yes Washington did not cut down a Cherry tree" 5000+ times. Historians are still "scientists." You either break new ground, propose new ideas, or refine existing theory or you can kiss your academic career goodbye.

Also to be blunt; a history book calling the US a douchebag for how it handled relations with Mexico isn't new. Historians have thought the US was pretty douchy with how it handled Mexico in the 19th century for ages. Even America itself thought it was pretty douchy at the time

Historians are scientists? News to me... Historians mostly just rehash the same old stuff over and over again. We should just give all of the funding to an actual science like archaeology instead. Archaeology actually brings us new developments and knowledge. With more money we could do so much more! Of course I am totally not speaking out of self-interest here.

But speaking of conspiracy theories, historians and archaeology, in the Netherlands there used to be a "historian" named Albert Delahaye who claimed that the entire early Dutch history (up until the late Middle Ages) basically had never happened but that all recorded events of that period actually happened in northern France and that the Dutch government 'stole' that history. Basically, the whole of Dutch history is a big conspiracy by the Dutch government to justify the Netherlands' existence as a nation. Any evidence to the contrary was dismissed with "all archaeologists and historians are in on it and work for the government to keep it up". It is pretty crazy. Luckily nobody but himself and his family ever believed in it. I guess the only reason his writings got any sort of notability is because people like to laugh at it.
And I guess that is the best explanation I can come up with for some of the weirder conspiracy theories (lizardmen anyone?) out there. Some people simply are crazy and do not have normally functioning brains, leading to insane ideas.

I can’t find it right now, but there was a wonderful XKCD comic that summarised this beautifully; essentially if you are looking for evidence to support your theory, you are doing science wrong. You look for evidence and then draw conclusions. It might support your theory, or it might not; but it shouldn’t change the evidence. Conspiracy theorists, a lot of media and the general public and, sadly, quite a lot of scientists forget this.

Aye, you should be looking to falsify your hypothesis, not prove it.

 AlmightyWalrus wrote:
Aye, you should be looking to falsify your hypothesis, not prove it.

Well, you should be conducting experiments and, for the more theoretical problems, testing the maths so that they are answering a well defined question about the theory or hypothesis you are seeking to test. You don't set up to falsify your own hypothesis, it is just that any experiment which is worthwhile in testing your hypothesis must have the possibility of disproving the assumptions made to form your hypothesis and have proper controls so you are only testing the parts you intend to test.

So, you want to test Boyle's law, which states that the pressure of an ideal gas at fixed temperature and quantity is inversely proportional to its volume.

So, you'd get your fixed amount of a gas which approximates an ideal gas, pick a temperature to hold it at and pick the minimum and maximum volumes you want to use. These are crucial steps. If you pick too low a temperature then your gas will not be approximating an ideal gas as the potential energy between particles will not be so small compared to the particles kinetic energy that it can be disregarded (ideal gas has no forces between particles except during particle collisions which are perfectly elastic). If your volume is too low for the amount of gas, then the spaces between your gas particles are too small which means that the interparticle forces are greater (leading back into the kinetic vs potential issue) and the size of the particles relative to the space they occupy is larger (ideal gas assumes particles are points with no volume).

If you don't constrain all of those variables correctly then you will end up not testing Boyle's Law as you have failed to satisfy the criteria for which it applies, which makes your results worthless. The issue with conspiracy theory "science" is that they never isolate the specific principles they wish to test, or at least never do so correctly. So their experiments never actually test what they say it tested and so when they get a result which is contrary to the established scientific consensus, it can be safely disregarded. But when called out on this they will often resort to the argument that mainstream science is falsifying their results by removing the data which doesn't fit etc. (for examples, see climate change deniers), even when they then turn around and hold up legitimately falsified "research" to support their argument (anti-vacciners and the Wakefield study which resulted in him losing his medical license, it was that bad).

Thing is, there are conspiracies in the broadest sense. That is, people conspire to do all kinds of stuff, like run criminal enterprises or overthrow governments or whatever. So in a general sense it is impossible to deny that there are theories about conspiracies, of which some are true. For instance, there was a lingering conspiracy that the Brazilian military coup was backed by the US, and the US sent a naval detachment to support the coup should it need it. Decades later under FOI this was verified, the US sent a fleet to supply the coup with military supplies should it be needed. That kind of conspiracy happens.

But in popular parlance the term conspiracy theory refers to something else, something a lot more fantastical. Either fantastical technology like mind control rays or weather control machines, or fantastical events like alien landings, or fantastically complex and exciting stories about famous and infamous people working together in highly complex, secretive organisations full of secret objectives.

Those sorts of conspiracy theories are basically all crap. Faced with a world of complex, confusing and ultimately tedious reality where the answer to the question 'why' almost never has a good answer, of course some people are going to invent incredible stories to explain it all. That's what humans do, we tell stories to make sense of things.

So yeah, humans do conspire. But are conspiracies in control of any of the great forces of history or nature? No, they are not, and people who like to pretend they are are just fooling themselves.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
There's actual genuine evidence that's what happened at Pearl Harbour - and that Roosevelt allowed it to happen to break the USA's then isolationist stance. He basically saw what was happening in Europe, and knew the US had to pick a side sooner or later.

No. That theory is absolute gak, peddled by liars and lunatics.

We can go through every single bit of detail and debunk it, but the conversation will end long before we get through each one (that's the dynamic these conspiracies rely on), so instead I'll just give you two summary points.

1) Surprise attacks happen. They're really common in history. They frequently work because military intel is trying to piece together an unknown situation in real time, with observations made from a diverse range of sources. Things which appear to be essential clues after the attack benefit from knowing the attack was coming, and knowing all the other clues. But to one person, oblivious to all the other available clues that are developing, and working on the assumption that they are at peace, well to them a set of objects on the radar will be assumed to be returning bombers, or a bird flight. They won't pass it up. It won't be assembled with the other range of clues. So surprise attacks happen. Pearl Harbour is not some unique event, never happened before event that requires some incredible conspiracy to explain it.

2) There was no need for the US to be poorly prepared for an attack by sea in order for the attack to wake America and rally its people for war. "We were attacked and fought a bloody and effective defense" is just as good as a rallying call as "we were attacked and were soundly beaten".

Being caught with its pants down 2 years into world War is a bit amateurish yeah but I certainly believe it more then some theory that it was allowed to happen. Why credit malicious intent when incompetence fits so much nicer.

 Ketara wrote:
The real danger is in the conspiracy theories that can't be separated from reality by anyone less than an expert. Take for example, Docherty and Macgregor's 'Hidden History':-

It's true that some conspiracy theories can only be picked apart by people with real knowledge of the subject, but I don't think those theories are more dangerous. For those theories to be the most dangerous we would need to believe that a large share of the potential audience for conspiracy theories find individual theories interesting but then read the text with a critical eye and ultimately find it lacking, so that cases like Hidden History sneak through and become popular because they deceive the critical eye of the general reader.

Truth is that there is no critical eye being passed over this stuff. People want to believe, so they don't question the stuff that supports the theory, but then they question or deny any thing that threatens the theory. Look at something as stupid as Pizzagate, that isn't believed because of convincing evidence that takes an expert review to debunk. It is believed because it presents and an exciting theory that helps people believe stuff they already wanted to believe.


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 notprop wrote:
A bettter question is why do so many conspiracies originate in the US?

Is the US more ‘awoke’ or more full of crazies?

Same reason most TV shows originate in the US. They're the dominant cultural force.

Other places produce whackjob conspiracies, because that's just a human thing. But some guy in the boonies of Iran theorising that Jews are behind the war in Syria doesn't really get in to the dominant media streams, certainly not the media streams that dakka members are most likely to see.

 sebster wrote:

 notprop wrote:
A bettter question is why do so many conspiracies originate in the US?

Is the US more ‘awoke’ or more full of crazies?

Same reason most TV shows originate in the US. They're the dominant cultural force.

Other places produce whackjob conspiracies, because that's just a human thing. But some guy in the boonies of Iran theorising that Jews are behind the war in Syria doesn't really get in to the dominant media streams, certainly not the media streams that dakka members are most likely to see.

And many people like to link to this theories and say "look how dumb Americans are", which gives them more exposure.
There's also the fact that many people understand English. If an American posts some conspiracy theory somewhere, I can read it. If it's a German guy, writing in German, I can't.

 ProwlerPC wrote:
Being caught with its pants down 2 years into world War is a bit amateurish yeah but I certainly believe it more then some theory that it was allowed to happen. Why credit malicious intent when incompetence fits so much nicer.

To be fair to the Americans here, nobody expected the Japanese to launch a surprise attack without a prior declaration of war (Not without reason, IIRC it was only down to a diplomatic FUBAR that the attack went in before the declaration rather than the other way around) and the attack itself was pretty unprecedented at the time, Taranto might have demonstrated the potential for such an attack but realistically that was a pin-prick compared to Pearl Harbour.

Pearl Harbour, pretty much as with every Allied defeat in the early days of the war in the Pacific was the result of overconfidence and/or arrogance mixed with a degree of incompetence. There's no shadowy conspiracy to be seen there.

simonr1978 wrote:

 ProwlerPC wrote:
Being caught with its pants down 2 years into world War is a bit amateurish yeah but I certainly believe it more then some theory that it was allowed to happen. Why credit malicious intent when incompetence fits so much nicer.

To be fair to the Americans here, nobody expected the Japanese to launch a surprise attack without a prior declaration of war (Not without reason, IIRC it was only down to a diplomatic FUBAR that the attack went in before the declaration rather than the other way around) and the attack itself was pretty unprecedented at the time, Taranto might have demonstrated the potential for such an attack but realistically that was a pin-prick compared to Pearl Harbour.

Pearl Harbour, pretty much as with every Allied defeat in the early days of the war in the Pacific was the result of overconfidence and/or arrogance mixed with a degree of incompetence. There's no shadowy conspiracy to be seen there.

Being caught with your pants down isn't amateurish, its the story of WW2 France, the Soviet Union, the US' the UK and a host of smaller countries all faced setbacks that especially the first two should have seen coming from miles away.

As for Pearl Harbor. The effectiveness of the attack has been vastly overestimated in the public perception. Not wanting to devalue the thousands of lives lost of course, but otherwise the damage was superficial only. No real strategic targets of importance were hit that were indeed actually present such as naval facilities and oil storage depots. The Japanese focus on sinking battleships in a shallow port was the best outcome as most were easily refloated.

Most Allied defeats were frequently down to small forces being quickly outnumbered by a Japanese opponent with superior material in those days. The only real incompetent loss was Singapore to an extent. Defeats in the Phillipines, Indonesia and the Pacific Islands were as good as inevitable with the force deposition at the start of the conflict. Incompetence played a part, but being competent wouldn't have turned it around.

 Disciple of Fate wrote:

As for Pearl Harbor. The effectiveness of the attack has been vastly overestimated in the public perception. Not wanting to devalue the thousands of lives lost of course, but otherwise the damage was superficial only. No real strategic targets of importance were hit that were indeed actually present such as naval facilities and oil storage depots. The Japanese focus on sinking battleships in a shallow port was the best outcome as most were easily refloated.

I'm not sure who the comment was by, but I can recall someone I read stating that the most important result of Pearl Harbour was that it changed the Pacific fleet from a 20 knot navy into a 30 knot navy since the loss of the slower Battleships meant the Carriers that made up the fleet in the aftermath and fought the early important battles could sail that much faster.

Most Allied defeats were frequently down to small forces being quickly outnumbered by a Japanese opponent with superior material in those days. The only real incompetent loss was Singapore to an extent. Defeats in the Phillipines, Indonesia and the Pacific Islands were as good as inevitable with the force deposition at the start of the conflict. Incompetence played a part, but being competent wouldn't have turned it around.

I'd add at least the first battle of the Java Sea and the sinking of Prince of Wales and Repulse. Allied forces were handled badly either as a consequence of being a mixed multi-national force at Java or through an assumption of superiority in the case of Force Z and were lost as a result. Whether it was incompetence or arrogance I guess could be up for debate, but the end result was a lot of allied ships were sunk for pretty trivial Japanese losses.

IIRC Force Z was lost because of a miscommunication between the RAF and the RN where the RN interpreted a message as "no air cover available, anywhere" when it was intended to be "no air cover available beyond point X".

simonr1978 wrote:

Most Allied defeats were frequently down to small forces being quickly outnumbered by a Japanese opponent with superior material in those days. The only real incompetent loss was Singapore to an extent. Defeats in the Phillipines, Indonesia and the Pacific Islands were as good as inevitable with the force deposition at the start of the conflict. Incompetence played a part, but being competent wouldn't have turned it around.

I'd add at least the first battle of the Java Sea and the sinking of Prince of Wales and Repulse. Allied forces were handled badly either as a consequence of being a mixed multi-national force at Java or through an assumption of superiority in the case of Force Z and were lost as a result. Whether it was incompetence or arrogance I guess could be up for debate, but the end result was a lot of allied ships were sunk for pretty trivial Japanese losses.

Yes this is true, incompetence cost a lot of ships. But realistically the allies didn't have the forces in place to stop a determined push in early 1942 in East Asia. As it stands the Japanese took some risks and it paid off, but with the amount of naval assets available as well aircraft, it was really just a matter of time, as none of the ABDA countries were really in any position to quickly reinforce the theater.

It didn't help that significant Allied assets were also lost for an already lost cause like almost all Dutch troops in the Dutch East Indies that were left in isolated positions to save face in defending the colonies.

simonr1978 wrote:

 Disciple of Fate wrote:

As for Pearl Harbor. The effectiveness of the attack has been vastly overestimated in the public perception. Not wanting to devalue the thousands of lives lost of course, but otherwise the damage was superficial only. No real strategic targets of importance were hit that were indeed actually present such as naval facilities and oil storage depots. The Japanese focus on sinking battleships in a shallow port was the best outcome as most were easily refloated.

I'm not sure who the comment was by, but I can recall someone I read stating that the most important result of Pearl Harbour was that it changed the Pacific fleet from a 20 knot navy into a 30 knot navy since the loss of the slower Battleships meant the Carriers that made up the fleet in the aftermath and fought the early important battles could sail that much faster.
.

Actually, we really didn't loose all that much at Pearl Harbor. We only lost two capital ships, permanently that is. All capital ships other than the Oklahoma and Arizona were salvaged, some needed less than a month to repair, all the rest were back in action in mid 1942.

simonr1978 wrote:

 ProwlerPC wrote:
Being caught with its pants down 2 years into world War is a bit amateurish yeah but I certainly believe it more then some theory that it was allowed to happen. Why credit malicious intent when incompetence fits so much nicer.

To be fair to the Americans here, nobody expected the Japanese to launch a surprise attack without a prior declaration of war (Not without reason, IIRC it was only down to a diplomatic FUBAR that the attack went in before the declaration rather than the other way around) and the attack itself was pretty unprecedented at the time, Taranto might have demonstrated the potential for such an attack but realistically that was a pin-prick compared to Pearl Harbour.

Pearl Harbour, pretty much as with every Allied defeat in the early days of the war in the Pacific was the result of overconfidence and/or arrogance mixed with a degree of incompetence. There's no shadowy conspiracy to be seen there.

The Empire of Japan actually did the most basic feth up anyone can manage; they bungled their time zones. Instead of their declaration of war arriving moments before the Pearl Harbor attack was executed (still kind of sleazy sure but not as sleazy as an undeclared attack I guess) their declaration wound up arriving after the attack by a big margin.

cuda1179 wrote:

simonr1978 wrote:

 Disciple of Fate wrote:

As for Pearl Harbor. The effectiveness of the attack has been vastly overestimated in the public perception. Not wanting to devalue the thousands of lives lost of course, but otherwise the damage was superficial only. No real strategic targets of importance were hit that were indeed actually present such as naval facilities and oil storage depots. The Japanese focus on sinking battleships in a shallow port was the best outcome as most were easily refloated.

I'm not sure who the comment was by, but I can recall someone I read stating that the most important result of Pearl Harbour was that it changed the Pacific fleet from a 20 knot navy into a 30 knot navy since the loss of the slower Battleships meant the Carriers that made up the fleet in the aftermath and fought the early important battles could sail that much faster.
.

Actually, we really didn't loose all that much at Pearl Harbor. We only lost two capital ships, permanently that is. All capital ships other than the Oklahoma and Arizona were salvaged, some needed less than a month to repair, all the rest were back in action in mid 1942.

The big advantage of Pearl Harbor was that it left the Japanese fleet free to range the Pacific for months before the US could reasonably mobilize its own. Or at least that was the intended goal. With Pearl Harbor as shallow as it is not even Japan thought that the US wouldn't manage to salvage most if not all of the ships damages and return them to combat ready status, but that takes time and with the Pacific so big knocking out the fleet at Pearl for any period of time is potentially a strategic deathblow. Unfortunately for Japan we didn't lose any carriers in the attack, and we not only managed to fight while getting out fleet back but Wake Island was a bloody embarrassment for Japan's military and we held on to Midway, which only encouraged a country that was already galvanized by the attack to keep fighting.

Arguably the Battle of Midway sealed the course of the war, as no matter what Japan did they'd never recover the loss of four carriers and never be able to stop the US Navy from rolling over the Pacific however it damn well pleased. Ironically the course of events they set into motion at Pearl Harbor lead the United States to achieving Japan's original strategic goal; render the opposing navy unable to achieve an crushing victory.

 LordofHats wrote:

simonr1978 wrote:

 ProwlerPC wrote:
Being caught with its pants down 2 years into world War is a bit amateurish yeah but I certainly believe it more then some theory that it was allowed to happen. Why credit malicious intent when incompetence fits so much nicer.

To be fair to the Americans here, nobody expected the Japanese to launch a surprise attack without a prior declaration of war (Not without reason, IIRC it was only down to a diplomatic FUBAR that the attack went in before the declaration rather than the other way around) and the attack itself was pretty unprecedented at the time, Taranto might have demonstrated the potential for such an attack but realistically that was a pin-prick compared to Pearl Harbour.

Pearl Harbour, pretty much as with every Allied defeat in the early days of the war in the Pacific was the result of overconfidence and/or arrogance mixed with a degree of incompetence. There's no shadowy conspiracy to be seen there.

The Empire of Japan actually did the most basic feth up anyone can manage; they bungled their time zones. Instead of their declaration of war arriving moments before the Pearl Harbor attack was executed (still kind of sleazy sure but not as sleazy as an undeclared attack I guess) their declaration wound up arriving after the attack by a big margin.

Pretty sure it was due to the message being so highly classified that the Japanese ambassador had to decipher it himself rather than having his staff do it for him, which meant it took forever because he wasn't used to deciphering stuff on his own. I'll see if I can find where I read that, it's somewhere in my pile of books.

That does sound familiar now that you mention it. Unless I'm mistaken though the message also contained instructions about when to deliver the declaration of war, and the time given was off by an hour.

 cuda1179 wrote:


Actually, we really didn't loose all that much at Pearl Harbor. We only lost two capital ships, permanently that is. All capital ships other than the Oklahoma and Arizona were salvaged, some needed less than a month to repair, all the rest were back in action in mid 1942.

Whilst it's true that only two capital ships were permanently lost and that Oklahoma was hardly a first line fighting vessel by that time anyway, it did temporarily effectively remove Battleships as a class from the US order of battle in the Pacific meaning that at Coral Sea or Midway for example where the heaviest US surface warships that weren't Carriers were Cruisers, the US Navy was able to make about 10 knots greater speed than if the task forces as a whole had to sail at Battleship speed. To be completely honest, I'm not really 100% sure just how much difference that speed made, but there's a good chance that if she'd had to travel at Battleship speed rather than Cruiser speed then Yorktown may well have missed Midway and with the absence of her air group the battle may have had a different result. Or it may not.

All conspiracies are accurate! The truth is out there.

This is an interesting thread and actually something I have talked about with the RL friends lately. Which lead me to a crazy realization about one of them.

He thinks that chem trails are a bonkers insane idea but the government is putting fluoride in our water to mind control us.

It was one of those "my friend may be insane" moments.

 Dreadwinter wrote:
This is an interesting thread and actually something I have talked about with the RL friends lately. Which lead me to a crazy realization about one of them.

He thinks that chem trails are a bonkers insane idea but the government is putting fluoride in our water to mind control us.

It was one of those "my friend may be insane" moments.

Here's the thing. Chemtrails aren't mindcontrol chemicals. But they are burning oil products. Part of one of a thousand things killing us with cancer.

One of my favorites is that AIDS is a CIA invented disease concocted to target Africans. A shockingly large number of African Americans actually buy that one.

 cuda1179 wrote:
One of my favorites is that AIDS is a CIA invented disease concocted to target Africans. A shockingly large number of African Americans actually buy that one.

Reminds me of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Pretty much everyone in the West who isn't a neo-nazi fethwit knows now that its a forgery, but it's got a lot of acceptance in Saudi Arabia and the surrounding countries and is even commonly trumpeted as a "must read" in entertainment media. It's even brought up casually in text books like we might find a passing reference to Mark Twain.

In general I think belief in conspiracies has a not at all unrelated relationship to how convenient said conspiracy is for other beliefs someone hold.

Note the percentage of users that liked it.

I mean, that's obviously out of the number that clicked an opinion on it one way or the other, and not representative of society as a whole, but it's unnerving to see stuff like that.

 ProwlerPC wrote:
Being caught with its pants down 2 years into world War is a bit amateurish yeah but I certainly believe it more then some theory that it was allowed to happen. Why credit malicious intent when incompetence fits so much nicer.

But the point is that it isn't amateurish to be caught with your pants down during peacetime. It is near impossible to maintain a constant state of war readiness.

It isn't evil political malice in Washington, but it also isn't military incompetence. Instead it's just one of those things - militaries can get surprised from time to time. It happens. Obviously militaries should do what they can to make sure it doesn't happen, but they'll never be perfect.

fresus wrote:
And many people like to link to this theories and say "look how dumb Americans are", which gives them more exposure.

Good point, it reinforces the stereotype so is much more likely to be spread by people looking for a laugh.

simonr1978 wrote:
To be fair to the Americans here, nobody expected the Japanese to launch a surprise attack without a prior declaration of war

The Japanese did the exact same thing to start the Russo-Japanese war, sending a declaration of war so that technically war was declared before the attack started, but where the time frame was so tight that the enemy had no chance to ready their forces before the attack came.

For what its worth, Japanese allies at that time, like the British, celebrated the ingenious Japanese attack. Then when Pearl Harbour came around the Japanese attack suddenly became immoral.

Pearl Harbour, pretty much as with every Allied defeat in the early days of the war in the Pacific was the result of overconfidence and/or arrogance mixed with a degree of incompetence. There's no shadowy conspiracy to be seen there.

I agree it wasn't a conspiracy, but I don't think we need to go as far as saying it must be incompetence or arrogance either. Militaries can't be operated on constant states of readiness.

 cuda1179 wrote:
One of my favorites is that AIDS is a CIA invented disease concocted to target Africans. A shockingly large number of African Americans actually buy that one.

There is actually a conspiracy there, funnily enough. The KGB spread the claim that the US created AIDS, in a program called Operation Infektion. The claims were embraced in various parts of the world, including among African Americans in the US.

In the early 90s Russia was unable to cope with its own AIDS epidemic, and called on support from the rest of the world. The US gave aid on condition Russia admitted it invented the Infektion claims out of thin air as an attack on America. They did, but the lies were already out there, and are still believed by a lot of people today.

Alright, let's see here.

- The world is, without a doubt, round.

- The CIA was probably involved in the JFK assassination - JFK was likely to curb their abuses of power, and we all know what shadowy, out-of-control organizations do when their alleged "Commander In Chief" is going to remove some of their powers.

- The US Government probably knew something about 9/11 before it happened, but thanks to poor communication didn't do anything about it. Whether this is because it stood to benefit from an endless war on terror that allows it to curtail its citizens rights, or simply incompetence, is honestly irrelevant at this point. Bush didn't do 9/11, but there's probably some knowledge that an attack was going to happen in the intelligence community.

- I am not a lizard person.

- Roswell was a weather balloon, I haven't seen anything that gives me reason to believe otherwise.

Here's a historical one:

- Stalin mostly opposed the Republican forces in the Spanish Civil War, instead giving aid to the fascists. Why? My reason is tentatively that he opposed the anarcho-syndicalist views of the CNT-FAI, and was afraid that the economic success of Catalonia would cause a schism within the Soviet Union. Better to fund the fascists and crush the anarchists than allow a competing left-wing ideology to rise to power. That some of the token aid he gave to the Republicans would be lost was just collateral damage, as were the Stalinists that were present in the Spanish Republic.

I actually buy into Roswell. I could totally see the confiscation of a mysterious crashed object and military cover up. I could also see how some bizarre leaps and bounds in random technologies happened at that time. I'm sure most are coincidence, but too much is conveniently timed.

I don't think the moon landing was faked.

I don't think that 9/11 was an inside job.

I could believe that FDR let Pearl Harbor happen, but as of right now I don't.

I think far more UFO sightings are legitimate than most people are willing to give credit to.

I'm a firm believer in extraterrestrial life, and of ghosts/paranormal activity.

I jokingly used to say all the time that I believed Randy Rhoads faked his death so he could play classical music without the pressure of his rock lifestyle. Definitely not a believer of that.

 cuda1179 wrote:
One of my favorites is that AIDS is a CIA invented disease concocted to target Africans. A shockingly large number of African Americans actually buy that one.

There was a popular theory that AIDS was first contracted by humans because of the polio vaccine, in Congo. It's mostly based on the fact that the disease first appeared around the places and times a new vaccine was being tested, and there was actually some scientific debate on the subject.
HIV initially comes from monkeys that inhabit the area. And the new polio vaccine was produced by using live monkeys as incubators. The correct way to do it was to use a different species of monkeys than the one that normally carries the virus, and obviously to make sure that they're healthy. But some people accused the scientists in charge to cut cost and use local, possibly contaminated monkeys to produce the polio vaccine, which could potentially create a vaccine that gives HIV.
So you have a theory that explains a mechanism by which HIV could come from a vaccine (one created by the colonialist Belgium to give to the local population), and is actually very believable. The biology works out, and the only evil wrongdoing is a guy doing a sloppy job to save a few bucks. I think it's still considered a very unlikely theory (if I remember correctly, they found some old vaccine and tested them, none of them have HIV in them), but I get my information from a documentary I saw a few years back.
Anyway, from this stuff some people obviously said that HIV definitely comes from the polio vaccine, and some powerful agency/secret society pulled the strings because they wanted the Africans dead.

It's a typical example of a good conspiration theory: the basic stuff is something plausible, even debated by experts, and is very hard to prove definitely. You just need to change a few things and perspective (like obviously the 60 years old samples didn't disappear because stuff gets lost/thrown away after decades of not being used, but because someone wanted the proofs gone) to convince yourself that it's all a big plot.


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 Just Tony wrote:
I think far more UFO sightings are legitimate than most people are willing to give credit to.

I'm a firm believer in extraterrestrial life, and of ghosts/paranormal activity.

But UFO sighting per capita is about 300 times higher in the US than in the rest of the world. With a huge spike on July 4th.
So either aliens really like the US, so much that they like to show up on the national day, or people see what they want to see, in which case culture is very important and you can explain the insane variations from one country to another.

There's some fascinating articles linking the alleged sighting of UFOs, and historical accounts of Fairies etc.

I mean, they're not claiming to be scientific about, just comparative. And when you scratch that surface, there are quite a lot of similarities!

One thing that gets my goat, every time? When people find an artefact of the ancient world, and leap to a conclusion.

For instance, engravings, reliefs and paintings showing the apparent ruler physically larger than their subjects. ZOMG! Evidence of Giants confirmed! Bad West Science, Y U KEEP FRUM US?. Or. Y'know. It's artistic license at work, and the larger stature is reflective of better diet = bigger bods alongside 'you can tell he's in charge because I painted him bigger, innit'.

Any obvious or rational explanation is slung out the window by these nutters.

 cuda1179 wrote:
One of my favorites is that AIDS is a CIA invented disease concocted to target Africans. A shockingly large number of African Americans actually buy that one.

Considering stuff like the Tuskegee Syphilis experiment, can you blame them?