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Wait the guy makes nuts claims and then you have to pay him £150 to get your £200 in a cheque?
Why do I get the feeling the bailiffs know him quite well.

 LordofHats wrote:

 Overread wrote:
It gets easier to deny something like the Holocaust because the further from the event you get the fewer people directly were present until there's no one left alive.

I think people also just struggle to fathom the scale of it. There's holocaust denial, but there's also what I think is more appropriately termed holocaust doubt. I've encountered and observed a common thread where it's pretty common to meet people who don't deny the holocaust, but doubt its scale. I'm not convinced those people deserve to be lumped in with deniers because they often seem to have legitimate struggles to appreciate the event and I can definitely say my education glossed over it in a way that did not well contextualize the industrialized murder of millions. Its very easy to go from doubt to denial.

That's very true indeed and I would agree that the scale is often underplayed. That and a lot of people don't have the real world relation to values into the millions to really visualise those kinds of numbers. They can understand them, but they can't mentally visualise a million. So that in turn also hides the real meaning of the words and numbers.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:


Now I’d like to take the chance to ask people to nominate and link to their favourite ‘erm.....whaaaaaaaaaaa?’ Conspiracy Theory. Ideally, looking for the fringe of the fringe. One you suspect most people aren’t aware even exists. Because I want initial ‘yeah, but, what about X, Y, Z and Pigeon’ responses. I reckon that us essentially being a group of layman with different skill sets might prove an interest test group for such an endeavour.

I'll bite. Have a conspiracy a hundred years old and still going that you've likely never heard of. It revolves around the role of armaments companies in the First World War.


In 1912 there was a massive public shock in Germany at the discovery that Krupp (the premier armaments firm there) was paying off German state officials to favour his product, advertise for him, and pass on intelligence. All very corrupt and nasty. This quickly got jumped upon in Britain by a lot of left-wing commentators -many of whom had been hoping/looking for a corrupt connection between big business and the State since the Boer War over a decade beforehand. Casting around for evidence here in the UK to demonstrate a similar connection, they stumbled upon a few interesting facts. They boiled down to the following:-

- Lots of domestic armaments companies had the same directors.
- There appeared to be many licensing agreements shared between armaments firms internationally.
- Many M.P.'s and members of the aristocracy were shareholders in arms firms.
- It was a well known secret that in certain fields (such as armour plate production), there were oligopolistic / cartel arrangements.
- Many officers and civil servants became directors at armaments firms after retiring.

From these associated facts, it became clear that there was a massive conspiracy wherby the State was either (a) directly controlled by or (b) at the tender mercy of a cabal of shadowy international armaments merchants. The conspiracy theorists effectively took the above facts, and drew their own conclusions about what it must mean. They were completely and utterly wrong (I have the paperwork to prove it), but they believed their new theory with a passion (after all, hadn't it happened in Germany!?). They pored over lists of directors, over amounts paid on debentures, gathering every little nitty gritty piece of publicly available information they could in their desperate attempts to prove their theories true. There were speeches in Parliament and many books published ranting about these links, and so forth.


But they never did find the smoking gun, the one bit of proof which would tie it all together. It all remained circumstantial. Then WW1 kicked in, and they were largely forgotten about. Being a hard left wing peace advocate doesn't pay much in wartime.


Once WW1 was past, everyone was horrified at what had resulted. They cast around looking for a scapegoat, and who did they find? The arms firms again. Given that arms spending had ramped up ridiculously prior to the War and the arms firms all shared technological information; there clearly must have been a conspiracy to orchestrate elevated amounts of military spending! And this took all the countries to a precipice of war which they eventually fell into.

Now the various writers through the 1920's and 1930's quoted and referenced each other in great quantities to give a veneer of respectability; raking through all the old pre-war circumstantial evidence and building it to support the new accusation. They added a few new pieces (a dicey sounding letter from the Chairman of Vickers, for example), and the whole thing escalated and escalated. It actually got so bad that there was a Royal Commission put together in the early 1930's to investigate and see if it was true.


But....it wasn't. Again, there was no smoking gun. There were a few uncomfortable facts drawn out of it which certain firms would rather other people didn't know, but they certainly weren't controlling or orchestrating anything. Then re-armament for WW2 started, which eventually hit and shut everyone up again. But that wasn't the end of it. Various historians (such as respected naval historian Arthur Marder) continued to cast a leery eye at the whole affair. Whilst Clive Trebilcock eventually smashed the theory to pieces back in the 1970's/80's (and it has taken academic blow after blow since then), it's still not dead. Why?


Because left-wing beliefs in the dangers of military-industrial combines which kicked in from the 1960's still prevail to this day and need a punching bag (which the arms firms provide nicely). But they need to look respectable. And so they quote all these old sources of circumstantial and ill-informed evidence from a century ago as if they were gospel, warning of the dangers of letting arms firms make money on the public dime. The role of the arms firms in the First World War is preached as being the 'hidden history', a perfect example of the dangerous links between capitalism and business which results in tragedy and war for the working man.

Take a look at this site, sponsored by the Campaign Against the Arms Trade:-

https://armingallsides.org.uk/

It's full of cherrypicked facts, ommissions, and generally poor quality low calibre research. Even worse still is this one:-

https://firstworldwarhiddenhistory.wordpress.com/category/armaments/

It advertises 'research' and books by two elderly left wing Irishmen who are determined to prove that Britain (of all people) was responsible for start of the First World War. Speaking as an actual academic specialist/authority on the subject with regards to armaments, their work there is crap. Balderdash. Citations to people who barely knew what they were talking about, misconstrued sources, and massive leaps of faith in their conclusions. But to the amateur, it seems authentic. And the writers insist that they are telling the real history, the real truth, the one which is hidden from normal people and passed over by bog standard corrupt historians. To seize from the website, here's a very telling quote:-

The distressing reality is that brave revisionist historians are a very rare breed indeed. Academic historians of all colours need to muster their courage to speak truth to power and stop toeing the Establishment line. The fact that it is not historians but ordinary men and women who are at the vanguard of the historical truth movement today brings shame to their profession. The verdict of history itself will surely judge them harshly.

Holocaust denial can also be considered an extension of the almost universal (throughout history) persecution of Jews. which is an entire subject in and of itself.

Hey folks. Polite request, but could we move away from using the Holocaust as an example?

Because of all the inane and downright dangerous conspiracy theories, that one is the hot potato. Not just for our lovely friendly mods, but because it genuinely is.

Not that anyone who denies it isn’t a scumbag of the very, very highest order (higher even than the clearly planted bum face in a reality TV show), but it’s too recent, too real, and too politically charged


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Overread wrote:
Wait the guy makes nuts claims and then you have to pay him £150 to get your £200 in a cheque?
Why do I get the feeling the bailiffs know him quite well.

 LordofHats wrote:

 Overread wrote:
It gets easier to deny something like the Holocaust because the further from the event you get the fewer people directly were present until there's no one left alive.

I think people also just struggle to fathom the scale of it. There's holocaust denial, but there's also what I think is more appropriately termed holocaust doubt. I've encountered and observed a common thread where it's pretty common to meet people who don't deny the holocaust, but doubt its scale. I'm not convinced those people deserve to be lumped in with deniers because they often seem to have legitimate struggles to appreciate the event and I can definitely say my education glossed over it in a way that did not well contextualize the industrialized murder of millions. Its very easy to go from doubt to denial.

That's very true indeed and I would agree that the scale is often underplayed. That and a lot of people don't have the real world relation to values into the millions to really visualise those kinds of numbers. They can understand them, but they can't mentally visualise a million. So that in turn also hides the real meaning of the words and numbers.

Oh good sir, you misread.

You promise him £150,000.

One Hundred And Fifty Thousand Pounds. Six digits......

 Ketara wrote:

The distressing reality is that brave revisionist historians are a very rare breed indeed. Academic historians of all colours need to muster their courage to speak truth to power and stop toeing the Establishment line. The fact that it is not historians but ordinary men and women who are at the vanguard of the historical truth movement today brings shame to their profession. The verdict of history itself will surely judge them harshly.

Another trend that I find is common among conspiracy theorists and their low understanding of subject matter.

Revisionist historians are not rare. Every time a historian publishes a new work on a subject they're 'revising' history. I don't know how it is across the pond, but historians here rarely employ the term 'revisionist' as an adjective to describe themselves today. In the wake of cooks and cranks who simply try to appropriate the label to lend themselves an faux air of credibility, they don't even much use it as a word to describe accounts or works anymore either (we call it a 'new look' or a 'new vision' instead). Someone who goes around saying 'I'm not a nutter, I'm a revisionist" is more likely than not a nutter. Professionals working to avoid the word have effectively relegated it to the realm of conspiracy theories.

 LordofHats wrote:

Another trend that I find is common among conspiracy theorists and their low understanding of subject matter.

Revisionist historians are not rare. Every time a historian publishes a new work on a subject they're 'revising' history. I don't know how it is across the pond, but historians here rarely employ the term 'revisionist' as an adjective to describe themselves today. In the wake of cooks and cranks who simply try to appropriate the label to lend themselves an faux air of credibility, they don't even much use it as a word to describe accounts or works anymore either (we call it a 'new look' or a 'new vision' instead). Someone who goes around saying 'I'm not a nutter, I'm a revisionist" is more likely than not a nutter.

As someone with more than a passing interest in history, I suspect you particularly will appreciate the way they try and argue that primary source material isn't needed and that enough secondary sources and guesses are just as good:-

https://firstworldwarhiddenhistory.wordpress.com/2018/04/17/fake-history-6-the-failure-of-primary-source-evidence/

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:

 Overread wrote:
Wait the guy makes nuts claims and then you have to pay him £150 to get your £200 in a cheque?
Why do I get the feeling the bailiffs know him quite well.

Oh good sir, you misread.

You promise him £150,000.

One Hundred And Fifty Thousand Pounds. Six digits......

I, wait... what?

So wait you do a job for him
Get offered a daft amount of Monoploy money
Spend a few weeks arguing over it
He then demands £150,000 in note form
In order for you to then get £200 from him?


So I guess I was right about the bailiffs then. Or is he just the kind who likes to string things along until the final final deadline and then pays up before things escalate to the next level (like those people who never ship your product until you raise a Paypal report on the payment)

I found more info! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WeRe_Bank

So you pay the promissory note and a subscription fee and a monthly fee to join the bank that doesn't pay your debts for you. Soo isn't this just one of those Pyramid schemes where he sits at the top and rakes off the cash whilst those below get into sticky waters because their "WeRe" doesn't actually pay anything out and thus all they get is increased fees, bailiffs and made to feel an utter fool

There is a statement I often make that modern politics is the death of all good humor because humor requires trust. Conspiracy theories require its absence.

 Overread wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:

 Overread wrote:
Wait the guy makes nuts claims and then you have to pay him £150 to get your £200 in a cheque?
Why do I get the feeling the bailiffs know him quite well.

Oh good sir, you misread.

You promise him £150,000.

One Hundred And Fifty Thousand Pounds. Six digits......

I, wait... what?

So wait you do a job for him
Get offered a daft amount of Monoploy money
Spend a few weeks arguing over it
He then demands £150,000 in note form
In order for you to then get £200 from him?


So I guess I was right about the bailiffs then. Or is he just the kind who likes to string things along until the final final deadline and then pays up before things escalate to the next level (like those people who never ship your product until you raise a Paypal report on the payment)

I found more info! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WeRe_Bank

So you pay the promissory note and a subscription fee and a monthly fee to join the bank that doesn't pay your debts for you. Soo isn't this just one of those Pyramid schemes where he sits at the top and rakes off the cash whilst those below get into sticky waters because their "WeRe" doesn't actually pay anything out and thus all they get is increased fees, bailiffs and made to feel an utter fool

Sorry, crossed wires!

The Gardener thing is purely an example. If someone does £200 of work, and accepts a high value item in place of cash, the debt is paid.

But, and Re’s fatal (well one of many) is that payment tendered is not payment accepted. As the debtor, it’s for me and me alone to decided what is a reasonable exchange. If you tried to pay me way Re, or Donkey Dung, or Tiger Repelling Stones, if I reject that, you still owe £200.

The sinister thing about Re is that in order to access his Magic Currency? You have to issue him with a (legally enforceable) Promissory Note for £150,000.......payable after 20 years.

One thing the conspiracy theorists have do draw on is that governments do get involved in just plain crazy, wrong and illegal stuff from time to time (or more often) and despite the fact that many people are involvepd very few of them stop to think of the wider implication of what their jobs involve

if they did they'd either complain to their higher ups who might well stop and think and quietly kill the project or talk to the press who get a story and exert pressure to stop things

hence we get stuff like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment

just plain wrong even when it was started, but by the time WWII was over totally unnessesary too as we had penicillin but it still took to the 70s to be stopped

Not that I think there is anything to the vast majority of conspiracy theories (especially any of them where the theorists spreading them have a financial stake in things).

Humans like answers, and if we don't get them we tend to make things up and some of us are more reluctant than others to let go of our home grown explanations when more evidence arrives, and try and bend it to fit what we've already decided

 Ketara wrote:
As someone with more than a passing interest in history, I suspect you particularly will appreciate the way they try and argue that primary source material isn't needed and that enough secondary sources and guesses are just as good:-

https://firstworldwarhiddenhistory.wordpress.com/2018/04/17/fake-history-6-the-failure-of-primary-source-evidence/

There's so many more red flags there. The primary source one is actually funny, cause they spend a whole bit (quoting economicist and SCOTUS of all things) on why primary sources can't be trusted and then cite primary sources. And they cite them without quotes which immediately makes me question the veracity of their claims cause when you've got a strong source that overturns established narratives, you put it up front and center. And that's just the hypocritical and self-serving dismissal of primary sources if they don't agree with them while pandering out ones that they say do.

There's also (list of red flags); A clear lack of any knowledge about archival practice and theory. Name dropping a historian and then attributing to them an opinion they 'secretly' hold with no evidence to suggest they hold it. Weak ass court of law analogies as if the procedures of the courts are the golden model of fact finding and not the imperfect rules and regs for resolving messy and unclear disputations of fact where lives are immediately on the line and no one has 50 years to study the subject. Mountains of assuming their own conclusion. Citing George Orwell. The word educated in air quotes. Fallacious attacks on grade school education curriculum not turning elementary children into subject matter experts. Citing George Orwell (it's worth two red flags). Accusation of vast secret keeping (even though they try to caveat it) among a field of tens of thousands of people, all of whom are willfully producing a 'fake' history for no apparent reason (failing to ask their own question of 'cui bono' of their own presumption).

EDIT: Though, I am baffled by the theme of 'Imperial Germany did nothing wrong.' I can get 'Nazi Germany did nothing wrong' cause neo-Nazis are a thing. Of course they want to engage in apologism for Nazi Germany. But I just don't get that with Imperial Germany. Is there some great ground swell of Imperialist Germans throughout the world? That's just weird.

This is an amazing example of how conspiracy nuts twist things into incoherence and rely on both their own apparent ignorance and the ignorance of the audience. Which is maybe a great path into another 'but why?'

Cui bono? Who benefits from the peddling of conspiracy theories? Nut jobs, academic rejects, and con artists who prey on ignorance for profit like leeches.

My thoughts on conspiracy theories.

Completely agree with the theory they originate with those who think they are smarter than the average person and can see past the lie or bs. Also that they continue living on in those people who want to pick up that conspiracy for their benefit in some form or fashion.

I argued quite a bit against vaccination causing autism on several Facebook groups and the lengths those people will go to try to find a culprit is incredible. That particular conspiracy was in my mind fueled by parents who couldn't accept that their children were 'different' without someone to blame external to themselves. You could stack a hundred different arguments against the theory and their belief trumped all of it.

Unfortunately there has now been millions possibly billions of dollars to research the link between the two when that money could have been invested in treatments or technology to assist those children who have autism.

 LordofHats wrote:

There's so many more red flags there. The primary source one is actually funny, cause they spend a whole bit (quoting economicist and SCOTUS of all things) on why primary sources can't be trusted and then cite primary sources. And they cite them without quotes which immediately makes me question the veracity of their claims cause when you've got a strong source that overturns established narratives, you put it up front and center. And that's just the hypocritical and self-serving dismissal of primary sources if they don't agree with them while pandering out ones that they say do.

...This is an amazing example of how conspiracy nuts twist things into incoherence and rely on both their own apparent ignorance and the ignorance of the audience.

I know, right? I mean, take this one section:-

Website wrote:In the early 1970s, Canadian war historian Nicholas D’Ombrain began researching British War Office records. He noted: ‘The Registry Files were in a deplorable condition, having suffered the periodic ravages of the policy of “weeding”. One such clearance was in progress during my foray into these files, and I found that my material was being systematically reduced by as much as five-sixths.’ [5] Astonishingly, a large amount of ‘sensitive’ material was actually removed as the researcher went about his business. Where did it go? He accused the establishment of systematic withdrawal of evidence. Who authorised its removal? In addition, D’Ombrain noted that minutes of the Committee of Imperial Defence and ‘circulation and invitation lists’ together with much ‘routine’ correspondence had been destroyed. [6] That D’Ombrain found five-sixths of the total files melting away in front of him demonstrated clearly that unnamed others still retained a vested interest in keeping hidden, genuine evidence of historical record.

Conveniently, I have the book in question next to me. The relevant section reads:-

D'Ombrain's actual book wrote:The War Office records, especially its registry files, are in a deplorable condition, having suffered the periodic ravages of 'weeding'. One such clearance was in progress during my foray into these files, and I found that my material was being systematically reduced by as much as five sixths. The Admiralty files are, on the whole, in far better shape and are organised with at least a modicum of attention to subject matter. The papers of the C.I.D. have received special attention from the officials of the P.R.O. Unfortunately, however, such items as circulation and invitation lists, together with much 'routine' correspondence, have been destroyed.

In other words, our wonderful authors have neglected to mention (a) that weeding was a routine archival activity to remove papers judged of low value (ascribing far more nefarious motivations), (b) that the Admiralty records did survive to a much more thorough degree (a very strange thing for our mysterious conspirators to miss), and (c) that the staff at the P.R.O. deliberately selected high-value C.I.D. papers as being worth preserving.

That's the sort of perverse and malicious omission that these conspiracy authors rely on. They bank on your average person not having d'Ombrain's book half a metre to their left on an easily accessible shelf; because if everyone did, they'd be laughed out of town.

 LordofHats wrote:
EDIT: Though, I am baffled by the theme of 'Imperial Germany did nothing wrong.' I can get 'Nazi Germany did nothing wrong' cause neo-Nazis are a thing. Of course they want to engage in apologism for Nazi Germany. But I just don't get that with Imperial Germany. Is there some great ground swell of Imperialist Germans throughout the world? That's just weird.

They're more interested in proving that a secret cabal of capitalists control the West. But given that such a thing isn't intrinsically bad, they need to ascribe a great moral crime to that cabal, and what better crime than the World Wars? It's less about extricating Germany than it is incriminating this mysterious cabal.

Given that Imperial Germany literally declared war and invaded Belgium first however, it really takes some genuinely spectacular leaps in logic to make it Great Britain's fault.

I think one I got this morning provides good insight into the Whys of conspiracy thought.

I recently wrote a blog article for my company relating to coronavirus, and my previous article was about biosafety levels, written in february. I get to my company email all questions sent in thru the "Contact us" link, and I got a question that was basically

"What biosafety level would be required to research Ebola?"

To which I responded, thinking this was a question like any other, that the CDC lists that disease as an extreme risk pathogen and it would require BSL-4.

I then got a long response email that this person was doing a bunch of research and they had found a BSL-2 lab in sierra leone doing research illegally using ebola, that lab was funded by the George Soros fund, who was also funding a russian laboratory staffed by american scientists who in 2015 had created a "chimeric hybrid" of ebola and coronavirus.

she then asked if I was looking into that and if I was concerned that these people might have orchestrated the coronavirus.

now, I've been talking to scared seniors a lot this past week, since a lot of people are finding the blog post intended as an info dump for medical professionals and trying to apply it to their homemade masks they're using. But this person was clearly after some other things: namely, a face to put on the thing that scared them, knowledge that other people didn't have, and a person who would talk to them about it.

I think that's the primary reason behind most conspiracy enthusiasts' obsession. They want a clearly defined villain, secret knowledge, and a community. And at a certain point, it doesn't matter what two unrelated topics they start with, they construct extremely similar narrative beats of vast far-reaching conspiracies secret enough to fool everyone but easy enough to crack with an hour or so of google research. It doesn't matter what Biosafety levels are, or what a coronavirus actually is, you just have to find enough things that don't seem to "add up" and a villain to pin it on, and you've got what you need to get.

It's probably easier in that people with no experience have no idea how much paper the state can produce. How long is your tax form? How many people live in your country? Multiply the first number by the second.

Example: (using google) the US has about 230,000,000 tax filings a year. Typical taxes for most Americans will be the basic form 1040 (which is 3 pages). Private citizens in the US thus file no less than 690,000,000 pages every year for a routine state function. That does not include all the paper your employer sends to the government, which is many many more pages.

In total the IRS, just to do the basic task of taxation annually, generates billions of pages of information. And that's just the routine functions of one government agency.

On its whole the United States federal government generates tens of trillions of pages of paper every year. There is no place on earth to store that, physically, digitally, or otherwise. By necessity, archives destroy records because they cannot feasibly store everything, and frankly the taxes of Joe from Salt Water Michigan are likely to be of zero historical value anyway, so why would anyone even want to store them? That he had a payroll tax of 4 dollars and 14 cents in the year 1976 is unlikely to matter to anyone at any point in the future and there are better sources of aggregate data for large numbers of people elsewhere so you wouldn't ever need the information as a sample either.

This is a somewhat weak example because the IRS is not an archival institution, but I think it's an effective practical example that people can easily relate to. All records in archival storage are subject to triage. They'll be retained in whole for a time, then weeded down. The weeded down collection would be held for a time and then weeded down again. As time goes on and it become increasingly apparent the records aren't relevant to anyone they are completely destroyed. There's nothing nefarious in the process, even before we go into the absolute mess of bad practices and poor training many archives were in the early 20th century.

Also missing that Country A’s safety standards might well be more or less stringent than Countries B, C and D - and that does not mean anyone is being overly lax, or over strict?

I’m guessing here, hence the question mark! And I suspect no safety standards start at ‘inject it into your Herman Gelmet, see what happens’ type risk?

I think this is apt in this discussion, many people were called tin foil hat conspiracy theorists for saying the current crisis was coming, now here we are and it was also caused by the very people these oft maligned people warned us about.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassandra_(metaphor)

As already covered, just because something is regarded as a Conspiracy Theory, doesn’t mean it’s wrong!

I mean, on average the chances are pretty high that it’s wrong, but it’s far from a universal constant

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
As already covered, just because something is regarded as a Conspiracy Theory, doesn’t mean it’s wrong!

I mean, on average the chances are pretty high that it’s wrong, but it’s far from a universal constant

I agree with you

I think the saying was "its only a conspiracy theory until it isn't"

Historical examples -

Crazy people thought the Earth was round.

They also thought the Earth rotated around the sun and the earth wasn't the center of the universe.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
As already covered, just because something is regarded as a Conspiracy Theory, doesn’t mean it’s wrong!

I mean, on average the chances are pretty high that it’s wrong, but it’s far from a universal constant

I think a clear distinction can be drawn between "the moon landing was fake" and "in hindsight we really should have listened." The later can have evidence and rationales that back up their claims. It's not a conspiracy theory to say "the world is ill prepared for a viral epidemic.' It is a conspiracy to say "the government has purposefully left itself unprepared for a viral epidemic so as to cull the poor from the population."


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Jjohnso11 wrote:
Historical examples - Crazy people thought the Earth was round.

Actually a case of historical myth. The idea sprouted in the Enlightenment, when many scholarly gentlemen viewed previous ages as intellectually backwards and incapable of the great feats of simple geometry and observation based learning.

The Earth's circumference was calculated independently in ancient Egypt, China, Greece, and even the Maya manage to know the Earth was a sphere. There is in fact, no point in time where it was 'crazy' to say the Earth was round. Typical farmers and everyday people probably didn't know, but they also probably didn't care. Too busy trying to grow enough food to pay their taxes and not starve in winter to bother with celestial geometry

Would it be a conspiracy to say the Chinese Government engineered a virus in an attempt to damage capitalism and convert more countries to socialism?

 Jjohnso11 wrote:
Would it be a conspiracy to say the Chinese Government engineered a virus in an attempt to damage capitalism and convert more countries to socialism?

I mean, no, that in itself would not be a conspiracy unless you were to work with some larger organization to propagate the idea online, maybe through the use of dedicated trolls or bots.

it would definitely be a conspiracy THEORY to say that, though

 LordofHats wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
As already covered, just because something is regarded as a Conspiracy Theory, doesn’t mean it’s wrong!

I mean, on average the chances are pretty high that it’s wrong, but it’s far from a universal constant

I think a clear distinction can be drawn between "the moon landing was fake" and "in hindsight we really should have listened." The later can have evidence and rationales that back up their claims. It's not a conspiracy theory to say "the world is ill prepared for a viral epidemic.' It is a conspiracy to say "the government has purposefully left itself unprepared for a viral epidemic so as to cull the poor from the population."


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Jjohnso11 wrote:
Historical examples - Crazy people thought the Earth was round.

Actually a case of historical myth. The idea sprouted in the Enlightenment, when many scholarly gentlemen viewed previous ages as intellectually backwards and incapable of the great feats of simple geometry and observation based learning.

The Earth's circumference was calculated independently in ancient Egypt, China, Greece, and even the Maya manage to know the Earth was a sphere. There is in fact, no point in time where it was 'crazy' to say the Earth was round. Typical farmers and everyday people probably didn't know, but they also probably didn't care. Too busy trying to grow enough food to pay their taxes and not starve in winter to bother with celestial geometry

Depends upon the example.

From my initial ‘maybe I’ll let other do their own searches, these just seem to be confirmation bias for my political leanings’ search, there are various, confirmed examples of a Government (can you tell I’m being very, very careful here!) manufacturing or outright fabricating a ‘Casus Belli’.

Those ones are real. But the trouble with the Conspirasphere, is that one being true is taken as solid evidence that all must therefore be true. And often, that’s the first stumbling block of many conspiracy theories (as we saw earlier. I won’t quote because hopefully peeps will know which post).

It’s also why, true to my own Fortean mindset, I will always remain a Willing Skeptic. Now that doesn’t mean I go so far as to rely on ‘absence of evidence not being evidence of absence’. Because most Conspiracy Theories instead provide ludicrous, poorly applied and deliberately twisted evidence. And that far more fun to play with and pick apart!

Alan Moore had a wonderful point about conspiracy thinking:

“The main thing that I learned about conspiracy theory, is that conspiracy theorists believe in a conspiracy because that is more comforting. The truth of the world is that it is actually chaotic. The truth is that it is not The Iluminati, or The Jewish Banking Conspiracy, or the Gray Alien Theory.

The truth is far more frightening - Nobody is in control.

The world is rudderless.”

Don't forget the Babylonians. IIRC they figured it out too.

I agree its a myth that the planet was discovered to have been a sphere in 1492 by Cristopher Columbus, but to say that Homer, Hesiod, the ancient Israelites, early Egyptians and Meopotamians didn't believe the earth was flat is wrong. Just moving the goal posts.. nothing to see here.

 Jjohnso11 wrote:
I agree its a myth that the planet was discovered to have been a sphere in 1492 by Cristopher Columbus, but to say that Homer, Hesiod, the ancient Israelites, early Egyptians and Meopotamians didn't believe the earth was flat is wrong. Just moving the goal posts.. nothing to see here.

You know that it can be simultaneously true for scholars within those societies to have discovered that the earth was not flat while it was still an incredibly widely held view among the general population, right?

"The Ancient X knew Y" is always a silly way to put things, because obviously what some random peasant or writer or even the head of state believes could be different from what the top scholar believed.

the_scotsman wrote:

 Jjohnso11 wrote:
I agree its a myth that the planet was discovered to have been a sphere in 1492 by Cristopher Columbus, but to say that Homer, Hesiod, the ancient Israelites, early Egyptians and Meopotamians didn't believe the earth was flat is wrong. Just moving the goal posts.. nothing to see here.

You know that it can be simultaneously true for scholars within those societies to have discovered that the earth was not flat while it was still an incredibly widely held view among the general population, right?

"The Ancient X knew Y" is always a silly way to put things, because obviously what some random peasant or writer or even the head of state believes could be different from what the top scholar believed.

Right. I'm agreeing with you. I said I was moving the goal posts to fit the narrative that I started with.

Kinda.

It does go to prove we don’t need to go to space to prove it