List conspiracy theories here.

Sara Robinson, who've I've linked to for years on here, wrote a couple of bits using Voodoo Histories to help explain why the hell the weirder Obama conspiracies are floating around now, like he blew up the Gulf oilwell to get the energy bill passed, that sorta thing.

...Aaronovitch defines a conspiracy theory as any story that assumes that things happen due to the deliberate, covert actions of powerful others -- even when the preponderance of evidence points to the conclusion that the events were almost certainly accidental and unintended.

Unfortunately, the right wing doesn't hold the franchise on conspiracy theories -- a lot of progressives are quite ready to believe all manner of sordid things about the Bush regime, for example. But as Dr. Robert Altemeyer observed, there are distinctively conservative habits of mind (suspicion, fear of strangers, fear of change, faith in strong leaders, paranoia) that do seem to lend themselves to conspiracy thinking. It's no surprise we're seeing it out of them -- but we also need to be more acutely aware that we're hardly immune to the siren song of crazy paranoia, either.

Why do people believe this stuff? It turns out that it's a complicated issue, with several answers. Some of those answers have to do with the internal state of the people who believe them; others have to do with the cultural and political environment they're trying to navigate. This post covers some of the external factors that create a climate that predisposes people to suspend their judgment and believe the worst. Next week, I'll follow up with a second post about what goes on inside people's heads that untethers them from reason just far enough to be swept away by their fears...

annnd the followup post to that.

...The bottom line on why we believe conspiracy theories is this: We're terrified of admitting that nobody is really in control. It's a lot more comforting to think that *somebody* engineered a crisis than to reckon with the horrible, sickening fact that *nobody* did.

Most humans don't deal at all well with the cruel, capricious randomness of fate. Shit happens -- and it often happens for absolutely no meaningful reason at all. That thought makes people crazy with terror, so we make up entities to blame -- God, Satan, the Freemasons, the CIA, or the All-Seeing Eye of Sauron. It's far easier to blame it all on imaginary Lizard People from another planet than have to deal with the bald fact that millions of lives have been upended (or just ended) by an event -- and yet there is simply is nobody out there to blame for it.

As my friend Bob Mackey puts it: "The alternative is a universe that is controlled by absolutely nobody. There is no control, no security, no Men in Black or Black Helicopters or Black Hussein Presidents to frighten the God-fearing upright citizens." In the end, conspiracy theories are simply stories we tell to fill the blackness of the existential void.

Bob also reminds us to "Never confuse a conspiracy with a massive cluster f**k." The bare truth is: most conspiracies start with massive clusterfucks. And this brings us back full circle to where this series started last week -- with the gusher in the Gulf, which is much easier to explain as the massive clusterfuck the evidence tells us it is than it is to attribute any of it to malice or venality on the part of President Obama...

What surprised me most in that book is learning most conspiracy theory peeps are middle class peeps w/college degrees.

Oh yeah; it's like if you think you're smart & educated, you'll naturally gravitate to things that will make you think you're smarter. "Hey man, get hep to the REAL truth." You'll have one up on all the suckers for being able to see the lever-pulling behind-the-scenes. Not an especially admirable trait, but humans ain't too admirable.

conspiracies are real. it's just that the successful ones you never learn about...unless they want you to.

my friend does this one on the Denver Airport (he's not a believer, just finds all this weird shit interesting): http://diaconspiracyfiles.wordpress.com/

"Oh yeah; it's like if you think you're smart & educated, you'll naturally gravitate to things that will make you think you're smarter. "Hey man, get hep to the REAL truth." You'll have one up on all the suckers for being able to see the lever-pulling behind-the-scenes."

The flipside of this is true, too. Many other people like to pat themselves on the back for seeing through the illusions of "crazy" people.

I should know!

Truth is we're all crazy. We're all crazy.

On the contrary, believing in one or more conspiracy theories seems to be compulsory in modern society, with people treating you as if you were naive if you don't.

it IS naive not to believe in one or two. after being involved in a creepy very secretive cult for several months i have firsthand experience with this. it may not be illluminati or spacemen, but there's weird shit going on everywhere!

But the real weird shit that goes on is very different from the fake weird shit that people make up. The fake stuff reads like fiction--they have morals and endings where everything gets resolved and other stuff that very, very rarely happens in real life.

Conspiracy Theorists = terrorists

Secrecy surrounding counter-terrorism operations is fuelling mistrust of authorities, a study by independent think tank Demos suggests.

It urges the government and secret services to be more open to stop extremist groups using conspiracy theories to discredit them.

A Demos spokesman said: "Less-secret services could make Britain safer."

The study calls for greater communication with trusted community leaders and individuals.

The report - entitled the Power of Unreason - says groups use conspiracy theories to recruit and radicalise people to commit acts of violence.

An example of one such theory is that the bombings in New York and London, on 11 September 2001 and 7 July 2005 respectively, were "inside jobs" carried out by authorities in the US and UK.

Other theories highlighted were that "freemasons control the world economy through manipulation of paper currency", that the UK government is "consciously seeking to destroy Islam" and that a "conspiracy between the Japanese government, the US, and the Jews existed to gain world domination".

The study claims such theories are frequently adopted by extremist groups to demonise outsiders, discredit moderates and push them in a more extreme and sometimes violent direction.

The report's authors made a number of recommendations concerning the counter-terrorism work carried out by MI5, MI6 and GCHQ and the government.

The publication of all National Security Council annual reports, including outlining the risks to national security and the current terrorist threat, was among their suggestions aimed at improving transparency.

"Conspiracy Theorists = terrorists"

most conspiracy theorists are not even violent, let alone terrorists! you only feed their persecution complex when you tar them all with the same brush.

"reasonable" people can be just as dismissive and prejudiced as the "crazies".

well yes. but reasonable people are much less dismissive and prejudiced than the crazies.

http://wfmu.org/playlists/DX

Dave Emory (who I thought I linked to on this previously but must've been another thread) does radio shows about all kinds of crazy things, from actual covert government operations to weird UFO stories. Two years ago he had a series of shows about Sarah Palin's links with secessionist and white power groups, and one of his pet conspiracies is that Ronald Reagan let an ex-Nazi pick all his cabinet members and that basically after WWII Nazis have infiltrated American politics. There's some fictional book that he says basically describes what has happened FOR REAL, but I can't find the name of it...

used to listen to emory for lols, one time during a fundraiser or something someone asked him about his love life and he made some half-hearted excuse about his research taking up all his time, could imagine him spending all his time on a blind date detailing the bush family/nazi connection

I really like the tone of his broadcasts. He's not screaming at you like 90% of political pundits, he's laying out these theories and hypotheses as if they were 100% valid facts, and his faith in it all comes through in his voice. It's pretty great.

http://jalopnik.com/5662917/car+eating-rabbits-invade-denver-airport

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJB2Woe5zeQ&feature=player_embedded#!

that one's a doozy

clear your schedules guys

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74lVrwA8K5g&feature=channel

she also has an interesting business opportunity at 5:00

at least the party won't have to worry about running out of assorted nuts

This story is setting off lots of conspiracy trip wires

A former Army officer and longtime government and business consultant who played a key role 30 years ago in erecting the Vietnam Veterans Memorial was found dead in a Delaware landfill Friday in what police said was a homicide.

John P. Wheeler III, 66, a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point whose civilian career included stints at the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Pentagon and an array of nonprofit organizations, had not been dead for long when his body was found in a Wilmington dump, police said.

Authorities, who publicly identified the body Monday, would not say how Wheeler died, but they said an autopsy concluded that the death was a homicide.

Wheeler, who had been working for a McLean company that does computer-related research and development for government agencies, was the first chairman of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund, serving from 1979 to 1989.

.....

Wheeler had been working since March 2009 as a consultant at the nonprofit Mitre Corp. in McLean, company spokeswoman Jennifer J. Shearman said. She said the company does information technology work for several federal agencies, including the Defense and Homeland Security departments, but she did not know what type of work Wheeler did.

"He was a complicated man of very intense (and sometimes changeable) friendships, passions and causes," one of his longtime friends, journalist James Fallows of the Atlantic, wrote on the magazine's Web site Monday.

...and it's already been linked to the weird bird deaths in Arkansas and Louisiana. Also, why not throw in manufactured earthquakes while you're at it. (obv. use multiple grains of salt w.r.t. site)

A shocking report prepared for Prime Minister Putin by the Foreign Military Intelligence Directorate (GRU) states that one of the United States top experts in biological and chemical weapons was brutally murdered after he threatened to expose a US Military test of poison gas that killed hundreds of thousands of animals in Arkansas this past week.

According to this report, John P. Wheeler III, Special Assistant to the Secretary of the Air Force, Washington, D.C. from 2005-2008, when he became the Special Assistant to the Acting Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Installations, Logistics and Environment, was found brutally murdered and dumped in a landfill, and as we can read as reported by Fox News:
“Delaware Police are investigating the apparent murder of a former Bush official who also championed the fund-raising effort to build the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the Mall in Washington, D.C. Wheeler’s body was found in Wilmington on Friday.

According to police, somebody initially reported that the body was dumped out of a refuse truck, which would have been coming from Newark, onto the landfill. Newark Police spokesman Lt. Mark Farrall told Fox News that nobody had reported Wheeler missing before he was found.

The Wilmington News Journal reported that Wheeler was last seen riding an Amtrak train from Washington to Wilmington, Del., last Tuesday.”

Wheeler’s military career included writing one of the most important manuals on the effectiveness of biological and chemical weapons which led to his being hired in 2009 as a consultant to the Mitre Corporation, whose aviation system development department, the GRU reports, is at the forefront of creating the computer command and control systems used by the US Air Force in their fleet of aerial spraying planes.

These aerial spraying planes, this report continues, are based at the Little Rock Air Force Base in Arkansas that over the past few months have been involved with ‘test dispersants’ of poisonous gasses in the Afghanistan War Theater using chemical weapons stocks obtained from Iraq and held at the Pine Bluff Arsenal, also located in Arkansas.

Important to note about the Pine Bluff Arsenal, which calls itself “America’s Arsenal”, is that it is one of the World’s most specialized munitions and chemical-biological defense products and services bases which Russia had previously accused of not fully reporting the chemical agents removed from Iraq, between 2003 and 2008, and taken to the US for testing and subsequent destruction.

According to this report, the US relocated from Iraq to the Pine Bluff Arsenal an estimated 63,000 metric tonnes of the poisonous gas Phosgene that is described as one of the most feared chemical weapons ever used due to its ability to literally cause the lungs and respiratory system to explode.

Nearly immediately after Russia accused the US this past summer of not fully destroying Iraq’s Phosgene poisonous gas stockpile the Pine Bluff Arsenal began an ‘accelerated’ disposal programme injecting it deep into the ground in central Arkansas, but which, unfortunately, since this past September, has caused over 500 minor earthquakes to occur raising the concerns of their local population.

I am such a sucker for D-land. It never fails to bring out the child in me and delight me. Anyone else share this feeling?

― Wiggy Woo, Tuesday, December 30, 2008 3:36 AM (2 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

― chairfuckers union (Whiney G. Weingarten), Sunday, May 8, 2011 2:27 PM (7 hours ago) Bookmark

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/9627011/chin_scratch.gif

I don't recall ever seeing them in the same room together.

I've recently met a bunch of people who honestly believe conspiracy theories its pretty disheartening abt the world

they're like not old either

in bill james' "popular crime" book, he goes through the various kennedy assassination theories and dismisses them, but then says there is one theory that he has come to believe in. basically in this theory, oswald was acting alone, did shoot two shots at kennedy, but these shots missed. the shot that killed kennedy was accidentally fired by a secret service agent in the car behind kennedy's in the procession, who basically panicked when he heard oswald's shots, pulled his gun and accidentally fired. james thinks only a few people (possibly not even the secret service agent) realized what happened and covered it up to protect the secret service as an agency, and goes through all the ballistics stuff for why he came to believe this theory.

Mortal Error: The Shot That Killed JFK (1992) by Bonar Menninger (ISBN 0-312-08074-3) alleges that while Oswald did attempt to assassinate JFK and did succeed in wounding him, the fatal shot was accidentally fired by Secret Service agent George Hickey, who was riding in the Secret Service follow-up car directly behind the Presidential Limousine. The theory alleges that after the first two shots were fired the motorcade sped up while Hickey was attempting to respond to Oswald's shots and he lost his balance and accidentally pulled the trigger of his AR-15 and shot JFK. Hickey's testimony says otherwise: "At the end of the last report (shot) I reached to the bottom of the car and picked up the AR 15 rifle, cocked and loaded it, and turned to the rear." (italics added).[128] George Hickey sued Menninger in April 1995 for what he had written in Mortal Error. The case was dismissed as its statute of limitations had run out.

mainly just think it's interesting because bill james says he believes it and because it's a more "credible" conspiracy theory that wouldn't require as big of a coverup. don't believe it's true though.

i wonder if paranoid conspiracy theorists are gaining in number. i unexpectedly ran into them online on 2 occasions not too long ago when they were fervently spamming their beliefs @ groups of people interested in the global movement for social justice that is going on... i was shocked by the antisemitism most of them seemed to have in common.

It's the historic template for all conspiracy theories I guess - hard to avoid those genre trails even when you're applying the structures to something new. In some ways conspiracy theory could be said to have designed itself round anti-semitism. Millennial fear and perceptions of hidden power structures.

last post before mysyerious crash...

COINCIDENCE?

i think not.

ILX mods are covering for the sham nation of israel's quest for global domination

Paul Is Dead ftw

the real cover-up there was that it was ringo done it

Couple days ago I discovered that my old high school physics teacher is a 9/11 truther: http://screwloosechange.blogspot.com/2009/04/when-will-david-chandler-fix-his-errors.html

have we done Libor yet?
a little bit was posted on the FB thread, which prompted me to google a little more.
get your string diagrams ready, this one's a doozy.

http://www.examiner.com/article/libor-scandal-grows-as-the-fathers-of-two-mass-murderers-were-to-testify

O_o

The LIBOR thing doesn't even make sense in conspiracy logic... "These dudes know too much about some money thing so lets -- mind control their kids into being spree killers! Yes, its perfect... almost ~too perfect~..." IDGI, and I can understand the weird leap-of-faith loosely-connected threads of most conspiracy theory-type thinking.

Also it's super boring. It's got nothing on the secret nazi shadow government in league with reptilian inter-dimensional aliens that controls the world from the DIA. (did you ever notice that the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Denver International Airport have the same initials???? hmmmmmmmm)

I mean, the people who would believe this "LIBOR connection" thing already likely believe that the powers that be can manipulate the weather with HAARP and beam microwave thoughts into peoples heads and possibly have a hi-tech base/lab set up on the dark side of the moon... so you'd think covering up a financial scandal would be child's play that doesn't require mass murder.

OTOH I can totally understand senseless tragedies causing already paranoid people to devise conspiracy-laden reasons for their occurrence. Many people are laying the blame on the shoulders of the NRA, on violent media, poor mental healthcare in the US, etc... everyone creates a narrative of their own to explain things that don't make sense - like killing 20 children in cold blood. Conspiracy peeps gonna make it about conspiracy stuff. Just like the gun nuts are gonna say "the teachers should've been armed!" and the Tipper Gore's of the world are gonna say "black ops 2 trains children to murder!" and so on...

The fringier reactions to events like this are always gonna seem disgusting and callous to more level-headed people, but IMO they are coming from the same impulse in other people's minds that go "fuck, maybe we should ban handguns or make ammo really expensive or something!"

haha yeah it's TOTALLY boring. that's what I find so funny about it. "We can now link Aurora and Sandy Hook shootings to...dun dun DUN... LIBOR!" Uhh. Okay. and? They 'didn't' commit random massaces of innocent people because their fathers were...what? So the government did this why? I seriously don't even get what these guys even talking about.

It's like the least sexy conspiracy theory ever.

That's what they WANT you to believe!

lol

http://partners.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/20001119mag-scarry.html

In academic circles, this wide-eyed woman with a girlish voice and unruly blond locks is mostly known for her unflinching investigations of war, torture and pain. These are grim and very unlikely subjects for a Harvard English professor. But Scarry, 54, has long tested the boundaries of literary criticism, devoting the same analytical energies to reading a naval weapons manual as she does to reading Thomas Hardy. She has ventured even further afield with her current obsession: airplane crashes. This latest fixation has led her outside the ivory tower and into the fray of public debate.

Three years ago, during a characteristic foray into technical arcana -- this time, military antennas - Scarry stumbled on a startling piece of information. She came across an article explaining how the United States Air Force had been losing Black Hawk helicopters because of electromagnetic interference (EMI) from military planes. (EMI occurs when the energy emitted by one electrical device -- ranging in power from a cell phone to the radar on a military plane -- interferes with the performance of another.) Immediately, Scarry says, she thought of T.W.A. Flight 800, whose mysterious explosion off the tip of Long Island on July 17, 1996, continued to elude federal aviation authorities' attempts to explain it. Could EMI from military ships and planes in the vicinity of T.W.A. Flight 800 have taken down the plane?

A mere conspiracy theorist might have zapped his conjecture straight to Matt Drudge. Scarry's approach was far more methodical. She spent weeks in the library, poring over government documents, military journals, newspaper reports and engineering texts, slowly gathering evidence. Ultimately convinced that the EMI explanation was a reasonable possibility, Scarry in April 1998 published her findings in The New York Review of Books, a prestigious but decidedly literary journal.

It was an unlikely forum for a scientific expose. To make sure the authorities didn't miss her dense, 20,000-word essay -- sandwiched between a review of a book on 18th-century culture and an exchange on Northern Ireland -- she sent a copy to James Hall, chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board. The agency eventually allocated several hundred thousand dollars for fresh research into EMI. What's more, Scarry's work was cited on the first page of a NASA study of EMI commissioned by T.W.A. 800 investigators.

These were remarkable coups for an English professor who had no formal training in aviation science and who had never been near a crash site. Anyone else might have stopped there, but Scarry wasn't through. This fall, she published two more articles in The New York Review, expanding her EMI hypothesis to include Swissair Flight 111, which went down near Nova Scotia after an electrical fire in September 1998, and EgyptAir Flight 990, whose fatal plunge into the Atlantic near Nantucket last October was caused, many experts believe, by a co-pilot on a suicide mission.

As an explanation for any of these plane crashes -- let alone all three -- Scarry's theory is generally considered extremely unlikely. (Ultimately, the N.T.S.B. ruled out EMI as a factor in the T.W.A. disaster.) But more interesting than whether she turns out to be right or wrong is the intellectual temperament that led Scarry to such unliterary pursuits in the first place. What is an English professor doing writing technical articles on airplane crashes? The answer, it turns out, owes nothing to a morbid streak; in fact, Scarry seems a resolutely cheerful person. Nor does it seem to be fueled by a private paranoia; despite her work on air disasters, she's a comfortable flier. Rather, it has to do with an almost alarmingly well-developed sense of civic duty. Let other literary critics debate T.S. Eliot's irony and Jane Austen's ambivalence about marriage. Scarry has grander aims for literary criticism. She wants to use it to solve social problems and save lives.

"There is nothing about being an English professor that exempts you from the normal obligations of citizenship," she says firmly. "In fact, you have an increased obligation, because you know how to do research."

Fake plastic snow the govt is trying to poison you wake up sheeple http://t.co/ecMgMaCLCG

Yep i heard about that last week. The snow in Atlanta was really lame snow btw.

It is more comforting to think the gov't can control the weather than the water supply is getting royally poisoned by utility companies.

sublimation shockah

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLfo49UwPEs

I only just learned about this one today, interested parties please share your knowledge of this!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bohemian_Grove

There's a good chapter in Jon Ronson's book Them about it, old rich white guys reliving frat lifestyle