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Why conspiracy theories aren’t harmless fun

dudalb said:
Haig was indeed scapegoated for the horrendous British casualaties. And Lloyd George was one of the biggest scapegoaters,blaming Hiag for just about everything that went wrong n the war,while absoslving himself as PM of any respoinsibility.
Haig was not a brilliant general by any reach of the mind, but the he was not the total nicommpoop of popular image (the film "OH,What A Lovely War" being a good example).An idiot would not have given the support and resources to Tanks that Haig did
I think Haig was too slow to relize when an offensive had failed and should have called off both the Somme and Paschaendael much earlier. Haig always felt the ,in the case of the Somme, he had to start the offensive long before he was really ready to relieve the pressure on the French at Verdun;that might be excuse making but should be taken into consideration.
One thing which fascinates me is why ,in 1917 the French Army's morale pretty much collapased with the Mutinys of 1917 but nothing close to that ever happened to the British armies,despite similiar casualty levels.
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French tradition I am given to understand!!!
 
Gawdzilla Sama said:
If you read the thread you'd know that there's a distinction between "conspiracies" and "conspiracy theories." We are NOT all conspiracy theorist, some of us are sane.
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The "difference" is crystal clear.

If I believe it, it's a conspiracy. If someone else believes it, it's a conspiracy theory.

It really is that simple.
 
To illustrate the difference between "conspiracy" and "conspiracy theory":

About 20 years ago I read about a man who called police to report a burglary. He claimed that someone broke into his house, stole the hard drive from his computer, and replaced it with a less efficient one. The much simpler idea that he accidentally downloaded some malware which made his hard drive work less efficiently, never occurred to this guy. Instead of this simple explanation, he came up with a "burglary theory", inventing an impossibly considerate burglar who steals hard drives and leaves slightly cheaper ones behind.

Yes, burglaries happen. When your window is broken and your computer is missing, burglary is a reasonable theory. When your hard drive is not working quite they way you expect, burglary is NOT a reasonable theory.

Same with any conspiracy theory. Yes, conspiracies exist. Yes, law enforcement agencies sometimes find them, just like burglaries, and convictions result. No conviction ever resulted from an overly complicated theory that tried to explain an event which had a much simpler explanation.
 
Gawdzilla Sama said:
I see you didn't read the thread. I also see that you're a CTer. That was quite a surprise. :rolleyes:
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I already told you that I read the thread. And yes, I am a CT, just like you are. I believe there have been thousands of conspiracies, just like you do.

A conspiracy is a crime involving more than a single perp. One happens every minute or two.

Sadly, some people misuse the term when dealing with theories that they don't agree with. Instead of pretending that conspiracies are the domain of lunatics, what is wrong with addressing the facts and evidence - objectively and honestly?
 
Mark6 said:
To illustrate the difference between "conspiracy" and "conspiracy theory":

About 20 years ago I read about a man who called police to report a burglary. He claimed that someone broke into his house, stole the hard drive from his computer, and replaced it with a less efficient one. The much simpler idea that he accidentally downloaded some malware which made his hard drive work less efficiently, never occurred to this guy. Instead of this simple explanation, he came up with a "burglary theory", inventing an impossibly considerate burglar who steals hard drives and leaves slightly cheaper ones behind.

Yes, burglaries happen. When your window is broken and your computer is missing, burglary is a reasonable theory. When your hard drive is not working quite they way you expect, burglary is NOT a reasonable theory.

Same with any conspiracy theory. Yes, conspiracies exist. Yes, law enforcement agencies sometimes find them, just like burglaries, and convictions result. No conviction ever resulted from an overly complicated theory that tried to explain an event which had a much simpler explanation.
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Well, first of all, this case was not a conspiracy, since this guy apparently, never claimed that more than one burglar was involved.

It sounds pretty silly however, since a burglar would undoubtedly have taken the whole computer, or at the very least, wouldn't have replaced the hard drive.

You are confusing flaky thinking with "conspiracy theories". This wasn't a conspiracy theory and even if the guy claimed there were others involved, the flaw would have had nothing to do with whether or not it was a conspiracy.

But let's consider a similar scenario. Three burglars break in and actually steal the guy's computer. That really would have been a conspiracy.

It's not about whether a concept is a "conspiracy" or not. It's about whether it was correct. And the ONLY way that can be determined is by analyzing the facts and evidence.
 
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Hmmm, how long will it be before Robert tries to turn this in a discussion of his JFK assassination ideas?
 
Robert Harris said:
You are confusing flaky thinking with "conspiracy theories".
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No. The difference between a conspiracy and a conspiracy theory is the flaky thinking. If it's more comfortable for you to recast the story so that there was more than one burglar, then maybe you'll get the intended point. The point the story was trying to illustrate was not how many people were involved, but how the accuser in the story arrived at his theory. That same method is evident in other conspiracy theories.
 
Conspiracy theorist are intent on attacking a person or group. This is why they're impervious to logic and reason, ignoring fatal flaws to their "theories". They just want to get the accusations, slander, and libel "out there" in the hope that some of it will stick.
 
May be referring to the kamikazeWP attacks, in particular the final phase in April through June 1945, which was code-named kikusui ("floating chrysanthemums").
 
grmcdorman said:
May be referring to the kamikazeWP attacks, in particular the final phase in April through June 1945, which was code-named kikusui ("floating chrysanthemums").
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Check ! Yeah I missed spelled it when checking on it in google and got nothing - I should have known that!
 
Robert Harris said:
Well, first of all, this case was not a conspiracy, since this guy apparently, never claimed that more than one burglar was involved.

It sounds pretty silly however, since a burglar would undoubtedly have taken the whole computer, or at the very least, wouldn't have replaced the hard drive.

You are confusing flaky thinking with "conspiracy theories". This wasn't a conspiracy theory and even if the guy claimed there were others involved, the flaw would have had nothing to do with whether or not it was a conspiracy.
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Are you being deliberately dense? Nowhere did I accuse the "hard drive guy" of being a conspiracy theorist. Rather, it is an analogy -- his ridiculous "burglary theory" bears exact same relationship to real burglaries, that conspiracy theories bear to real conspiracies.

In both cases an absurdly complicated explanation for some event is theorized, when a much simpler explanation (which does not involve either burglars or conspirators) suffices. Except that the simpler explanation -- "I really downloaded a computer virus!", "Yes, NASA really did land on the Moon", -- is not as appealing to the theorist.
 
Mark6 said:
Are you being deliberately dense? Nowhere did I accuse the "hard drive guy" of being a conspiracy theorist. Rather, it is an analogy -- his ridiculous "burglary theory" bears exact same relationship to real burglaries, that conspiracy theories bear to real conspiracies.

In both cases an absurdly complicated explanation for some event is theorized, when a much simpler explanation (which does not involve either burglars or conspirators) suffices. Except that the simpler explanation -- "I really downloaded a computer virus!", "Yes, NASA really did land on the Moon", -- is not as appealing to the theorist.
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...and one that blames mysterious others for his trouble instead of accepting he made a mistake by either downloading it or not having sufficient virus protection.
 
Mark6 said:
Are you being deliberately dense? Nowhere did I accuse the "hard drive guy" of being a conspiracy theorist. Rather, it is an analogy -- his ridiculous "burglary theory" bears exact same relationship to real burglaries, that conspiracy theories bear to real conspiracies.

In both cases an absurdly complicated explanation for some event is theorized, when a much simpler explanation (which does not involve either burglars or conspirators) suffices. Except that the simpler explanation -- "I really downloaded a computer virus!", "Yes, NASA really did land on the Moon", -- is not as appealing to the theorist.
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Invoking a straw man argument (or other logical fallacy) to rebut your point is a strong indicator of a Conspiracy theorist at work. It makes it sound like they have an actual rebuttal argument when all they are really doing is deflecting your point and making one of their own.

Hank
 
Just to be absolutely clear. There may well be many proven conspiracies, and many theories about those conspiracies. But those are not the Conspiracy Theories we use capital letters for.

You will notice a theory about how known terrorists conspired to fly jets into buildings is a conspiracy theory. Deoderising aerosol lasers destroying those same buildings would be a Conspiracy Theory.
 
Tomtomkent said:
Just to be absolutely clear. There may well be many proven conspiracies, and many theories about those conspiracies. But those are not the Conspiracy Theories we use capital letters for.

You will notice a theory about how known terrorists conspired to fly jets into buildings is a conspiracy theory. Deoderising aerosol lasers destroying those same buildings would be a Conspiracy Theory.
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"Conspiracy theory" seems like a loaded term, but Michael Wood and others have shown that in practice the label has little effect on whether third parties actually believe the claims or not. Hence the notion that calling something a "conspiracy theory" is a ploy to squelch dissent doesn't seem to have any empirical justification. But what Wood et al. have discovered is that the proponents of these theories react strongly to the label. They vehemently don't want to be called "conspiracy theorists."

Conversely defusing that displeasure with "Everyone is a conspiracy theorist" similarly has little scientific foundation. Psychologists have developed and validated the General Conspiracy Beliefs psychometric, which is shown to be both stable and predictive. More specifically, it has been shown to measure the degree of conspiracist ideation and to contribute toward the prospective characterization of conspiracism as a belief system in and of itself. "Everyone is a conspiracy theorist," therefore has validity only in the meaningless sense that everyone whom the GCB measures will fall somewhere along the spectrum of its metric. That's entirely different than noting that someone who scores high on the scale is provably more apt to form and hold beliefs on the basis of conspiracy-style thinking, whereas someone who scores low is more apt to engage in critical analysis. There is a scientific basis for calling some people conspiracy theorists, and others not.

A proven conspiracy is not at all the same as a conspiracy theory. The latter has a definition among psychologists and speaks directly to the "flaky thinking" meme. A conspiracy theory is "the unnecessary assumption of conspiracy when other explanations are more probable" (David Aaronovitch, Voodoo Histories). Specifically the psychologists' definition requires a comparative judgment among all contenders. This clashes violently with the conspiracy theorists' typical practice of first dismissing the conventional explanation categorically, and only thereafter looking at the remaining alternatives.
 
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