On 4/5/2014 12:40 PM, LizR wrote:
On 5 April 2014 23:30, Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.com
<mailto:te...@telmomenezes.com>> wrote:
On Sat, Apr 5, 2014 at 11:47 AM, LizR <lizj...@gmail.com
<mailto:lizj...@gmail.com>>
wrote:
That doesn't narrow it down too much.
Je m'accuse. I was one of them.
My point was that conspiracy theories, in the sense of power elites secretly
cooperating to further their own interests against the interests of the
majority are
not, unfortunately, unusual events in History. We know of countless
examples of this
happening in the past. I think it requires some magical thinking to assume
that this
type of behaviour is absent from our own times.
I further pointed out that broadly discrediting any hypothesis that some
elites
might be conspiring against the common good, in broad strokes, seems to
benefit
precisely the ones in power. Furthermore, thanks to Snowden, we now have
strong
evidence of a large-scale conspiracy by western governments that I would
not believe
one year ago. In this case I'm referring to the secret implementation of
global and
total surveillance, with our tax money, by the people we elected, to spy on
us,
infringing on constitutions.
I can't help but notice the very common rhetorical trick of using the nutty
conspiracy theories (UFOs, the Illuminati, fake moon landing, etc.) to
discredit the
much more mundane and reasonable suspicions of elites abusing their power.
The paper
you cite in this thread uses that trick too.
This broad denial of the existence of conspiracies is silly, if you think
about it.
The official explanation for 9/11 is a conspiracy theory: some religious
arab
fundamentalists conspired to create a global network of terrorist cells
with the
objective of attacking western civilisation. They hijacked planes and sent
them into
buildings and so on. If you don't believe in this explanation, you are then
forced
to believe in some other conspiracy.
Of course conspiracies exist. The current denial of this quite obvious fact
feels
Orwellian, to be honest.
OK, it seems likely that conspiracies exist, however it seems unlikely that the IPCC is
part of one of them (I've lost track of whether you're claiming this or not, so please
let me know) because the ruling interests are in favour of business as usual - i.e.
there is almost certainly a conspiracy to discredit the science. The fact that they will
use the idea of conspiracy theories to do this is indeed Orwellian, not to mention ironic.
How does the paper use this trick?
I think Telmo makes conspiracies ubiquitous by calling any kind of cooperative effort
which is not publicized a "conspiracy" - like Eisenhower's conspiracy to invade France.
Legally a conspiracy is planning and preparation by two or more people to commit a crime.
So most of what rich and powerful people do to keep themselves rich and powerful at the
expense of others is not legally a conspiracy because there's no crime - the rich and
powerful use laws, not break them. But in common parlance a conspiracy *theory* refers to
some group doing something nefarious while pretending to do something benign, and
especially something contrary to their stated goals, e.g. Catholic clergy conspiring to
abuse children. It doesn't even have to be illegal, e.g. tobacco companies conspiring to
obfuscate scientific evidence that smoking caused lung cancer. It's not some group doing
a bad thing that you might well expect them to do - like muslim fanatics crashing an airliner.
Brent
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