On Sun, Apr 6, 2014 at 1:01 AM, meekerdb <meeke...@verizon.net> wrote:
> On 4/5/2014 12:40 PM, LizR wrote: > > On 5 April 2014 23:30, Telmo Menezes <te...@telmomenezes.com> wrote: > >> On Sat, Apr 5, 2014 at 11:47 AM, LizR <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. > Or prohibition, or the implementation of anti-constitutional total surveillance, or starting wars under false pretences, or using government agencies like the IRS to harass political opponents, or trying to silence journalists. We have compelling evidence that governments have been engaging in all of these types of conspiracy very recently, and they mach your definition. So my point is that it is not reasonable to dismiss the possibility of a conspiracy by government actors just on the grounds of it being a "conspiracy theory". We need more to decide one way or the other. Telmo. > 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 > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Everything List" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. 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