'Conspiraloons' in the ascendancy?

[Sgt Howie]

Is that what's happening though? Or is it that a bunch of alienated citizens are latching on to some vaguely plausible sounding, easily digested, and in some ways thrillingly exciting ('We know what's *really* going on') alternative interpretations of the modern world, some of which are coming from the right.

The stoners tend to drop out somewhere in between spotting the implicit and explicit racism.

 

[elbows]

Another reason it attracts certain shades of right-wingers is because it fills a gap that was previously occupied by paranoia about communists and the soviet union during the cold war.

 

[existentialist]

The Cyclops Fuhrer himself.

Oh, right. So what's this about his grandad?

 

[taffboy gwyrdd]

Oh, right. So what's this about his grandad?

His father. Long standing and high up in the masons.

 

[existentialist]

His father. Long standing and high up in the masons.

You're speaking in riddles. I've had two glasses of red (Lidl, boxed - I shouldn't bother, if I were you) and my brane is racked by tooth pain and rosacea. I have managed to figure out that NG the Cyclops Fuehrer is Nick Griffin (ithangyew *bows*), but WTF does what his dad does in his spare time have to do with the price of fish?

My missus-to-be's matron of honour's husband is, by common repute, both long standing (fnar) AND high up in the masons, but I still call him Harry and spit in his beer.

 

[Combustible]

There is clearly quite a strong authoritarian streak amongst many conspiracy theorists. You certainly get the impression that despite their protestations to the contrary they take secret comfort from the fact that the world is not chaotic and unpredictable but everything is under the control of the NWO/Lizards. However maleovent they might appear to be they will not let the world slide into total chaos which would be their worst fear.

 

[existentialist]

There is clearly quite a strong authoritarian streak amongst many conspiracy theorists. You certainly get the impression that despite their protestations to the contrary they take secret comfort from the fact that the world is not chaotic and unpredictable but everything is under the control of the NWO/Lizards. However maleovent they might appear to be they will not let the world slide into total chaos which would be their worst fear.

What I don't get is that they're well big on this " warning, the New World Order is taking over", but whenever you say "Nooooo! What shall I do! Here, I have my own AK47 and bullets and everything!!!1!!!", all they ever say is "psssst watch this interminable sequence of 10 minute YouTube clips, and don't tell anyone I told you".

As if some overarching government conspiracy, propped up with all the resources of the most powerful nations in the world - plus the Illuminati and assorted plenipotentiary space aliens - somehow has managed to fall victim to a bunch of blowhards on the Internet, who have been able to spout this garbage with impunity while organisations whose capacity for causing sudden and totally deniable death would leave even Uncle Joe Stalin's eyes watering conspicuously fail to catch, silence or "disappear" a single one of them, or any of their "useful idiots".

If credulity wasn't stretched enough by the plots they're "uncovering", it certainly is by the implausibility of their continued survival...

 

[Bernie Gunther]

<snip> If credulity wasn't stretched enough by the plots they're "uncovering", it certainly is by the implausibility of their continued survival...

Well, one way to look at this is that they're enormously useful to people who are actively pursuing real conspiracies.

This thought hit me one day when I was reading about the US stealth fighter. It was developed in the deep black, even to the point where it was operational in squadron strength before Reagan finally announced it. Some US military planners were apparently scared that the Soviets might be provoked into a first strike if they knew the US was developing planes that could breeze through their air defence network like it wasn't there. So the need for secrecy was intense.

They developed the plane at the air base which is home to Area 51, near Roswell New Mexico

By an odd coincidence, they were doing this around the time all those alien autopsy videos appeared.

What do you think happened to all the stories about funny looking aircraft that didn't show up on radar?

 

[kyser_soze]

By an odd coincidence, they were doing this around the time all those alien autopsy videos appeared.

You sure about that? The B2 and F-117 were both developed and went into active service in the 1970s/early 80s, and I'm pretty sure that the alien autopsy video stuff didn't surface until the early 90s...

*yup, according to Wiki the 'footage' was first screened in 1995. By this time Roswell were practically doing guided tours to the land around A51 to gain views of the Skunnkworks...altho the 1990s were the period when Project Aurora was being developed (before possibly being cancelled - again, blacker than black build project, altho it was carried out under the relatively declassified umbrella of FALCON (Force Application and Launch from Continental United States...)

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Bob Lazar's 'reverse engineering a saucer' stories, surfaced the year after the F-117 was announced and the Santelli 'Alien Autopsy' videos, as you rightly say, appeared a few years after that, but still ...

Rather than acknowledgeing the existence of the top-secret flights or saying nothing about them publicly, the Air Force decided to put out false cover stories, the C.I.A. study says. For instance, unusual observations that were actually spy flights were attributed to atmospheric phenomena like ice crystals and temperature inversions.

''Over half of all U.F.O. reports from the late 1950's through the 1960's were accounted for by manned reconnaissance flights'' over the United States, the C.I.A. study says. ''This led the Air Force to make misleading and deceptive statements to the public in order to allay public fears and to protect an extraordinarily sensitive national security project.''

The study, ''C.I.A.'s Role in the Study of U.F.O.'s. 1947-90,'' was written by Gerald K. Haines and appears in Studies of Intelligence, a secret Central Intelligence Agency journal. Five years ago, the agency began releasing unclassified versions of the journal yearly. The 1997 edition, with the study on unidentified objects, is at http://www.odci. ogv/csi/studies/97unclas/ on the World Wide Web.

http://www.nytimes.com/1997/08/03/us/cia-admits-government-lied-about-ufo-sightings.html

The F-117 was announced in 1988, having been in development since the mid 70's.

In the late 70's UFO buffs became enthused about an alleged 'saucer crash' back in 1947 in the Roswell area and the first major book on the subject was published in 1980. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roswell_UFO_Incident

So yes, I'm mixing two different lots of UFO stories a couple of hundred miles and a few years apart up here, but I think the point still stands (particularly as the CIA have apparently since openly admitted it)

 

[smokedout]

In summary: I dont detect disproportionate bias for social class or ethnicity, but the movement can be pulled to the right for some small reasons. The real reason why it would drift that way though would be a failure of the left to be engaged in the dialectic and thus pull it back.

can you name one prominent CTer with left wing views?

 

[smokedout]

Is that what's happening though? Or is it that a bunch of alienated citizens are latching on to some vaguely plausible sounding, easily digested, and in some ways thrillingly exciting ('We know what's *really* going on') alternative interpretations of the modern world, some of which are coming from the right.

science may have killed god, but it didn't kill the need for god

 

[taffboy gwyrdd]

can you name one prominent CTer with left wing views?

Left wing theory tends to gravitate around CTs of it's own which both carry water and have large parallels with more contemporary CTs. Marxists, anarchists and more besides theorise that a capitalist class is constantly engaged in exploiting the masses and that nationhood is a ruse to divide those masses.

However, textbook CTers dislike formalised communism because (they say) it was bankrolled by the likes of the Rothschilds in the same way as the French revolution was a masonic gig.


As for a more standard reading of 'conspiracy theory' 3 things come to mind straight away: Mckinny's questions on 911. Kuccinich and Sanders on the banks and none other than Comrade Chavez postulating that the US is using earthquake causing technology.

 

[butchersapron]

That's none then.

 

[Bernie Gunther]

An alternative explanation here

In his book “The Conspirator’s Hierarchy,” Dr. John Coleman named Chomsky as a deep cover CIA agent working to undermine social protest groups. Certainly Dr. Coleman’s claims appear validated by an honest review of Chomsky’s role as a Left gatekeeper.

Since 9-11, he has steadfastly refused to discuss the evidence of government complicity and prior knowledge. Furthermore he claims that the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), Bilderberg Committee, and Trilateral Commission are “nothing organizations.” When critiquing poverty, he never mentions the Federal Reserve and their role in manipulating the cycle of debt.

Similarly, he claims the CIA was never a rogue organization and is an innocent scapegoat; that JFK was killed by the lone assassin Lee Harvey Oswald; that the obvious vote fraud in 2004 did not occur; and that peak oil is real and good for humanity.

What he does advocate is population control, gun control, support for U.N.E.S.C.O., and the end of national sovereignty in favor of a one-world government under the UN. In other words, the major goals of the New World Order.

Chomsky’s role in propaganda paradigm is much like that of Karl Marx: to present a false liberation ideology which actually supports the desired solutions of the elite. Marx pointed out the inequalities and brutality of capitalism and then advocated a one world bank, army, and government with the abolition of private property and religion; in other words, the major goals known of the New World Order.

Tens of millions of activists worldwide still remain trapped by this scam, failing to recognize the inherent autocratic and elitist structures of Marxism-Leninism or the newer incarnation under Chomsky.

The Globalist elites and their army of social scientists at the Tavistock Institute understand that people are going to question the inequities of the current economic system. For example, why is wealth distributed so unevenly between classes and countries? Why are those living in third world nations allowed to die from preventable diseases and starvation? Why does the U.S. government sponsor and direct such murderous foreign policy? Why was America attacked on 9-11?

In other words, why is the world embroiled in such violence? Who is behind all this suffering? And most importantly, what solutions would relieve the poverty and destruction plaguing the worldwide population?

Enter Chomsky, the controlled opposition, to play the role of re-direct agent. He discusses a mere fraction of the real elite manipulation and then quickly pushes his followers into dead-end solutions and alienating rhetoric.

source

 

[frogwoman]

I think there's some strange stuff about 9/11, am I a conspiracy theorist then?

BTW marxism isn't a conspiracy theory, I can understand how it could appear that way if it hasn't been explained very well though, but there is theory and critique behind marxism, and there isn't behind tales of lizards running the world.

 

[taffboy gwyrdd]

not to mention that much 2012 stuff is infused with hippy values that are certainly more green/anarcho skewed. but in terms of orthodox Marxism - I repeat that it has it's own well founded CTs which are echoed in more modern ones, distorted sometimes by paranoia and sometimes by the fact that the elites can be even more devious.

Butchers - is Chavez not a formal leftist in any regard?

 

[xes]

I think there's some strange stuff about 9/11, am I a conspiracy theorist then?

'fraid so

What in particular do you think is strange about 9/11? (if you don't mind me asking )

 

[butchersapron]

Oddly enough, there was an article by the fraud Chris Knight running across the prominent pages of the Weekly Worker a few weeks back arguing something rather similar.

Extraordinary double-act of Noam Chomsky

When the brain reached a certain level of complexity or when a mutation took place in the genetic instructions it received, the facility for language was installed. This is the myth which suited both the US military-industrial complex and Chomsky’s anarcho-syndicalism. Chris Knight examines the paradox

 

[butchersapron]

Butchers - is Chavez not a formal leftist in any regard?

Is he a prominent conspiracy theorist - or a prominent populist politician with his own agenda. Prominent CT'ers were what you were tasked to find.

 

[taffboy gwyrdd]

I think there's some strange stuff about 9/11, am I a conspiracy theorist then?

BTW marxism isn't a conspiracy theory, I can understand how it could appear that way if it hasn't been explained very well though, but there is theory and critique behind marxism, and there isn't behind tales of lizards running the world.

Marxism does have theory, you've said so yourself, and the theory includes the fact that capitalists will organise to exploit. To so organise they must communicate, and not too openly. Ergo they conspire. Marxism is much more than a conspiracy theory, it is an analysis of commodity exchange, production etc. but it does contain, IMO, one mighty and true conspiracy theory that is strikingly similar to the idea that an elite is enslaving the masses for their own ends (post industrial-revolution and social struggle the elite tend to go in more for 'free range serfdom').

The confusion regarding reptillians is important to set out because most CTers IME dont go along with it. You yourself say you find something fishy about 911. Some would indeed call you a CTer and laugh a squillion times and say you believe in lizard rulers. It's used as a strawman distraction to divert from some genuinelly concerning issues around black ops and the MIC.

As for reptillians in the planets history - they are a suprisingly common theme among worldwide folklores of people who, according to conventional history, would never have had the opportunity to confer.

 

[butchersapron]

You miss the whole central point of the laws of competition - they organise the capitalists themselves, they dictate what they need to do to defend or extend their interests and they act on individual and associations. They're not the result of the capitalists getting together and deciding to follow them.They're the result of capitalists being capitalists. The various conjunctural actions and plans are neither here nor there. You reduce the theory to the level of the CTers and kill it with this approach.

I like how theory now becomes, by default, conspiracy theory here as well.

 

[taffboy gwyrdd]

Is he a prominent conspiracy theorist - or a prominent populist politician with his own agenda. Prominent CT'ers were what you were tasked to find.

There's a guy called Freeman whose background is with Rainbow Tribe. His politics are hippy anarchist leaning, he's more into occult ritualism and goings on in space.

Webster Tarpley is something of a centre-leftist, fond of union power and stuff like the tobin tax.

Other than that I am struggling a bit, as you can surely tell, to find a prominent CT analyst from a solid left background, but I see no reason why it would be logically precluded. I certainly know a fair few rank and file GP members who are left wing and interested in CTs.

 

[taffboy gwyrdd]

Oh yeah, the guy behind Zeitgeist is clearly more of the green / left school than the right wing school. He and Alex Jones had a right old ding dong which you will be glad to have been spared Butchers.

 

[butchersapron]

There's a guy called Freeman whose background is with Rainbow Tribe. His politics are hippy anarchist leaning, he's more into occult ritualism and goings on in space.

Webster Tarpley is something of a centre-leftist, fond of union power and stuff like the tobin tax.

Other than that I am struggling a bit, as you can surely tell, to find a prominent CT analyst from a solid left background, but I see no reason why it would be logically precluded. I certainly know a fair few rank and file GP members who are left wing and interested in CTs.

We can't have la Rouche types (Webster Tarpley) as left wing can we?

Struggling you are!

 

[Bernie Gunther]

An old (pre 911 I think) article from Michael Albert echoing Chomsky's views on CT and how it differs from institutional analysis

Conspiracy Theory

A CONSPIRACY THEORY is a hypothesis that some events were caused by the intractable secret machinations of undemocratic individuals. A prime example is to explain Irancontra as the secret rogue actions of Oliver North and co-conspirators. Likewise, another conspiracy theory explains the hostage-holding in Carter's last presidential year as the machinations of a "secret team" helping Reagan win the presidency. A conspiracy theory of Karen Silkwood's murder would uncover the names of people who secretly planned and carried out the murder. Bending usage, we could even imagine a conspiracy theory of patriarchy as men uniting to deny women status, or a conspiracy theory of the U.S. government as competing groups seeking power for their own ends.

Conspiracies exist. Groups regularly do things without issuing press releases and this becomes a conspiracy whenever their actions transcend of "normal" behavior. We don't talk of a conspiracy to win an election if the suspect activity includes only candidates and their handlers working privately to develop effective strategy. We do talk about a conspiracy if the resulting action involves stealing the other team's plans, spiking their Whiskey Sours, or other exceptional activity. When a conspiracy cause's some outcome, the outcome would not have happened had not the particular people with their particular inclinations come together.

Conspiracy theories may or may not identify real coteries with real influence. Conspiracy theories:

(a) Claim that a particular group acted outside usual norms in a rogue and generally secretive fashion.

(b) Disregard the structural features of institutions.

Personalities, personal timetables, secret meetings, and conspirators' joint actions, claim attention. Institutional relations drop from view. We ask, did North meet with Bush before or after the meeting between MacFarlane and Mr. X? Do we have a document that reveals the plan in advance? Do phone conversations implicate so and so? How credible is that witness?

Institutional Theory

IN AN INSTITUTIONAL theory, personalities and personal motivations enter the discussion only as results of more basic factors. The personal actions culminating in some event do not serve as explanation. The theory explains phenomena via roles, incentives, and dynamics of underlying institutions. An institutional theory doesn't ignore human actions, but the point of an institutional explanation is to move from personal factors to institutional ones. If the particular people hadn't been there to do it, most likely someone else would have.

An institutional theory of Irancontra and the October surprise would explain how and why these activities arose in a society with our political, social, and economic forms. An institutional theory of Karen Silkwood's murder would reveal nuclear industry and larger societal pressures that provoked her murder. An institutional theory of patriarchy explains gender relations in terms of marriage, the church, the market, socialization, etc. An institutional theory of government emphasizes the control and dissemination of information, the dynamics of bureaucracy, and the role of subservience to class, race, and gender interests.

Institutions exist. Whenever they have sufficient impact on events, developing an institutional theory makes sense. However, when an event arises from a unique conjuncture of particular people and opportunities, while institutions undoubtedly play a role, it may not be generalized and an institutional theory may be out of place or even impossible to construct.

Institutional theories may or may not identify real relationships with real influence on the events they explain. Institutional theories:

(a) Claim that the normal operations of some institutions generate the behaviors and motivations leading to the events in question.

(b) Address personalities, personal interests, personal timetables, and meetings only as facts about the events needing explanation, not as explanations themselves.

Organizational, motivational, and behavioral implications of institutions gain most attention. Particular people, while not becoming mere ciphers, are not accorded priority as causal agents.

source

 

[Bernie Gunther]

Now what I think is kind of interesting is that what we're usually calling "conspiraloonery" on urban goes beyond old fashioned conspiracy theory which concerns itself with the alleged clandestine machinations of real individuals and concerns itself also with entirely imaginary institutions and personalities, superintelligent lizards, satanic child molesting mind control cults and so on.

 

[elbows]

CT attitudes towards Chomsky tend to be quite revealing. They have numerous reasons to turn their hate towards him; he doesnt come out and support their views using their language and logic, he's Jewish, an intellectual, on the left, and better known than any of their pathetic figureheads.

If they really cared about the truth they would try to understand some of what he says, it wouldnt take long to realise that their version of the truth gives him nothing useful to work with. He can, and probably has, look at how the 9/11 attacks compare to other historical events, the underlying causes, the reaction and language used, and how the attacks were used to further certain agendas.

 

[kyser_soze]

I think there's some strange stuff about 9/11, am I a conspiracy theorist then?

BTW marxism isn't a conspiracy theory, I can understand how it could appear that way if it hasn't been explained very well though, but there is theory and critique behind marxism, and there isn't behind tales of lizards running the world.

'fraid so

What in particular do you think is strange about 9/11? (if you don't mind me asking )

Depends what you mean by 'strange stuff', and whether or not it's already been debunked.

If you mean by strange stuff 'Why did C. Rice sideline the CIA Director-in-Chief and place the emphasis of the NSA and US foreign policy on the Russians when it was clear from the mid 1990s that radical Islamicists were the real issue?' you're asking a sensible question about administration policy.

If your asking 'How do you make nano-thermite' you're asking a dim question.

 

[William of Walworth]

I think there's some strange stuff about 9/11, am I a conspiracy theorist then?
.

No, as kyser explains above.

The real trouble though, the real obstruction getting in the way of real, rational doubts (such as yours?) being taken seriously, is that such an overwhelmingly high proportion of 9/11 'troofers'/obsessives really are demonstrable conspiracy theorists. And in all but a few cases , 9/11 banger-onners suffer from (at best) terminal irrationality and obliviousness to the real nature of evidence. And at worst, out and out insanity.