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The Validity of Conspiracy Theories

editor said:
World of difference between "speculating" and announcing some conspiracy-tastic, bonkers evidence-free theory as "the truth", though.

I suppose so. But when DrJazz or bigfish or whoever try to raise the possibility that the twin towers were destroyed by a controlled demolition, reasoning that the operation was a setup by organisations that needed to find some enemy or some reason to justify the project they'd already conceived of keeping the US on a war footing, spending lots of money on arms, and generally taking a pre-emptive approach to foreign policy, do they actually announce this speculation as being "the truth."? I mean, if they do, I can understand you finding it annoying, but I hadn't noticed that they had certainty.

From my point of view, the odd thing is that the official line that the bombings were conceived by Osama Bin Laden and performed through a shadowy organisation called Alquaeda seems to me to be just as much an evidence-free conspiracy theory as anything else.
 
ZWord said:
From my point of view, the odd thing is that the official line that the bombings were conceived by Osama Bin Laden and performed through a shadowy organisation called Alquaeda seems to me to be just as much an evidence-free conspiracy theory as anything else.
So are all the international experts, demolition experts, structural engineers, WTC architects, airlines, insurance agents, accident investigation teams, political pundits, governments etc who broadly agree with the jist of that analysis in on the conspiracy too, then?
 
editor said:
So are all the international experts, demolition experts, structural engineers, WTC architects, airlines, insurance agents, accident investigation teams, political pundits, governments etc who broadly agree with the jist of that analysis in on the conspiracy too, then?

Personally, I can't see how the expertise of a demolition expert, structural engineer, WTC architect, airline, insurance agent, accident investigation team, or a political pundit would help them in deciding who's Responsible for the bombings.(which was the jist of that analysis) (Though I can of course see how many of these have a perfectly good claim to expertise on the question of controlled demolitions.)

The thing is as far as assigning responsibility for the destruction is concerned, the only people with a claim to expertise that I can think of are the intelligence services, and they seem like the most likely alternative candidates for responsibility, so they're not necessarily to be trusted. Governments' knowledge only really comes from what the intelligence services tell them, similarly international experts. And it is after all well known that Osama Bin Laden once worked for the CIA. And it's admitted that the CIA have a history of "black ops" (I think) in countries other than the US, e.g. Nicaragua.

The thing is, you find near unanimity of opinion on the question of how the towers fell down much more impressive than small divergences of opinion.
I don't. The reason is: I don't find it unthinkable that if the operation was set up by elements within the US intelligence services, they'd also make sure that there was near unanimity in official opinion on the cause of the fall of the twin towers.

Imagine you're an accident investigator, and while you're doing your investigation, someone comes and says to you, -I want you to understand that no matter what anomalies you find the official explanation for this is as follows, ... And anyone who doesn't go along with that, is at the very least going to lose their job,..and possibly worse- Well in those circumstances, if you were an accident investigator, what would you do? I reckon most people wouldn't bother to go against unanimity of opinion if they could see that the people they were up against were clearly powerful enough to organise an operation of this magnitude and assign responsibility for it, what would they achieve,? be labelled a fruitloop and lose their job. Why would they be any more likely to question the verdict than an investigator of the Reichstag fire would be to question the verdict that the Jews did it?

I don't say this is what happened. I say that it could have happened, and that if it did, appearances to us on the outside would be no different.
 
ZWord said:
Imagine you're an accident investigator, and while you're doing your investigation, someone comes and says to you, -I want you to understand that no matter what anomalies you find the official explanation for this is as follows, ... And anyone who doesn't go along with that, is at the very least going to lose their job,..and possibly worse- Well in those circumstances, if you were an accident investigator, what would you do?
This is classic conspiraloon nonsense. That collapse of the towers was watched by billions the world over. No doubt, tens of thousands of qualified structural engineers, demolition experts etc around the globe would have been amongst those viewers, yet none have have managed to spot what these totally unqualified bedroom conspiracy theorists claim to see.

Why is that, do you think? And why on earth would any sane person believe them over the opinions of suitably qualified experts the world over? who are absolutely at liberty to speak their opinions?

They'd have no job to lose, or suffer your (evidence free) claims of someone threatening that something "worse" mighy happen to them.
ZWord said:
I don't say this is what happened. I say that it could have happened, and that if it did, appearances to us on the outside would be no different.
Aliens might have done it too by your "argument", but it would be just as unlikely.
 
editor said:
Aliens might have done it too by your "argument", but it would be just as unlikely.

Well they might have. If they exist. And you've got no scientific way of knowing how unlikely it is, unless you've developed a device that accurately calculates probabilities of different explanations of events being correct with incomplete data fed into it.

It is classic conspiraloon stuff. But it's not nonsense. It may be farfetched. It may be completely untrue. But it does make sense. Just as a hypothetical question -do you think that if some organisation within the US connected to the government organised the destruction, they wouldn't have gone to considerable lengths to ensure unanimity of official opinion.? And as far as the experts all over the globe are concerned, my guess is that their opinion is no more relevant than anyone else's unless they made a detailed study of the building and of the event. Watching the event on TV and being an expert in the field wouldn't qualify them to have an expert opinion. As I understand it, though I haven't really investigated the thing much myself, there are a few experts who have questioned the possibility of the planes and the fire causing the total collapse. Most of them wouldn't bother, as they haven't investigated it, someone else has, and it's not really their business, I guess.
 
ZWord said:
It is classic conspiraloon stuff. But it's not nonsense. It may be farfetched. It may be completely untrue. But it does make sense.
Sounds like your mind's made up so there's not much point trying to point out that such an immense conspiracy would involve the tacit co-operation of thousands of people and as such would be nigh-on impossible to keep secret.

If you want to while away a few hours, try compling a list of the people who'd have to be in on the conspiracy, but be sure to get a nice big A4 book with lots of pages: you could start with accident investigators, explosive experts, international experts, demolition experts, structural engineers, WTC architects, insurance agents, accident investigation teams, political pundits, governments, American Airlines, WTC staff, WTC office managers, WTC security, owners insurance agents etc etc etc
 
I don't see why all these people would have to be "in on the conspiracy" for it to have worked, if the official explanation is incorrect. I really don't.

I seem to remember that one of the standard fallbacks of the conspiracy theorist was "the sheeplike masses". The reason for this is perhaps because it is demonstrably true that people are sheeplike. That is -people tend to believe that a million people can't be wrong. What everyone thinks is true.
Etc. If you were a white person in Mississipi, not so long ago and even now maybe, you'd probably think black people were racially inferior, Why, everyone else thinks it, and what everyone else thinks is probably true, as a norm of human psychology, particularly when what everyone thinks is also more comfortable than the alternative. If you're a guy who lives in Newcastle, maybe there's a good chance you think that football is important or at least, interesting. And if you don't, or you're a woman, you probably keep the peace by not bothering to argue about it.

We continue to vote for the same political parties, on the grounds that everyone else probably will, and voting for a minority or an unknown, is a wasted vote. Isn't sheeplike a reasonable description? Watch crowds at festivals. ..

The only thing my mind is made up about is this. All I know about what happened on 9/11 is that two planes appeared out of the sky, hit the towers, and that the towers fell down. And after that, I know that the blame was officially laid on bin laden. and Al qua eda, (who I'd never heard of before.)
I never heard what the evidence was for this, and I've never come across any that convinced me. Without investigating it myself, I know it's impossible for me to know anything more. And I'm fairly convinced that even if I did investigate it myself, it would still be impossible for me to know anything more.
So in the circumstances, anything seems possible to me, and I wonder why people bother to try to shout down and ridicule alternative theories, if they're self-evidently garbage. My reading of things tends to be that people only bother to shout down theories when they're not self-evidently garbage, but they're troubling for some other reason.
 
Top posting ZWord

editor said:
Sounds like your mind's made up so there's not much point trying to point out that such an immense conspiracy would involve the tacit co-operation of thousands of people and as such would be nigh-on impossible to keep secret.

But 10,000 people were involved in the conspiracy to nuke Japan, which was kept a closely guarded secret, even from the US Congress.
 
bigfish said:
Top posting ZWord

But 10,000 people were involved in the conspiracy to nuke Japan, which was kept a closely guarded secret, even from the US Congress.





Bottom line (regarding 9/11)- what evidence can you produce?
 
ZWord said:
Do you think it was Bin Laden and Alquaeda who done it, zed66?

I don't have an opinion , I'm waiting for to see the evidence to support the conspiracy theory that you proposed and Bigfish seconded. By producing evidence that is subject to scrutiny you can prove to me the validity of conspiracy theories, and in particular you can prove to me that they are not just idle speculation based on all the points in post 29 of this thread.
 
zed66 said:
I don't have an opinion , I'm waiting for to see the evidence to support the conspiracy theory that you proposed and Bigfish seconded. By producing evidence that is subject to scrutiny you can prove to me the validity of conspiracy theories, and in particular you can prove to me that they are not just idle speculation based on all the points in post 29 of this thread.

I didn't propose it, I hypothesised it for the sake of argument and suggested that given our incomplete knowledge it's as possible as anything else.

If you don't even have an opinion, then why do you call speculation idle?

I guess that means it's a waste of time in your book/?

But surely you don't want to suggest that wherever knowledge is doubtful, speculation is unprofitable. Lucky humanity's not generally like that, we'd all have starved. We'd never even have bothered to go and hunt buffalo.
 
In answer to your question......

Unable to provide evidence to support a claim=fuckspud ramblings of a demented loon.
 
bigfish said:
But 10,000 people were involved in the conspiracy to nuke Japan, which was kept a closely guarded secret, even from the US Congress.
Right. And all those involved with the project denied it afterwards and never ever uttered a word about it while someone else was blamed for the act, yes?

What a truly idiotic "comparison".
 
zed66 said:
In answer to your question......

Unable to provide evidence to support a claim=fuckspud ramblings of a demented loon.

Can you provide some evidence for your claim.?
 
ZWord said:
So in the circumstances, anything seems possible to me, and I wonder why people bother to try to shout down and ridicule alternative theories, if they're self-evidently garbage.
I'd say that the theories proposed here have been utter garbage, yet some people persist in repeatng them with conviction - and seeing as I don't want my site to be a one-stop shop for cut'n'pasting conspiraloons, I'm happy to rip the fuck out of their clueless claims.

(For a while, that is, until seeing the same evidence-free drivel repeated ad infinitum becomes a bore and then it goes straight in the bin.)
ZWord said:
My reading of things tends to be that people only bother to shout down theories when they're not self-evidently garbage, but they're troubling for some other reason.
Do I smell some cod-psychology on the horizon? Please elaborate further what you're insinuating here, please.
 
zed66 said:
Bottom line (regarding 9/11)- what evidence can you produce?

Sadly for you zed, and after 4 years of looking, I'm unable to produce a single scrap of hard material evidence that clearly establishes the presence of any of the 19 alleged hijackers in any of the targeted airports on the morning of September 11 2001. Similarly, I am unable to produce any CCTV footage of any of the London bombers boarding any of the targeted underground trains on the morning of July 7.

With regard to Sept 11, their is a CCTV image of Atta and an accomplice allegedly taken of them at Portland, but no pictures of any of them at Logan. Similarly, their is a CCTV image of the 4 Yorkshiremen allegedly taken of them at Luton, but none of any of them boarding underground trains at Kings Cross.

The London attack seems to bear the hallmarks of the same scriptwriters of 911, don't you think?
 
bigfish said:
Similarly, I am unable to produce any CCTV footage of any of the London bombers boarding any of the targeted underground trains on the morning of July 7.
That'll because a police investigation is still underway and satisfying your fruitloop curiousity isn't quite as important as pursuing the case.
 
surprisingly enough, the one I quoted.: The one you made. :confused: :confused: :confused:

"Unable to provide evidence to support a claim=fuckspud ramblings of a demented loon." Can you provide any evidence in support of this claim.
 
bigfish said:
Similarly, their is a CCTV image of the 4 Yorkshiremen allegedly taken of them at Luton, but none of any of them boarding underground trains at Kings Cross.
The police have stated that they have this footage, so how about you wait for them to release those images at the appropriate time instead of embarking on yet another of your fact-free knee-jerk X Files fantasies?
On Monday night, police had viewed CCTV footage of four suspects together at London King's Cross last Thursday
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4676577.stm
 
ZWord said:
surprisingly enough, the one I quoted.: The one you made. :confused: :confused: :confused:

"Unable to provide evidence to support a claim=fuckspud ramblings of a demented loon." Can you provide any evidence in support of this claim.

Where I came in on this post was post 79
It's just a personal point of view but I see a strong parallel between unsubtantiated conspiracy theories and religious/evangelical arguements. Going through the (by the way excellent) 10 Point list posted earlier on the thread, any or all of the characteristics listed could just as easily be applied to arguements put in favour of Chritianity/Scientology (insert belief system here).The main characteristic being that belief in the conspiracy appears to be of more importance than the objective veracity of the claims made. Also the willingness to defend a point of view in the absence of any evidence being produced and an unwillingness or inability to reevaluate the original position stated. I enjoy historical/journalistic exposes of conspiracies where there is documented primary evidence (Eg: Tom Bowers-The Paperclip Conspiracy) but when it comes to the Lizards/poisonous monkeys end of the spectrum I don't think it possible to actually debate the issue because you are now into the realms of belief with the same circular arguements.

The point I made then and the point I have consistently made is that being unable to provide evidence to support a given theory in no way diminishes the enthusiasm for said theory. If you are suggesting a particular theory is it not reasonable to expect you to back this up with hard evidence.
 
editor said:
Do I smell some cod-psychology on the horizon? Please elaborate further what you're insinuating here, please.

Well, when things are obviously garbage, people can see they're garbage, and they might laugh at them, but they don't really need to argue with them, and they certainly don't need to bin them: When the self-evident truth that it is garbage is staring everyone in the face, argument and censorship are just unnecessary. The easiest way to ridicule them is just to leave them there for general ridicule.

We've had zed66 state that he doesn't have an opinion on who was responsible for the destruction of the twin towers. Do you?

So at least one non-fruitlooper seems to think there isn't enough evidence either way for him to form an opinion. Maybe he's just unusually sceptical. Maybe he's unusually wary of having opinions that may be wrong.
What's odd though is that despite not having an opinion he still doesn't want to hear other people's speculations on the things he doesn't have opinions about.

Me I'm quite the opposite. I don't have an opinion. (Well, maybe I do, but I wouldn't go so far as to call it a belief, and I certainly wouldn't call it knowledge.) But because I don't have an opinion, I'm delighted to hear all manner of speculations as to who's responsible, and what happened and why etc.

I can't see why you aren't equally willing to hear them. I can theorise privately, but they're only theories, and I don't believe any of them. The only explanation I can see is that you think you have some infallible method for separating fruitloopery from credible opinion. I can't work out what it is.
 
zed66 said:
Where I came in on this post was post 79
It's just a personal point of view but I see a strong parallel between unsubtantiated conspiracy theories and religious/evangelical arguements. Going through the (by the way excellent) 10 Point list posted earlier on the thread, any or all of the characteristics listed could just as easily be applied to arguements put in favour of Chritianity/Scientology (insert belief system here).The main characteristic being that belief in the conspiracy appears to be of more importance than the objective veracity of the claims made. Also the willingness to defend a point of view in the absence of any evidence being produced and an unwillingness or inability to reevaluate the original position stated. I enjoy historical/journalistic exposes of conspiracies where there is documented primary evidence (Eg: Tom Bowers-The Paperclip Conspiracy) but when it comes to the Lizards/poisonous monkeys end of the spectrum I don't think it possible to actually debate the issue because you are now into the realms of belief with the same circular arguements.

The point I made then and the point I have consistently made is that being unable to provide evidence to support a given theory in no way diminishes the enthusiasm for said theory. If you are suggesting a particular theory is it not reasonable to expect you to back this up with hard evidence.

That's not evidence.. That's just a mass of stewed and distilled opinion and argument. Or if it is evidence, then what have you got against bigfish and other's inferences and conjectural arguments?
 
We've had zed66 state that he doesn't have an opinion on who was responsible for the destruction of the twin towers. Do you?

I do have an opinion thanks, it is boringly in line with the mass of evidence already available. I did not want to bring my personal ideas into the arguement earlier when you were trying to divert attention form the very clear request I made for you to provide de facto evidence to support your claims.
 
How's this for evidence of the nature of the reasoning behind conspiracy theories?

Well it's an argument suggesting that as there are such things as secret societies whose purposes and operations we don't know, It's quite likely that these secret societies would conspire either together or against each other to further their various purposes. And since they choose to be secret, as there are lots of advantages in being secret, i.e. you can't be attacked as no-one knows who you are, it's well-nigh impossible to find evidence of what they're up to, -- therefore, inference-based evidence-free theories of what might be going up on, while they shouldn't be accepted as gospel, should equally well not be dismissed lightly.
 
I can't see why you aren't equally willing to hear them. I can theorise privately, but they're only theories, and I don't believe any of them. The only explanation I can see is that you think you have some infallible method for separating fruitloopery from credible opinion. I can't work out what it is.


I'll give you a clue......

Provide some evidence to support the claims you make.
 
ZWord said:
I can't see why you aren't equally willing to hear them. I can theorise privately, but they're only theories, and I don't believe any of them. The only explanation I can see is that you think you have some infallible method for separating fruitloopery from credible opinion. I can't work out what it is.
Take a look around Usenet and at websites where conspiraloons' fantastic yarns are left unchallenged and there's your answer, wiseguy.

Average traffic to those sites = barely a soul.

No one's making you post here, you know, so if you don't like the way that conspiraloon posts are treated, the internet's a very big place....
 
editor said:
The police have stated that they have this footage, so how about you wait for them to release those images at the appropriate time instead of embarking on yet another of your fact-free knee-jerk X Files fantasies?


10/7/05 Associated Press: Deputy Assistant Police Commissioner Brian Paddick said the near-simultaneous nature of the attacks Thursday indicated timers — not suicide bombers — set off the explosions.

You may remember that when the first bombings occurred, the official story by police (see Brian Paddick's statement above) was that these are DEFINITELY NOT suicide bombers, but we were being fed stuff at the same time through the corporate media that led us to guess "intuitively" that they might be. In other words, this exercise was staged by a very powerful group within the power apparatus (lets call them the "power surgers") which is in conflict with other groups or another group. To understand this more fully, one would need to know more about such things, for example, as the power struggles within the British Metropolitan police force. In any event the July 7 bombings appears to me to signify the return of something known as 'The Strategy of Tensions'. A covert strategy operated through proxies and instigated by the United States in the 1970's to destabilize Europe, most notably Italy. It also involved the bombing of the Bologna railway station and the framing of patsies.
 
bigfish said:
10/7/05 Associated Press: Deputy Assistant Police Commissioner Brian Paddick said the near-simultaneous nature of the attacks Thursday indicated timers — not suicide bombers — set off the explosions.
Fascinating. And your point that can't possibly wait until the police investigation reaches its conclusion?

Or do you think you somehow know better already?
 
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