fela fan said:
But look, who are these people on urban? Who are these 'true-believers', who are these 'conspiracy theorists'? <snip>
Well, the point of what I was attempting earlier was to come up with a way to tell the difference.
I can think of a few possible criteria that we might perhaps use to make a distinction between what I'm calling 'true-believers' and people who simply entertain doubts that the government and/or the various state security organisations, can be relied upon to tell the truth about stuff like this.
The two main characteristics that make me tag someone as a probable conspiracy theorist or true-believer are:
1) Claiming to follow accepted standards of evidence and logic but not actually doing so, or only doing so selectively and instead using information of poor provenance and/or logical fallacies to argue their point of view.
2) Where this is also a point of view which ascribes the events in question to some hidden conspiracy, rather than to more prosaic factors such as institutional interest or attempts to cover up routine incompetence or blowback from poor judgment by state security agencies or politicians.
Both of these things have to be the case for the tag to be legitimate, at least in my mind. Simply doubting the statements of government spokesmen does not automatically make someone a conspiracy theorist.
Similarly, if someone doesn't or can't follow what I'd see as reasonable standards of evidence and logic, but doesn't advocate conspiratorial explanations of particular events, that may make them a sloppy thinker, but not necessarily a conspiracy theorist.
I'd apply an extra criterion before calling someone a 'true-believer' though and comparing them to cultists, freepers and other religious nuts however.
3) Behaving in a way that indicates that an emotional attachment or existential committment to some particular theory is taking priority over facts and logic.
A good example of this might be accusing someone of being a state agent or a racist or both, on the sole grounds that they stated a belief that 7/7 was the work of British muslims, where the person in question holds it as an article of faith that this was not the case.
I was trying to come up with a test for the latter characteristic based on some theories I was entertaining about why people might want to act in that way. I'm not sure that the idea was particularly successful however.
