What is it About Conspiracy Theorists ?

[n2ize]

I have been coming across this more and more on FaceBook. Not just people who think that 911 was a hoax, or that aircraft vapour trails are really the government spraying us with poison, or that we never really went to the moon, but people who cannot hear a single bit of information without believing that its some bizarre, secret, nefarious hoax or covert lie ? I am hearing some of the strangest things, i.e. human beings are presently living in towns and cities on Mars, secret plots to take away our canned food, perpetual motion machines, etc... I understand that people have mistrust for the government, heck I don;t believe everything that comes out of Washington. But some of the crazy conspiracy theories, what is the matter with people these days ?

[PA5COR]

They waych/listen to FOX.

[n2ize]

They waych/listen to FOX.

Maybe. But many of them are also people who swing more to the liberal or libertarian side. They don;t trust corporations, they don't care for the republicans or democrats and often they have sensible opinions, i.e. they believe in conservation, protecting the environment, etc. Some of them are smart in many ways. Yet they still fall for or invent crazy conspiracy theories that defy logic, defy history, defy science, and literally make no sense and are so easily debunked by facts and logic. And I am seeing more and more people buying into this conspiracy nonsense, hook, line, and sinker, and promoting it. Some of them swear by it so strongly that trying to convince them they are wrong is fruitless. They will tell you that you are naive if you try to present them with real science, or real facts.

I wish I could just attribute it to watching and believing FOX but it seems to afflict far too many.

[KG4CGC]

Obama caused 9/11.

[W1GUH]

With some risk, I'll try to answer that from my own perspective. I'll begin my mentioning my original call, K8TFH. There is one possible set of phonetics to that that may come to mind. Go ahead -- I've seen enough of what I'm about to say that I'm confident about it and I've pretty much gotten used to a lot of the responses.

John, it's true that I've met with, hung out with, and talked with two of the more prominent members of the community that have uncovered, researched, and presented well the evidence they used to come to the conclusions they've come to. One of them gets viciously attacked over and over. But in person, he's extremely intelligent, is an excellent communicator, and, together with a colleague who is also prominent, puts on a very, very competent and well-done presentation of his work. I sat through one at the LAX Hilton back in the fall of 2007, and their presentation fulfilled all the requirements for credibility, and especially in presenting compelling evidence. That's the gospel truth, and I'll swear that on a stack of handbooks.

But they only represent a small sliver of what's going on, and the only cover a tiny part of the whole spectrum of those who trigger the "conspiracy theory tin-foil hat" response.

If you dig deep enough, you CAN find very disturbing questions about, and uncovered evidence of, shall we say, shenanigans on the part of very powerful forces. One example is Russ Baker's book, "Family of Secrets" where the author has submitted lots and lots of well-researched evidence about the Bush familiies questionable behavior. I highly recommend that book, and invite anyone to read it and check out the copious footnotes that Mr. Baker provides.

Moving on from there...

I won't say always, but I can say that usually when these people, and even yours truly, get viciously attacked for putting any credence in these so-call "crackpot" theories at all, the attacker had NEVER, and I mean NEVER responded to the request of, "Could you please inform me why you feel that way, what do you know that supports your views, and what evidence is there of the correctness of what you know?" Never at all. It is ALWAY a personal attacke without any comment at all about the subject matter. Usually the excuse is, "That's too crack-pot to even waste any time or energy on."

I've got ideas about why that happens, which for now I think is appropriately kept to myself. After all, it's only speculation on my part. But the the above is a pretty accurate picture of what I've experienced. As you know by now, personal attacks never phase my own thinking, only my opinion of the attacker. The way I see it is, if someone has solid evidence that something is "whacko", they'd be more inclined to spell it out dis-passionately instead of issuing a viscious attack, venomous fangs and all.

[n2ize]

John, it's true that I've met with, hung out with, and talked with two of the more prominent members of the community that have uncovered, researched, and presented well the evidence they used to come to the conclusions they've come to. One of them gets viciously attacked over and over. But in person, he's extremely intelligent, is an excellent communicator, and, together with a colleague who is also prominent, puts on a very, very competent and well-done presentation of his work. I sat through one at the LAX Hilton back in the fall of 2007, and their presentation fulfilled all the requirements for credibility, and especially in presenting compelling evidence. That's the gospel truth, and I'll swear that on a stack of handbooks.

I don't know who in particular you mean but one popular name that comes to mind, particularly with respect to space and Mars conspiracies is Richard Hoagland. All of his claims have been debunked, not by arrogant people who claim he is a "wacko" but by sensible scientists who carefully listened to his claims and then did some research and uncovered his hoaxes. I'll give you one example in which Hoagland measured angles between a graph of nodes which represented points on the Cydonia region of Mars. He then manipulated those angles using trig functions and claimed it showed a pattern of numbers indicating that rhe region was developed by intelligent beings therefore Mars is habitable. However, when you apply some mathematics to Hoaglands "analysis" you start to notice some problems. If you take the same set of points he used and you path connect them any you count the total number of angles you come up with you get an incredibly enormous number of angles. This can be proved via graph theory but simply looking at the picture you immediately see how vast are the number of possible angles. Yet Hoagland cherry picks only certain ones. He then narrows down the number of possible values by applying trig functions to the cherry picked angles. he then performs his "analysis" and claims it proof of intelligence. Yet a math professor at a prominent university recreated Hoagland's experiment and instead of cherry picking certain angles he used random numbers to randomly chose angles from the entire set of possible angles. Guess what ?? Using random numbers he wound up getting better results than Hoagland got. In short, Hoagland's mathematical proof of intelligent design of Cydonia was not a mathematical proof at all. . However, how many people reading Hoagland's explanation are aware of this ? Probably very few, if any. In any event the professor made several attempts to contact Hoagland and offered to debate him on this. very conveniently Hoagland never responded.

I won't say always, but I can say that usually when these people, and even yours truly, get viciously attacked for putting any credence in these so-call "crackpot" theories at all, the attacker had NEVER, and I mean NEVER responded to the request of, "Could you please inform me why you feel that way, what do you know that supports your views, and what evidence is there of the correctness of what you know?" Never at all. It is ALWAY a personal attacke without any comment at all about the subject matter. Usually the excuse is, "That's too crack-pot to even waste any time or energy on."

I agree with you. I don;t like iot when people refer to conspiracy theorists as wacko's, or used derogatory put downs. I feel that a far better way to debate, at least scientifically related conspiracies is to explain in a scientific way as to why the theory may be wrong and to present scientific facts. That is what I generally try to do when i am confronted with a conspiracy theory. Case and point, not long ago I debated a person who believes in "chemtrails", that common aircraft contrails are really deliberate chemicals being sprayed on an unsuspecting public. He gave me several reasons as to why he believes they are not real contrails. For each phenomenon he described I presented a scientific explanation based in sound meteorology and in physics that explains why a contrail would naturally behave as described. No hassles, no name calling, no put downs. Whether I convinced him of anything or not I don't know. I hope I got him thinking a bit.

I've got ideas about why that happens, which for now I think is appropriately kept to myself. After all, it's only speculation on my part. But the the above is a pretty accurate picture of what I've experienced. As you know by now, personal attacks never phase my own thinking, only my opinion of the attacker. The way I see it is, if someone has solid evidence that something is "whacko", they'd be more inclined to spell it out dis-passionately instead of issuing a viscious attack, venomous fangs and all.

Like I said, i don't believe in attacking people over their beliefs. I am just puzzled by the proliferation of some extremely bizarre conspiracy theories, many of them so absurd and easily debunked by simple logic

[W1GUH]

Thanks for the comments, John. As usual, well done. I'll be digesting them for a while...not something to make quick comments about!

[N8YX]

If there's anything the government (past or present) is guilty of, it's capitalizing on tragedy. While not intentionally orchestrated by same, 9/11 was indeed a Kristallnecht. As long as the political climate in this country tends toward the reactionary and inflammatory, expect more of the same. This phenomenon is not unique to one party; it is the methodology of all politicians. None of them want to be out of a job, and to a man or woman they'll go to damn near any length to justify their positions.

[KG4CGC]

If there's anything the government (past or present) is guilty of, it's capitalizing on tragedy. While not intentionally orchestrated by same, 9/11 was indeed a Kristallnecht. As long as the political climate in this country tends toward the reactionary and inflammatory, expect more of the same. This phenomenon is not unique to one party; it is the methodology of all politicians. None of them want to be out of a job, and to a man or woman they'll go to damn near any length to justify their positions.

It's for the children.

[W1GUH]

John,

I believe this thread is about why some people take the time to check out these theories to see if there's anything there, and not about any particular researcher. As such, IMHO, it's irrelevant who I was talking about. Regardless of who I was talking about, my comments stand irrespective of who it was. Fiar enough?

Don't mean to weave a "web of mystery" -- just want to avoid it becoming a discussion of any particular flavor of conspiracy.