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Wahrheitseeker wrote:

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nickterry wrote:

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Before you get carried away, let's remind ourselves what the claims made in Hoofnagle's blog were, vis-a-vis the structural features of denialism:

• claiming a conspiracy to suppress the truth
• selectivity or cherrypicking data
• fake experts
• moving goalposts or impossible expectations
• logical fallacies

Obviously, if any sceptic on any subject under the sun chose to eschew these five tactics, then they'd stand a much better chance of being listened to.

Dr. Terry, do you personally believe in any "conspiracies"? This can be as minute as an oil company suppressing documents regarding oil spills/pollution at specific locations?

WS,

both business and governments engage in cover-ups all the time, yet these are routinely discovered and publicised in the media, meaning not just the MSM but the outlets used by investigative journalists. Of course there are conspiracies, however they tend to become known: Watergate, Iran-Contra, using soldiers as guinea pigs for NBC warfare tests, etc. We can infer from the behaviour of corporations and governments that they engage in further cover-ups of similar kinds.

Any other ideas contrary to mainstream opinion? You seem to fall in line with the popular accounts of human-caused global warming, the 9/11 attacks, and obviously the Holocaust.

I do not believe in meta-conspiracies alleging grand-scale orchestration of human events, i.e. what are usually known as conspiracy theories. Holocaust denial implies just such a meta-conspiracy, as does the 9/11 Truth movement, and of course the grand tradition of Illuminati-Freemason-Elders of Zion-Bilderberger-Rothschild nonsense dating back to the 18th Century.

The big problem I have with most of them is that they usually project American parochialism onto the world, which has always been more complex and multipolar than Americans usually allow for. Thus, if there were real evidence that the US or Israel had orchestrated 9/11 then this would surely have been publicised in convincing detail by an anti-American power by now.

Scientific denialism is a slightly different kettle of fish. There the claims are not about secret government information but scientific data. That is relatively transparent - there will always be problems of having enough data with some issues, and consensuses will evolve over time to reflect that. And of course, politics distorts science just as much as any other walk of life. Duh. But this does not mean that self-styled Galileos are always right. I am sceptical of anyone claiming to have the absolute 'Truth', and that tendency is more manifest among the fringe than the mainstream.

Politics obviously distorts science reporting and science issues in many instances, and usually blows up fringe opinions from 'mavericks' into official dogmas. AIDS denialism strikes me as particularly grotesque. It originated from a scientist but was of no real consequence until the South African government more or less endorsed it. The MMR vaccine scare here in the UK is another example where non-scientific ignoramuses seized on a minority, fringe view and trumpeted it across the media.

The most obvious examples of scientific conspiracies are precisely those orchestrated by corporations and supported by governments for political or commercial reasons. Tobacco companies obviously hired paid experts to lie about the dangers of smoking. The classic example, right?

It seems undeniable to me that oil corporations have done the same thing about the dangers of global warming. My 'conspiracist' alarm bells start ringing if I am told, as is a matter of record, that oil corporations have funded global warming sceptics. My leftwing alarm bells also start ringing if the politicians who rubbish the concept of global warming tend to be doctrinaire rightwingers, like the Bush administration or Nigel Lawson. There are two issues here - one is the science and the other, the public policy implications. The science will either turn out to be right or not. That can be left to the future to decide who was right and who had the best estimate. It seems prudent, however, to adjust our way of life as a matter of insurance, which is a matter of public policy. I'd rather more be spent on that than on defense, for example.

The same might be said for the issue of oil reserves - some people think "peak oil" is a conspiracy theory, and there is much controversy predicting exactly how much oil might be left. But again as a matter of prudence it seems really obvious to invest as much in researching into alternative energy sources as possible.

Dave Rogers continues his sterling track record of perceptive comments (post #13)

Wahrheitseeker wrote:

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nickterry wrote:

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The big problem I have with most of them is that they usually project American parochialism onto the world, which has always been more complex and multipolar than Americans usually allow for. Thus, if there were real evidence that the US or Israel had orchestrated 9/11 then this would surely have been publicised in convincing detail by an anti-American power by now.

I'm not so sure on this.

Then you haven't thought the complexity of 9/11 through very well. And you're reasoning purely by analogy to make historical comparisons; they're also not very good comparisons, and ignore changing historical contexts.

If we look at a few historic examples, it doesn't seem to really hold up: Gulf of Tonkin, USS Maine, and the various 'Stay Behind'/Operation Gladio variant atacks throughout Western Europe, among others. None of these events were challenged by the alleged perpretrators, and all could have caused a major anti-American/anti-Western backlash at the time.

Of course, there are a variety of such similar 'false-flag' and propaganda incidents/proposals, with their size ranging in scope and intent: The Nurse Nayirah testimony, Operation Northwoods, Operation Ajax, the Reichstag fire (if you believe it to be), etc...The Indian police are notorious for staging such actions across the country.

These all remained 'covered up' for many years, and were only allowed to be revealed into a global political climate that had largely grown past its relavancy.

None of these examples stretch the bounds of what can be understood by mainstream international relations, political science or historiography. It's not like CIA funding for anti-communist journals in the US and Europe isn't a matter of historical record. It is a vast leap from there to say that the CIA orchestrated everything in the ideological battle of the Cold War.

[sarcasm] A CIA coup in Iran, wow, never knew that one! [/sarcasm] Gulf of Tonkin was controversial at the time, and led to a disastrous war for the United States. Operation Northwoods was simply a plan that was never even accepted, so it's lousy evidence for this false flag obsession displayed by CTs. Come one, everyone knows that the CIA was something of a cowboy outfit in the 1950s and 1960s, trying to assassinate Castro with exploding cigars and whatnot. You remember what happened next? It was gutted in the 1970s, placed under much tighter oversight and harnessed to sigint.

The main problem with trying to analogise from earlier events is that 9/11 simply isn't comparable, and the claims made by 9/11 Truthers are so utterly ridiculous. You cannot leap from an unimplemented plan like Northwoods, 40 years previously, involving very different methods, to a successful plan, without evidence. There is none.

The 9/11 Truth movement has not managed in more than seven years of yapping away to come up with a single claim that has not been shot down or which is not basically barking mad.

BTW, what are your thoughts on the work of fellow British academic Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed?

From the little I can divine after a minute's reading of a newspaper article, he seems to be claiming that there has been a bit of a whitewash of the competence of the security services for failing to spot the 7/7 bombers earlier, or even knowing who they were but not tracking them continually. That's not a a 'false flag'. It's what you expect from institutions covering their arses.

WS

It seems undeniable to me that oil corporations have done the same thing about the dangers of global warming. My 'conspiracist' alarm bells start ringing if I am told, as is a matter of record, that oil corporations have funded global warming sceptics.

Surely thats relevant, but don't forget the companies and institutions who will benefit under cap-and-trade policies, as well as carbon taxes. I'm not sold that humans aren't causing environmental changes, to what extent remains open to question IMHO, but I did find the documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle to be very interesting.

That documentary was exposed as dishonest in its handling of sources and talking heads, as was a predecessor made by the same director, who incidentally - if you like conspiracy theories - had connections to the now-defunct Revolutionary Communist Party, a onetime Trotskyist outfit who went spectacularly entryist and whose graduates now litter the British media. Among the RCP's other hilarious gambits, back when it was still a functioning party, was to claim that the TV footage of the Bosnian concentration camps was basically false, a claim that resulted in them being sued out of existence by ITN because it was so utterly wrong. You may wish to follow the links from the Living Marxism wiki page to learn more.

I knew some of those people in the early 1990s, and broke contact because of their shameless 'enemy of my enemy' anti-imperialist routine over Bosnia, which led them like others on the hard left to enter into CT-land. A good retrospective survey of these antics can be found here, in an article by Marko Attila Hoare. And there we're back to fullblown denialism again.

Dr Adequate, over at JREF (post #26)

On one side: the hijackers made martyrdom videos. Documentary evidence shows that they bought plane tickets. Eyewitness accounts show that they bought weapons and boarded the planes. Phone calls from the planes show that they hijacked the planes. Forensic evidence shows that they were on the planes when they crashed. Al-Qaeda claimed responsibility for 9/11.

On the other side: every detail that I can't explain about 9/11, no matter how trivial, is proof that Bush did it, or the Jews did it, or the Pope did it (I'm not making that up) using explosives, or thermite, or thermate, or missiles disguised as planes, or "silent nukes", or death rays from outer space (I'm not making any of this up, either) whereas in fact no planes were involved at all, or alternatively planes hit the Twin Towers but not the Pentagon (not only am I not making that up, but that's the standard conspiracist belief) because pretending that a bunch of Saudis had attacked America was the perfect excuse that Bush needed to invade Iraq. All the evidence to the contrary was faked by the Bush/Jew/Pope conspiracy, so I can discount it. And any of my fellow-conspiracists who don't agree with my version of The Truth is in the pay of Bush/the Evil Jews/the Pope. And the fact that my own incomprehension of every little detail of 9/11 is evidence of a conspiracy means that I can prove my conspiracy theory, not by offering actual evidence for it, but by asking questions that I don't know the answer to.

Basically it's like creationists had gotten interested in politics

From same thread, which has yielded a number of classic examples of what the OP discussed above, Unloved Rebel (post #196) comes up with a nice variation on an old saying:

Have you ever heard the phrase "entities must not be multiplied unnecessarily"? Only in conspiracy world does Occam's razor state "entities must be multiplied in order to relieve cognitive dissonance."

One of the central tenents of good theorizing is the Rule of Parsimony. One should always prefer a simple theory to a complex one if the simple one fits the data. But it seems that CTer's need a more complex theory to fit the data. The problem comes if one tries to fit one's theory to the data when the data are erroneous. You end up with theory that explains not only the "signal," but much of the "noise" too. That's a recipe for a convoluted theory & disaster especially in a field where there is so much noise.

JohnG highlights a well-worn conundrum (post #313)

Sometimes it feels like most of the people on the internet can be divided into two categories: pretending to be stupid and actually stupid. Both groups are sad commentaries on the human race in their own unique ways.