Laying it out there...Conspiracy Theories

[ScreamingMeemie]

(Hide the thread if it bothers you )

There seems to be an all-or-nothing, if you believe this then you believe that attitude going on here...while we commemorate the 50th anniversary of JFK's assassination.

Just because I believe Oswald acted alone, doesn't mean I believed everything we were/weren't told about NSA...and I also believe climate change is real.

I believe the Warren commission did a craptastic job, and I came to my own conclusion by myself...over the years.

I am also a LIHOPper; I believe that Bushco let "something" happen in order to retaliate against their targeted enemies...not knowing that that "something" would be as horrendous as the events of 9/11.

I believe that flight 587 crashed as the result of a shoe bomb, and that the government did the right thing by not claiming this. Otherwise we would not have been lulled into the false sense of security provided by removing our shoes in the TSA line, and the airline industry would not have recovered.

I believe the conspiracy theory activity around JFK is a sign of intelligence and not idiocy or ignorance. I don't think we need to move on. I think we should continue to think for ourselves and come to our own conclusions on all manner of things.

I believe DU is an interesting place, filled with people who hold differing ideas on many of these things. To shut down that discussion, to all walk the same narrow line, would be kind of a yicky thing.

(I believe this thread will be alerted on, and I believe the odds of it being hidden are about 50/50)

Have a good night, DU

[Suich]

1. You go girl!!!

[ScreamingMeemie]

12. Suich!

How've you been?

[CaliforniaPeggy]

2. Well, I respect you hugely, my dear ScreamingMeemie...

So, by posting in your thread, I have removed myself from any potential jury pool.

Your ideas are sound and I applaud your writing them out here for us to see.

[ScreamingMeemie]

13. Thank you CP

[villager]

3. Holy cow... as if you came to a discussion board.. to discuss!

When so many here can only "pronounce!"

Nicely stated OP...

[ScreamingMeemie]

14. It's an odd turn we've taken on so many things.

Thank you villager.

[Nye Bevan]

4. Do you think Paul Wellstone's plane was sabotaged or shot down?

How about JFK Jr's plane?

[ScreamingMeemie]

6. I believe both were tragic accidents.

I live a half mile from a small airfield (Hooks). In my five years here, there have been 3 crashes--two of them fatal. One of them was just last week. So much can go wrong so quickly with small aircraft.

[flamingdem]

5. I shouted out "who killed the Kennedys"

[ScreamingMeemie]

15. ...and just as I was looking for something to listen to as I worked.

Thanks flamingdem!

[RobertEarl]

7. It is nice of the overlords of the underground...

...to allow us to discuss this issue in GD. Usually they load all such discussions and truck them off to a dungeon somewhere.

I especially like your idea that such discussions show intelligence. Except, if you look too close, there are some clownish replies to some serious items.

But the facts are that 70% of the people are still seeking solid answers. I think if they were to have released all the info gathered and not kept so many secrets, most of us would have more faith in the WC report.

[ScreamingMeemie]

16. It's when we stop, or disallow, the discussion of these

major historic events that we show our ignorance.

The rotten replies to reasoned debate is what prompted me to write this. And, I agree with you, the Warren Commission left the door wide open for these things to happen. As did the HCSA.

[Pretzel_Warrior]

8. NTSB says differently regarding flight 587

with the wealth of data being pored over by countless NTSB professionals, why would you automatically assume the official story is wrong about the first officer's inordinate adjustments of rudder to combat wake turbulence?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_587

[ScreamingMeemie]

10. It wasn't automatic.

And this is neither the time, nor the correct forum.

[starroute]

9. The starting point for me is that human beings *love* to conspire together

Little kids form clubs and hatch secret plots and keep other little kids out. Archaic culture all over the world have secret societies with special rituals and methods of scaring off the uninitiated. I'm more than half convinced that humans invented language in the first place so that we could communicate our secrets in whispers instead of hooting across the clearing like chimpanzees.

So from that perspective, it would be surprising if there were no conspiracies in our own culture. I think that when people argue about conspiracy theories, the question is not whether conspiracies exist but how powerful they are, how deeply they reach into the centers of power, how willing they are to undertake criminal acts, and how easily they can get away with them.

I mean, everybody knows that the Republicans are colluding to try to undercut President Obama. That's so obvious, it would be ridiculous to try to deny it. But if somebody claimed that John Boehner was planning a military coup or an assassination, the most likely reaction would be, "Yeah, right. And would you like to buy this bridge in Brooklyn?"

In other words, the real line to draw is not between conspiracies and no-conspiracies, but between plausible conspiracies and implausible ones. In the case of the Kennedy assassination and a few other episodes, the stakes are so high and the events so shocking that it becomes very difficult to know where to draw that line. But I do think that what we're really arguing about here is not whether there *was* a conspiracy to kill Kennedy but whether it's plausible that there might have been. And that, I think, should be a legitimate subject for discussion.

[ScreamingMeemie]

11. Very well said, starroute

And that (whether it was plausible) is what really interests me. Thanks for your input.

[blue14u]

17. If I were on a jury about your OP

I would not vote to have it removed..


I'm a Democrat.. and we are "free thinkers".. I thought.

Thank you for the very well stated OP..

I and I don't want to be told not to...EVER!!!

[ErikJ]

18. I believe Vincent Bugliosi -and he says ....................

that Oswald did it as the Warren Commission reports.

[starroute]

19. Even if you believe Oswald did it, that leaves many unanswered questions

Why was there such panic in the establishment? Why does the Warren Commission have every appearance of a coverup or a whitewash?

Were there powerful interests that were afraid unrelated secrets would be revealed if someone probed too deeply? (I'm thinking, for example, of the events immediately after 911, when the Bush administration hustled the Saudis out of the country.)

Was there a fear that Americans would lose their naive faith in democracy if they started to suspect that this country was not much different from less "civilized" parts of the world, where assassinations and military coups were a standard method of transferring power? In particular, would the changes in policy between the Kennedy and Johnson administrations have seemed more suspicious if there had been questions about whether it was all planned?

As we constantly see in the case the of Tea Party types, people who are up to no good tend to panic if someone else does what they're already thinking. This is why the right freaks out every time someone points to the proliferation of hate groups or notes that the latest mass shooter was a fan of Alex Jones. So even if Kennedy's killer was a lone gunman, everybody who'd been fantasizing about seeing him dead might have reacted similarly and started doing whatever it took to make sure their actual plots could never be pinned on them.

There are a lot of festering questions about the Deep State activities of the early 60s, and saying "Oswald did it" doesn't make them go away.

[scarletwoman]

21. "There are a lot of festering questions about the Deep State activities of the early 60s..."

Excellent post. I would only add that the festering questions about the Deep State continue to this day.

[PCIntern]

20. Thank you for your civility. nt

[scarletwoman]

22. Thank you for this very lovely post!

Good job!

[Spider Jerusalem]

23. ...

...people who suspect conspiracies aren't really sceptics. Like the rest of us, they're selective doubters. They favour a world view, which they uncritically defend. But their worldview isn't about God, values, freedom, or equality. It's about the omnipotence of elites.

Conspiracy chatter was once dismissed as mental illness. But the prevalence of such belief, documented in surveys, has forced scholars to take it more seriously. Conspiracy theory psychology is becoming an empirical field with a broader mission: to understand why so many people embrace this way of interpreting history. As you'd expect, distrust turns out to be an important factor. But it's not the kind of distrust that cultivates critical thinking.

(snip)

But the survey instrument that was used in the experiment to measure "trust" was more social than intellectual. It asked the students, in various ways, whether they believed that most human beings treat others generously, fairly and sincerely. It measured faith in people, not in propositions. "People low in trust of others are likely to believe that others are colluding against them," the authors proposed. This sort of distrust, in other words, favours a certain kind of belief. It makes you more susceptible, not less, to claims of conspiracy.

(snip)

The common thread between distrust and cynicism, as defined in these experiments, is a perception of bad character. More broadly, it's a tendency to focus on intention and agency, rather than randomness or causal complexity. In extreme form, it can become paranoia. In mild form, it's a common weakness known as the fundamental attribution error – ascribing others' behaviour to personality traits and objectives, forgetting the importance of situational factors and chance. Suspicion, imagination, and fantasy are closely related.

The more you see the world this way - full of malice and planning instead of circumstance and coincidence - the more likely you are to accept conspiracy theories of all kinds. Once you buy into the first theory, with its premises of coordination, efficacy, and secrecy, the next seems that much more plausible.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn24626-inside-the-minds-of-the-jfk-conspiracy-theorists.html